I read the following in a biography of Bram Stoker: “The critic, Terry Eagleton, sees parallels between the position of Dracula, running out of land, and that of the Irish aristocracy, similarly afflicted as land reform measures transferred ownership to their tenants.” This piqued me. I like to take a piece of entertainment and examine it against its times; I’m watching TV anyway and maybe I want to spot how various unspoken attitudes get expressed, thereby gaining an idea of society’s collective mental contradictions. Or maybe I’m just being fancy and wasting my time, like Peter Bagge’s young male schmuck watching The Golden Girls. “I want to see what message they’re beaming out to their demographic,” he says.
But how about the pros? They don’t free-associate and hope for the best. They make a case. They compile evidence and line it up; they show how it supports one interpretation better than another. I wanted to see a case like that, so I got out the book cited, Eagleton’s Heathcliff and the Great Hunger. It was a water-in-the-lap experience. The Dracula discussion proved to be a paragraph, a long one but still just a paragraph, and in the middle there was a joke about Madonna. The discussion, a boneless thing, gestured at five points of resemblance between Dracula and Ireland’s English landlords.
First, Dracula’s “an absentee landlord” and “a devout anglophile, given to poring over maps of the metropolis.” Dracula means to set up in the English town of Purfleet, “as a number of the Anglo-Irish gentry were to migrate… to the watering holes of the English south coast.” Further, Dracula is “much preoccupied with leases and title deeds,” and money in general; and (aha!) he’s “running out of land.” The vampire came to England with multiple crates of dirt to be used for coffin stashes. Chasing the monster, Van Helsing ruins the stashes that he uncovers. Bad news for Dracula. Eagleton (analytically):“His material base is rapidly dwindling, and without this soil he will die.” The same for the Protestants who were sitting atop Irish society. “The Ascendancy, too, will evaporate once their earth is removed from them,” the professor says.
If Eagleton’s case is a list of identifying details, I’d say the case is lousy. Everyone in 19th-century fiction cares about money, and they’re not indifferent to leases and deeds. Nor does Dracula admire England so much as he targets it. Patton looked at maps of Germany, Dracula looks at maps of London (or England, if that’s what Eagleton meant by “metropolis”). Purfleet was nevera watering hole and isn’t located on the south coast; it’s located on the Thames and is right near London, which is where Dracula wants to operate. Also, the Anglo-Irish “were to migrate”? That would mean they did so after Dracula was written. I’m not sold on Dracula as absentee landlord either. The villagers are neighbors, not tenants.
Eagleton’s writing doesn’t help. His paragraph displays marked “No, it isn’t” tendencies, as in this statement about Dracula: “When he is slashed with a knife, it is banknotes and gold coins rather than blood which cascade from his breast.” No, it isn’t! At no point in the book do coins or banknotes emerge from the bodily cavities of Count Dracula. Eagleton’s doing a “How hot was it” joke, only it’s about a vampire’s supposedly money-based nature—odd territory. He’s pumping up his claim that Dracula was money-minded, and doing so by making the claim more wacky and grandiose, as opposed to better founded or more clearly expressed. He introduced the theme in question with the words “Living in a material world, Dracula is a material ghoul,” the previously mentioned joke about Madonna. (Key detail: “Material Girl” came out in 1985, Eagleton’s book in 1995.)
Atop Eagleton’s slipshod pile of goofiness there rests something heavy and moralizing. Because Eagleton offers a final parallel, one between the Protestant landlords and Lucy Westenra, Dracula’s vampire-convert. The professor doesn’t always make clear the subjects of his verbs, but I string together his thoughts this way. The landlords and Lucy inherit a “primordial crime,” Lucy as a neckbite victim, the landlords as heirs to Ireland’s conquerors. The landlords don’t want to know about the sins their rule was founded on. Lucy doesn’t know about the sins she commits at night. Kismet: in Lucy we have an image of “the divided self, the vampiric victim who is sweetly unaware in waking life” of the harm (“unspeakable horror”) going on after dark, and the thought of this being offers psychic escape from a “frightful paradox.” The paradox, one that might “shatter the mind,” is the “unspeakable foulness at the very heart of civility”when Prots can’t have their past deeds brought up.
Eagleton posts a flimsy claim and pumps it, and this time the grandiosity is accompanied by frantic sanctimony, not mere goofiness. If Lucy’s divided self is going to make a mind-shattering guilt bearable, you’d think the book would keep her around more. If Bram Stoker invented Lucy’s plight because of the landowners’ moral situation, you’d think Eagleton could show that the situation was on Stoker’s mind. But I suppose true followers of lit analysis see what’s going on here. They know the coherent stuff is kept somewhere else and I’ve stumbled across a different product, one called Big-Name Academic Entertains Himself. Stoker’s biographer is right. Eagleton does see parallels between Dracula’s situation and that of English land owners in Ireland. You can see parallels between a cloudand a camel, and between that same cloud and a ship. Sometimes it takes a professor to remind us of this simple truth, and now I’m going to watch The Golden Girls.