Dracula's Deleted Ending: A Mini-Essay

     Revision is a natural part of the creative process. Whether it's a dance, novel, painting, sculpture, or song, an artwork undergoes a series of transformative stages. Indeed, Peter Barry emphasizes that, with each reprint and new edition of a text, authors are given the opportunity to amend their works. As a result, alternate versions of a literary composition may exist. According to Barry, these revisions allow scholars a candid glimpse into the methods of an artist’s creativity. Interestingly, Barry fails to discuss that, while some changes are enacted intentionally by the creator, others are done to satisfy the demands of audiences and distributors. In the case of the latter, these alterations reveal more about cultural ideology than the artist’s craft. Oscar Wilde's manuscript for The Picture of Dorian Gray, for example, went through extensive modifications between July of 1890 and April of 1981 as publishers and friends persistently requested the author prune much of the text's homosexual overtones. 
     At the same time Wilde was reluctantly editing his work, Bram Stoker began his manuscript for The Un-Dead. Between March of 1890 and May of 1897, the text underwent several changes: Professor Max Windshoeffel was renamed Dr. Abraham Van Helsing; the setting was shifted from Germany, then Styria, and finally Transylvania; Count Wampyr was rechristened Count Dracula; and the title was altered to showcase the count's new foreboding name. One of the most intriguing alterations occurred in 1897 as the book's final contract was signed. Originally, the novel ended with a dramatic destruction of Dracula's castle, obliterating all traces of the nefarious vampire. As the work reached completion, this afterward - part of Jonathan Harker’s journal - was deleted (read the original ending below). No known reason was given and, over the century, literary scholars have reached several differing opinions. Was the castle deliberately left standing to signal a potential return of the count, with the publisher and/or Stoker considering a sequel? In fact, Barbara Belford postulates that there might have been discussions about a series of stories revolving around Van Helsing as a psychic detective. Was the adjustment enacted because, as Jim Steinmeyer postulates, it offered an unrealistic and sensational climax? Was the ending modified because it held too close a parallel to the finale of Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Fall of the House of Usher"? Or, as Noel Montague-Etienne Rarignac proposes, was there a far simpler explanation: the modification was not born from any commercial consideration, but merely part of an artist’s process of refining “a working draft in an indeterminate state of development.” The reasoning, of course, will never be known and, similarly, it will forever remain a mystery if Stoker - akin to Wilde - was pressured by editors to change the ending or had willingly done so as part of his own creative process.

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     As we looked there came a terrible convulsion of the earth so that we seemed to rock to and fro and fell to our knees. At the same moment, with a roar which seemed to shake the very heavens, the whole castle and the rock and even the hill on which it stood seemed to rise into the air and scatter in fragments while a mighty cloud of black and yellow smoke volume on volume in rolling grandeur was shot upwards with inconceivable rapidity.

      Then there was a stillness in nature as the echoes of that thunderous report seemed to come as with the hollow boom of a thunder clap – the long reverberating roll which seems as though the floors of heaven shook. Then down in a mighty ruin falling whence they rose came the fragments that had been tossed skyward in the cataclysm.

      From where we stood it seemed as though the one fierce volcano burst had satisfied the need of nature and that the castle and the structure of the hill had sunk again into the void. We were so appalled with the suddenness and the grandeur that we forgot to think of ourselves.

Works Referenced

Barry, Peter. English in Practice: In Pursuit of English Studies. London: Arnold Publishing, 2003.

Belford, Barbara. Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1996.

Rarignac, Noel Montague-Etienne. The Theology of Dracula: Reading the Book of Stoker as a Sacred Text. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2012.

Steinmeyer, Jim. Who Was Dracula? Bram Stoker's Trail of Blood. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2013.
 
Stoker, Bram. Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Extended Edition. 1897. Vancouver, BC: Superjet Press, 2016.