The old truism rings ever more resoundingly in pop culture today that a hero is only as great as his greatest villain, which explains the stream of mediocrity stinking up Hollywood and comic book stands across the nation. Yet there was once a time when (brace yourselves) heroes were heroic and selfless, and villains were terrifying exemplars of pure evil. What more terrifying and influential villain has shaped modern pop culture more than Bram Stoker’s very own Prince of Darkness, Dracula?
Dracula is more than some thickly accented, Romanian aristocrat with a thirst for the blood of beautiful maidens. He’s an avatar of pure evil—a warlike prince in pursuit of an undead empire harkening to the bloody conquests of his notorious namesake.
“Who more gladly than we throughout the Four Nations recieved the ‘bloody sword,’ or at its warlike call flocked quicker to the standard of the king? When was redeemed that great shame of my nation, the shame of Cassova, when the flags of the Wallach and the Magyar went down beneath the Crescent? Who was it but one of my own race who as Voivode crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground? This was a Dracula indeed!”
-‘Dracula’, Bram Stoker, Ch. 3
In many ways, Dracula is an avatar of the devil himself, terrorizing the local peasants and stealing their children to feed to his wives, all the while damning the souls of his victims by corrupting them and incorporating them into his undead harem. Like many corrupt aristocrats (Baron Gilles de Rais, for example), he subjects the people under his control to his perverse lusts and sadistic pleasures or uses them as chattel where he sees fit not unlike one of his primary inspirations, the Countess Elizabeth Bathory.
In the shadow of so great and terrifying an exemplar of pure evil, it could be somewhat understandable how one might dismiss the character of Jonathan Harker at first. He begins as more of an everyman—a mere, oblivious, young, English solicitor arriving on the mistaken premise that he’s just closing out a real estate deal for a wealthy client. He appears naive and almost cherubically innocent, detailing his stay in Transylvania in a traveling diary while writing regularly to his fiancée, Mina Murray. He’s the avatar of the audience at the beginning, rationally minded, brash, dismissive of the superstitious locals, and so hasty in his attempts to close the deal and appease his superiors that he ignores Dracula’s own instructions to not travel at night to his castle. What ensues from the moment he arrives at the castle are relentless nights of ever mounting horror and psychological torment as he’s stalked by Dracula’s wives and forced to hear and witness their grotesque feeding habits and incomparable cruelty, including Dracula feeding children to his wives and sending his wolves to eat a village woman begging for the return of her stolen child.
“‘Are we having nothing tonight?’ said one of them, with a low laugh, as she pointed to the bag which he had thrown upon the floor, and which moved as if there were something living within it. For answer he nodded his head. One of the women jumped forward and opened it. If my ears did not deceive me there was a gasp and low wail, as of a half-smothered child. The women closed round, whilst I was aghast with horror…Then the horror overcame me, and I sank down unconscious.”
-‘Dracula’, Bram Stoker, Ch. 3
Dracula himself even begins to taunt him, telling him that he may leave any time while simultaneously posting his wolves outside at night to pounce on Harker and locking the door during the day to keep him from leaving. Even when he finally decides take action and slay the sleeping Dracula bloated with blood like a great leech in his coffin, he finds the vampire impervious to his attacks and smiling mockingly at them.
“To my intense astonishment I saw that it was unlocked. Suspiciously, I looked all round, but could see no key of any kind. as the door began to open, the howling of the wolves without grew louder and angrier; their red jaws with clamping teeth, and their blunt-clawed feet as the leaped, came in through the open door. I knew then that to struggle at the moment against the Count was useless…I cried out:—‘Shut the door; I shall wait till morning!’ and covered my face with my hands to hide my tears of bitter disappointment…The last I saw of Count Dracula was his kissing his hand to me; with a red light of triumph in his eyes, and with a smile that Judas in hell might be proud of.”-
-‘Dracula’, Bram Stoker, Ch. 4
“God preserve my sanity, for to this I am reduced. Safety and the assurance of safety are things of the past. Whilst I live on here there is but one thing to hope for, that I may not go mad, if, indeed, I be not mad already.”-
-‘Dracula’, Bram Stoker, Ch. 3
Yet, despite it all, he never loses hope, even when he discovers Dracula has intercepted his every attempt to contact the outside world and forced him to forge letters to London telling people that everything’s alright. He knows he must escape and reunite with Mina. And that he does, climbing down the side of the castle from his window like the Count and braving the deadly wilderness filled with Dracula’s bestial servants before being discovered, fevered, starved, and half-delirious by Transylvanian nuns who nurse him back to health.
