Louis S. Warren (51 page)

But some of the most important, and least noticed, influences of the Wild West show involved a fourth passenger, one who was probably unknown to most observers that day. Large and red-haired, engaging and solicitous, Bram Stoker, the future author of
Dracula,
was also aboard with Cody, Toole, and Irving.
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This probably was not Stoker's first meeting with Cody. The two had likely met in the United States at least a year before. Stoker corresponded with Cody and with the showman's staff. He most likely attended the Wild West show in London. Henry Irving was Cody's most renowned social patron that summer, and Bram Stoker, who followed Irving's every move, had a front-row seat at the American's conquest of London society.

In 1897, ten years after Buffalo Bill's London premiere and at the height of his fame, Bram Stoker introduced another frontier figure to the English capital. Commander of the Christian forces against the Ottoman Turks hundreds of years before, the “bravest and most cunning of Transylvania's sons” on the Turkish frontier, his purpose in London was very different from Buffalo Bill's. So was his reception. After turning one wealthy young woman into a vampire and nearly snagging another, he was chased out of the capital by an international posse of English, Dutch, and American men, who tracked this nemesis to Transylvania, vanquished his Gypsy bodyguards, and killed him within sight of his castle.

Unlike William Cody, Count Dracula was, of course, an entirely fictional creation. This did not prevent his becoming an object of immense fascination. Among the reading public, the count would become almost as popular as Buffalo Bill. Appearing for the first time in 1897, the novel
Dracula
was in paperback by 1900. It has never been out of print since, and the count's many film incarnations have made him the preeminent nineteenth-century monster.
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Superficially, the contrast between Cody and the count could not be greater. Benign hero and malign villain, one is the center of a progressive myth of regeneration and renewal; the other embodies the decadence and the terrifying power of the gothic imagination. It is well established that Stoker's monster had many inspirations and literary precursors, including a century of bloodsucking forebears.
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Less recognized is how much Stoker's masterpiece turns on the frontier mythology of Buffalo Bill.

Weird as it may seem, Buffalo Bill and his Wild West show were important inspirations for Bram Stoker's
Dracula.
In Cody's drama, as in
Dracula,
the frontiers of racial encounter were invested with the possibility of degeneration and the necessity of race war. Tracing Stoker's famous novel to its roots in Cody's spectacle illustrates how late-nineteenth-century progressive frontier myth and the literature of gothic horror represented fictional worlds that were homologous—that is, divergent but sprung from common origins, on mythic race frontiers. Cody himself saw his creation as historical epic, which joined the white race to the spilling of blood across the frontier. We shall see that
Dracula,
although a novel set in the world's largest city, is also, crucially, a frontier tale. For showman and author both, continual westward expansion and continual race war secured the racial destiny of white people. But they differed, ultimately, on the promise of frontier warfare. Cody believed in it as the salvation of the white race; Bram Stoker's view, shared by many compatriots, was much gloomier. In his most famous novel, frontiers became almost as dangerous to the race as vampires.

The connections between Buffalo Bill and Count Dracula take us well beyond the popularity of American frontier myth in late Victorian England.
Dracula,
as literary scholar Steven Arata has written, is a novel of reverse colonization, in which “the colonizer finds himself in the position of the colonized, the exploiter is exploited, the victimizer victimized.” In this analysis, the powerful Count Dracula invades imperial England and comes very close to reducing it to his “imperial” domain. By removing the race essence of his victims, their blood, he turns them into vampires and extends, in the words of the novel's chief monster hunter, his “vampire kind.” In a fundamental way, he underscores the racial weakness of his victims and the transformative racial power of his own monstrosity.
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The appeal of Cody's Wild West show for English audiences flowed in part from their own obsession with racial decay, which was at least as great as that of the Americans. The late nineteenth century saw widespread concern in Britain about slowing birth rates, the steady loss of international competitiveness, the growing ranks of the city poor and of a combative, strike-prone industrial working class, the continued shrinking of rural villages, and a general decline of English political and industrial power, all accented by the diminishing fortunes of the nation's aristocracy and upper classes. To many observers, progress seemed in danger of stopping and reversing itself.

