8. Bram Stoker (1902), The Mystery of the Sea
Saturday, 7 March 2020 20:53![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
strange_complexI have been wanting to explore more of Bram Stoker's fiction in order to get a sense of the wider context for Dracula, and chose this book to start with because it is set in Cruden Bay, where I went with the Dracula Society in Bram's footsteps in summer 2018 (LJ / DW). While we were there, local Stoker researcher Mike Shepherd showed us the places where he had stayed or which had inspired his fiction, with The Mystery of the Sea featuring fairly heavily because of its local setting. I read Mike's book, When Brave Men Shudder: the Scottish origins of Dracula about six months later (LJ / DW), which revealed that for Mike, The Mystery of the Sea was important not only for its engagement with the Cruden Bay region, but also for its insights into Stoker's spiritual outlook. So that intensified my desire to read it, and here we are.
It's recognisably from the same author as Dracula, yet at the same time a very different kettle of fish in multiple ways. Stoker uses his knowledge of Cruden Bay to lend realism to the story in a very similar way to his use of Whitby in Dracula - right down to attempting to replicate the local dialect. There's also evidence of careful background research, again reflecting the same mind which took detailed notes on multiple topics when researching Dracula. In particular, quite a lot of the plot revolves around people using and decoding a bilateral or Baconian cipher, and Stoker goes to the trouble of providing multiple appendices about how it works - probably partly inspired by his well-attested liking for Edgar Allan Poe. The story has some supernatural elements, including second sight, telepathy, and a parade of ghosts from the sea, and their presence is particularly striking because they could actually be completely excised from the plot without really impeding the core narrative in any way. They must therefore at least reflect a strong interest in these matters, and perhaps also some awareness of having had a success with Dracula and attempting to replicate it. And if the bulk of the story lies in the domain of more straightforward adventure, there are elements here too which can be found in Dracula, including an independently-minded and well-defined female character and mysteries rooted in the past which threaten Britain in the present day. For all that, though, the format of the narrative is simpler. It is told in the first person as an account of 'real' events, but only in a single character's voice. A lot of time is also spent on a long-winded Victorian romance beset by huge amounts of anguish about not wanting to appear too forward - far in excess of any of the romantic elements in Dracula and on its own easily explaining why this novel is not of widespread interest to modern audiences. And although there is careful research underpinning this story, I don't think either that or the levels of literary intertextuality here really match Dracula.
Some people have noted that Abraham Van Helsing shares the same first name as his creator, but I don't think I have ever read such an egregious authorial self-insertion as the main character in The Mystery of the Sea. Again, there's a certain resonance in the format of the names: Archibald 'Archie' Hunter is not dissimilar to Abraham 'Bram' Stoker. But there are many more parallels. Just like Stoker, we learn that in his boyhood Archie "had been an invalid for a considerable period", but his natural strength has been developed by athletic training as a young man. Just like Stoker, he goes to Cruden Bay regularly for a month-long summer holiday, and the locals even believe that he is an author. Indeed, Archie's knowledge of Cruden Bay reflects Stoker's experience of it quite precisely. Though the book was published in 1902, the text specifies that the story is set in in 1897-1898 (i.e. just after Bram had finished Dracula), and in those few short years the area had changed quite distinctly from a lonely fishing village to a fashionable holiday destination thanks to the opening of a railway station there in 1897. Hence comments in Archie's voice when he is setting the scene early on such as "The shore was quite lonely, for in those days it was rare to see anyone on the beach except when the salmon fishers drew their nets at the ebbing tide" sound a lot like Bram explaining to his readers that the Cruden Bay he is writing about isn't quite the one they now know. In the light of all this, it's hard not to see quite a few of the things which happen to Archie as very Stokerish wish-fulfilment: particularly when he is able to use his athletic prowess to rescue a young woman who proves to be an intelligent, independent and spectacularly wealthy heiress, and not only that but from America, which Stoker had conceived a great admiration for on visits with Irving's company.
All of this made me revisit the views I had formed when reading Mike Shepherd's book, When Brave Men Shudder: the Scottish origins of Dracula (LJ / DW). At the time of reading, I had only read Stkoker's Dracula (and a couple of biographies about him), and struggled to see from those how some of Mike's conclusions about Stoker's spirituality could be true. Mike had argued in particular that Bram had been inspired by the poetry of Walt Whitman to embrace pantheism, view the sea in particular as the embodiment of the spiritual world, and to consider all religions, gods and spirits to be real. And to be be honest, now that I have read The Mystery of the Sea, I see where he is coming from. Bram does indeed put a lot of that into Archie's mind and voice, and given what an obvious self-insertion character Archie is, it's hard not to see him at least as a vehicle for Stoker to think about what it would be like to hold such beliefs.
