Copyright 2004 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved.

ELH 71.1 (2004) 229-249

Access provided by University of Colorado @ Denver [Access article in PDF]

Nonstandard Language and the Cultural Stakes of Stoker's Dracula

Christine Ferguson
University of Alberta

It has become customary to enlist Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) in support of what remains a dominant myth of the culture and popular fiction of late Victorian Britain: namely, that both were obsessed with the preservation of a pure, homogenous, and unchanging national identity increasingly under siege from subversive elements. While critical assessments of the nature of the menace or the success of narrative resistance vary, the essential terms of the debateoutside versus inside, dangerous dissonance versus healthy cultural stabilityremain remarkably consistent. So common, indeed, is this approach it has earned its own sobriquet as "the anxiety theory," an expression used by Nicholas Daly to describe the thesis whereby a particular fictional villain signifies a dissonant threat to an established social order.1 This article allies itself with recent critical attempts to challenge the overly anxious construction of the nineteenth century by showing how Dracula, long a seminal text in the mythology of Victorian paranoia, anathematizes the very values of conformity, sameness, and hierarchy it is said to engender.2 Nowhere is this process more evident than in Stoker's treatment of language, a currency that becomes interchangeable with blood in Dracula and provides a primary tool for the vampire's exclusion. Once dismissed as unworthy of serious scholarly attention, Dracula has in recent years spawned an immense critical industry populated with increasingly ingenious modes of interpreting the identity and cultural resonance of the vampire.3 The Count has been identified with real historical figuresHenry Irving, Vlad the Impaler, and Charles Stewart Parnellas well as a host of late Victorian social fears, including ones about same-sex desire, devouring female sexuality, monopoly capitalism, the New Woman, the Jew, reverse colonization, unruly democracy, and the contradictory nature of Anglo-Irish identity.4 The rich variety of these laudable critical interventions is somewhat negated, however, by the surprising dependence on the anxiety paradigm

that so many of them share. Regardless of the [End Page 229] specific nature of the threat represented by the vampire, Dracula is described, time and time again, as anarchic disruption to some historically specific convention of bourgeois culture, to an order obsessed with the maintenance of order and purity. Anxietyabout the dangers of social and sexual change, about the replacement of social stability with chaos and mayhemremains the dominant idiom of Dracula, and it is one long overdue for reconsideration. We must reassess our willingess to impute a horror of destabilization to a novel so deliberately fraught with wildly varied and often chaotically fractured forms of subjectivity and communication. Far from being a spectre of transgression, Stoker's Dracula is a victim of relentless limitations that render him even more ineffective, once his occult nature is understood, than a mundane petty criminal. Vampirism has given him supernatural strength and transformative powers, but has also subjected him to a series of prohibitions which often curtail these powers when they are most needed, such as at the moment of his death. He cannot enter a dwelling without permission, pass running water at any time but slack tide, or transform during the day. He can be warded off with garlic, holy water, wild roses, communion wafers, and crucifixes.5 His few successes in England are the result not of evil omnipotence but of the ignorance of his victim's protectors. Lucy Westenra's mother removes the garlic wreath from her daughter's neck and opens her bedroom window, giving free access to the vampire who would otherwise be held at bay; Mina Harker's male associates cut her out of the communication circle and ignore the signs, such as her nightmares and enervation, that indicate her imminent vamping. Mina is, of course, eventually redeemed, reducing Dracula's victim count to one for his entire six months in England. This seems a decidedly poor showing for such a vaunted master villain, but one in keeping with the numerous limitations that bind his actions. The vampire is, as Van Helsing gleefully proclaims, "even more prisoner than the slave of the galley, than the madman in his cell. He cannot go where he lists; he who is not of nature has yet to obey some of nature's laws."6 More significant than the occult restrictions that hinder the Count are the linguistic ones. His ultimate defeat is as much a result of his failure to navigate the wildly divergent and multimediated forms of English as it is of his inability to move through London freely. It is in the Count's relationship to the language(s) of the country he covets that we find the most compelling refutation of the anxiety thesis so frequently diagnosed in Dracula; it is here that his embodiment of a [End Page 230] deadly stasis rather than dizzying mobility is most evident. Yet despite its importance to the narrative, the issue of language use in Dracula has generally received less attention than that of the communication technologies that feature so prominently in the text. Those critics who have paid attention to the formsof spoken English as well as those of linguistic transmission in Dracula typically downplay the diversity of the novel's voices in service of their own recapitulation of the anxiety paradigm. Franco Moretti, for example, insists that the triumph of the vampire hunters be read as a triumph of standard English over less orthodox forms. As Dracula is a danger because he constitutes an unforeseen variation from the British

