Bram Stoker's
Dracula and Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop by
Kevin Patrick Mahoney.
|
Visit
our Bram Stoker
page for Bram Stoker biography, Bram Stoker bibliography, free Bram
Stoker ebooks, free Dracula essays, and listings of academic Dracula essays |
|
Visit
our Angela Carter
page for Angela Carter biography, Angela Carter bibliography, Angela
Carter links, free Angela Carter essays, and listings of academic Angela
Carter essays |
These two novels have very similar themes. Both are set
in a steadily declining England; from the height of imperial power, to the impotence
of modern times. In Dracula, as Stephen Arata argues, the Count embodies the
threat of reverse colonization, the realisation of the fear of an uprising. The
Magic Toyshop portrays that revolution in a very different way. Both novels are
of great interest to a Anglo-Irishman, like myself therefore. There is also the
theme of sexual oppression, another traditional Gothic subject.
Much attention has been focused on the sexuality of Lucy Westenra, the
character most like Melanie in Toyshop. Kathleen Spencer argues that it is this
very sexuality that means that Lucy will have to be sacrificed to save the
community: "She is a woman whose sexuality is under very imperfect
control." She has been proposed to by three men in a single day, which prompts
her outburst: "Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as
wants her, and save all this trouble?" Such a desire in the Victorian age
was wicked. Indeed, one could see Lucy as the female form of `Lucifer'. The
devil has always been a much more interesting figure than God, so Lucy is more
stimulating than the dour Mina Murray. Perhaps that is a cruel thing to say; it
would be kinder to describe Mina as `safe'. This is because Mina has so much
potential, a "man brain" (as Van Helsing says), but it takes an
extraordinary situation for her to reveal her talents. Mina wastes her
capabilities by memorising the Bradshaw train timetable for her husband. Still,
she has to be viewed as being very much part of the generation before female
emancipation. Mina does follow the growing trend for
2
middle class women to seek employment; she becomes a
school teacher. Upon marriage, however, she gives this all up, to become the
perfect angel in the house.
At least, that was the plan. It is doubtful whether the Harkers
could ever have returned to complete normality after their experience. One of
the most startling passages in the novel is when Seward and Van Helsing visit
Lucy's tomb for the first time. Jennifer Wicke turns our attention to the fact
that Stoker wrote of the "sperm" of the candle dripping onto the
coffin. 'Sperm', in this case, referring to spermacetti, an ingredient used to
make candles. Stoker's choice of words can hardly be seen as accidental here.
They reflect Van Helsing's misogyny (and Stoker's). Lucy must be destroyed
because she has become a voluptuous New Woman; she is so `nasty' that she sucks
the blood out of children. She is quite free here in showing off her sexual
airs in front of her lover, Lord Godalming. He has to be restrained by the other
men, because he finds her most seductive. They are all unsettled, as
Harker was, to find their secret sexual desires coming alive... it is as Andrea
Dworkin wrote in Woman Hating; these are the lessons which must be learnt by
women: "The good woman must be possessed. The bad woman must be killed, or
punished. Both must be nullified."
Much of Dracula criticism concerns consumption, as in the writing of
Wicke. Geoffrey Wall gives a quotation from E.J.Hobsbawn, concerning the
British economy in 1897:it was "becoming parasitic rather than
competitive.., living off the remains of world monopoly." There can be no
doubt that Britain was losing her position as `the workshop of the world'.
British inventions were being put to far better use abroad, in Germany and the
USA. Arata wrote "Vampires are generated by racial enervation and
the decline of empire, not vice versa. They are produced... by the very
conditions characterising late-Victorian Britain." What is very noticeable
in the novel is that nobody is expected to have a
3
very long lifespan. Parents die at a relatively early
age. The one exception is the robust Van Helsing, but even he has suffered the
death of his wife. Lucy was ill before Dracula's arrival. Indeed, there is a sense
that Dracula temporarily gives energy to his victims; Mina notes that Lucy
looks better after her night of sleepwalking.
Dracula feeds off this powerlessness. "The girls that you love are
mine," he boasts. The tables have turned. An Easterner threatens
Westerners. It could be that Dracula is a parable of insurrection. The Count
could be the always feared Irish rebellion: punishment for shameful crimes
committed by the imperial power. He does not just take land, but people's
bodies in a process of vampirisation. The angels in the house are turned
against their masters. Arata notes that "Dracula represents the nobleman
as warrior. His activities in death carry on his activities in life; in both
cases he has successfully engaged in forms of conquest and domination."
He is finally killed by western might. The peculiar American Quincey
Morris also dies. `Peculiar' because he sometimes behaves oddly. Such as the
time when he fires into the room full of his friends, to kill a "big
bat". Throughout the novel, he shines with energy, unlike his English
friends. Renfield talks of America's imminent power. Arata suggests that
Quincey is just as much a threat to the British empire as Dracula. This may be
so; but it would have made more sense if Quincey or Dracula was a German. Much
of America's economy at the time was based on a home market, unlike Germany's
more threatening international one. Still, Dracula has to have something of the
primitive about him, which was more likely to come from a Romanian than a sophisticated
German.