“I shall not remain alone with them; I shall try to scale the castle wall farther than I have yet attempted. I shall take some of the gold with me, lest I want it later. I may find a way from this dreadful place. And then away for home! Away to the quickest and nearest train! Away from this cursed spot, from this cursed land, where the devil and his children still walk with earthly feet! At least God’s mercy is better than that of these monsters, and the precipice is steep and high. At its foot a man may sleep—as a man. Goodbye, all! Mina!”
-‘Dracula’, Bram Stoker, Ch. 4
It’s true that from this point on, Jonathan is sidelined until near the end of the novel and the narrative is largely carried by Lucy Westenra, Dr. Seward, Arthur Holmwood, and Van Hellsing, the latter two of which decide to take direct action against Dracula at first to save Lucy’s life, and then with the help of Quincey Morris, to save her soul. Yet, Jonathan’s account of Dracula proves instrumental to confirming Van Hellsing’s suspicions of vampiric activity and gives him the identity of Dracula outright as the culprit. By aiding Van Hellsing’s plot, he becomes a target for the vampire’s revenge. Dracula takes this revenge by putting Jonathan in a deep sleep and claiming Mina as his bride by making her drink his blood.
I understand that favorite characters like Arthur, Quincey, and Seward are favored for their love triangle with Lucy as a core romantic component of the story and, therefore, get the most focus in cinematic adaptations. Also, I won’t deny that Lucy meets a truly tragic and horrific end, again contributing to the appeal of her story.
Yet for sheer scope and time, none of the characters can outpace Harker for suffering the most throughout this story. He becomes an unwitting agent of Dracula without whose assistance he could never have gotten Carfax Abbey and begun his reign of terror in England (making Jonathan also responsible for Lucy’s death by proxy). He suffers psychological and emotional torment as a plaything of Dracula and his wives and must engineer his own escape, braving the elements, illness, harsh terrain, and the pursuit of Dracula’s wives and bestial servants. When at last he finds shelter, fevered, starved, and raving, he’s so traumatized that he can’t remember any of what happened to him or how he got there. Then, when at last he’s reunited with his fiancée, marries her and returns home in seeming safety and security to live happily ever after, Dracula arrives at England, wreaks havoc on Jonathan’s homeland much as he’d done in Transylvania, kills and corrupts Mina’s best friend, and then corrupts Mina in their own bedroom while Jonathan’s rendered insensate and powerless to stop him. This makes Mina not only corrupted in a spiritual sense, but in an allegorically sexual sense (a rape of body and soul, so to speak), all under their own roof! Even going so far as to mark her unclean before God and damned.
“There was a fearful scream which almost froze our hearts to hear. As he had placed the Wafer on Mina’s forehead, it had seared it—had burned into the flesh as though it had been a piece of white-hot metal. My poor darling’s brain had told her the significance of the fact as quickly as her nerves received the pain of it; and the two so overwhelmed her that her overwrought nature had its voice in that dreadful scream. But the words to her thought came quickly; the echo of the scream had not ceased to ring on the air when there came the reaction, and she sank on her knees on the floor in an agony of abasement. Pulling her beautiful hair over her face, as the leper of old his mantle, she wailed out:—‘Unclean! Unclean! Even the Almighty shuns my polluted flesh! I must bear this mark of shame upon my forehead until the Judgment Day.’”-
-‘Dracula’, Bram Stoker, Ch. 22
Jonathan cannot even allow himself the intimacy of a kiss with Mina lest he too become corrupted by the vampire curse. So, from that moment until his ultimate revenge against Dracula, he’s forced to hold Mina at arm’s length and share no intimacy with her.