cultural code, so the maximum threat on the plane of language coincides with the maximum efficiency and dislocation of the English language. Half way through the novel, when Dracula seems to be in control of the situation, the frequency of Van Helsing's speeches increases enormously, and his perverse English dominates the stage. It becomes dominant because although the English language possesses the word "vampire," it is unable to ascribe meaning to it. . . . Van Helsing has to explain in his approximate and mangled English what a vampire is. Only then, when these notions have been translated into the linguistic and cultural code of the English, and the code has been reorganized and reinforced, can the narrative return to its previous fluidity, the hunt begin and the victory appear secure. It is entirely logical that the last sentence should be a . . . veritable procession of literary English.7 It is not logical, however, that such a success of literary language should be attributed to a Dutch alienist whose own "mangled" English is much less careful than, in Harker's words, the "excellent" (46) English of his undead foe. Despite its weakness, however, the argument for Dracula as a novelistic defense of language standardization is one that numerous critics, from Jennifer Wicke to Barbara Belford, continue to make.8 Such assertions ignore Stoker's clear fascination with the potential of English to metamorphosize, break down, and conceal as much as it reveals. For despite the totalizing claims of the introduction that "all records are exactly contemporary, given from the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them" (10), the narrative is full of speech that is neither familiar nor comprehensible to those who record. In his account of a conversation with the dockworkers who served the Czarina Catherine Van Helsing states, "They say much of blood and bloom, and of others which I comprehend [End Page 231] not, though I guess what they mean; but nevertheless they tell us all the things which we want to know" (357). Meaning is transmitted, but not through the transparency of the linguistic medium employed. Mina records a similar confusion after her first meeting with Mr. Swales in the Whitby churchyard. Recounting his comments in her shorthand diary, she admits "I nodded, for I thought it better to assent, though I did not quite understand his dialect" (98). The fact that a middle-class South Englander such as Mina should be confused by Swales's rough dialect is unsurprising; that she then transcribes it word for word into shorthand, with all the zeal of a dialectologist, is simply astonishing. Swales's speech, like the vulgar idiom of the dockworkers, comes to us from reporters who claim not to understand what they hear but who are nonetheless able to find some signification in the unfamiliar words. Rather than standardizing or reifying language, Dracula seems to deliberately confound what Daniel Cottom has termed the "Enlightenment faith in words" as rational, transparent signifiers.9 The implications of such a move are clarified when examined in the context of the surrounding late Victorian debates about nonstandard language. Stoker's novel appears at a time when the historical conceptions of the function, status, and essence of language were being radically revised, when the perceived difference between pure and impure, progressive and degenerative, forms of speech and writing no longer seemed plain. Dracula both represents and participates in

the language revolutions of its period, presenting a unique linguistic ethos that further demonstrates the text's increasingly recognized alliance to modernism and defies the charges of anxious standardization so frequently ascribed to it.10 At the time of Dracula's publication, the English language was being discussed in terms of life and death. Poised to become the new world language, it was being spread all over the globe through colonial expansion, inventoried in the period's great dictionary projects, transmitted through new communication technologies, and disseminated to a seemingly enlarged reading public through the emergent popular press.11 English had never before been spoken in so many mouths abroad, nor apparently read by so many eyes at home. While such a spread seemed to testify to the virility and resilience of the language, some Britons worried it might also result in the transformation and denigration of the pure essence of English. The more English was spoken, written, and read by Others, the more it seemed liable to unruly variation and extinction. Simultaneous to these concerns [End Page 232] about the debasement of English from without, however, was a growing awareness that the language spoken at home never had been pure or consistent; its very vitality was a result of its adaptability. Through the new popular press, the rise of dialect societies, and the prominence of nonstandard English in the writing of authors such as Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Morrison, the mutable character of domestic English became increasingly visible. English, as most commentators could agree, was changing, but whether this change signalled the death of its stateliness and purity, or simply the continuance of its tradition of radical transformation, was open for debate. Thus as important, if not more important, than debates about thelegitimacy of nonstandard English at this time were those about its significancewas it a deviation from the norm, or rather the means by which the norm was produced?12 The range of responses to the nonstandard is almost as extensive as that of the forms that it might take, and it would be impossible, as both Richard Bailey and Manfred Gorlach point out, to document them fully on the basis of surviving literary evidence.13 We can nonetheless list some of the era's more common and compelling reactions to dialect and nonstandard usage. Some writers, for example, condemned dialect for its association with the capricious and heady growth associated with modernity. In an article for The Westminster Review published in the same year as Dracula, R. J. Lloyd claims that "differences of pronunciation, whether in time or place, are an unmixed evil; and some day, perhaps we resolve that they shall be abolished, and shall establish standards of sound as fixed, as well known, and as accessible as those of weights, measures or money." The redemption of English lay in a utopic future when "pronunciation will be fixed with a rigidity hitherto undreamed of," and in which "language [will have] ceased to be chiefly a growth, and has become chiefly a structure."14 English, in Lloyd's analysis, is deteriorating from too much growth, from a superabundance of monstrous life. In yearning for a stop to the growth and a reification of pronunciation, Lloyd imagines a salvation of the language in its very death. Only when it has ceased to grow, spread, and, indeed, be modern, can it be restored to the state of clarity and perfection it apparently once held. A similar association of the nonstandard with ephemeral modernity can be found in some of the period's invectives against dialect literature. An

