liminality dracula
“Betwixt Sunset and Sunrise”: Liminality in Dracula
Mark M. Hennelly, Jr.
[Mark M. Hennelly, Jr., a Professor of English at California State University, Sacramento, has published fairly widely on Victorian fiction, including several liminal readings of Dracula.]
In various ways, among widely different primitive peoples, the marriage customs go to show that the home threshold cannot be passed except by overcoming a barrier of some kind, and making an offering, bloody or bloodless, at this primal family altar. (H. Clay Trumbull, The Threshold Covenant 35)
“Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!” [The Count] made no motion of stepping to meet me, but stood like a statue, as though his gesture of welcome had fixed him into stone. The instant, however, that I had stepped over the threshold [of Castle Dracula], he moved impulsively forward. (Bram Stoker, Dracula 2:25-26)
[T]he door is the boundary between the foreign and domestic worlds in the case of an ordinary dwelling, between the profane and the sacred worlds in the case of a temple. Therefore to cross the threshold is to unite oneself with a new world. (Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage 20)
When Van Helsing instructs the occidental vampire hunters about the gnostic powers of the Count in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), he also announces the primary liminal premise of the occult: no demon can “enter anywhere at first, unless there be some one of the household who bid him to come; though afterwards he can come as he please” (18:308). In other words, an “evil” spirit cannot cross a threshold unless first invited by an indweller, just as Dracula understands above that no “innocent” outdweller can be forced unwillingly to cross a demon’s threshold. Each must voluntarily and chiastically “unite onself with a new world” as Stoker’s contemporary Arnold van Gennep puts it – that is, accept the other in what another contemporary, H. Clay Trumbull, calls “the covenant of union”
Mark M. Hennelly, Jr.
[Mark M. Hennelly, Jr., a Professor of English at California State University, Sacramento, has published fairly widely on Victorian fiction, including several liminal readings of Dracula.]
In various ways, among widely different primitive peoples, the marriage customs go to show that the home threshold cannot be passed except by overcoming a barrier of some kind, and making an offering, bloody or bloodless, at this primal family altar. (H. Clay Trumbull, The Threshold Covenant 35)
“Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!” [The Count] made no motion of stepping to meet me, but stood like a statue, as though his gesture of welcome had fixed him into stone. The instant, however, that I had stepped over the threshold [of Castle Dracula], he moved impulsively forward. (Bram Stoker, Dracula 2:25-26)
[T]he door is the boundary between the foreign and domestic worlds in the case of an ordinary dwelling, between the profane and the sacred worlds in the case of a temple. Therefore to cross the threshold is to unite oneself with a new world. (Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage 20)
When Van Helsing instructs the occidental vampire hunters about the gnostic powers of the Count in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), he also announces the primary liminal premise of the occult: no demon can “enter anywhere at first, unless there be some one of the household who bid him to come; though afterwards he can come as he please” (18:308). In other words, an “evil” spirit cannot cross a threshold unless first invited by an indweller, just as Dracula understands above that no “innocent” outdweller can be forced unwillingly to cross a demon’s threshold. Each must voluntarily and chiastically “unite onself with a new world” as Stoker’s contemporary Arnold van Gennep puts it – that is, accept the other in what another contemporary, H. Clay Trumbull, calls “the covenant of union”
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