BOOK REVIEW: William Hughes.BEYOND DRACULA: BRAM STOKER'S FICTION AND ITS CULTURAL CONTEXT. London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.

Abstract

What would it mean to go beyond Dracula? William Hughes's answer directs us not only to Bram Stoker's other, less famous and, it has to be said, less successful texts, but also to the [End Page 355] wider questions that informed and were in turn animated by that curious oeuvre, the work of "an individual well placed with regard to, and well versed in, the issues and discourses of his day" (9). On its own, however, this formulation is somewhat misleading, implying a view of Stoker as first and foremost a highly articulate spokesman who represented late-Victorian or Edwardian society to itself, unhesitatingly reproducing the stock assumptions and cultural prejudices of an era. But Hughes is understandably less interested in the stolidly conventional figure of the author as citizen and moralist, Stoker's own preferred self-image, and intrigued instead by the manifold ways in which his fiction tends to lapse into contradiction or crisis "in a sentence or phrase which sits uneasily at the end of a proposition, or in the presence of a strange linguistic or moral twist to an otherwise stylistically orthodox pattern of rhetoric or narrative" (10). These dissonances are not to be read as unconscious expressions of the vicissitudes of Stoker's personality, resistances to his single-minded drive towards exemplary resolutions, slips of the pen rather than slips of the tongue, for Hughes is at pains to distance himself from psychoanalytic interpretations. Rather, it is the irremediable plurality of discursive logics that produces this effect of waywardness and recalcitrance, all too often eluding the writer's best intentions. There is, in short, no single unifying principle or problematic, biographical or otherwise, around which the Stoker corpus might cohere.