1898 critique of dialect fiction published in Literature wonders if "we are not in danger of exalting dialects at the expense of the tongue in which [End Page 233] Shakespeare wrote" and concludes that "the taste for dialect is a literary fashion of the day. . . . New literary fashions are interesting to study. . . but they never seriously affect great writers."15 In this second example, the sheer faddishness of dialect writing will prevent it from ever seriously taking hold of a canon built on tradition and order. For others, the problem with dialect was not that it was too new but that it was too old, an atavistic remnant from an earlier and less sophisticated stage of human consciousness. Borrowing from contemporary social Darwinism, exponents of this view held that dialect was a sort of linguistic Dodo that had long ago lost the battle for supremacy to the more advanced forces of Standard English. Like other so-called atavistic forces at the fin de siclefor example, the criminal and the trance medium nonstandard English was framed in this context as a pernicious influence on modern civilization.16 An 1897 article in Macmillan's Magazine claims that "it is a sign of degeneracy in our literature when writers deliberately resort to the grotesque, the archaic, or the vernacular . . . the ideas capable of being expressed even in the purest dialect which has fallen behind in the race for supremacy, are and must at best be only of second-rate or third-rate value."17 Implicit in this complaint is a concern about the effects of vernacular writing on a mass readership. If language, as philologist F. Max Mller had argued in 1887, really was synonymous with thought, then it would follow that those who began to write and read dialect would accordingly come to think in a correspondingly diminished state.18 Primitive language might be more than a side effect of atavism; it could also act as a catalyst for decline. Some defenses of nonstandard English employed the same terms as these pseudoDarwinist attacks on dialect, while inserting them into a radically different context. Preservationists such as Dorset dialect poet William Barnes and philologist Joseph Wright, editor of the English Dialect Dictionary (1898-1905), also aligned the nonstandard with the past, but a wholesome past rather than a primitive one. Barnes, a clergyman, poet, and close friend to Thomas Hardy, held that foreign words and roots had corrupted the beauty, simplicity, and apparent homogeneity of a lost Anglo-Saxon tongue. In order to recuperate this loss, he advocated and composed his poems in a "purified" English made up of contemporary Dorset dialect words, obsolete English words of Anglo-Saxon origin, and neologisms based on Anglo-Saxon rootsfor example, "manywedder" for "polygamist," "folkdom" for "democracy," and "bendsome" for "flexible."19 Recent [End Page 234] biographer Andrew Phillips describes Barnes as "a 'language patriot,' for his home-love made him also love the speech of the Saxon English."20 But, of course, it was not Saxon English in which he wrote, but rather an eccentric polyglot of Englishes, modern and ancient, actual and imagined. Barnes's work inadvertently suggests that the only way we can return to a primal, simple, and unadulterated English is to first invent it. Barnes's mandate (if not method) in preserving dialect was shared by the English Dialect Society, an organization founded in 1873 by W. A. Wright and W. W. Skeat in response to the perceived extinction of regional speech in Britain. Favoring the idiom

of rural areas vanishing under industrial expansion over the slang of the slums, the Society set out to record all surviving traces of this speech in a comprehensive dialect dictionary. Imagined as a linguistic mausoleum for beautiful old words, the culminating English Dialect Dictionary appeared in six volumes between 1898 and 1905. In the preface to the first volume, editor Joseph Wright notes: It is quite evident from the letters received daily at our "Workshop" that pure dialect speech is rapidly disappearing from our midst and that in a few years it will be almost impossible to get accurate information about difficult points. Even now it is sometimes found extremely difficult to ascertain the exact pronunciation and the various shades of meanings, especially in words which occur both in the literary language and in the dialects.21 As fascinating as Wright's conviction that British dialect was truly about to disappeara fairly standard belief at the timeis his alliance of its imminent departure with semantic and etymological obscurity.22 In their death throes, the folk words and phrases of Old Britain lose the constancy and lucidity they allegedly maintained in earlier periods. Wright's dictionary acts as an elegy not simply for the vanishing words but also for a vanishing relationship between diction, community, and mind in which dialect once participated, mourning a period in which correct pronunciation and connotation were never in doubt. One might argue that this perceived lost or dying linguistic consistency was just as fictional, just as artificial, as Barnes's polyglottal pure English. Not all fin de sicle dialect advocates were as convinced of its inherent decrepitude as the learned members of the English Dialect Society. For some scholars and journalists, particularly those in the United States, vernacular speech and writing were welcomed as a [End Page 235] sign of growth and independence from a reactionary past.23 In an 1890 article for the professional journal Writer, Richard Dawson suggests that the abandonment of dialect would reduce contemporary literature to "nothing . . . but dry, scientific imagery" and concludes that "the dialects build up the vitality of a language."24 For Dawson, dialect is a sort of anarchic life force of language, vital not despite but because of its eccentricity. American novelist and poet Rupert Hughes employs similar terminology in an 1897 article entitled "Dialectophobia," in which he also imbues dialect with unique energizing properties. "It is one of the best proofs of the vitality of contemporary American letters," he states, "that its best masters are vitally interested in matters of dialect. It proves that the spirit of democracy is still yeasty."25 When dialect is represented in fiction, Hughes suggests, the political validity of its speakers and their right to self-representation is correspondingly asserted. Dawson and Hughes share a common idiomdialect is linked to vitality and vigoras well as mutual association of nonstandard language with lively mutability rather than archaic deadliness. They imply that, far from epitomizing the past (whether imagined as primitive or pure), dialect subverts it. The examples of popular reaction to nonstandard usage listed here, from revulsion at its apparent atavism to celebration of its correlation with an emancipatory modernity,

are intended not to be exhaustive, but rather to suggest the intriguing and often contradictory range of late Victorian fantasies for and about Englishwas it to be a homogenizing principle or agent of differentiation, a vehicle of tradition or of revolution? Further, what kind of national identities might language, in these different figurations, underwrite? Stoker's Dracula represents one of the period's most interesting literary engagements with these concerns about the nature, function, and implications of linguistic variation. The novel pits linguistic variation and incoherence against the vampiric attempt to purify and eradicate language. In Dracula, the vampire's agenda is first to standardize and then to silence the languages of his victims. It is thus fitting that his first textual appearance should be not as a fantasy, nightmare, or revenant, but as a specimen of overcareful writing. In the book's opening sequence, recently qualified solicitor Jonathan Harker travels to Castle Dracula in order to assist the Count with the purchase of some real estate in the London suburb of Purfleet. While stopping at the [End Page 236] Golden Krone hotel in Bistritz, Harker receives the following note from his host. My friendWelcome to the Carpathians. I am anxiously expecting you. Sleep well tonight. At three o'clock tomorrow the diligence will start for Bukovina; a place on it is kept for you. At the Borgo Pass my carriage will await you and bring you to me. I trust that your journey from London has been a happy one, and that you will enjoy your stay in my beautiful land. (34) Dracula's English is curiously at odds with the muddle and disorder that Harker has hitherto encountered at every turn in his travels. All words are spelled correctly and the sentences, while a little stilted, are nonetheless grammatically correct. Transylvania has thus far seemed "an imaginative whirlpool," a place of erratic train schedules, ethnic heterogeneity, and picturesque dress (32). But the Count's careful language and impeccable timing sets him apart from this landscapewhile the trains may not run on time in Transylvania, vampiric coaches arrive with supernatural precision.26 The Count is not simply, as some critics have suggested, an epitome of the dissonance associated with foreign space, for even in this foreign space he remains profoundly unheimlich.27 His aberrance is communicated primarily by the unanticipated order of his writing and planning in a zone of colorful mayhem. As significant as the curious tone of Dracula's writing is the unearthly silence of his territory. Harker's journey towards Castle Dracula is one of increasing linguistic diminishment. When Harker attempts to question his hosts at the Golden Krone hotel about the Count, they first feign incomprehension and then "simply refus[e] to speak further" (35). When the vampire's name is spoken, silence follows. Undeterred by the couple's reaction, Harker proceeds on his journey through a countryside muffled by vampirism, populated by mute pilgrims with "neither eyes nor ears for the outer world" (38) and fellow travellers who mutter strange words and gesture at him in a sign language intended to thwart the evil eye.28 Unable to read the warning signs directed at

