In the book, he seems to have just been a patient in Seward’s sanitarium picked to be Dracula’s herald & “inside man”. We know he was a member of a gentleman’s club with Arthur Holmwood’s father (the previous “Lord Godalming”) and that he said he was committed by friends upon attempting a murder.
NOSFERATU has him (Knock) as Harker(Hutter)'s boss, perhaps enchanted by recieving a magical-rune-inscribed letter from Dracula(Orlock).
The Lugosi version puts him (by the brilliant Dwight Frye) in Jonathan Harker’s place, having him semi-vamped by D’s brides & being the only human survivor of the Demeter’s voyage.
1970’s COUNT DRACULA with Chris Lee has Klaus Kinski’s Renfield being mute, autistic & finger-painting with mashed insects in the sanitarium, having been found in that state next to his murdered (by Dracula?) daughter.
The 1979 Langella- “Milo” Renfield is a workman enslaved by D as he loads the crates from the Demeter into Carfax Abbey.
The Louis Jourdan version doesn’t give an origin for Renfield. He’s just there.
Finally, Copolla’s version has him (Tom Waits) as Harker’s predecessor, sent sane & healthy to Transylvania and returning a lunatic.
Apparently, there is a graphic novel titled RENFIELD which gives a thorough origin story- alas, I haven’t yet read it.
I wrote my own account from Renfield’s POV “A Taste of Eternity”, which isn’t half-bad if I do say so myself G
I read Dracula for my critical writing class this semester, and I always got the feeling that he was somehow involved in British colonialism. (Of course, in that time, who couldn’t be connected to a colonial possession somehow?) A clerk in some business or something like that. This idea is probably heavily influenced by my reading of the events of the book as symptomatic/caused by Great Britain’s colonization ; i.e.: the fear of sexual predation by the dark foreigner (Dracula) on pure, British womanhood (Lucy and Mina); the “reverse colonization” efforts of Dracula (this reading is troubled by the introduction of Van Helsing, who is also a foreigner); the core group of men’s camaraderie being forged in war in a tropical area; blah blah blah. It’s all connected to conquest and ownership somehow, so it only seems natural that Renfield would be too.
Um, I’m not sure if that previous paragraph answers your question. I guess I think that Renfield’s insanity is an expression of an overwhelming feeling of xenophobia and greed, while simultaneously showing the temptation inherent in the other (Dracula). He also serves the purpose of showing that Dracula works by picking off the weak – crazy people and women*.
*Sexuality is Dracula is completely and utterly bizarre, once you get past the petite mort thing.
Hmmmm- have you read Kim Newman’s story in his “Anno Dracula” series “Coppola’s Dracula”? It’s Stoker’s DRACULA a la Apocalypse Now/Heart of Darkness (Brando- Dracula, Sheen- Harker, Duvall- Van Helsing, Hopper- Renfield).
With your colonialism reading of DRAC, you might find that treatment interesting. It’s on the Net so you should be easily able to Google it up.
I wondered exactly what Seward, Morris & Holmwood were doing in the Korea- was there some Anglo-American military presence there in the 1870-90s era?
Funny you mentioned that. Was it subtitled “A Gospel of Dracula”?
Later yesterday afternoon, a couple hours after my OP, I bought the latest issue of horror mag RUE MORGUE and what should I read in it but a review of that book!
I haven’t read it, but maybe I’ll Google and see what I think. I recently read Heart of Darkness, too, and I never thought to contrast the two. Maybe I’ll entertain myself by writing another paper this summer. Hmm.
Korea? I always thought Latin America. I didn’t pay much attention to the men sections, though, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I was wrong about that. I wrote my papers on the relationship between Lucy and her mother and contrasted it to Mina’s role as a paragon of womanly virtue.
Dracula is an interesting but complex and fragmented book. It’s not a good example of the Aristotelean ideal of “unity of place and time”. It wanders all over the place, using different voices (and different media!) and has a huge and sprawling cast of characters that a more fastidiousd editor would have taken a pencil to long before publication.
In a more ordered world, or with a more traditional author, Renfield would have some connection to Dracula that would explain howcum a Count in Transylvania managed to pick a madman in a sanitarium in Whitby (very inconveniently far from London and from Dracula’s estate) as his long-distance agent. But Stoker wrote it, and Renfield seems to come out of nowhere.
When people turn these things into movies and (especially) into plays they tend to eliminate or combine characters, both to keep audience confusion to a minimum and to avoid having to pay more actors. You can’t just get rid of Renfield – his craziness enliven what can be dull exposition, and keeps an edge of creepiness on everything. So they combined him. As you noted, FriarTed, in Nosferatu he’s the Harker-clone’s boss. In the 1931 film he’s Herker himself (at least as agent in Transylvania).
Almost every version of Dracula I’ve seen eliminates or combines characters, with interesting results (the 1979 version is arguably the worst – Lucy van Helsing?). One reason I like the Coppola version is that he tries to keep them all in without such compromises, right down to that Texan that everyone else jettisons.
