Louis S. Warren (57 page)

But Dracula is no mere villain to Cody's hero. It is rather as if his evil powers represent Cody's strengths and virtues carried to unprecedented extremes. Cody's martial abilities, his long military career, his facility with manipulating nature and particularly animals, all have their dark counterpart in Dracula, the ages-old frontier hero who can become an animal at will.

Even Dracula's inability to die, his undeadness, seems to be a distorted echo of Buffalo Bill's frontier life, particularly his exploits in the Indian wars. In the accounts of his military commanders—liberally excerpted in show programs and on posters—Cody's remarkable talents as tracker, fighter, and strategist were charged with a legendary, practically superhuman endurance. In the esteem of General Carr, “Mr. Cody seemed never to tire and was always ready to go, in the darkest night, or the worst weather, and usually volunteered.”
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The sleeplessness of Buffalo Bill and the restlessness of westerners, so prevalent in the enormous energy on display in the Wild West show, rendered the frontier a place of eternal watchfulness, where, in the words of one London columnist, “constant vigilance is the price of existence.”
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And “constant vigilance” is the essence of Dracula's curse, for as the centuries-old border guardian, Dracula himself has become an eternal sentry, unable to sleep, to rest, to die. As he puts it, his has been the “endless duty of the frontier guard, for, as the Turks say, ‘water sleeps, and enemy is sleepless.' ”
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Dracula was created by unceasing war, by a frontier that went one step further than Cody's in refusing to close. So long as it remains open, so too must the eyes of its heroic border guardian. As we learn in the novel, Dracula was once a man. But his passion for victory over the hated Other, itself a characteristic of the racial frontier, led him to a Faustian bargain. In exchange for learning the dark arts which allow him finally to vanquish the Turk, he became the deathless vampire, the eternal warrior.
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Seen in this light, the career of the young American begins to look like a pale version of Dracula's early days. We might say that to be Buffalo Bill in the war against the Turks is to become Dracula.

Like his application of frontier tropes to Transylvania, Stoker's many inversions of the frontier myth were in keeping with older gothic traditions. In the words of one scholar, “the mingled apprehension and aspiration” of the New England Puritans became the starting point for both the progressive frontier myth of later generations and its gothic horrors.
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Put another way, regressive gothic literature inverts progressive New World expectations: the Christian errand into the wilderness becomes the traveler's ordeal, the city on a hill becomes the castle ruin (also on a hill) into which the traveler stumbles in the hour of dark need, and the climactic moment of the frontier saga, the removal of wilderness savages by the bearers of light, becomes in its gothic counterpart the transformation of the pilgrim into a monster.
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In the end, Stoker conceived a vampire world which drew comprehensively on contemporary frontier myth to create a fully realized inversion, a gothic nightmare that stands in close counterpoint to Cody's frontier dream.

It would have been difficult for Stoker to restrain himself from the racial implications of that inversion. Cody himself had stood against the degenerative power of the frontier since his early days as a scout, as a white man in an occupation dominated by Indians and mixed-blood men, on a frontier that had, in the parlance of the day, “corrupted” Spanish conquistadors into conquered Mexicans, and which threatened to work its dark magic on Americans, too. As we have seen, his abilities as a scout were considerable, but officers praised him as much as they did partly because he so closely approximated their fantasies of a white man who mastered the frontier but avoided its interracial temptations. Implicitly, Cody continued to remind his audience of his strengths in this regard, by surrounding himself with white frontiersmen, Indians, and mixed-blood families, such as John Y. Nelson, his Lakota wife, and their children, and the Lakota and mixed-blood family of “Bronco Bill” Irving. To see Cody amidst the sexy, polyglot crowd of the Wild West camp was to recognize how “superior” his will must be in rising above frontier sensuality.

