CONCORDIA’S FIRST LADY OF DARKNESS

By Mark Shainblum

Originally published in University Affairs magazine, 1997

A Scottish emigrant who came to Canada as a very small child, there was little in Davison’s background (except, perhaps, with an adolescent fascination with horror novels) to suggest where she might end up. But she has found her niche in a rich literary and academic landscape that was relatively unexplored until recently: Irish writer Bram Stoker and his immortal creation, Count Dracula.

Also a lecturer in the areas of feminist theory, the novel as genre, and South African literature,

Davison’s interest in Stoker began almost accidentally, she explains. “Four and half years ago. I taught a summer course on Victorian literature called “Fiction from Dickens to Hardy,” and I decided to jazz it up a little, thinking that if we ended with Hardy students would be suicidal and throw themselves from the university roof. I decided to try something funky and new and end with Dracula.”

“Once I taught Dracula, and read it closely and done all my lecture notes,” she continues, “I found that there was still much about the period that I didn’t understand or didn’t know about. That was exciting to me. I hadn’t answered all my questions, not only about the time and the context of the novel, but also about the novel *itself.* I knew the book was speaking to its time, but it was cryptically encoded and I couldn’t figure out how.”

Though attracting more attention of late because of the book’s 1997 centenary, until the late 1980’s genuine critical approaches to Stoker’s work were few and far between, and usually more psychoanalytic in nature than truly literary or historical, Davison claims. “I think gothic literature in general tends to draw criticism that’s psycho-sexual and pseudo-biographical in nature,” she says. “People are wont to consider how these monsters and these horrifying images derive from the authors’ own personal lives, their own sexual preferences, their own family sexual dynamic. The big questions around Frankenstein, for example, all have to do with ‘who is the monster and how does he relate to Mary Shelley’s childhood?’ Is he her husband who was fooling around with her stepsister? Is he the father who neglected her?”

Davison’s approach is very different. Her new book from Dundern Press, Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Sucking Through the Century, 1897-1997 is a massive collection of essays by writers from across Canada and around the world. It’s also one of the first deliberate attempts to place Stoker and his fictional Count in a genuine historical and literary context.

Davison views Dracula as a “vampire text,” as a novel which itself draws out, channels and distills the contemporary issues of the 1890’s. Ironically, Dracula the character continues to do that even in contemporary society, constantly adapting to filter contemporary anxieties. “Even low cultural Dracula stuff, even stuff being produced now, can be traced back to the anxieties and interests and desires of our contemporary society,” Davison explains. And he keeps changing. Dracula himself has been vampirized: tapped into and revised and reconfigured by the new 20th century media.

“In cinema he is another character entirely,” Davison says. The so-called “goth” movement, heavily influenced by the novels of contemporary vampire writer Anne Rice, is also based on an image of the vampire completely at odds with Stoker’s.

“Goth is a romantic movement, but it’s also sort of nihilistic in a way,” Davison says. “I think many of those involved with it see the world as a pretty bleak place presently, and they look to Anne Rice’s vampire world as almost an ideal state. The vampire has become a sort of idealized figure in a strange sort of way.

“Stoker’s Dracula,” she continues “is a nasty piece of work. He’s no wooing, sensitive, demon lover. He’s a dangerous, fiendish creature who can perhaps speak to your desires, but is in no way a romantic figure at all. In fact he’s quite deadly.”

The original, literary Dracula in Davison’s view, was nothing less than Victorian England’s primordial fears given form and human shape. Dracula is the unliving incarnation of the wave of foreign, largely Jewish immigration which was sweeping the country at the time, and the character perhaps unconsciously reflected some of the darkest anti-Semitic stereotypes of the era, which still resonated with the medieval blood libel.

“It’s a more complex picture than just anti-Semitism,” Davison explains. “There was a syphilis epidemic going on at the time, and there was a gross misconception that many Jews were syphilitic. Dracula was a metaphor for disease, for immigration into England, and not just immigration but *parasitism* upon England. The image of vermin is very strong.

Davison’s fascination with Dracula has had both positive and negative consequences on her academic career. She is sometimes frustrated by the attention she gets as Concordia’s “Dracula Lady,” but on the other hand, her interest has enabled her to travel and lecture extensively. The Concordia University Part-time Faculty Association (CUPFA) funded her speaking trips to both Ireland –where she spoke last year at the Bram Stoker Summer School in Dublin– and to Romania, where she was a featured speaker at the First World Dracula Conference in Transylvania.

Actually a mobile event which traveled all across Romania, it was five intensive days with four busloads of people, most of whom were journalists and other associated hangers-on. Only about forty of the some 200 participants were actually giving papers. “It’s a very controversial subject for the Romanians,” says Davison, “because the figure from whom Dracula is derived, Vlad Tepes or Vlad Drakul is a Christian hero who fought against the ‘infidel Turks.’ They look upon him in a very positive way for the most part. To have some Irishman who doesn’t really know Romanian history adopt this figure as a vampire is an offensive thing to them.

“Ironically, the conference was being used by Romanian travel officials as a big advertising device to attract foreign tourists to Transylvania and Romania as a whole. So there were tensions between the organizers and the Romanians who were giving papers.”

According to Davison, many of the convention attendees were more surreal than the material they were discussing. There was a young woman from Japan who dressed as goth and spoke virtually no English, the official conference language. Then there was the woman who shared a room with Davison for most of the trip, a Dracula scholar who called herself a “red witch,” which Davison asserts she simply made up.

“She dressed up for most of the time as a kind of goth, sado-masochistic leather goddess,” Davison laughs. “She carried blood capsules, which she would occasionally bite into while people were giving papers just to call attention to herself. Her paper was about Dracula and Menstruation, surprise, surprise! Ironically, she was also a militant vegetarian and would berate people for eating meat.”

“Everyone who’s interested in strange and unusual individuals should make their way to Los Angeles in August. They’re hosting the Cenetanary Conference on Bram Stoker’s Dracula.”