They centre in particular around Gormala, an elderly local woman who has the Second Sight, and helps Archie realise that he has it too. She is a complex and often rather unpleasant character, but in the context of the plot she comes out on the side of good in the end, and she is constantly having visions of the future and talking about spirits. This is one of Archie's early appraisals of her:
On other fronts, this book seems more concerned with delineating stark gender roles than Dracula, for all the latter's passing snark about New Women. As already noted, The Mystery of the Sea includes a long courtship between Archie and the American heiress he rescues from a rising tide, whose name turns out to be Marjory, and that whole section of the novel is pretty hard going for a modern reader. Quite apart from wanting to bang the two of their heads together and yell "Oh just kiss already!", there is a lot of stuff in it about how women are weaker than men, but the two different types are necessary, which quite often comes out as outright misogyny. Indeed, there are some cringe-inducing comments about what is supposed to be women's typical behaviour. When Marjory explains how it was that she and her friend got stuck on a rock at high tide in the first place, she says "I took care to fasten the painter to a piece of rock; but like a woman forgot to see that the other end was fixed to the boat, so that when the tide turned she drifted away with the stream." Later on, she tells Archie: "We women have to give something in order to be happy. The stronger-minded ones, as we call them, blame the Creator for this disposition of things — or else I do not know who or what they blame; but the rest of us, who are wise enough to accept what cannot be altered, try to realise what can be done for the best. We all want to care for some one or something, if it is only a cat or a dog." In fairness, sometimes the sexism is benevolent. When Marjory has made an intelligent suggestion about how to solve the bilateral cipher, Archie's narrative voice comments: "It was with genuine admiration for her suggestion that I answered Miss Anita [her surname]: “Your woman’s intuition is quicker than my man’s ratiocination.”" But that's about as good as it gets. It's just all very Victorian - and either actually in more striking ways than Dracula, or in ways that I haven't already had a lifetime of reading and re-reading to normalise and forgive.
Mind you, the misogyny is as nothing next to the absolute Grade A racism! This is not absent from Dracula either. The whole set-up of the story there is one of east vs west, and there is some explicit anti-semitism towards the end about a Jewish businessman in Galatz called Immanuel Hildesheim. But that is one sentence. In The Mystery of the Sea, hatred based on stereotyping is, I regret to say, absolutely rife. Some of it is directed towards Spaniards, and has a historical context in that (as its Wikipedia entry explains), the novel is set at the time of the Spanish-American war, and its heroine is an American. She hates the Spanish virulently, and Archie actually comments on this, describing it as 'racial hatred'. But he is no progressive. Spain is personified in the novel through Don Bernadino, whose ancestors were part of the Spanish Armada and buried a treasure they were carrying somewhere near Cruden Bay. Initially, Archie considers him a gentleman, but when he begins to get bit nasty, Archie's appraisal changes: "Somehow at that moment the racial instinct manifested itself. Spain was once the possession of the Moors, and the noblest of the old families had some black blood in them. In Spain, such is not, as in the West, a taint. The old diabolism whence sprung fantee and hoo-doo seemed to gleam out in the grim smile of incarnate, rebellious purpose."
And, as that passage already rather indicates, much worse surfaces in Archie's attitude to one member of a gang who later kidnap Marjory. This particular kidnapper is a black man from New Orleans, and without knowing anything much about him other than that, Archie becomes obsessed with him to the exclusion of the rest of the gang. Here's what he has to say about him:
It's recognisably from the same author as Dracula, yet at the same time a very different kettle of fish in multiple ways. Stoker uses his knowledge of Cruden Bay to lend realism to the story in a very similar way to his use of Whitby in Dracula - right down to attempting to replicate the local dialect. There's also evidence of careful background research, again reflecting the same mind which took detailed notes on multiple topics when researching Dracula. In particular, quite a lot of the plot revolves around people using and decoding a bilateral or Baconian cipher, and Stoker goes to the trouble of providing multiple appendices about how it works - probably partly inspired by his well-attested liking for Edgar Allan Poe. The story has some supernatural elements, including second sight, telepathy, and a parade of ghosts from the sea, and their presence is particularly striking because they could actually be completely excised from the plot without really impeding the core narrative in any way. They must therefore at least reflect a strong interest in these matters, and perhaps also some awareness of having had a success with Dracula and attempting to replicate it. And if the bulk of the story lies in the domain of more straightforward adventure, there are elements here too which can be found in Dracula, including an independently-minded and well-defined female character and mysteries rooted in the past which threaten Britain in the present day. For all that, though, the format of the narrative is simpler. It is told in the first person as an account of 'real' events, but only in a single character's voice. A lot of time is also spent on a long-winded Victorian romance beset by huge amounts of anguish about not wanting to appear too forward - far in excess of any of the romantic elements in Dracula and on its own easily explaining why this novel is not of widespread interest to modern audiences. And although there is careful research underpinning this story, I don't think either that or the levels of literary intertextuality here really match Dracula.