If that’s not enough to demonstrate his status as the true, tragic hero of the novel and as a compelling character, he is also one of the two, key figures responsible for Dracula’s death. He pursues Dracula back to Transylvania with Mina, Van Hellsing, Seward, Holmwood, and Morris and deals the fatal blow with the latter, thereby avenging himself and his wife and bringing the story full circle by defeating Dracula on his own turf where he’d tormented Harker and left him to die.
As another Substack article by The Brothers Krynn commendably pointed out, the romance of Jonathan and Mina is the very heart of the Dracula narrative, and to excise or diminish Jonathan’s part in that narrative is to rip the very heart from the story. Dracula is a gothic romance par excellence, and the romantic devotion between Harker and Mina is a driving force of the narrative throughout. Yet, as usual, it’s the titular villain who so often takes up all attention in the story, or Van Hellsing, who’s often rewritten into a very Sherlockian archetype and too often falsely remembered as ‘Dracula’s arch-nemesis’. More disturbingly, there are those like Francis Ford Coppola who actually try to turn Dracula himself into a romantic, or erotic figure, which to me is akin to casting Sauron as Romeo. Jonathan’s devotion to Mina was the only thing keeping him sane as Dracula’s prisoner, and Mina’s devotion to Jonathan was the only thing keeping her from ending her life after Dracula corrupted her.
Now to the meat of the matter: how Harker has been treated in adaptations. While I’m a massive horror movie buff and routinely collect and watch the Universal and Hammer film series of Dracula, I must confess that no adaptation except for the 1977 BBC miniseries has ever come even remotely close to doing the novel justice. More to the point, not one of the myriad filmic adaptations of Dracula over the past 100 years and some change, beginning with Nosferatu, has ever done the character of Jonathan Harker justice.
Nosferatu’s Hutter is a rather shallow facsimile of the character of Harker who’s essentially supplanted by Mina (or Ellen per Murnau’s changes) as the protagonist who ultimately brings about Dracula’s (or Orlock’s) end through her sacrifice. Harker is replaced by Renfield in the beginning of the 1931 Dracula and isn’t even present until Dracula has already come to America, whereupon he plays second fiddle to Van Hellsing. Harker is turned into a vampire by Dracula and killed by Van Hellsing in the beginning of Hammer’s ‘Horror of Dracula’ after which he’s essentially replaced by Holmwood. He’s a glorified plot device that disappears after the beginning of Dan Curtis’ Dracula, and Coppola’s version makes him an impotent loser easily seduced by Dracula’s wives and bumbling around worthlessly while Mina and Dracula whisper sweet nothings and look longingly into each other’s eyes. Even in the most faithful adaptation (the BBC 1977 version), Harker is once again supplanted by Van Hellsing, who delivers the final blow to Dracula in the end. Oddly enough, the Jess Franco adaptation from 1970 does the most justice to Harker, keeping him a central, driving character of the story and allowing him and Quincey to kill Dracula in the end like in the novel (albeit with a more cinematic flourish).
I truly don’t understand what elicits such profound distaste for Harker’s character in so many people, particularly to such a degree that he’s so often written out, humiliated, or killed off in filmic adaptations. Perhaps too many people are caught up with the idea of Van Hellsing’s character as the central hero because he has been overly glorified in nearly all adaptations of the story, meaning when they encounter Jonathan, they opt to cast him aside to continue propping up a character heavily altered by pop culture perception over the years. Yet even that doesn’t explain the outright derisive adaptations of the character that have typified the majority of adaptations featuring him.
