ELH

Recent treatments of Bram Stoker’s novel analyze its homoerotic desperation, unconscious desire, and deeply buried trauma. 1 Not one critic, however, has recognized that Stoker began writing Dracula one month after his friend, rival, and compatriot Oscar Wilde was convicted of the crime of sodomy. Wilde’s influence on Stoker has been neglected partly because much of Stoker’s biographical information has disappeared. 2 Without knowing of Stoker’s corrosive long-term relationship with Wilde, critics have lacked a context for analyzing Wilde’s effect: an earthquake that destabilized the fragile, carefully elaborated mechanisms through which Stoker routed his desires. Stoker’s careful erasure of Wilde’s name from all his published (and unpublished) texts gives a reader the impression that Stoker was airily ignorant of Wilde’s existence. Nothing could be further from the truth. The two men had an intimate and varied history lasting for at least twenty years, precisely of the sort whose permutations have been mapped in reliable precision by Eve Sedgwick. Stoker’s erasures can be read without much difficulty; they utilize a recognizeable code that was, perhaps, designed to be broken. In texts patently about Wilde, Stoker crammed the gaps where Wilde’s name should appear with terms like ‘degeneracy,’ ‘reticence,’ ‘discretion,’ and references to police arrests of authors. Dracula explores Stoker’s fear and anxiety as a closeted homosexual man during Oscar Wilde’s trial. 3 The novel is generally considered Stoker’s only successful novel among many potboilers, as it constructed an enduring modern horror myth; regardless of the usefulness of this canonical distinction, its continuing acceptance does register a recognizably different affect provided by Dracula. This peculiar tonality of horror derives from Stoker’s emotions at this unique moment in gay history. Oscar Wilde’s trial set up a stark set of alternatives—safe concealment, or tempting revelation—yet forbade anyone to choose between the two. The trial’s own interplay of disguise, half-admission, defense, and denial placed Wilde on the threshold of the closet. Thus the two extremes acquired value from their unattainability; the closet seemed like perfect sanctuary; coming out seemed like liberatory honesty. For a gay observer like Stoker, secrecy and self-assertion both became desirable goals even as [End Page 381] Wilde’s trial constructed 1890’s homosexual identity as a delicate negotiation between them.

Honesty and secrecy are twin impossible ideals, for homosexuality is always an open secret:

[There is] radical uncertainty closeted gay people are likely to feel about who is in control of information about their sexual identity.... no one person can take control over all the multiple, often con codes by which information about sexual identity and activity can seem to be conveyed. 4

Dracula takes place on that ambiguous threshold between the known and the unknown. Harker journeys from Bistritz, “a fairly well-known place,” to the “waste of desolation” of Castle Dracula, and the landscape marks his marginal status; he rides on the borders of three states. 5 In the rest of the novel, Dracula’s victims constantly negotiate between hiding or revealing their condition. Dracula seems to be structured by the anguishing choice between repressed helplessness and dangerous action, and it is the unconsciousness of the whole problem that gives the novel its mythic status. The crisis of the closet in 1895 makes Dracula a horror novel; but Dracula ‘s happy ending only shows that the closet is no longer a crisis but a state of complex, lived social relations whose inescapability-therefore, in a sense, whose normality—constitutes Jonathan Harker’s hope of happiness. By the novel’s last page, Harker has learned to love the memory of his internment in Castle Dracula, and has organized both a homosocial band of ‘brothers’ and a bourgeois family to revolve endlessly around that nucleus.

The earliest surviving document of Stoker’s gender self-analysis is a remarkable letter to Walt Whitman, which records the particular accents of Stoker’s closet discourse. Due to its passionate homoeroticism, this Whitman letter has been ignored or euphemized by Stoker scholars.

Love of Whitman was a widespread cultural phenomenon in England...