Of Vampires and Virtue: Friendship in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Aquinas once wrote that “among all worldly things, there is nothing which seems worthy to be preferred to friendship” (De Regno, I, ch. XI). Regardless of one’s station in life, be he wealthy or in the depths of poverty, be he famous or unknown, a true friend is a comfort unrivaled on this side of heaven.

As I ascend my twenties and life continues to grow busier by the year, the question of friendship is one that has often been on my mind. What constitutes a true friend? What does true friendship demand of us, and what does it give in return?

One of the reasons great literature is so worthwhile is that rather than answering the fundamental questions of life directly—providing us with the textbook answer, as it were—it shows us in a way that speaks to the human heart: through storytelling.

In Dracula, the novel’s male heroes (Dr. John Seward, Jonathan Harker, Quincey Morris, and Arthur Holmwood) team up under the guidance of a Dutch polymath learned in vampire lore (Dr. Van Helsing) to defeat a preternatural being who feeds on the living. By drinking their blood, Count Dracula not only gives himself life, but seeks to put those on whom he preys under his domination. Few novels offer a more vivid portrait of authentic friendship, and few set it against a darker villain.

The close bond seen between friends in this novel stands in stark contrast to the solitary and predatory existence of the Count. The Count operates alone and in the darkness. He sees others as objects purely to be used: “Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine—my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed” (Dracula, ch. XXIII). He has slaves, victims, and brides, but not a single friend. He not only does not have one, but he cannot have one. This is because Count Dracula is incapable of seeing another as anything but a means to his own ends. The fellowship of men in this book, on the contrary, is entirely focused on protecting the vulnerable, easing their sorrows, and fighting for the preservation of their dignity: “Then without a word we all knelt down together, and, all holding hands, swore to be true to each other. We men pledged ourselves to raise the veil of sorrow from the head of her whom, each in his own way, we loved” (Dracula, ch. XXII).

Contemporary criticism of Dracula has read the close friendship of the novel’s male characters as charged with homoerotic undertones driven by Freudian sexual repression. This is not surprising. In today’s society, virtually any authentic friendship between men is sexualized by some of the modern intelligentsia: Frodo and Sam, Ishmael and Queequeg, Holmes and Watson—the list goes on. C.S. Lewis comes to our aid in this regard, for as he points out, “those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend” (The Four Loves, ch. IV).

In other words, modern man has a difficult time conceiving of friendship that is entirely selfless. Aristotle grouped friendship into three kinds; in two of these, we love what another gives us. In the third form of friendship, that of virtue, we love the person for their own sake. A culture that has lost sight of the third must explain it as one of the first two. Freud conveniently supplies us with the explanation: eros in disguise. As Lewis points out, however, erotic love is exclusive and absorbed in the beloved. Stoker’s heroes, by contrast, are communal and outward-facing: their fellowship looks not at itself, but at the evil it must destroy.

In the first section of the novel, three of the men (Seward, Morris, and Holmwood) ask for the hand of the same girl, Lucy Westenra, in marriage. Although Lucy is forced to pick one despite recognizing the high character in each of her suitors, not one of the men is filled with animosity or jealousy. In fact, when later in the novel she finds herself in dire straits, the men whose love was left unrequited do not hesitate to lay their emotion aside in order to come to her aid. The reason they were able to do this is that virtuous men do not allow lesser things to displace their priorities. Despite the fact that all of these men were vying for the same woman, in the end it was their friendship and the well-being of the woman they loved that took precedence. This magnanimity is extremely rare in today’s world, and if you find a friend who behaves in this way, hold on to them.

Another element of this friendship that is altogether desirable is that each of these men is in his own right courageous, capable, and generous. In short, they are men. They then take the virtue they have cultivated and measure themselves not by what they receive from their friends, but by what they can give to them. Long before the Count arrives on the scene, Dr. Seward sucked the poison of gangrene from a wound of Van Helsing’s that could have proved fatal. When Seward later enlists the help of Van Helsing to defeat Dracula, the professor crosses the sea from Amsterdam at a moment’s notice to repay the debt. Jonathan Harker is the first of the cadre to encounter the horror of Dracula and endures it for weeks on end in bitter solitude. Rather than despairing and thinking only of himself, his thoughts during that desolate chapter return constantly to Mina, the woman waiting for him in England. Quincey Morris is ever ready to jump into the fray of danger without a second thought. And Arthur…poor Arthur. He is asked to perform what may be the most difficult act of love in the novel. I will allow you to read it yourself to fully understand what it is he had to suffer.

Their virtue, while cultivated apart from one another, is strengthened all the more by their friendship: ferrum ferro exacuitur, et homo exacuit faciem amici sui (Proverbs 27:17).

Nowhere is this display of virtue clearer than in the novel’s final pages. In the last struggle against Count Dracula, Quincey Morris is wounded unto death. In his final moments, he notes that the mark Dracula left on Mina Harker’s forehead has vanished, and his last thoughts are not for himself, but for the victory won against evil: “Now God be thanked that all has not been in vain! See! the snow is not more stainless than her forehead! The curse has passed away!” (Dracula, ch. XXVII).

So what is it that constitutes a true friend? Stoker’s answer is a man who wants your good more than his own, sometimes even more than you want it for yourself. It is a man who stands beside you come what may and who makes you better for his company. It is one who celebrates your wins and mourns your losses as if they were his own. This book will, without a doubt, raise your standards of friendship as well as your notion of sacrificial love. This life is but a breath, and what better way to pass it than surrounding oneself with others who live nobly, give without counting the cost, and to their dying days remain true to those they love.