I understand the Sherlock and Moriarity-esque appeal of a genius like Van Hellsing pitting his wits against a demonic, undead fiend with centuries of experience. One is an academic intellect blending the scientific method with religious fundamentalism and iconography, and one is an ethereal intellect shaped by centuries of experience combined with supernatural might. Yet like sherlock Holmes and Moriarity, these characters have gone so far afield of their original versions after about a century of variegate iterations in films, comics, television, etc. that they’re utterly unrecognizable. They’re essentially completely different characters that happened to hijack the names of Stoker’s original characters.
In focusing on Van Hellsing and Mina, we forget the heart of the Dracula story—the humanity. We turn these other characters into vague archetypes that fit well into whatever box constantly changing societies can fashion for them. The result is that more people know Dracula as a Halloween decoration than as the gothic, horror masterpiece it truly is. Mina Harker is turned into a seductive, immortal action hero a’la Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Van Hellsing is turned into a world-weary, monster slaying Solomon Kane ripoff.
Jonathan Harker is the anchor of the Dracula story—the impetus for the narrative. The fact that we find Dracula himself more appealing and tend to paint him in an increasingly sympathetic light in more and more adaptations is a sad reflection on the moral degradation of western society at large. Dracula is no longer terrifying, but alluring and appealing to sexually frustrated women and hormonal teens who were weaned on Twilight and Fifty Shades of Gray. He’s not evil; he’s just misunderstood, and by that token, he’s no longer scary! When an immortal, libertine sadist is cast as a misunderstood antihero or tragic villain, you know society has hit rock bottom.
Dracula? Misunderstood playboy. Mina? Victorian girl-next-door in search of sexual awakening. Van Helsing? Sherlock Jekyll. These atrocious rewrites are largely achieved through first writing off, or writing out, Jonathan Harker, because he’s the man’s man—the traditional hero.
Yes, Dracula is a horror story, and as such, the horror elements always take precedent in an adaptation. Yet we must recognize that Dracula isn’t merely couched in folklore and gothic storytelling, but in Anglo Saxon hero tales like Beowulf. Before you balk at that as a stretch, look at the parallels between the two stories (heck, I had to as a requirement for my English Literature paper in university).
The symbolism, literary elements and themes of Dracula owe much to Anglo Saxon epics like Beowulf. While not presented as a form of mythology as in the cases of works like Beowulf or Dream of the Rood, Dracula does present a mythologized use of history and Christian symbolism mingled with ancient superstitions about monsters and evil spirits. Just as Grendel is presented as a descendent of the historical figure, Cain, Dracula is inspired by the historical figure of Vlad Tepes and is presented as a demonic figure. Furthermore, both Dracula and Grendel share a vampiric propensity to prey upon victims at night and drink their blood. In Beowulf, Grendel raids Hrerot after Beowulf has arrived and snatches a sleeping warrior, slitting him open from gullet to gizzard and gorging on his blood before eating him. Dracula hunts somewhat similarly, albeit more subtly and without eating anyone (as far as we can tell). He routinely raids a Transylvanian village at night and steals children to feed to his wives much like how Grendel raids the mead hall Hrerot and steals Hrothgar’s soldiers to feast on them. Like Beowulf, Dracula’s story also presents the clash between (and occasional intermingling of) old world, pagan traditions and superstition with medieval Christian ethics and ways of life.
However, a major point of divergence between Dracula and Beowulf lies in the difference between their respective heroes. While Beowulf features a herculean protagonist conquering evil through sheer mettle and strength of faith, the protagonists of Dracula are ostensibly normal human beings with only their faith and wit to aid them in battle against a demonic adversary. While the power and majesty of Beowulf is mythologically emphasized, in contrast, Dracula emphasizes the fragility and helplessness of its heroes. Harker, in particular, survives and defeats Dracula through sheer tenacity and willpower reinforced by his love for Mina, and only by striking the vampire with Morris as he slept in a weakened state in the daytime rather than tackling him in a head on battle like Beowulf. He’s aided by the combined genius of Van Helsing and Seward who provide the intellect needed to defeat Dracula. Likewise, Van Helsing, Seward, Morris, and Holmwood join forces to avenge the death of Lucy Westenra. Finally, Mina serves a crucial role in locating Dracula through her psychic connection to him. Yet, unlike Anglo Saxon epic heroes like Beowulf, they’re only able to kill Dracula by attacking him while he sleeps instead of taking him on in a straightforward battle (sorry Coppola). Dracula is, at its core, an examination of the clash and synergism between ancient superstition, science, and Christendom, and its heroes reflect that.