him, he remains ignorant of the impending danger, a danger as much of being silenced as of being vamped. Little wonder that his initial observations of Castle Dracula focus on its communicative isolation from the outside world: "Of bell or knocker there was no sign; through these frowning walls and dark window openings it was not likely that my voice would penetrate" (45). The [End Page 237] vampire's lair is a place not of polyglottism and miscegenation but of silence and dead speech. Once inside, it becomes clear that the Count is far more interested in Harker's language than in his blood. The evening hours are devoted to continuous practice of English conversation, during which Dracula bids Harker to correct him on even the most minor of inconsistencies. One critic has suggested that the Count's linguistic obsession is a sublimation of his homoerotic desire to penetrate and drain another man, but it seems that the opposite is true.29 Dracula's interest, if any, in vamping Harker is minimal in comparison to his desire for the solicitor's easy English facility. "As yet I only know your tongue through books," he tells Harker, "to you, my friend, I look that I know it to speak" (51). When Harker, perhaps disingenuously, protests that the Count "speaks excellent English," the Count responds: Not so. . . . 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. . . .You come to me not alone as agent of my friend Peter Hawkins, of Exeter, to tell me all about my new estate in London. You shall, I trust, rest here with me a while, so that by our talking I may learn the English intonation; and I would that you tell me when I make error, even of the slightest, in my speaking. (51) Interestingly enough, this passage represents some of the worst English spoken by Dracula, far less regular than that of his introductory note to Harker. Ironically, it is when he expresses his desire for linguistic competency (and the corresponding invisibility it brings) that his speech becomes most awkward and outlandish. Yet it is not these occasional syntactical eccentricities that mark his deviance from the British subjects he wishes to conquer; after all, the England represented in Dracula abounds with dialect, slang, and hybrid forms of language. The use of nonstandard English in such a space would hardly mark one as particularly alien. Rather, it is his obsessive concern with linguistic perfection and standardization that truly sets him apart. Count Dracula equates linguistic mastery with other kinds of masteryif he can speak English like, or perhaps better than, a native, he can assimilate with and eventually dominate British citizens. This conviction is not an illogical onepower does indeed circulate through linguistic control. But the vampire's plan falters on his mistaken assessment of the medium he wants to master. To be English, he seems to believe, is to speak its language in an utterly unidiomatic way. This belief leaves him unequipped to navigate [End Page 238] the varied and multimediated forms of language that are rallied against him when he does alight on England's shores. The individuals he encounters there manifest their national identity through a willingness to

transform English to meet their own needs, free from the vampiric dread of breaking rules of syntactical or supernatural law. Dracula never learns to speak English like a native because of his unwillingness or inability to bastardize the language in the same manner as its domestic speakers. His deadly speech is limited by the same compulsive orthodoxy and adherence to rules that hinder his movements. The mobile nature of living English is embodied in the language and language recording methods of Dracula's antagoniststhe American adventurer Quincey Morris, the aristocrat Arthur Holmwood (later Lord Godalming), the asylum keeper John Seward, Jonathan and Mina Harker, and the foremost vampire hunter of all, Dr. Abraham Van Helsing. Despite his considerable learning and adopted role as chief defender of Britain, Van Helsing speaks a bizarre and often hilariously garbled form of English. Like Dracula, he makes his first textual appearance as a specimen of writing; unlike his vampiric foe, however, he is blissfully unconcerned with correctness. When Lucy Westenra first begins to sicken from Dracula's nightly visits, her fianc Arthur Holmwood asks Dr. Seward for help. Confused by her symptoms, Seward in turn asks his old friend Dr. Van Helsing for advice and receives the following note in response. My good friendWhen I have received your letter I am already coming to you. By good fortune I can leave just at once, without wrong to any of those who have trusted me. Were fortune other, then it were bad for those who have trusted, for I come to my friend when he call me to aid those he holds dear. Tell your friend that when that time you suck from my wound so swiftly the poison of the gangrene from that knife that our other friend, too nervous, let slip, you did more for him when he wants my aids and you call for them than all his great fortune could do. But it is pleasure added to do for him, your friend; it is to you that I come. (148) The letter has two functions: first, to provide the necessary exposition about Van Helsing and Seward's friendship, and, second, to showcase the creative and unregulated use of language that is fundamental to antivampiric identity. Helsing's addled speech is the perfect foil to both the stasis and overregulation of the undead and those cultural studies-based approaches to Dracula that have attempted to draw a [End Page 239] seamless connection between the vampire hunters and British imperial hegemony. Jennifer Wicke, for example, subsumes the eccentricity of his language and the ideological purpose he serves, claiming that his "flights of oratory are foreignness bounded by a rigid adherence to the primacy of English goals in the world."30 It is, however, because of, not despite, the eccentricity of his speech that he is able to serve these goals, by embodying the disruptive and evasive mechanisms of language that the vampire can never master. Nowhere is Van Helsing's instinctual understanding of these mechanisms more apparent than in his near-hysterical laughter after Lucy Westenra's funeral. When the outraged Seward demands an explanation, Van Helsing makes the following reply:

Do not think I am not sad, though I laugh. See, I have cried even when the laugh did choke me. But no more think that I am all sorry when I cry, for the laugh he comes just the same. Keep it always with you that laughter who knock at your door and say, "May I come in?" is not the true laughter. No! he is a king, and he come when and how he like. He ask no person; he choose no time of suitability. He say, "I am here." . . . Oh, friend John, it is a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and troubles; and yet when King Laugh come he make them all dance to the tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fallall dance together to the music that he make with that smileless mouth of him. (211-12) In this description, King Laugh is monarch of a kingdom where meanings and signs are constantly put at odds with each other, where attempts to control and determine the sounds one emits frequently collapse. He compels laughter even at the point of deepest grief and joyless mirth at the height of agony. He embodies an absurd and yet innately human tendency of communication. Indeed, King Laugh's function might be seen as a metaphor for Van Helsing's role in relation to both Count Dracula as villain and Dracula as text, providing humor and fulfilling the disruptive function that forces the vampire's careful plans to crumble. The constant mutation of his speech is far more anarchic and unpredictable than the regulated movement of Dracula. While not all the vampire hunters share Van Helsing's idiosyncratic speech, they do evince a common interest in the different ways in which English can be spoken and transcribed. Morris playfully speaks American slang, Seward keeps a phonographic diary, both the [End Page 240] Harkers write in shorthand, and Mina is fascinated with dialect. Even Arthur Holmwood, in many ways the most standard (and least developed) character in the set, indulges in colloquial patter. In a letter to Mina, Lucy Westenra writes, "Dress is a bore. That is slang again, but never mind; Arthur says that every day" (88). As a collective, the group represents the diverse ways in which English can be spoken, heard, and mediated. Their ability to traffic in nonstandard forms of English marks their difference from Dracula and provides the key to their eventual victory over him. It is significant that almost all the information about the Count's whereabouts in Britain comes from nonstandard speakers. London laborer Sam Bloxam points the way to Dracula's lair in Piccadilly; cockney zookeeper Thomas Bilder reports the strange disappearance of a wolf from the London Zoo; and Glaswegian ship captain Donelson describes the supernaturally assisted voyage of the Czarina Catherine back to Galatz.31 "It's no canny to run frae London to the Black Sea wi' a wind ahint ye," he recounts, "as though the Deil himself were blawin' on yer sail for his ain purpose" (388). In a narrative that continually foregrounds the nonstandard, the form of these speakers' speech is as crucial to the project of resisting vampiric stasis as the information it contains. The linguistic deviationswhether of syntax, diction, or accentof these sources are constitutive of a fundamentally human network of communication from

which the vampire is excluded. Just as linguistic irregularity and metamorphosis are a hallmark of the living, so too are linguistic regularity and silence a characteristic of vampirism. The careful eloquence and eventual speechlessness of Dracula's victims stand in stark contrast to the varied speech and writing methods of his opponents. Prior to her vamping, Lucy Westenra was a devotee of slang and an irregular correspondent who toyed with words as carelessly as with the men who courted her affection.32 Following her sham death, however, the vampirized Lucy addresses fianc Arthur Holmwood with a "diabolically sweet"articulateness, bidding him to join her in an almost irresistibly persuasive manner (250). This rhetorical transformation is nonetheless minor in comparison to that of Dracula's asylum-bound acolyte Renfield. Initially a raving lunatic, Renfield gradually becomes more rational and polished in his speech as his encounters with the vampire increase. He astonishes the vampire hunters by calling them to his cell and making the following fluent, persuasive, and flattering plea for his release. [End Page 241] You, gentlemen, who by nationality, by heredity, or by possession of natural gifts, are fitted to hold your respective places in the moving world, I take to witness that I am as sane as at least the majority of men who are in full possession of their liberties. And I am sure that you, Dr. Seward, humanitarian and medico-jurist as well as scientist, will deem it a moral duty to deal with me as one to be considered as under exceptional circumstances. (283-84) Astounded by the grace and precision of Renfield's speech, the company momentarily believe him to have regained his wits. Yet in the cacophonous world of Dracula, clear and eloquent speech is less synonymous with reason than it is with vampirism. Renfield, as they later discover, has been Dracula's confederate; his speech and silence on the matter of Mina's vamping is a product of his interaction with the undead. When freed from vampiric thrall in the moments before his death, he explains that he knew about the attacks on Mina yet was unable to tell the hunters because "I felt my tongue was tied" (318). Dracula is capable of both silencing and standardizing the speech of his victims, marking it with the same uniformity as he does other aspects of their identity, such as appetite and growth. Given this linguistic mandate, it is only fitting that the vampire should be as intent on nullifying the various communicative media of modern Britain as he is on vamping its women. Indeed, his fixation with language explains his gender-specific choice of victims, for, as we see in the case of Mina, women in Dracula represent England's most sophisticated means of language transmission. This antipathy towards nonstandard transcription is first evidenced in the Count's reaction to an intercepted request for help that Harker has attempted to smuggle out of the Castle. Written in shorthand, the letter is beyond Dracula's penetration; he confronts Harker with it and deems it "a vile thing, an outrage upon friendship and hospitality!" (74). In retribution,

