Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage by Catherine Wynne (review)

Reviewed by: Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage by Catherine Wynne Scott D. Banville (bio) Catherine Wynne, Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). pp. ix + 195. $80/£50 cloth. In this fine volume, Catherine Wynne takes an interdisciplinary approach to illustrating how Bram Stoker’s experiences as a theatre critic in Dublin, his experiences as business manger of the Lyceum Royal Theatre, and his relationships with Henry Irving and Ellen Terry led him to incorporate supernatural Gothic and melodramatic themes in Dracula. In chapters 2 and 3, Wynne discusses how Irving’s penchant for sacrificing and punishing women via what Ellen Bayuk Rosenman terms “melodramatic masochism” (qtd. in Wynne 79) is repeated in Dracula through the characters of Lucy and Mina, who were most often acted by Ellen Terry. In chapter 3, Wynne shows how Stoker uses Terry’s enactment of various forms of suffering and sacrifice to rehabilitate her public image and how he mirrors this victimhood in the fates of both Lucy and Mina. Whereas Irving and Terry use the sacrifice of women to punish and rehabilitate fallen women, Stoker instead uses the trope to interrogate the link between “violence and misogyny” in the late nineteenth century (77). Readers of VPR will be most interested in chapter 5, which makes extensive, intelligent use of Stoker’s periodical-based theatre criticism along with other contemporary theatre criticism to trace the evolving Victorian interpretation of Macbeth as a man corrupted by the three witches. Wynne shows how Stoker, as part of this reinterpretation of the nature of Macbeth’s character, uses much the same logic in constructing the Count’s character in Dracula. Here the interplay of Victorian Shakespearean scholar Edward Dowden’s research, Stoker’s reviews of Irving’s Dublin performances of Hamlet, Stoker’s reviews of other performances of Macbeth, [End Page 520] and reviews by other theatre critics help shape the audience’s reception of Irving’s 1875 and 1888 productions that figure Macbeth as predisposed to evil. Wynne argues that if we are to look for a model of Stoker’s vampire, it is not in the personal or professional relationship between Stoker and Irving but in the artistic and intellectual collaborations that recast Macbeth not as innocence corrupted but as dormant evil awakened. If there is a weakness in Wynne’s fine book, it is that scholars who specialize in one area, whether it be gender studies, periodical studies, or Shakespearean reception studies, may find that she does not treat those areas with enough nuance or depth. However, what is gained by her interdisciplinary approach more than outweighs any potential losses. Bram Stoker, Dracula, and the Victorian Gothic Stage does an admirable job of placing Dracula in conversation with the literary Gothic, supernatural Gothic, and melodramatic drama on offer at Irving’s Lyceum Royal Theatre. It also situates the novel in relation to the function of science, literature, and the theatre in “legitimizing brutality” towards women as a means of rehabilitating them (64). Finally, it provides insight into the role of periodical-based theatre criticism in crafting public perceptions of the supernatural Gothic and melodrama as well as in promoting the idea of Macbeth’s inherent evil, which is then transplanted into Dracula. Scott D. Banville Nicholls State University Scott D. Banville Scott D. Banville is the Lorio Endowed Professor of Languages and Literature at Nicholls State University where he teaches literature and digital humanities. He is the author of articles on Victorian literature and popular culture. He is currently working on a project exploring connections between Dracula and advancements in the science of observation. Copyright © 2014 The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.