Harker may not be a conventional, mythological hero armed with superhuman strength or a charmed weapon, but he could be seen as the reconnection of the modern, civilized Englishman with his noble, Saxon roots, reliant on the mystical methods of ancient tradition, superstition, and genuine, devout faith when science and narrow, contemporary rationality fail to aid him. Though he is a Christian, Harker at first looks down on the superstitions of the Transylvanian peasants and their faith in reliquaries and charms like the crucifix, considering them a form of idolatry.
“She then rose and dried her eyes, and taking a crucifix from her neck offered it to me. I did not know what to do, for, as an English Churchman, I had been taught to regard such things as in some measure idolatrous, and yet it seemed so ungracious to refuse an old lady meaning so well and in such state of mind.”-
-‘Dracula’, Bram Stoker, Ch. 1
Despite his religious conviction, he is too heavily influenced by a world of scientific reasoning, such that he cannot imagine the prospect of demonic forces taking so tangible a form as Dracula (this constraint to exclusively scientific rationale proves to be an especially formidable barrier to the character of Dr. Seward later on). Once confronted with this barrier, Harker is forced to take on the role of the traditional, Saxon hero, moving against Dracula with only his ingenuity, wit, determination, endurance, and faith to aid him. So it is that the modern, rational, educated man is reduced to an almost primal version of himself. The comparison of Jonathan with the knightly archetype in the Krynns’ article is particularly apropos, given Dracula’s roots in Anglo Saxon heroic tradition—the same tradition which served as a precursor to Arthurian heroic tales.
The characters so many choose to idolize or at least favor in Dracula is a trend that has always baffled me. Yet I think it has less to do with misunderstandings of the source material and more that too many people are more familiar with Dracula’s adaptations, derivatives and other unrelated works that simply use the character than they are with Stoker’s original work. Christopher Lee would be turning over in his grave!
Van Helsing has been so rewritten and transmogrified over the years that he’s practically unrecognizable. In lieu of a Sherlockian genius matching wits with an undead fiend, everyone seems to just identify him with a cheesy, ghostbusting, monster hunting, Solomon Kane ripoff, which frankly does both Stoker and Howard immeasurable disservice!
What the emphasis on Van Helsing has done not only harms Jonathan as a character, but offsets the entire cast! Each character serves their own, distinct, and important role in the novel and together make up the mortal machinery that ultimately destroys Dracula. As the old saying goes, no man is an island. Harker is the first piece of the narrative without which it all falls apart. Without him, there is no emotional connection to either Dracula or Mina. It turns the former from a sadistic, undead mastermind into an incidental, basic, garden variety movie monster whose rampage the other characters simply happen to be caught up in. It turns Mina into a mere pretty face for the monster to stalk like a cheap slasher movie, or at worst a Victorian Bella Swan. Van Helsing is a compelling, entertaining, but ultimately emotionally dry character who can provide no human center to the story.
This often leaves Seward and Arthur to be the emotional center of the story, but they are too divorced from the character and nature of Dracula, since they primarily experience, interact with, or are affected by him through Van Helsing and Lucy. While both are good characters, they don’t offer much as protagonists since they lack that direct, emotional connection to Dracula and even serve as skeptics for most of the story who just happen to get roped in. Because of this, they can only really fill the role as lackeys for Van Helsing. And Quincey? He gets it almost as bad as Harker, too often combined with Seward or Arthur or ignored completely as a third wheel. All of these characters are forced to carry this burden specifically because Harker is neutered or outright excised from the story! Neither can Lucy hope to fill this emotional center since she is young, naive, detached, and ultimately a doomed victim. We pity Lucy, but we cannot follow her as a compelling protagonist, for her connection to Arthur and her other suitors is mostly puppy love against whom Mina’s genuine love and devotion to Jonathan stands a stark (and deliberate) contrast.