Some people have noted that Abraham Van Helsing shares the same first name as his creator, but I don't think I have ever read such an egregious authorial self-insertion as the main character in The Mystery of the Sea. Again, there's a certain resonance in the format of the names: Archibald 'Archie' Hunter is not dissimilar to Abraham 'Bram' Stoker. But there are many more parallels. Just like Stoker, we learn that in his boyhood Archie "had been an invalid for a considerable period", but his natural strength has been developed by athletic training as a young man. Just like Stoker, he goes to Cruden Bay regularly for a month-long summer holiday, and the locals even believe that he is an author. Indeed, Archie's knowledge of Cruden Bay reflects Stoker's experience of it quite precisely. Though the book was published in 1902, the text specifies that the story is set in in 1897-1898 (i.e. just after Bram had finished Dracula), and in those few short years the area had changed quite distinctly from a lonely fishing village to a fashionable holiday destination thanks to the opening of a railway station there in 1897. Hence comments in Archie's voice when he is setting the scene early on such as "The shore was quite lonely, for in those days it was rare to see anyone on the beach except when the salmon fishers drew their nets at the ebbing tide" sound a lot like Bram explaining to his readers that the Cruden Bay he is writing about isn't quite the one they now know. In the light of all this, it's hard not to see quite a few of the things which happen to Archie as very Stokerish wish-fulfilment: particularly when he is able to use his athletic prowess to rescue a young woman who proves to be an intelligent, independent and spectacularly wealthy heiress, and not only that but from America, which Stoker had conceived a great admiration for on visits with Irving's company.
All of this made me revisit the views I had formed when reading Mike Shepherd's book, When Brave Men Shudder: the Scottish origins of Dracula (LJ / DW). At the time of reading, I had only read Stkoker's Dracula (and a couple of biographies about him), and struggled to see from those how some of Mike's conclusions about Stoker's spirituality could be true. Mike had argued in particular that Bram had been inspired by the poetry of Walt Whitman to embrace pantheism, view the sea in particular as the embodiment of the spiritual world, and to consider all religions, gods and spirits to be real. And to be be honest, now that I have read The Mystery of the Sea, I see where he is coming from. Bram does indeed put a lot of that into Archie's mind and voice, and given what an obvious self-insertion character Archie is, it's hard not to see him at least as a vehicle for Stoker to think about what it would be like to hold such beliefs.
They centre in particular around Gormala, an elderly local woman who has the Second Sight, and helps Archie realise that he has it too. She is a complex and often rather unpleasant character, but in the context of the plot she comes out on the side of good in the end, and she is constantly having visions of the future and talking about spirits. This is one of Archie's early appraisals of her:
All through her speaking I had been struck by the old woman’s use of the word ‘Fate,’ and more especially when she used it in the plural. It was evident that, Christian though she might be — and in the West they are generally devout observants of the duties of their creed — her belief in this respect came from some of the old pagan mythologies.Then, later on, he begins to mull over matters spiritual on his own account, saying things like:
My own intellectual attitude to the matter interested me. I was not sceptical, I did not believe; but I think my mind hung in poise. Certainly my sympathies tended towards the mysterious side, backed up by some kind of understanding of the inner nature of things which was emotional or unintentional rather than fixed.and
With this insight I began to understand the grand guesses of the Pantheists, pagan and Christian alike, who out of their spiritual and nervous and intellectual sensitiveness began to realise that there was somewhere a purposeful cause of universal action. An action which in its special or concrete working appeared like the sentience of nature in general, and of the myriad items of its cosmogony.That is certainly quite Thinky on the issue, and again as I've noted above for the supernatural elements of the story, it doesn't really need to be there for the main plot to work. So, I take back my scepticism over Mike's readings of all this, and rather wish I could reach back through time and give Bram a little hug about it all.
