Universidad Pedaggica Nacional

Literatura Anglfona II
David Acua Valbuena
My thesis is this, I want you to believe. () to believe in things that you cannot.
Chapter 14, Dracula.

Short

Story:

Dracula's

guest

Not much is said about a missing chapter in Bram Stoker's Dracula, since the
story begins with the diary of Jonathan Harker; Dracula's guest gives the
name to a short-stories collection published in 1914, two years after Stoker's
death. This narration is very similar to the first chapters of the novel Dracula:
A man (whose name is not given), travels towards a destination in the noon,
the carrier is told to be careful because of the climate, and there is where it all
turns out. In this text we have the chance to see a possibility for Stoker to
begin his novel, with the mixing of pure folkloric terror elements.
The protagonist of the novel is trying to cross Munich before the afternoon,
but the maitre of the hotel Four Seasons advices Johann -the driver of the
carriage- to be careful because it was the Valspurgis Natch, the night of the
30th of april and May 1rst. This is the first folkloric piece used in the text,
because it reflects a traditional feast day for witches to dance with demons and
other dark elements of nature.
This situation leads us to believe that Stoker depicted a narration highly

connected with Jonathan Harker's diary, remembering the road full of blue
spectral lights that he goes through when reaching to Dracula's castle.
Following the narration, the protagonist on the carriage sees a road and
because of his curiosity decides to follow it while Johann abandons him
because of his fear after explaining that suicidal people were buried in there
and that continuing the road he would find an abandoned town in which it was
said that villagers found buried people laid in their graves with blood in the
mouth.
These are other image of rituals that continental Europe people used to
practice: First, to bury suicidal people and thieves in the crossroads because in
that way they would get lost in case they turn to live again; second, people
checked graves when thinking that corpses were actually non-death.
Certainly Stoker presents also the confrontation of two different personalities,
on the one hand Johann the driver is fearful because of the German
superstitions, but he has a silver clock; that represents his division or
ambiguity between supernatural elements and reason. On the other hand, the
protagonist is given the faculty of curiosity, a symbol for adaptation and
evolution, probably Stoker wanted to show Englishmen as the most qualified
kind of man for world: supernatural and human.

The protagonist starts walking alone trough a forest experimenting feelings of

loneliness, fear and reflecting about what is real or not, surrounded by snow,
wind and dark clouds (they are all particularities of the Romanticism
movement), and it goes on until he finds himself in the ghost town. In there a
snow storm takes place and he has to hide from it in a building which turns to
be a cemetery; then he reads in a stone grave the name Countess Dolingen of
Gratz. In this part Stoker will again show his mastery in folklore due to the
fact that this Countess represents Eleonore von Schwarzenberg (1682-1741),
one of the most important characters of vampirism in Europe.
This idea is supported by a following line found in the same stone: Dead
travels fast, which is actually taken from a Gottfried August Brgers poem
named Lenore, published in 1773 (in German Die Toten reiten schnell), this
poem is said to be inspired in the image of the real countess because as she
was suffering from a cancer, she decided to experiment several kinds of
treatments including non conventional and esoteric medicine that would let
people think that she was actually extending her lifetime; this is the reason
why a stone slab was placed in her tomb for preventing her rising.
Back in the narration, the character finds a grave with a woman laying inside
whose lips are stained with blood, this image scares him and he decides to
move away from that place, then a lightning hit the mausoleum and it starts to

burn in fire, minutes after the protagonist will black out until he wakes up with
a wolf on his chest. Again Bram Stoker uses the relation between wolves and
specters. In the novel they appear in different situations, as Dracula's servants
or as Dracula himself.
We can see, then, how the female role has a predominant participation in here.
There is no longer a man who dominates the weather conditions and the beasts
of the darkness; we are talking about a woman who has all the powers in the
Walspurgis Natch.
This balance of gender roles is also represented with the soldiers that appear
and save the Englishman in the narration. It is so because the men depicted in
the novel are very different from those soldiers, in Dracula stoker would
prefer to show scientists, aristocrats and businessmen rather than strong men
because it is more interesting to deal with supernatural forces with intellect
and reason and not only with strength.
Finally the Englishman is taken back to the hotel Four seasons and the maitre
explains him that if it were not for a telegram, he would have died. Who sent
the telegram? Count Dracula, his sense of providence rescued him -who might
be Jonathan Harker or at least someone similar- from dying in German lands
by the hand of a mythical being.

How these details affect the meaning of the story? I can say that this story
suggests a scenario in which man cannot understand the nature in the same
way that Jonathan Harker, Dr Seward and Doctor Van Helsing do; the
complexity of this environment and its relation with terror and fantasy is
related to the theory developed by Louis Vax:
"Fantastic comes from the impossibility to decide. The hero of the story is fighting an
inexplicable event, from which he has not real certainty of its happening in the world,
witness of the unknown. This fight has its repercussion on the reader. Caillois also
establishes that the lack of certainty causes a feeling of ambiguity, which implies the
difficulty on making judgments before the event that has frightened both the character and
the reader"

Finally, I can say that the reading of Dracula's guest is as important as reading
the novel because it extends the overwhelming feeling of fear, because we do
not know with accuracy if this event was created by another unknown
supernatural creature frightening an unknown man, or if it was Dracula
himself playing a little game with Jonathan Harker, or -a third possibility
appears- that there are more creatures as powerful and as unexplored as
Dracula hiding somewhere in Munich waiting for a special night between the
last moon of April and the first glimpses of the sun of may.