9 - Bram Stoker's Ambivalent Response to the Frontier and the American Frontiersman

Summary

A man who was born in one cosmopolitan center, Dublin, and spent the second half of his life in another, London, Bram Stoker was nonetheless fascinated with the American frontier, which he wrote about in both his fictional works and his nonfiction, sometimes enthusiastically, sometimes with a degree of apprehension, and occasionally with a mixture of the two responses. Stoker's first mention of America came early in his career, when on November 13, 1872 he delivered a lecture entitled “The Necessity for Political Honesty” at the first meeting of the Trinity College Historical Society. This early lecture was followed by A Glimpse of America (delivered at the London Institution on December 28, 1885 and published in early 1886) and a series of lectures on Abraham Lincoln delivered in the United States in 1886 and 1887, and in England until at least 1893. While the lectures reveal his enthusiasm for American culture, many of his fictional works—perhaps most obviously Dracula (1897), which features both the American frontiersman Quincey Morris and Dracula, the Old World opponent who nonetheless resembles him in some ways—reveal his ambivalence about the frontier and the people who inhabit it. Among the other fictional works that examine the American frontier are The Shoulder of Shasta (1895) and The Man (1905), as well as shorter works such as “The Squaw” (1893) and two stories in Snowbound (1908)—“Mick the Devil” and “Chin Music.” In addition, Stoker occasionally uses frontier experience to reinforce certain character traits, as with Colonel Lucius Ogilvie in Lady Athlyne (1908) and a number of characters in The Mystery of the Sea (1902): the heroine Marjory Drake, her guardian Mrs. Jack, and the criminals who kidnap Marjory to hold her for ransom. Among the traits that Stoker associates with the frontier are a willingness to stand up for oneself and one's loved ones, quick—indeed, impulsive—reactions in the face of physical challenges, and an independent spirit. Finally, toward the end of his career Stoker introduces frontiersmen from other countries, including the rugged mountaineers in The Lady of the Shroud and Adam Salton, an Australian frontiersman, and Oolanga, an African practitioner of voodoo, in Lair of the White Worm (1911).