On other fronts, this book seems more concerned with delineating stark gender roles than Dracula, for all the latter's passing snark about New Women. As already noted, The Mystery of the Sea includes a long courtship between Archie and the American heiress he rescues from a rising tide, whose name turns out to be Marjory, and that whole section of the novel is pretty hard going for a modern reader. Quite apart from wanting to bang the two of their heads together and yell "Oh just kiss already!", there is a lot of stuff in it about how women are weaker than men, but the two different types are necessary, which quite often comes out as outright misogyny. Indeed, there are some cringe-inducing comments about what is supposed to be women's typical behaviour. When Marjory explains how it was that she and her friend got stuck on a rock at high tide in the first place, she says "I took care to fasten the painter to a piece of rock; but like a woman forgot to see that the other end was fixed to the boat, so that when the tide turned she drifted away with the stream." Later on, she tells Archie: "We women have to give something in order to be happy. The stronger-minded ones, as we call them, blame the Creator for this disposition of things — or else I do not know who or what they blame; but the rest of us, who are wise enough to accept what cannot be altered, try to realise what can be done for the best. We all want to care for some one or something, if it is only a cat or a dog." In fairness, sometimes the sexism is benevolent. When Marjory has made an intelligent suggestion about how to solve the bilateral cipher, Archie's narrative voice comments: "It was with genuine admiration for her suggestion that I answered Miss Anita [her surname]: “Your woman’s intuition is quicker than my man’s ratiocination.”" But that's about as good as it gets. It's just all very Victorian - and either actually in more striking ways than Dracula, or in ways that I haven't already had a lifetime of reading and re-reading to normalise and forgive.
Mind you, the misogyny is as nothing next to the absolute Grade A racism! This is not absent from Dracula either. The whole set-up of the story there is one of east vs west, and there is some explicit anti-semitism towards the end about a Jewish businessman in Galatz called Immanuel Hildesheim. But that is one sentence. In The Mystery of the Sea, hatred based on stereotyping is, I regret to say, absolutely rife. Some of it is directed towards Spaniards, and has a historical context in that (as its Wikipedia entry explains), the novel is set at the time of the Spanish-American war, and its heroine is an American. She hates the Spanish virulently, and Archie actually comments on this, describing it as 'racial hatred'. But he is no progressive. Spain is personified in the novel through Don Bernadino, whose ancestors were part of the Spanish Armada and buried a treasure they were carrying somewhere near Cruden Bay. Initially, Archie considers him a gentleman, but when he begins to get bit nasty, Archie's appraisal changes: "Somehow at that moment the racial instinct manifested itself. Spain was once the possession of the Moors, and the noblest of the old families had some black blood in them. In Spain, such is not, as in the West, a taint. The old diabolism whence sprung fantee and hoo-doo seemed to gleam out in the grim smile of incarnate, rebellious purpose."
And, as that passage already rather indicates, much worse surfaces in Archie's attitude to one member of a gang who later kidnap Marjory. This particular kidnapper is a black man from New Orleans, and without knowing anything much about him other than that, Archie becomes obsessed with him to the exclusion of the rest of the gang. Here's what he has to say about him:
All but one I surveyed calmly, and weighed up as it were with complacency; but this one was a huge coal-black negro, hideous, and of repulsive aspect. A glimpse of him made my blood run cold, and filled my mind at once with hate and fear.and
He was callous to everything, and there was such a wicked, devilish purpose in his look that my heart hardened grimly in the antagonism of man to man. Nay more, it was not a man that I loathed; I would have killed this beast with less compunction than I would kill a rat or a snake. Never in my life did I behold such a wicked face. In feature and expression there was every trace and potentiality of evil; and these superimposed on a racial brutality which made my gorge rise.As readers, we are very clearly supposed to fear this man alongside Archie, rather than to condemn Archie for his irrational and dehumanising attitude towards him. Indeed, although the word is never used explicitly, Archie becomes convinced that this man is going to rape Marjory, and we are expected to share his fear. It all culminates in Archie stabbing the guy to death in the course of rescuing Marjory, whereupon he comments:
Never before did I understand the pleasure of killing a man. Since then, it makes me shudder when I think of how so potent a passion, or so keen a pleasure, can rest latent in the heart of a righteous man. It may have been that between the man and myself was all the antagonism that came from race, and fear, and wrongdoing; but the act of his killing was to me a joy unspeakable. It will rest with me as a wild pleasure till I die.Given everything I've said above about authorial self-insertion and wish-fulfilment, that can only read as something Bram himself could rather imagine wanting to do. Certainly, if we're to talk Archie's comments about spirituality as an insight into Bram's mind-set, we have to take the blatant racism on the same level as well - which is not a point Mike Shepherd makes in his book. I've seen people falling over themselves to excuse the anti-semitism in Dracula, because of course they do. But this is so blatant it would be hard to pull the same sleight of hand over. I'm including it all here partly to remind myself, and partly so that I have the quotes easily to hand next time I see that happening. In the end, Victorian literature is just like this, and it's on us to acknowledge that if we also want to enjoy what is good about it.
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