Regardless of how much attention Stoker paid to Cody's Great Plains mythology, he would have been familiar with the idea of a racially degenerate frontier. An Anglo-Irish writer who favored home rule, he knew the rhetoric of colonial and frontier degeneracy from a lifetime of “bog trotter” epithets and arguments over British power. America was a hopeful destination for the multitudes of Irish who fled the famine and for many who stayed at home, too. But at the same time, since the beginning of the American experiment, various writers had speculated that Americans were racially degraded by historic and often familial ties to Indians and Africans, relations which were themselves symptomatic of licentious backcountry freedom and America's remoteness from European sources of whiteness.
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Mexicans, a constant reminder of the frontier's potential for “unfit amalgamation” of Europeans and Indians, were the largest minority presence in the U.S. Southwest in the 1870s (and a major component of Cody's show, too). In the 1890s, the threat of frontier miscegenation yet preoccupied apologists for the American conquest of the Southwest and California, and ultimately it played a large part in restraining U.S. expansion across the Pacific, particularly in the Philippines.
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Thus, it is not surprising to find that racial ambiguities swirl around both the novel's frontiersmen. The doomed Lucy compares Quincey Morris to Othello, a curious reference for an infatuated white girl to apply to her ostensibly white suitor.
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And where Morris suggests Stoker's suspicions about New World frontiersmen, it is Count Dracula who embodies his deepest fears about Americans and the fate of the Anglo-Saxon race. Just as Cody resembled Cetshwayo and Jung Bahadur in the barbs of his critics, just as his face suggested “traces of Indian blood” to some observers, so Dracula is revealed as the embodiment of racial ambivalence, the descendant not only of Vikings, but of their enemies, the Huns of Attila, “whose blood is in these veins,” as the count tells Jonathan Harker.
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Scion of Asiatic and Teutonic lineages, not just berserker but Hun-berserker, Count Dracula is a racial hybrid, defying the categories that the frontier line itself purports to demarcate, subverting the civilization which is maintained by blood purity and in defense of which the frontier line is drawn.

Like those who worried that Americans might be too close to nonwhite peoples, to the frontier, to remain white, the novel
Dracula
depicts the frontier as the near edge of a racial transformation which threatens British civilization. In Stoker's vision, miscegenation leads to the replacement of weaker races by the stronger, to the triumph of the frontiersman over the city dweller.
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The racial frontier is thus key to understanding the real danger of the count, to
seeing
the monster who is in fact either absent or invisible for much of the book. What makes him so very dangerous is that he has a lust for blood befitting a frontier warrior, and that good people cannot tell he is a monster. The source of these talents is the too-permeable frontier line, that too-fragile division between light-skinned civilizers and dark-skinned savages, whose congenital race hatreds can give way without notice to interracial sex. Thus he is a savage, a dark-hearted villain, and yet he is wrapped in skin so white that he seems to be “without a speck of color about him anywhere.” Neither red, nor brown, nor yellow, he is “of extraordinary pallor.”
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The most deadly monster to emerge from the frontier is neither an Indian nor a Turk. He appears as a very white man, but is in fact a frontier miscegenate from the ancient past, able to extend his “vampire kind” through his own desire. Unless the novel's protagonists stop this embodiment of the frontier, he is the vision of their racial future.

Westering race myth is in this sense the deeper context of the novel, its genetic bed, just as it was for the Wild West show, with its relentless westward march of Progress and Civilization.
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Derived from Europe's mythic race frontiers, the war between westering Vikings and Asiatic Huns, Dracula is not just some relic of another country's barbaric heritage, but an inverted race hero who comes straight out of the Anglo-Saxon past. Far to the east, Dracula's kin began the westward progression of Teutonic civilization which Morris is completing. Thus, the centaur and the vampire are not mere symbolic opposites. Rather, Dracula and Quincey Morris, or Dracula and Buffalo Bill, mark the beginning and ending of a mythic drama: the epic birth of Western civilization.

This interpretation explains the curious ending in which the American's death, not Dracula's, signals the novel's climax. The killing of the two race frontiersmen, one from the East—the land of the past—and the other from the West—the land of the future—terminates the thirst for blood and the threat of race mixture that the ancient race wars bequeathed to the English, the virtuous sons of the berserkers. In the capable and dispassionate hands of the bourgeois and racially pure Englishmen who return Mina to England, the nation can become modern, and yet remain progressive and free. Away from the racial frontier, there is still hope for blood purity, restrained passion, and enduring civilization.

