Dracula: The Decline of an Empire

By Sam Barnett 


“History is movement, and if you’re not riding with it then in all probability you’re beneath its wheels.”--Alan Moore 

What defines a civilization has largely to do with progression. Decline and change; following a map of culture that is human precisely because it is sporadic. We drift as individuals and as a society towards sunsets we can’t see.  Our history is ruptured with invasions and betrayal as well as renaissances and revolutions, often coexisting within the folds of the same warped, glassy eyed period. 

Dracula is exempt to history, parading through the filmy centuries (the reader can only guess at Dracula’s age as one is never given an exact number), a shadow against the swiftly evolving horizon. 


He’s missing something vital, which the stolen blood that swims through his veins cannot replace. The vampire watches, as through a mirror, change he can only perceive and can’t touch. Is this what separates Dracula from humanity?  The abrupt distinction is tightly drawn. 

Is this what makes the vampire inhuman, more subtle than the killing to survive aspect, but the simple fact that he holds to his past, knows the secrets that are as a law reserved for the humbly churning Earth beneath our feet?  The paradox with the vampire is that the vampire disease encases the victim’s humanity. As Dracula grows older he finds himself removed from humanity and transcending history. History is humanity. 

Dracula can only flirt with history. As he reveals: 'I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is.'  The most blunt idea to take away from this statement is that Dracula longs for London to capture the lust of life and blood. But, personally, I argue that it’s more than that.

Dracula does not seek to meld himself into the lives of Londoners, because at this point he must realize that all attempts would be futile. Dracula wants to understand the primal mechanics of society, to pin the rapture of this change he cannot feel like a butterfly under glass. 'Well I know that, did I move and speak in your London, none there are who would not know me for a stranger. That is not enough for me. Here I am noble; I am boyar; the common people know me, and I am master.’ 

With this quote Bram Stoker reveals that Dracula is built upon the persona of his history, earlier in the novel he relates to Jonathan Harker the wars and escapades of his past. He cannot seem to escape his past, or reinvent himself as a vampire must. History trudges along without him on board.  Perhaps this is what leads to Dracula’s demise. 

Stoker teases the reader with  fragments of Dracula’s past and with this device Stoker builds Dracula up to be a sort of legend within himself, and that the reader is only being treated to a snapshot of who Dracula is and once was. 

If one views the life of Dracula as a thread separate from the novel, I find the phase in Dracula’s life that Stoker chose to intercede, a strange choice. Personally, I get the feeling that the ordeal with Harker at Dracula’s castle is not the pinnacle  of Dracula’s existence. The process of abducting Harker and the cat and mouse games that follow seem almost routine. I see Dracula not as the legendary monster he once was, but nearly a shell of himself, attempting to live up to the ideals of his past. Which is what makes Stoker’s choice so genius. 

He cuts into Dracula’s life in it’s final stage. It’s the decline of an empire. We see Dracula, the timeless wanderer in a state of total abandon, the shadow against the rapt tides which toss him  and faze him and surge on. In the beginning of the novel the reader observes Dracula in the closest state to his prime. His ego is built upon the rumors of the townspeople, who in fear speak of him with the same kind of fervor as a figure of worship. Dracula’s native Transylvania is a dream scape and he is the creature of nightmares. 

Dracula transitions from Transylvania into the bustling reality of an overcrowded London and Stoker’s allegory works beautifully. The old meets the new, and the new stamps out those which cannot adapt.