The most popular explanation for these complicated developments was the weakening of the Anglo-Saxon race. In September, as Cody prepared to take his show north to Manchester for a winter of indoor performances, one Dr. Joseph Milner gave a lecture on the condition of the English people at the Islington Agricultural Hall. Warning that Britain's increasingly urban people were ill-nourished and smaller than their rural ancestors, Milner postulated that they were degenerating, moving backward down the evolutionary ladder, in “a reversion towards an earlier and lowlier ethnic form. While the residents in the country remained Anglo-Danes, town dwellers approached the smaller, darker Celto-Iberian race.” To see the frightening truth, one need only compare the scurrying little workers in London's East End with “the massive folk seen in country towns on market day,” or visit the wax museum of Madame Tussaud and compare “the crowd of small dark living beings with the substantial fair personages sitting there in effigy.”
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Milner echoed widely held views, which were pervasive in the literature of the period, notably Robert Louis Stevenson's
The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1886), H. Rider Haggard's
She
(1887), and the fiction of Rudyard Kipling, all of which explored the implications of diminishing white manhood, adrift in a world of rough, industrial cities and dark, menacing colonies.
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To be sure, Britain and other nations of western Europe in general saw themselves as exemplars of progress and apogees of civilization, just as the United States did. Belief in the redemptive value of civilization for the poor benighted savages of the world energized their imperial expansions and their nationalism, both of which grew dramatically in these years.

But the dramatic demographic changes and political strife that came with industrialization made Europeans, like Americans, highly sensitive to the darker aspects of Progress. Since civilization itself was racial (the gift of white people to the world), it was almost impossible to understand the decay of civilization as anything but the decay of the race (although French, English, Germans, and others differed on exactly who was “white”). Just as Americans began romanticizing the “barbarian virtues” of dark people, and trying to find ways to infuse white manhood with them, Europeans contemplated the decay of civilization and the corruption of the modern with meditations on barbarism and the nobility of the primitive.

This gigantic project encompassed many aspects of European art and culture, and Buffalo Bill's Wild West resonated with them in dramatic, even inspirational ways. London commentators were bedazzled by the many rhetorical tropes and images which flowed from the Wild West show's vibrant tension between primitive and progressive energies, but no theme was so pronounced in the show's reception as the fear of racial decay. For this reason, most commentators were lavish in their praise of Cody and his show in 1887. Its drama was overtly optimistic, depicting white Americans—Anglo-Americans—invigorated and racially empowered by the experience of conquering the frontier. And yet, between the lines of adulatory show reviews lurked an abiding ambivalence, even a fear, of the powerful American virility on display in Buffalo Bill's arena. Amid all the English enthusiasm for the Wild West show's regenerative promise of frontier warfare glimmered a specter of reverse colonization by racially powerful frontier warriors, the Americans, which observers seemed unable to escape completely.

For all the differences between the Wild West show and
Dracula,
there can be little question that Stoker had the American West on his mind as he composed the novel, in which his representative American was an almost-cowboy from the far western frontier named Quincey Morris. A Texan, he joins the tale's European protagonists. Stoker had traveled in America, and seems to have admired the place.
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But reading between the lines of the novel, one has to wonder how deep his admiration ran. Of the three young male protagonists who chase Dracula down and dispose of him, Morris is disturbingly incompetent. His trigger-happiness and poor aim endanger his friends, he fails in simple assignments to follow the vampire, and in the attempted capture of Dracula in London, the count escapes when Morris bungles. So consistently does he parade his ineptitude that other questions arise. Why did Stoker make his representative American, his westerner, such a fool? For that matter, is Morris just a buffoon? Or are his numerous blunders a mask for a deeper malevolence? He is presented as a racial relative of the book's English protagonists, and in a crucial scene his blood is transfused into one of the count's English victims—who then becomes a vampire. Whose side is the American on?
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The answers to these enduring riddles of Stoker's plot and intent are connected to the novel's racial implications, which become salient when read against the backdrop of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Its drama, in which the American Anglo-Saxons are hardened in the crucible of frontier race war, had a distorted reflection in
Dracula,
a dark parable about urban Anglo-Saxons threatened by a frontier hero gone bad. In the twentieth century, scholars have often examined the racial and cultural anxieties that underlie horror and western film genres.
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Tracing the shadowy connections between Bram Stoker and William Cody provides some startling clues not only about the meaning of the novel
Dracula,
but also about William Cody's signal, and probably unwitting, contribution to the development of frontier and gothic traditions as racial myths in the transatlantic fin de siècle.