The novel thus mimics social evolutionary scholarship of the period in utilizing the frontier as both a historical and a predictive tool. To social evolutionists, the frontier line was, among other things, a purported division between primitive and modern. By looking from metropolis to frontier, cosmopolitans could locate “primitives” and say, “They are what we once were.”
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Stoker suggests that Morris is what Dracula once was; and Dracula is what Morris will become. The relief at the novel's conclusion, where Dracula turns to dust and Morris lies buried, flows in part from this final resolution of the vampire's curse, which itself stems from a frontier that remains open for too long, warping the race that wins it.

While Cody trafficked in nostalgia for frontiers and race wars well into the twentieth century, the novel
Dracula
burst forth at the end of the nineteenth century to issue a warning about them. Perhaps the frontier wars were glorious, Stoker says, but the closure of the frontier is not all for the worse. The frontier is where Dracula comes from, where the dark desires of his eternal longings were cloaked in a white skin. It whetted his bloodthirst, fired his blood passion, and, before that, begat the blood mixing that in turn begat him. Frontiers that do not close bring consummate bloodletting. Frontier wars that do not end require Faustian bargains. They nurture vampires.

Given that the novel
Dracula
plays on pervasive fears of race weakness, Stoker's reliance on myths of race origin for his tale's deep historical context is understandable. Since those myths were characterized by the centrality of frontier warfare, his resort to frontier settings, frontier tropes, and frontier warriors to carry the tale makes a great deal of sense. That he drew on the most famous Anglo-Saxon frontier hero of his day, Buffalo Bill Cody, as an inspiration for his fictional frontiersmen, Count Dracula and Quincey Morris, is hardly surprising, particularly given his obsession with his benefactor's social life and Irving's close attachment to Cody during the years Stoker was working on the novel. Popular doubts about Cody's racial identity, combined with his physical beauty, his “irresistibility,” his military prowess, and his ability to master savages and savage nature, all suggest that the novel
Dracula
is a fantasy of the ambivalences that made Buffalo Bill such a figure of power and fascination in late-nineteenth-century London, played out on the dark side.

As an artistic statement, the novel exceeds its origins to become much more than the sum of its parts. Until Stoker's time, most literary vampires were women. For most of the nineteenth century, from Polidori's
The
Vampyre to Le Fanu's Carmilla they were eastern, sexy, and very thirsty.
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In making his vampire a masculine figure, a frontier warrior spawned from a mythic collision of races in the ancient past and out to conquer London, Stoker both inverted Buffalo Bill and imitated his method. As Buffalo Bill had done with the Wild West, he connected his “show,” his monster, to the origins of Europe, and his mission to a widely perceived crisis, racial degeneration. The result was to suggest that the ancient vampire is profoundly entangled in the modern English world.

As much as Cody embodied a frontier myth of individual achievement and redemption, the noisy triumphalism of that myth was a counterpoint to its own dark baggage: the lurking fear of the frontier as a place of racial monstrosity and moral decay. Cody's frontier centaur symbolized the trans-formative power of the frontier, the way that going west and conquering could potentially make of Americans something new, something more free and powerful. The vampire was Bram Stoker's dark vision of the same frontier transformation, the shifting of Self into Other, the loss of will and restraint before a new self that was soulless, consuming, and irresistible.

The connections between Cody and the count suggest how very plastic the frontier mythology of the Wild West show could be for cultural commentators and artists in the countries it visited. The myth of the American frontier became a touchstone for understanding other national histories and contemporary crises. But they also suggest how much the Wild West show itself borrowed from European traditions of race, empire, and warfare to weave its New World spectacle into Old World epic. The progressive dream of Cody's show in fact provided fertile ground for cultural consideration of its darker counterpart, the fear of frontier monstrosity and decay that had long preoccupied Europeans and Americans alike. Thus Cody's appeal to myths of centaurs and race wars as the birthing process of nations found resonance in European concerns with racial degeneration and cultural decline, nowhere better evidenced than in the use of the frontier myth by Bram Stoker, England's greatest gothic novelist.