At first glance, The Magic Toyshop does not appear to be Gothic. For one
thing, there is no castle. This is hardly surprising, for people in the 1950s
did not generally live
4
in castles, unless they were royalty. The novel is set in
the recent past, although exactly when is hard to say. In Carter's film
adaptation, Finn mentions that it is a hundred years after the National
Exposition of 1852. So, it was at the beginning of the reign of our current
monarch. In fact, the Gothic castle has fallen down: "'They built this
vast Gothic castle, a sort of highland fortress, only gargantuan, and filled it
with everything they could think of, to show off.'" If the British empire
was degenerating in Dracula, then it had really collapsed by the time of The
Magic Toyshop. In the film this is emphasised by Queen Victoria's statue
shedding a tear for the wasteland around her.
As in many Gothic novels, the protagonist is a lone, defenceless female,
under the `protection' of a patriarch, her parents having died in an airplane
crash. She is curious about sex, but Carter changes the rules and makes Prince
Charming a scruffy Irishman. Neither is he a frog, to be kissed into
handsomeness. Indeed, as Finn tells Melanie, it is only due to "proximity"
that she likes him at all. He is the only eligible man around. Or as Patricia
Duncker puts it, Carter uses all the "iconography of the Gothic.., the
virgin at the mercy of the tormented hero-villain, the enclosed spaces, hidden
atrocities, women voraciously, masochistically eager for the corruption of
sexuality."
Actually, this is a comment about Carter's tale of The Bloody Chamber.
It is relevant here, because Melanie feels like the heroine of that story:
"She felt lonely and chilled, walking along the long, brown passages, past
secret doors, shut tight. Bluebeard's castle."(p.82). Unfortunately,
unlike Carter's other tale, Melanie has no mother to reveal the truth to her.
The reader fears for the heroine when she is forced to undertake the role of
Leda. One immediately recalls Yeats' violent poem; so we know that violence is
on the agenda. We fear that Uncle Philip will commit incest by raping his
niece. Yet he is much more subtle than
5
that. He perverts everything that is good in the world:
"'you're so fresh and innocent, all of you, and so you're something to
change and destroy.'" Fortunately, Finn resists his desires.
Uncle Philip, like Van Helsing, is also a misogynist. He keeps his wife,
Margaret, choked by a silver necklace. As Finn says, Philip does not like women
talking, just as men in the previous century did not want women to
express themselves through writing. Finn says: "'He can't abide a woman in
trousers. He won't have a woman in the shop if she's got trousers on and he
sees her.'" Just as the men in Dracula cannot bear the sight of the New
Woman, so Philip cannot bear a woman taking on any manly qualities.
"`But you're Irish!' " Melanie exclaims. Philip has power over
an oppressed race. He represents the patriarchal Augustan, whilst they have
more of the wildness in their hearts, expressed by Francie's music. They may
not even be traditional Catholics, but something far older and Celtic, and
therefore lost. Lost, but not forgotten. Finn attacks the swan with an axe,
much as Arthur kills Lucy, but they are fighting different enemies. Margaret
herself, with her red hair, fair skin, and emerald dress stands for Ireland,
and also the emancipation of women when she throws her silver band away. In the
film of The Magic Toyshop, the irony is made clearer. Francie, with his Celtic
magic, turns Philip into a puppet, to be eventually burnt on the November
bonfire. Guy Fawkes, alleged protagonist of a Popish plot to kill King and
Parliament, is replaced by one of his enemies. Philip is a modern vampire, one
whose joyless authoritarianism just sucks the life out of people. And in this
novel, the incest is not the result of a degrading lust, but of true love.
Carter demythologises the Gothic elements, but they are still there, and invite
close analysis with Dracula. The decline of empire, the rebellion of oppressed
peoples, the misogyny, and the exploitation of female virgins are still the
vital ingredients.
6
Bibliography
'The Occidental Tourist:'Dracula' and the Anxiety of
Reverse Colonization' by Stephen D.Arata, Victorian Studies Summer 1990,
vol.33, no.4.
'Purity and Danger: `Dracula', the Urban Gothic, and the
Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis' by Kathleen L.Spencer ELH vol.59 1992.
'Vampiric Typewriting: 'Dracula' and its Media' by Jennifer
Wicke, ELH vol.59, 1992.
"Different From Writing": 'Dracula' in 1897 by
Geoffrey Wall, Literature and History
'Re-imagining the Fairy Tales: Angela Carter's Bloody
Chambers' by Patricia Duncker, (+ Dworkin quotes) Literature and History
The Magic Toyshop film, adapted by Angela Carter,
produced by Granada 1987.
|
Visit
our Bram Stoker
page for Bram Stoker biography, Bram Stoker bibliography, free Bram
Stoker ebooks, free Dracula essays, and listings of academic Dracula essays |
|
Visit
our Angela Carter
page for Angela Carter biography, Angela Carter bibliography, Angela
Carter links, free Angela Carter essays, and listings of academic Angela
Carter essays |