the Count destroys all of Harker's documents. The young solicitor wakes the next morning to find "every scrap of paper . . . gone, and with it, my notes, my memoranda, relating to railways and travel, my letter of credit, in fact all that might be useful to me were I once outside the castle" (75). There remains, however, one piece of documentation that is unknown to and untranslatable by DraculaHarker's shorthand journal, the item that both testifies to the truth of vampiric existence and forms the basis of Dracula's narrative. The crusade against Dracula is initiated by a specimen of encoded writing that, in partnership with the novel's dialects, symbolizes the linguistic diversity of the living. [End Page 242] Dracula repeats this attempted document destruction in England with equally unsuccessful results. With the vampire hunters hot on his pursuit, he breaks into the Harkers' bedchamber and, in what is perhaps the novel's most horrifying scene, forces Mina to drink his blood. Subsequent to this violation, he breaks into the study and incinerates the group's extensive records on his movements. "All the manuscripts had been burned," Lord Godalming tells Dr. Seward, "and the blue flames were flickering amongst the white ashes; the cylinders of your phonograph too were thrown on the fire, and the wax had helped the flames" (325). In obliterating their writing, the vampire seeks to annihilate the force that marks him as deviant Other, as a visible instance of pathology in an environment with which he longs to assimilate. Yet, as in the first such attack, there is something that the Count overlooks. A duplicate set of documents, industriously typed by Mina, remains intact in the safe, ready to reinitiate the campaign at the point of its interruption. The vampire makes the same mistake in his attempt to appropriate both the written and spokenforms of English; he assumes that the language has only one original source or location that he can master and destroy. But in both cases, there is always something left over, something in excess of the standard forms of speech and transcription with which the Count is familiar. Language proves too mobile a force to be absorbed by the vampire. It is no coincidence that the destruction of the group's documents is concurrent with the attack on Mina, for both targets embody the type of linguistic transmission that is so inimical to vampirism. Mina's role as scribe and organizing genius of the group's documents has long been recognized by feminist critics, some of whom have read it as a sign of her passivity, some of her power. Rebecca Pope, for example, suggests that Mina's role as amanuensis is antipatriarchal, while Alison Case argues that the subversive potential of this role is overturned by her subjugation to Dracula.33 Case writes that "the threat of vampirism . . . serves to displace Mina from her position of narrative mastery, converting her into (alternately) someone who can provide only the raw material of a plot, or someone whose potential plots are inherently dangerous."34 The point of contention here is not the relationship between linguistic mastery and power, which both arguments take as self-evident, but whether or not Mina is ever allowed any direct control over the narratives garnered against the Count. That she has some key relationship to the novel's numerous documents is clear; the nature of this relationship, whether one of [End Page 243] dominance or submission, appears more ambiguous. All too often the question of whether Dracula might be seen as a reactionary or progressive, feminist or patriarchal, narrative is made to rest on this

issue. There is, however, a profound irony in searching for validating evidence of linguistic mastery in a novel that so fervently depicts and even celebrates the impossibility of a total hegemony over words. Recent critics have condemned the ahistorical presentation of women's writing as a perpetually distinct entity jockeying for position within the socalled patriarchal language, noting that the meaning of any type of writing is determined by its cultural and literary context rather than its innate qualities.35 In Dracula, for example, Mina's relationship to language, in which she compulsively transcribes and reproduces the speech of others, cannot be figured as an example of a stereotypically feminine passivity. Instead, it represents the only viable and fundamentally human approach to the problems of communication in the modern age. As word conduit rather than vampiric assimilator, Mina epitomizes the novel's logic of linguistic and subjective vitality. Mina's fascination with language is evident in her interest in foreign recipes, her demands on her correspondents, and her attraction to the places where words are exchanged.36 Following her arrival at Whitby, she becomes a regular visitor to the seaside churchyard where the elderly local men gather and "do nothing all day but sit up here and talk" (73). Unlike the vampire, who studies the English so that he may be taken for a native and thus be better equipped to complete his standardizing mission, Mina has no interest in perfecting or assuming the identity associated with the varieties of speech she encounters. Instead, she writes everything down in the hopes that she might "remember all that goes on or that one hears said during a day" (86), preferring shorthand not for its greater efficiency but for its ability to make the mundane act of writing seem strange and unfamiliar. "I am anxious," she writes in her shorthand journal, "and it soothes me to express myself here; it is like whispering to one's self and listening at the same time. And there is something about the shorthand symbols that makes it different from writing" (105). Mina is attracted to that which is different from writing and to difference inwriting, to forms, words, and technologies beyond the standard. She functions as a living, nonhierarchical compendium of language, in all its degrees of clarity and refinement. Dracula is no more able to assimilate Mina within his vampiric identity than he is to master and standardize the forms of language [End Page 244] and linguistic transmission that she embodies. His attack on her fails for the same reason as did his other attempted archival annihilations; in each case there remains something left over, something in excess that he is unable to account for and master. In sucking Mina's blood and forcing her to suck his, he aims to bind her in a relationship of seamless communication whereby her thoughts will become transparent and his wishes may be planted directly into her mind, without need of an unreliable external medium. Telepathy seems to offer him the ultimate vehicle of linguistic control, far more stable and manipulatable than speech and writing. Yet what the Count fails to realize is that no form or act of communication with the living is wholly pure and controllable. At Mina's request, the vampire hunters hypnotize her at daybreak when Dracula's powers are at their weakest, and they thus obtain crucial information about his whereabouts.

