Hopkins, Lisa. Bram Stoker: A Literary Life.

Miller, Elizabeth

Hopkins, Lisa. Bram Stoker: A Literary Life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 178 pp. Hardcover. ISBN 1-4039-4697-7. $65.

Fortunately, this is not just another biography of Bram Stoker. We already have several, the most recent from Barbara Belford (Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula) and Paul Murray (From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker). Barring the discovery of a significant body of fresh material, we do not need another. What, then, is Bram Stoker: A Literary Life? It is one of a series, the objective of which, according to the publisher, is to "follow the outline of writers' working lives, not in the spirit of traditional biography, but aiming to trace the professional, publishing and social contexts which shaped their writing." Author Lisa Hopkins sees her book as "an attempt to locate [Stoker's] fiction in its biographical and cultural contexts" (3). She selects five focal points: Stoker's childhood and upbringing in Dublin, his long involvement with the theatre, his ambivalent position as an Irishman in London, his fondness for travel, and his probable involvement in freemasonry. The results of these explorations are mixed.

The author's introduction (significantly entitled "Stoker's Book") establishes a major premise: that although Stoker wrote several other books, "[W]hen it comes to his fiction, there is a sense in which he wrote Dracula many times over and called it a variety of different things" (1). Consequently, even though much of this book is devoted to Stoker's other works (both fictional and non-fictional), Dracula is never far away. Parallels are drawn with not only the more familiar novels such as The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) and The Lady of the Shroud (1909) but also the lesser known The Snake's Pass (1890), The Shoulder of Shasta (1895), The Mystery of the Sea (1902), Lady Athlyne (1908), and The Man (1905). I suppose it is the fate of a novelist known essentially for one book to have his entire body of work examined through the lens of his masterpiece. Hopkins offers a heavy dose of such scrutiny in her book, noting, among others, the following recurring motifs: coffins, resurrection, phrenology, evasion of the law, and (most important) blurring and reasserting of gender norms.

Chapter 1, "Early Life in Stoker's Fiction," examines the impact on Stoker's writing of his early years in Dublin. While she draws on familiar material (childhood illness, relationship with his mother), Hopkins does provide new insights into how these experiences shaped Stoker's writing. She perceives "conflicted depictions of motherhood" not only, as several critics have noted, in Dracula but throughout his other novels and short stories. Indeed, it is when she puts Dracula aside and applies her critical skills to Stoker's other work that Hopkins is at her best. For example, she traces images of monstrous motherhood from The Snake's Pass to The Lair of the White Worm (1911) and-in what is one of the best segments of her treatise--in the short story "The Squaw" (1892).

In the next chapter, "At the Theatre," we get the standard overview of Stoker's life at the Lyceum and its influence on his writing. But once again, Hopkins goes beyond Dracula and traces resonances of Lyceum productions (most notably Faust and various Shakespearean plays) in Stoker's lesser known novels. I take issue with her claim that "the direct influence of Irving on Stoker's fiction is overestimated" (60). While she argues that Stoker's fondness for Shakespearean allusions goes well beyond Irving, we must keep in mind that it was Irving's Shakespearean text--errors and all (errors which raised the ire of George Bernard Shaw who accused Irving of "Bardicide")-that Stoker generally quoted.

The focus in chapter 3 ("London and its Teeming Millions") is less on the city itself than on Stoker's Irishness and how it may have affected his relationship with others. This proves to be a productive field of inquiry, as Hopkins ranges over the body of Stoker's writing, noting ambivalence about what it meant to be an Irishman living and writing in London. She rallies support for the view that Dracula, at first glance among the least "Irish" of Stoker's texts, goes the furthest in representing Stoker as an Irish writer. In his other novels, Hopkins identifies certain motifs that reinforce this ambivalence, such as skepticism about official repositories of knowledge and the redistribution of land.

Experiences and insights gained through travel also inform Stoker's writing. Chapter 4, "On Holiday," offers an overview of his use of locations, both experienced and gleaned second-hand from his reading, and of how the connotations of these locations condition the meanings of the texts. We have the usual list--Stoker's American tours, his visits to Whitby and Cruden Bay, and his vicarious reconstruction of Transylvania. But Hopkins treats us to a superb comparative analysis of Dracula and The Mystery of the Sea, arguing that in both "Stoker delineates a detailed, intricate, and ultimately incriminating connection between women and the associations generated by specific places" (91). The chapter concludes with a lengthy (12 pages) and occasionally tedious digression in which Hopkins offers a new reading of Dracula through the lens of the controversy generated by the publication in 1893 of Emile Zola's novel Lourdes. At times the argument relies on over-reading, for example, the yoking of the vision of the beautiful lady in white seen by the children on the heath in Dracula and the apparition seen by Bernadette.

Hopkins pushes the envelope even further in chapter 5, "The Cave." She begins with an exploration of the "obsessions" in Stoker's fiction "with sex, gender, disease and forms of secret knowledge" (121), wisely avoiding detailed analysis of Dracula from this perspective (it has been done so often), providing instead a sustained inquiry into The Mystery of the Sea and The Lair of the White Worm. The chapter concludes with a lengthy argument to support a reading of Stoker from a Masonic perspective, speculating on the resonances of Masonic ritual in Stoker's fiction. It is, of course, all speculation. Even though Stoker did know several Masons (including Irving himself), there is no evidence that he himself was a member (or even that he belonged to the Order of the Golden Dawn). Once again, Hopkins squeezes the text of Dracula, contending that the inscription on George Canon's tomb that he was the son of a widow is "reminiscent of the frequent terming of Masons as 'sons of the widow'" (139). Surely sometimes a widow is just a widow.

Occasionally throughout her book, Hopkins falls victim to a few popular misconceptions about Dracula. She refers to Dracula's "heavily accented" speech (21)--though Stoker's Count is reported to have excellent command of English with just a "strange intonation." Elsewhere she erroneously identifies "Dracula's Guest" (1914) as the deleted first chapter of Dracula, a position that clearly contradicts the evidence of Stoker's own notes. A third is her reference to Vlad Dracula as early evidence in the novel's "gestation" of appalling cruelty to mothers and children. There is no evidence that Bram Stoker was aware of any of Vlad's atrocities.

With the exception of a couple of misspellings of characters' names (Hopkins repeatedly renders "Quincey" as "Quincy" and misspells "Canon" as "Cannon"), Bram Stoker: A Literary Life is well written, demonstrating clarity of prose with a minimum of critical jargon. The book does, however, assume a general overview of Stoker's life and works on the part of its readers; consequently, it is likely to be of greatest value to an academic rather than a general readership.