Bram Stoker: His Internalized Homophobia Externalized in “The Censorship of Fiction”

Whereas twenty-four-year-old Bram Stoker’s 1872 letter to Walt Whitman confessed his yearning for comradeship with like-minded unconventional men, and forty-nine-year-old Stoker’s 1897 publication of Dracula, with its dueling depictions of comradely and predatory male interactions, revealed the author’s anxiety over Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trials and imprisonment for “gross indecency,” sixty-year-old Stoker’s article “The Censorship of Fiction” (1908) amounted to a public declaration of his internalized homophobia. Though couched in opaque Edwardian language, his self-loathing turned outward and against other authors indisputably targets, among other so-called unspeakable unnatural depravities, homosexuality as depicted in fiction, as spelled out in boldface at the end of the following passage:

“The self-restraint and reticence which many writers have through the centuries exercised in behalf of an art which they loved and honoured [i.e., fiction writing] has not of late been exercised by the few who seek to make money and achieve notoriety through base means. There is no denying the fact nor the cause; both are only too painfully apparent. Within a couple of years past quite a number of novels have been published in England that would be a disgrace to any country even less civilized than our own. The class of works to which I allude are meant by both authors and publishers to bring to the winning of commercial success the forces of inherent evil in man…. For look what those people have done. They found an art wholesome, they made it morbid; they found it pure, they left it sullied. Up to this time it was free—the freest thing in the land; they so treated it, they so abused the powers allowed them and their own opportunities, that continued freedom becomes dangerous, even impossible. They in their selfish greed tried to deprave where others had striven to elevate. In the language of the pulpit, they have “crucified Christ afresh.” The merest glance at some of their work will justify any harshness of judgment; the roughest synopsis will horrify…. It may be taken that such works as are here spoken of deal not merely with natural misdoing based on human weakness, frailty, or passions of the senses, but with vices so flagitious [i.e., atrociously wicked; vicious; outrageous], so opposed to even the decencies of nature in its crudest and lowest forms, that the poignancy of moral disgust is lost in horror. This article is no mere protest against academic faults or breaches of good taste. It is a deliberate indictment of a class of literature so vile that it is actually corrupting the nation.”

It is beyond belief that Stoker did not comprehend how his own words could be used against his own work (i.e., Dracula) to argue it “deeply affect[ed] the principles and lives of the young people of [his] country” and called for “repressive measures such as are required in dealing with all crimes”—including the intervention of “the police.” But then, he doubtless believed his own published depravity was worthy as a cautionary tale against the sins he excoriated and, like most hypocrites, entertained, even if he could not bring himself to enjoy them.

Gay Dracula’s Closeted Author Bram Stoker

In a letter that apologizes for itself at length, twenty-four-year-old Bram Stoker wrote to fifty-two-year-old Walt Whitman in February 1872:

• “If I were before your face I would like to shake hands with you for I feel that I would like you—I would like to call you Comrade and to talk to you as men who are not poets do not often talk. I think that at first I would be ashamed for a man cannot in a moment break the habit of comparative reticence that has become a second nature to him; but I know I would not be long ashamed to be natural before you. You are a true man and I would like to be one myself and so I would feel towards you as a brother and as a pupil to his master. In this age no man becomes worthy of the name without an effort. You have shaken off the shackles and your wings are free. I have the shackles on my shoulders still.—but I have no wings. If you are going to read this letter any further I should tell you that I am not prepared to “give up all else” so far as words go. The only thing I am prepared to give up is prejudice—and before I knew you I had begun to throw overboard my cargo—but it is not all gone yet.”
• “You see I have called you by your name I have been more candid with you—have said more about myself to you than I have ever said to any one before—You will not be angry with me now if you have read so far you will not laugh at me for writing thus to you. It was with no small effort that I began to write and I feel reluctant to stop, but I must not tire you any more. If you ever would care to have more you can imagine, for you have a great heart, how much pleasure it would be to me to write more to you, how sweet a thing it is for a strong healthy man with a woman’s eyes and a child’s wishes to feel that he can speak so to a man who can be if he wishes father and brother and wife to his soul. I don’t think you will laugh Walt Whitman, nor despise me, but at all events I thank you for all the love and sympathy you have given me in common with my kind.”

These soulful sentiments, penned almost twenty years before Stoker started drafting Dracula, inform its most homoerotic passage, in which Dracula rages at his so-called brides regarding Jonathan Harker:

“‘How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me! Beware how you meddle with him, or you’ll have to deal with me.’”

That Stoker’s coded language in his letter arose from his reading of William Michael Rossetti’s prudishly abridged Poems of Walt Whitman is remarkable. That it gives way to free expression in his most famous work of fiction is undeniable.