Anyone interested in Dracula and Dracula studies needs to read Dracula: A Study of Editorial Practices by Cristina Artenie. In fact, anyone interested in annotating literary classics would benefit from reading this book.
At this blog, I have previously reviewed Artenie’s book Dracula Invades England and the essay collection she edited Gothic and Racism. I expected Dracula: A Study of Editorial Practices would reiterate a lot of what Artenie said in those other works, in which she looked at Dracula from a postcolonial perspective and revealed the lack of true research into Romanian and especially Transylvanian history and culture by Dracula scholars in their attempts to understand and source Stoker’s novel. I was pleased to find that while this book has some repetition, the majority of it covers new ground.
As a scholar and fan of Dracula myself—I admit to being one of those scholars who went to Romania to tour Dracula-associated places and surprised to find it was not a perpetually dark, stormy night in Transylvania—and through my visit to Romania and reading Artenie’s work, I have come to realize just how unfair it is to the Romanian people to have Dracula be regarded as the emblem for their country by the rest of the world. I am completely won over by Artenie’s efforts to redeem her homeland from Gothic stereotypes that make it synonymous with vampires. As Artenie points out, Romania does not even have a vampire tradition—Stoker imposed one on the country—and the country is still trying to live it down—or in some cases, capitalize upon it through tours and tourist sites. Consequently, I found the depth of her discussion in this book only added to my understanding of the injustices committed by Stoker’s novel and its subsequent editors, who while not intending to be harmful or racist, out of oversight have done more harm than good in perpetuating stereotypes of the Romanian people.
Dracula: A Study of Editorial Practices is divided into two sections. Part I focuses on Editorial Theory and Part II on Editorial Practices. Even if you are not remotely interested in how Stoker treats Romania in a less than accurate manner, anyone interested in Dracula studies will still find Part I invaluable because Artenie walks readers through a discussion of every annotated edition of Dracula that has been published, explaining the literary theories as well as idiosyncrasies of the various editors and their editions. She discusses the role of an editor, the politics of annotation, and the different types of annotation made. This discussion should be of interest to anyone interested in annotation and the editing of literature. Artenie repeatedly refers to how editors rely upon Stoker’s text, and in most cases, on his notes, as well as the sources he used in his notes. Plus she shows where they sometimes go overboard citing sources Stoker could not have known or they rely on other editors’ works for their own annotations. Most importantly, she reflects how there is an absence of focus upon Romanian sources used in the annotations. In addition, she discusses how the various editors have different agendas, linked to their different theoretical readings of Dracula, such as theological, historical, and psychosexual, but also from their own desire, springing from a love of the text, to bolster it by providing additional information to support the way it creates a Gothic atmosphere complete with Romanian superstition and vampire mythology. For example, Florescu and McNally’s annotations are designed to help bolster their belief that Vlad Tepes is the basis for Count Dracula. Artenie discusses also the extratextual myth of Dracula—created by the countless films, comic books, and other Dracula spin-off materials that make Count Dracula a household name to people who have not even read the book—influence our reading of the novel. Artenie’s voice is important, consequently, because it will make future editors think about how they edit books as mediators between the text and its readers, and it will make people aware of the agendas various editors may be working from.
The second half of the book is largely a close reading of Dracula divided into various topics to show just how lacking Dracula scholarship has been in understanding both Romania and Stoker’s use of it. Artenie goes into detail about Romania’s geography, taking editors to task for not providing maps of the country in their editions or for including outdated maps, or not even bothering to learn anything about Romania’s geography but just quoting from sources that are themselves ill-informed. She discusses both landscapes and cityscapes in the novel, and she goes into great detail about the food eaten in the novel and how editors have annotated it. She also discusses how editors and the sources they have used—never Romanian sources—have misunderstood the Romanian people’s history, mocking their claims to being descended from the Romans because they were not viewed as civilized enough, and she discusses how the editors tend to exoticize and orientalize Romania in a way that supports the Romanian myth created by Stoker’s text rather than look at the reality of Romania.
One prime example of how editors have failed to do their job in relation to understanding Romania and annotating the novel properly that Artenie cites is from when Jonathan Harker is warned of danger by the innkeeper’s wife on St. George’s Day, which is April 23 traditionally. However, the event happens on May 5 in the novel, because May 5 in England is April 23 in Romania, given that England used the Julian calendar while Romania used the Gregorian calendar at the time. The woman gives Harker a crucifix, which suggests she is Catholic, although most Romanians are Eastern Orthodox and do not use crosses—this is likely a mistake Stoker made, but editors have gone overboard trying to explain Stoker’s reasons for this, including suggesting the woman is a Hungarian Catholic. However, if that was the case, she wouldn’t think May 5 is St. George’s Day because Hungarians would use the Julian calendar. (This discussion also makes me realize how the novel focuses upon Catholic symbols like holy water and crucifixes as a means to defend or at least fend-off Dracula. This, in itself, is rather culturally irresponsible since it suggests that Catholicism, not Eastern Orthodoxy, is the religion that can defeat Dracula. Stoker, being Irish, of course associated Christianity predominantly with Catholicism, and the novel can be read as a vindication of Catholicism in the Gothic tradition since earlier Gothic novels mocked Catholicism as a religion of superstition. However, while Stoker was championing Catholicism, he was overlooking Eastern Orthodoxy, which would be the religion of the Romanians. Or perhaps his use of Catholicism was a veiled effort to show once more that the West is superior to the East because only the Western form of Christianity can defeat vampires.) Artenie concludes Part II with discussions of how the editors continually vampirize Transylvania; this discussion includes analyzing the word nosferatu at length and showing it is itself another error in the novel.
In addition to Artenie’s overall purpose of analyzing various editorial practices used for Dracula, I found that she drops many fascinating tidbits of information I had not heard before. For example, she mentions there are similarities between Dracula and The String of Pearls, the penny dreadful that introduced Sweeney Todd to the world. I had not seen The String of Pearls discussed as a Dracula source before. Also interesting is mention that Anne Rice was a student of Leonard Wolf, who composed the first annotated edition of Dracula, and that he read Interview with a Vampire and gave Rice feedback before she published it. Later, Wolf also was a consultant on the screenplay by James V. Hart for Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). Also, I did not know Mary Elizabeth Braddon, best known as the author of Lady Audley’s Secret, had written a vampire story named “Good Lady Ducayne.” These are all tidbits worth exploring further. But perhaps the most fascinating to me was that H. P. Lovecraft claimed he knew a woman who had offered to revise Dracula for Stoker and said the manuscript she saw was a fearful mess. I have often wondered, as have other critics, if Stoker had help in writing the novel or at least a very good editor because Dracula is superior to his other works. While the woman Lovecraft mentions apparently did not get the job, it’s suspected Stoker’s good friend Hall Caine may have helped him.
Artenie concludes this insightful study by saying that she hopes her work will make both current and future editors rethink their editorial practices and create new or revised editions of Dracula that take into consideration the Romanian perspective. While I fully support this statement, it’s a bit ironic that Artenie took her own advice and in the same year published Dracula: The Postcolonial Edition—an edition I will review on this blog this autumn.
Dracula: A Study of Editorial Practices was published in 2016 by Universitas Press in Canada. In the United States, it’s available at Amazon.
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Tyler Tichelaar, PhD, is the author of King Arthur’s Children: A Study in Fiction and Tradition, The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, The Children of Arthur novel series, Haunted Marquette: Ghost Stories from the Queen City, and many other titles. Visit Tyler at www.GothicWanderer.com, www.ChildrenofArthur.com, and www.MarquetteFiction.com.
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