Well, all the Hammer productions actually did drop Renfield (except for D- PRINCE OF DARKNESS, which renamed him & made him the ward of a vampire-hunting monastery), as did the really anemic Dan Curtis production, tho Jack Palance did a find job with the material.
I always thought that Renfield was Harker’s predecessor as the firm’s representative in its real estate transactions with Dracula.
I assumed that there was some unspoken backstory that resulted in the return of Renfield as a minion of Dracula, but so mentally broken that he was unable to carry through with the business side of the matter.
I thought Renny was just a loony that Drac ‘somehow’ communicated with and brought under his power. Either in his dreams or some sort of astral projection or something like that.
It’s stated outright in Copolla’s DRACULA. Harker’s boss (Hawkins?), played by Jay Robinson (Caligula in THE ROBE and DEMETRIUS & THE GLADIATORS, and also Dr Shrinker of Sat morn TV), tells Harker he’s getting the job of selling Carfax to an “eccentric Count” in Transylvania, as his predecessor Renfield has lost his greedy mind. He then dismisses Harker’s Q as to what happened to Renfield in Transylvania.
It occurred to me that one could take the omitted opening chapter of DRACULA, retitled as the short story “Dracula’s Guest”, and apply it to Renfield.
The book referenced by Little Nemo- was it THE BOOK OF RENFIELD: A GOSPEL OF DRACULA by Tim Lucas?
All these examples from the films and pastiche novels (and plays, I might add) are just attempts by others to try and draw Renfield into the circle of other characters in the novel. In Stoker’s original, he seems to just be a random soul drawn into the power of Dracula. His association with Seward seems utterly fortuitous ,unless Dracula have vast knowledge, and somehow planned all this. But there’s nothing to substantiate that. Stoker seems to use happenstance and coincidence pretty easily in his book.
I’ve read the book, the Annotated edition and “The Essentiall Dracula” (and updating of the Annotated version) several times over. I don’t recall any prior connection between Refield and the Count. I think Leonard Wolf (the annotator) would’ve mentioned it if there had been one.
And may I say, Friar Ted, that I’m impressed by your knowledge of minutiae from the flicks.
[QUOTE=FriarTed]
It’s stated outright in Copolla’s DRACULA. Harker’s boss (Hawkins?), played by Jay Robinson (Caligula in THE ROBE and DEMETRIUS & THE GLADIATORS, and also Dr Shrinker of Sat morn TV), tells Harker he’s getting the job of selling Carfax to an “eccentric Count” in Transylvania, as his predecessor Renfield has lost his greedy mind. He then dismisses Harker’s Q as to what happened to Renfield in Transylvania.
[QUOTE]
It’s funny how a movie can affect your perception. I first read Dracula in 1980, when I was 11 and I’m sure I read it at least a couple more times before I saw Coppola’s movie in 1992. Now, I have no recollection of what I thought of Renfield before then.
Oh, your assessment is pretty much unconstestable. Renfield is chosen because he’s there. Lucy is chosen because she’s there. After Lucy is totally killed, Mina is chosen because… well, you get the point.
And I take a bow at your compliment, but wipe a tear away as I know my vast knowledge of Dracula movie trivia is one of many evidences that I have no life.
As much as I hate to contradict you - you really know your poop when it come to Dracula - Seward’s asylum was next door to Carfax Abbey, not in Whitby.
Of course, it’s rather amazing how Seward was able to zip up and down from the London suburbs to Yorkshire so quickly while attending to Lucy.
I don’t believe you’re entirely correct here. Lucy certainly is chosen because she’s there. But Renfield is an inmate at an asylum that is connected to the house where Lucy lives. Dracula entices Renfield to invite him inside which gives D the permission he needs to come and go as he pleases to attack Lucy, what with vampires not being allowed to enter any house without being invited in.
After Lucy’s death, the group assembles to hear Van Helsing explain that Lucy was killed by a vampire and to start their plan to destroy Dracula. During this meeting, Quincy runs out to shoot at a bat that was near the window that almost certainly was Dracula eavesdropping. It was after this that the attacks on Mina began. I’ve always assumed that the attack on Mina was Dracula’s counterattack.
There is no indication that the asylum is connected to Lucy’s house. Indeed, it must be some distance away, because Seward has to travel in order to get there, and makes arrangements for his assistant to be in charge of the sanitarium on the nights he (Seward) is standing guard over Lucy. One night he does not get Van Helsing’s message to stand watch at Lucy’s house, and fails to be there, leading to disaster.
In Fred Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape, which is the story told (sympathetically) from Dracula’s point of view, Dracula himself comments on the amazing coincidences that haunt his existence. Remember that the Harkers live in Exeter, in the south west of England. And yet one of the first people Dracula encounters in Whitby, on the north Yorkshire coast, turns out to be the fiancee of the young man he had left back in his castle. And her best friend, his first English victim, happens to have turned down a proposal from the doctor who runs an insane asylum right next door to the new house that Dracula has just bought!
As Saberhagen has Dracula say, “Some intellect more powerful than my own may find a thread or threads of natural causation running through and uniting them all; I can find no sensible explanation for these wild chains of ‘coincidence’ without appealing to causes that are above and beyond nature as she is commonly understood.”