To look at Cody's glorious legend in the shadowy twilight of Stoker's art is to discover new meanings within it. While scholars of Cody and of the frontier routinely evaluate Wild West show nostalgia and frontier triumphalism, they have been less willing to acknowledge its darker twin, the contemporary fear of the frontier as a place of racial monstrosity. This anxiety had stalked Cody's career ever since he consorted with mixed-blood scouts on the Great Plains, and Cody himself had played on it, by situating himself as the unquestionably white man who yet mastered the miscegenated—degenerated—world of frontier and wilderness. The conjoined study of Buffalo Bill and Count Dracula suggests such fears informed a gothic frontier myth, featuring not a clear-cut conquest of the wilderness by white settlers, but the transformation of the pioneer into something more racially powerful—and infinitely twisted—that threatens the decadent metropolis.
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The points of contact between the creators of these tales, Stoker and Cody, combined with the many significant correspondences between novel and show, command our attention. From the relative superficialities of plot and character to the deeper issues of the book's perspectives on race—blood—the ghost of Buffalo Bill's Wild West haunts this greatest work of vampire fiction.

THE PERSONAL HISTORIES that connect William Cody and Bram Stoker reveal how entangled the social and literary worlds of frontier myth and gothic terror actually were.
Dracula
is, in the words of Richard Davenport-Hines, “an intensely personal book,” through which Stoker responded to developments in his private life.
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Figures in Dracula were often warped reflections of friends and colleagues in the London theater world. Cody's arrival among that circle constituted Stoker's most immediate and significant exposure to the American West prior to his visit to California in the 1890s.

William Cody and Bram Stoker were almost exact contemporaries. Stoker was born in Dublin, in 1847, the son of an Anglo-Irish civil servant, and educated at Trinity College. His early writings consisted of theater reviews for Dublin newspapers and horror stories, which made him a favorite of Dublin's literary elite, including Lord William and Lady Jane Francesca Wilde, parents of Stoker's college acquaintance, Oscar Wilde. In the late 1860s, Stoker was much taken with the stage performances of a young English actor named Henry Irving, the leading light of the new Romantic school of acting. In 1876, the same year Cody took the “first scalp for Custer,” Stoker met the thirty-eight-year-old Irving at a private gathering where Irving recited a poem in his honor, which sent Stoker into what he called “something like hysterics.”
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Irving was well on his way to becoming the Victorian era's most famous actor, and by 1878 Stoker had signed on as manager for his London theater, the Lyceum. Stoker worked for Irving for the next twenty-eight years, until the actor's death, and the relationship profoundly affected his life and his literary work.
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That Irving provided an uncertain bridge to a life of culture and wealth helps to explain Stoker's obsessive interest in the actor's affairs. Stoker was not only adulatory of Irving, but captivated by his presence and devoted to following his every move. As one contemporary remarked, “To Bram, Irving is as a god, and can do no wrong.” Stoker's wife, Florence Balcombe Stoker, was a legendary beauty. She rejected Oscar Wilde's proposal of marriage to accept Stoker's, and George du Maurier, the author of
Trilby,
acclaimed her one of the three most beautiful women he had ever seen. But the marriage was cold, and Stoker's devotion to Irving subsumed his personal affections. In the considered judgment of one biographer, Stoker's friendship with Irving was “the most important love relationship of his adult life.”
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