The failure to anticipate the reciprocality and volatility of their telepathic union, indeed, of all acts of communication amongst the living, proves to be the Count's undoing. Using Mina as a sort of remote sensor, the hunters track down Dracula and slaughter him rather unceremoniously with a few knife thrusts. Dracula's spectacularly anticlimactic physical death is no more than a footnote to the real triumph that has happened elsewhere, that of nonstandard and multimediated English against the deadly tongue of the vampire. The nation emerges triumphant not because of its purity or physical might but because of the mutable and diverse nature of its native language(s). Far from a dread of difference, we find in Dracula and other fin de sicle invasion texts a cultural fulfilment of the Darwinian ethos of variation. In The Origin of Species (1859), Darwin had praised the advantages of diversity, noting that "in the general economy of any land, the more widely and perfectly the animals and plants are diversified for different habits of life, so will a greater number of individuals be capable of there supporting themselves."37 Simply put, vitality is the product of modification; the more varied a community, the greater its sustainability. For many of the late Victorian imaginative interpreters of this edict, the most privileged site of variation was not the body, but the one trait that seemed most definitive of and exclusive to humanitylanguage.38 No usurping force, regardless of its strength, occult knowledge, or technological superiority, can conquer the cultural space of Great Britain unless it can master the myriad forms of communication, both orthodox and nonstandard, that comprise it. Invasion narratives such as Dracula suggest that if language is the most human thing about us, then the most human [End Page 245] language of all is that most subject to fluctuation, breakdown, and polyphony.

Endnotes
1. Nicholas Daly, Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Sicle (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 34. 2. Examples of this approach include Matthew Sweet, Inventing the Victorians (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), and Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy: 1870-1901 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002). 3. The MLA index currently lists over 200 entries on the novel for the 1991-2001 period alone. 4. For the identification of Count Dracula with specific individuals, see Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula (New York: Knopf, 1996); Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu, In Search of Dracula: A True History of Dracula and Vampire Legends (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1972); and Michael Valdez Moses, "The Irish Vampire: Dracula, Parnell, and the Troubled

Dreams of Nationhood," Journal X 2 (1997): 66-111. For the association of Dracula with particular cultural anxieties, see Christopher Craft, "'Kiss Me With Those Red Lips': Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula," Representations 8 (1984): 11126; Phyllis Roth, "Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker's Dracula," Literature and Psychology 27 (1977): 113-21; Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgas, and David Miller (London: Verso, 1983); Carol Senf, "Dracula: Stoker's Response to the New Woman" Victorian Studies 26 (1982): 33-49; Judith Halberstam, "Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker's Dracula," Victorian Studies 36 (1993): 333-52; Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Sicle (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996); David Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1996); and Joe Valente, Dracula's Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2002). 5. Fascinatingly, none of these talismans requires the prerogative of faith in order to be effective. The crucifix, for example, repels the vampire whether or not its wearer believes in its potency. Jonathan Harker initially refuses the crucifix given to him by his landlady, viewing it as "idolatrous" (Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Glennis Byron [Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Press, 2000], 35); nonetheless, it quells the Count's wrath when he finds Harker shaving himself in a mirror. 6. Dracula, 297; hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 7. Moretti, 96-97. 8. In her astute work on the relationship between mass culture and the reproductive technologies of vampirism, Jennifer Wicke argues that "the text relies on pushing at the limits of the common language of English to ark out its national boundary, and controlling the unruliness of speech by technologizing ittyping itas a print language of hegemony" ("Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and its Media," ELH 59 [1992]: 488). Here, she recognizes the polyglottal diversity of the narrative only in order to deflate it, suggesting that the technologies of linguistic transmission dissolve rather than foreground the differences between the narrative voices. [End Page 246] In her biography of Stoker, Belford confirms Wicke's assessment of the novel's narrative homogeneity. She writes, "Except for the frivolous tones of Lucy's letters, Quincey Morris's Americanisms, and Van-Helsing's annoying Dutch-English accent, the voices are indistinguishable" (266). This somewhat astonishing assertion ignores the text's plain interest in documenting variant forms of contemporary English, from the thick Whitby dialect of Mr. Swales to the cockney slang of the numerous carriers and clerks who assist the vampire hunters in their pursuit of Dracula. 9. Daniel Cottom, Abyss of Reason: Cultural Movements, Revelations, and Betrayals (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), 55.

10. Wicke, 467. 11. See Alan J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press in England 1856-1914 (London: Croon Helm, 1976), 29; and Nigel Cross, The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth Century Grub Street (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), 205. As both Lee and Cross have argued, the extent to which literacy in the United Kingdom was increased by the 1870 Education Act has been largely exaggerated. Nonetheless, the myth of a suddenly expanded mass readership was widely circulated at the end of the century. 12. See Norman Page, Speech in the English Novel (London: Longman, 1973); Peter Trudgill, The Dialects of England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999); and Tom McArthur, The English Languages (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998). Definitions of nonstandard and standard English are, of course, highly political, shifting with the sensibilities and ideological position of each writer. Some scholars, like Page, define standard English as simply the written form of English, devoid of any syntactical or idiomatic peculiarities (6), while others, such as Trudgill, view it as the dialect of the most educated and privileged elite (2-3). Historically, as McArthur points out, standard English was used almost exclusively in the nineteenth century to refer to the educated, middle-class speech of London that would eventually be referred to as "R. P." (107). 13. Richard Bailey, Nineteenth-Century English (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1996); and Manfred Gorlach, English in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999). 14. R. J. Lloyd, "Can the English Tongue be Preserved?" The Westminster Review 147 (March 1897): 289. 15. [Anonymous], "The Domination of Dialect," Literature 39 (14 May 1898): 547, 549. 16. Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, whose highly influential L'Uomo Delinquente was published in 1876, popularized the notion that the criminal was "an atavistic being, a relic of a vanished race." In 1865, British anthropologist E. B. Tylor made similar comments about the primitivism of contemporary mediums, noting that "no Greenlander or Kaffir every mixed up his subjectivity with the evidence of his senses with a more hopeless confusion than the modern spiritualist." For both men, aberration from the norms of bourgeois behaviour read as a form of psychic and biological return to a previous state of development. See Gina Lombroso-Ferrero, Criminal Man, According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso (Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1972), 135; and Tylor, Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization (1865; reprint, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1964), 4-5. 17. [Anonymous], "On the Abuse of Dialect," Macmillan's Magazine 76 (1897): 139. 18. F. Max Mller, Three Introductory Lectures on the Science of Thought (Chicago:

Open Court, 1887), 46. [End Page 247] 19. Andrew Phillips, The Rebirth of England and English: The Vision of William Barnes (Chippenham: Andrew Rowe Ltd., 1996), 161. 20. Phillips, 107. 21. See Joseph Wright's introduction to The English Dialect Dictionary, Being the Complete Vocabulary of All Dialect Words Still in Use, or Known to Have Been in Use during the Last Two Hundred Years (London: Henry Frowde, 1898), v. 22. As Bailey notes, "[S]o uncritically accepted was the idea that dialects were vanishing that the Society was dissolved in 1896 since it was thought, with the completion of Wright's English Dialect Dictionary to have finished its task" (71). Thus the year prior to Dracula's publication was set as the expiration date for nonstandard English. 23. For more on the cultural figuration of dialect literature in nineteenth-century America, see Kersten Holger, "The Creative Potential of Dialect Writing in Late Nineteenth Century America," Nineteenth-Century Literature 55 (June 2000): 93. Stoker had a lifelong fascination with the United States and visited several times while touring with Irving. 24. Richard Dawson, "American Dialect," Writer: A Monthly Magazine for Literary Workers 4 (1890): 27. 25. Rupert Hughes, "Dialectophobia," Current Literature: A Magazine of Contemporary Record 22 (1897): 195. 26. Harker must travel by coach to the Borgo Pass to get to Castle Dracula. The coach driver, fearing for Harker's safety, speeds to the meeting point in hopes of preceding the Count and convincing his passenger to abandon his travel plans. Despite arriving an hour early, the coach is nonetheless met almost immediately by the Count, who cautions the driver, "You cannot deceive me, my friend; I know too much and my horses are swift" (40). 27. See Glover, 42; and Halberstam, 191. 28. Waiting with the other carriage passengers, Harker notes "I could hear a lot of words often repeated, queer words, for there were many nationalities in the crowd; so I quietly got out my polyglot dictionary from my bag and looked them out. I must say they were not cheering to me, for amongst them were 'Ordog'Satan, 'pokol'hell, 'stregoica'witch, 'vrolok' and 'vlkoslak'both of which mean the same thing, one being Slovak and the other Servian for something that is either werewolf or vampire"

(36). 29. Craft, 98. 30. Wicke, 498. 31. Describing Dracula's Piccadilly house, Bloxam says, "Well, guv'nor, I forgets the number, but it was only a few doors from a big white church or somethink of the kind, not long built" (303). His cockney idiom echoes that of Bilder, who states in his interview about the escaped wolf Berserker, "I'm more surprised at 'im for wantin' to get out nor any other animile in the place. But, there, you can't trust wolves no more nor women" (174). In these interactions, Stoker takes care to record the eccentricity of domestic speech through irregular syntax, word choice, and spelling. 32. Indeed, Lucy's interest in American would-be suitor Quincey Morris is based on his ability to amuse her with exaggerated and invented slang from across the Atlantic. In one of her few letters to Mina, she writes, "I must tell you beforehand that Mr. Morris doesn't always speak slangthat is to say, he never does so to strangers, or before them, for he is really well-educated and has exquisite mannersbut he found out that it amused me to hear him talk American slang, and whenever I was present, [End Page 248] and there was no one to be shocked, he said such funny things. I am afraid, my dear, he has to invent it all, for it fits exactly into whatever else he has to say" (90). 33. Rebecca Pope, "Writing and Biting in Dracula," LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 1 (1990): 210. 34. Alison Case, "Tasting the Original Apple: Gender and the Struggle for Narrative Authority," Narrative 1 (1993): 239. 35. Jennifer Fleissner argues that, far from pitting so-called "masculine" and "feminine" forms of writing against each other, Dracula reveals the historically specific manner in which an emergent form of female dominated labor, namely clerical work, was fetishized in the late Victorian imagination. See Fleissner, "Dictation Anxiety: The Stenographer's Stake in Dracula," Nineteenth-Century Contexts 22 (2000): 419. 36. In his Transylvanian travel journal, Jonathan Harker frequently makes notes to "get recipe for Mina" (31). Lucy complains in her 17th May letter to Mina, "I must say you tax me very unfairly with being a bad correspondent. I wrote to you twice since we parted, and your last letter was only your second. Besides, I have nothing to tell you" (87). 37. Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species, in Darwin, ed. Philip Appleman, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 126. 38. Darwin, along with other prominent scholars such as Mller, described language as

the cornerstone to human identity and progress. In The Descent of Man (1871), he writes that "[m]an in the rudest state in which he now exists is the most dominant animal that has ever appeared on this earth. . . . Through his powers of intellect, articulate language has been evolved; and on this his wonderful advancement has mainly depended" (in Darwin, 200).