Dracula and Diegesis: Making a Monster Real

by Robinson Ensz and Katie Lanning. Katie Lanning is an assistant professor of English at Wichita State University, with research and teaching interests in 18th century British media & culture and in the history of the book. Katie is a 2024 Rose Visiting Research Fellow for English-Language Poetry and Literature. Her research partner, Robinson Ensz joined her at Rose Library for her dive into different editions of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

We were delighted to have the opportunity to sink our teeth into the John Moore Bram Stoker Collection at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, where we examined a host of editions and theatrical adaptations of Dracula. We are interested in the way Stoker structures his novel as a metadiegetic text: a collection of journal entries, newspaper reports, and letters carefully compiled to persuade the reader of the veracity of the tale. From the first edition, the novel’s brief foreword frames the text as evidence that marks the supernatural story as “simple fact” (see Figure 1). Thus, before the first page of chapter one, the novel transforms into a casebook, likewise transforming its audience into authorities who must accept or deny the evidence before them. What we wanted to know, as we began working with the vast and impressive John Moore Bram Stoker Collection, is how further editions and adaptations uphold, add to, or omit this metafictional framing that calls on audiences to take the story seriously.

In examining over eighty editions of Dracula, we determined that the foreword is mostly placed in one of three layouts. The first edition places the foreword after the table of contents and before the title page, while some other editions place the foreword before the table of contents. Interestingly enough, some editions, such as the 1975 Chartwell Books US publication, omit the foreword entirely. Each of these layouts affects the beginning of diegesis, and thus, the narrative. In the ordering of the first edition, the table of contents reads as paratext, with diegesis beginning before the title page. Contrast this with placing the foreword before the table of contents, and suddenly, the table of contents becomes diegetic. The order of the chapters is now a self-reflexive utterance, presumably of Jonathan Harker. In texts without a foreword, the reader isn’t pulled into Stoker’s narrative illusion until Chapter 1. Yet, because the majority of editions contain the foreword, most readers experience the threshold between paratext and diegesis becoming blurred. As the diegetic paratext unfolds, the reader’s role changes from passive audience to active assessor of the text’s evidence.

Beyond reprinting the foreword itself, we were intrigued to find that early William Rider & Son editions of the novel contain advertisements that heighten the novel’s depiction of hypnotism. Rider & Son acquired popular Victorian occult publisher Philip Wellby’s collection in 1908 and began publishing reprints of Dracula in 1912, positioning the text not so much as a novel but as a complementary volume to the company’s “Mental Tonics” and “Scientific and Occult” handbooks.¹ Advertisements in these editions regularly called readers’ attention to texts like Nerve Control, A Book of Auto-Suggestion, Have You a Strong Will?, and A Manual of Hypnotism (see Figure 2). These advertisements blur the line between text and paratext, adding an extra dimension to mind-control elements of the novel’s plot. While bringing Dracula into a catalog of occult texts, Rider & Co. also created advertisements that can read diegetically as supporting testimonies to the novel’s depiction of hypnosis. Indeed, in the context of a Dracula edition, these advertisements can read even more persuasively, as though they offer readers a path to avoiding the same fate as several characters in the novel.

Playbills for theatrical adaptations of Dracula also have a long history of extending the novel’s diegesis by gesturing to the audience’s safety and welfare. The tradition originates with the first performance of Hamilton Deane’s adaptation at the Little Theatre in London on August 5, 1924, where a nurse in uniform walked the aisles ready to administer smelling salts. The idea was repeated when Deane’s adaptation was revised by John L. Balderston and debuted on Broadway in 1927.² While a tongue-in-cheek gimmick to some, the nurse in the audience effectively extends the diegetic sphere of the play: the audience are now a part of the story in a new way, subject to the same fears and dangers as the characters on stage. Several playbills we studied replicate this with safety warnings in their pages. The London programs for the 1949 Golders Green Hippodrome and Streatham Hill Theatre performances noted, for example, “The Management cannot be responsible for any Patrons who may faint or feel unwell, but First-Aid Attendants are in the Theatre throughout the performance” (see Figure 3). An undated playbill from the Westwood Club in Dublin similarly warns that Dracula may “not suitable for persons with nervous dispositions,” while a WWII-era U.S. Army Special Services production in Hawaii put an insert in their program with information about ambulances at the ready during the performance. Just as the early editions of Dracula amplified the sublime terror in the story’s pages by extending diegesis to the foreword and insisting that the monster is real, many playbills for Dracula adaptations expand diegesis by warning audiences of potential dangers and fears they may experience during the performance. The result is to make the audience’s fear a part of the performance, a remarkable parallel to the way the foreword makes the audience’s belief or acceptance of evidence a part of the novel. In case you are curious about whether these antics actually paid off, a viewer’s handwritten note on her 1931 playbill from Parsons Theatre in Hartford, Connecticut confirms: “scarey!” (See Figure 4).

In addition to an expansion of diegesis to include the audience, many examples of these plays incorporate the reality effect into their paratextual utterances. In one example, the Skerries Theatre Group includes a history of Vlad the Impaler, claiming, “… the historical Dracula was the subject of horrible and terrifying stories” (See Figure 5). These kinds of paratexts prime the audience with brief and exciting snippets of historical information, making the absurdities of the narrative seem more historically grounded and real, while amplifying the anticipation and fear of the audience. The Queens Theatre in London even included a kind-of “Dracula-dictionary,” providing definitions and context for many of the locations, characters, and other references within the play The Passion of Dracula, as well as various pop-culture and historical touchstones surrounding the enigmatic vampire.

Finally, throughout our research, we examined numerous international editions of Dracula, which led us to an interesting discovery. In most translated editions of Dracula, there is no foreword. The text simply starts with chapter 1. This happens often enough that it is statistically relevant, prompting additional questions: why do so many translations of Dracula lack this key piece of the text? This foreword sets the tone for the novel.  All of this information opens up a wealth of potential research. Pulling on any of these threads in isolation has the potential to unravel the truths of why Dracula remains so significant over one hundred years later. Pulling on all of them could illuminate the often overlooked relationship between paratext and diegesis within the narrative of a text, even extending to adaptation. It’s no wonder that Dracula remains a titan of gothic literature.

Notes

1. See Elsa Richardson’s “Stemming the black tide of mud: Psychoanalysis and the occult periodical” in The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875-1947 edited by Christine Ferguson and Andrew Radford (Routledge 2018): 110-128.
2. For a brief history of smelling salts at debut performances of Dracula, see, for example, David J. Skal, Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen (Faber and Faber, 2004), especially Chapter 3, “A Nurse Will Be in Attendance at All Performances,” pp. 103-138. Origins of this story trace to an interview Hamilton Deane gave to Stoker biographer Harry Ludlum for A Biography of Dracula (Foulsham, 1962).. In this interview, Deane recalls telephoning Queen Alexandra Hospital, telling them, “I know it’s not generally done, but I must have a nurse to look after my patrons. I don’t want a glamorous girl, but a good, plain, upright woman, brisk and efficient” (162).