Without the drama of Harker’s imprisonment by Dracula and his unwavering love and devotion for Mina, the story simply has no emotional center. Harker is the only character with a genuine arc in the story, since Seward’s arc of skepticism to belief must needs be rushed in order to get him active in the plot to unfold. Seward also mostly leans on Van Helsing’s character, serving as a practical aid, but not standing apart as particularly compelling in his own right.
Even after uniting in a personal war against Dracula and acting as a thorn in his side, none of those characters interacts with him more or is more affected by him than Jonathan. Jonathan is the everyman who tries to flee his problems only for them to inevitably catch up with him and force him to take on the role of a hero. Van Helsing is the same man from his introduction to the book’s conclusion, but Jonathan is changed forever. While others are more often than not convinced by Van Helsing through proof and a shared personal tragedy (one without half the emotional weight or connection of Jonathan and Mina), Jonathan is forced to discover and suffer the true horror of Dracula without the benefit of scientific or academic prowess. Even Quincey Morris is presented with the advantage of being a kind of rugged, dashing adventurer, but Jonathan is just a man thrown directly into a horrifying situation without the benefit of allies to help him (at least initially). Unlike the others, there was no disconnect or intermediary in his interactions with Dracula, and only he knows the full scope and power of the Count’s cruelty. Not only that, but his detailed, personal interactions with the count are not only instrumental to his comrades, but to the audience, as they provide our only, real, deep look into Dracula’s personality and motivations. Without the opening arc in Transylvania and the interactions between Harker and Dracula, the Count wouldn’t be nearly as horrifying because we wouldn’t have a clear idea of what he was capable of. It’s only with their interactions that we catch a genuine look into Dracula as a character, particularly when he is leading Jonathan through his castle and speaks of the pride of his ancestors and their great, military achievements (betokening his future conquest into England).
With all this considered, I make the final point that without Jonathan as the emotional connection to the narrative, we have no real catharsis in the end when Dracula dies and the lives of the survivor’s go on to flourish. With the ending of Jonathan and Mina living happily ever after, we bring the narrative cycle full circle— Jonathan beginning as a man with a bright and hopeful future before having that hope tried at every turn by the relentless cruelty of Dracula and feeling himself responsible for the Count’s reign of terror, finally escaping to reunite with his bride only to have her corrupted by Dracula while he is rendered helpless, and finally returning to the land where he endured so much trauma to put an end to Dracula’s evil and avenge himself, his wife, and all others who suffered because he unwittingly facilitated Count’s travel to England. Then we cap it off with the confirmation of his new future with Mina, raising a family, and finally returning to Transylvania once more to put the shadows of his trauma behind him.
“In the summer of this year we made a journey to Transylvania, and went over the old ground which was, and is, to us so full of vivid and terrible memories. It was almost impossible to believe that the things which we had seen with our own eyes and heard with our own ears were living truths. every trace of all that had been was blotted out. The castle stood as before, reared high above a waste of desolation.”
-‘Dracula’, Bram Stoker, Chapter 27 Final Note
Jonathan Harker isn’t some mere, inconsequential, throwaway character or glorified plot device. He’s the righteous martyr, the suffering hero, the gallant knight who must rescue his princess from the evil dragon. This’s especially apropos, given the name Dracula is derived from the Romanian word for ‘the devil’ which is itself derived from the Latin word draco, which means ‘dragon’. Jonathan is the true, romantic hero of this gothic tale, rescuing the terrified villagers, his own countrymen, and his fair maiden from the terrible dragon. He’s the noble, Saxon hero wrestling with the might of the mythic ogre terrorizing the village. He’s the delineation between the exploitative horror of cinema and cheap Stephen King novels, and the thrilling, romantic, adventure of classic horror fiction.
A disrespected hero is finally respected.
A fantastic writeup on a fascinating Character - well done, Austin!