Perhaps the best-known vampire novel of all time, many readers and scholars assumed that everything that could be said about Dracula had been, but the discovery of the following letter between Count Dracula and Jonathan Harker suggests what many scholars had only previously speculated: a homosexual relationship between the two men. This document was found in a basement office of the English building at Kansas State University. When the office was cleared of books to be sent off to a book sale, this note was found behind the now-empty bookshelf. The paper was so thin and fragile that half of it disintegrated the moment it was exposed to light and air. We may never know what the first half of the letter could have told us, but using the latest technology, we were able to preserve the remnants of the letter so that its contents could be shared with future generations of readers and scholars. The following is a reproduction of the text, complete with notes and outside sources for the benefit of you, the reader.

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[…] difficult for me to understand, Mr. Harker, why you would choose the life of domesticity[1] over a life of adventure. Has it not been—is it still not—your desire to explore[2], to learn? In your last letter, I sensed your hesitation at coming, but the Carpathians is a marvelous region, and an intellectual man such as yourself is sure to grow in body, mind, and spirit if you were to visit. And I do anticipate that you can help me meet my needs.[3] If you should decide to come, I will look forward to meeting you in person.[4]

Your obedient servant,

Dracula[5]

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[1] Throughout the opening journal entries of the novel, we see Jonathan Harker aligned with traditionally feminine roles. As Barry McCrea writes in his 2010 article “Heterosexual Horror: Dracula, the Closet, and the Marriage-Plot,” “Many elements of Jonathan's experience match that of a successful heroine in a marriage-plot; he is physically displaced from his own country and people to a new, foreign place where he knows no one and is suddenly confined to a strange, huge house from which he is forced to write jolly letters home, all the while part fearing, part desiring some kind of bloody penetration. Dracula is courteous and wealthy, and he enjoys a superhuman ability (or so it seems to Jonathan, whose world is now confined to the house and its ‘staff’) to come and go between home and the outside world. He scales the steep walls ‘just as a lizard’ and, like any good Victorian husband, has plenty of unnamed business to transact outside the house (Stoker qtd. in McCrea 265). Moreover, he treats Jonathan with chivalry and deference, and he provides for all his material necessities - a true aristocratic ‘husband’” (265).

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[2] McCrea says that the novel explores a “particular view of the official heterosexual world that we cannot get anywhere else. Dracula's subtle but persistent focus on marriage, and the uncanny continuity between Castle Dracula and the happy English home both suggest that the horrified fantasy is about life outside, not inside, the closet” and that, to a closeted gay man, like Dracula, heterosexuality would be “an exotic foreign world, at once alluring and frightening” (253).

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[3] Dracula’s “needs” here are vague. From Harker’s own journal entries in Dracula, it is possible that he is referring to the business venture that brings Harker to Transylvania, but there is an undertone of sexual desire. McCrea observes that “The novel opens with a physical movement from West to mysterious East, with a detailed account by Jonathan of his train and coach trips across Europe to Transylvania. At the outset he is unworried, and the novel's chief concerns, as they are presented to the reader, are Jonathan's engagement to Mina and his dutifully middle-class professional ambitions. The further east he goes, the stranger his surroundings and encounters becomes” (258), an idea that we can parallel to Harker’s move from hetero- to homosexuality.

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[4] McCrea argues that Dracula can be read as “a hypothesis about what it would be like to love men publicly” and that “the relationship between Jonathan and the count as a gay marriage only in the specific sense of being a conjecture about what it would mean to participate in an official, as opposed to illicit, sexuality” (267). In the context of this letter, the physical distance between Dracula and Harker represents the impossibility of their union. What Dracula is looking forward to is the same acceptance that heterosexual couples are afforded, something that can only be imagined when the two men are together.

 

[5] Even the name of Stoker’s famous vampire contributes to the suggested theme of homosexuality “Dracula” comes from the Latin word “draco,” meaning “dragon,” and the “—la” or “—a” ending is traditionally used to feminize words in Latin and Romance languages.