At the Edge of Death: Safety Coffins, Poe, and Dracula

What happens when the boundary line between life and death is blurry?

The boundary between life and death is not a particular concern in the 21^st century. In the 19^th century, though, the possibility that some dead people weren’t actually dead was a major preoccupation. Fears that judgments about death might be incorrect link together a variety of seemingly disparate cultural phenomena discussed in this post, from inventions designed to help the not-actually-dead escape from a premature burial; to essentially the entire oeuvre of Edgar Allan Poe; to the vampire literature of the 19^th century, culminating in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula.

Edvard Munch, Love and Pain (1895). This painting began to be identified as The Vampire during Munch’s lifetime, and he returned to similar imagery many times.

Buried Alive

The preoccupation with burial of undead people arose, at least in part, from an awareness that various survivable conditions existed that could mimic death, such as “trance, catalepsy, and other forms of suspended animation.” An authoritative work on the problem by William Tebb, appropriately titled Premature Burial (1896), ran to 362 pages, plus an extensive bibliography and index. Blurbs from medical authorities urged that the only certain sign of death was “decomposition” or “putrefaction.” Tebb warned in his Preface that “The danger [of premature burial], as I have attempted to show, is very real—to ourselves, to those most dear to us, and to the community in general.” A major proposal: “waiting mortuaries” in which the putatively dead could be kept until decomposition made the fact of death undeniable (p. 285ff.).

Antoine Wiertz, The Premature Burial (1854), detail.

The uncertainties emphasized by Tebb and many others reflected a widespread and pressing fear of premature burial. Numerous 19^th century inventors responded by designing coffins that would allow a putatively but not actually dead person to call for rescue and to breathe while waiting for help to show up. Perhaps the most celebrated of these is the Vester “Improved Burial-Case,” U.S. Patent No. 81,437 (1868), depicted below. This design included a bell, an air exchange tube, and a ladder for any reanimated corpses who were particularly athletic. There were many competing designs.

Poe’s Liminal Spaces Between Life and Death

[Warning: this section contains spoilers about Poe’s stories.]

If Tebb and the inventors represent a practical, if horror-driven, approach to the problem of premature burial, the work of Edgar Allan Poe represents a deep exploration of liminal states between life and death, including those Tebb emphasizes (“trance, catalepsy, and other forms of suspended animation”).

For example, in “The Facts of the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845), the narrator imposes a mesmeric trance on his dying friend Valdemar. After being mesmerized, Valdemar shows signs of death but is still able to vocalize: “I have been sleeping—and now—now—I am dead.” The trance arrests Valdemar in a liminal state for a full seven months, until the narrator ends the trance – with the result that Valdemar’s “whole frame at once—within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk—crumbled—absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putrescence.”

In “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), the narrator visits his childhood friend, Roderick Usher, at the dreary family mansion. Usher’s sister, the Lady Madeline, is dying from “apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical character.” After she dies, Usher entombs her deep below the walls of the mansion. The narrator and Usher look at her in her coffin before screwing on the lid. “The disease … had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face ….” A week later, during a stormy night, the mansion resounds with uncanny sounds, from “cracking and ripping” to “a low and apparently distant, but harsh, protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating sound.” The doors of the chamber in which they sit open and

… there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame…. [T]hen, with a low moaning cry, [she] fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse.

Poe’s work contains many other examples of stories that deny a firm boundary between life and death. Yet in his short story entitled “The Premature Burial” (1844), he seems to mock the popular concern on that subject. At its outset, this story reads almost like a better-written version of Tebb. The narrator is a man who suffers from catalepsy – and also from a fear of premature burial. As he observes, “The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague.” And he vividly describes his horror at the possibility of being buried alive:

The unendurable oppression of the lungs—the stifling fumes from the damp earth—the clinging to the death garments—the rigid embrace of the narrow house—the blackness of the absolute Night—the silence like a sea that overwhelms—the unseen but palpable presence of the Conqueror Worm—

He designs for himself a coffin that closely resembles the Vester Burial-Case. (Vester should perhaps have cited Poe’s story as prior art to the Patent Office.) But the story ends in a curious fizzle. The narrator experiences something that seems like a premature burial, but is actually something very different: a slumber in the dark, confined berth of a ship. When he wakens and begins to scream, the crew shakes him into his senses – and into the realization that he has been foolish. So he reforms:

I took vigorous exercise. I breathed the free air of Heaven. I thought upon other subjects than Death. I discarded my medical books…. I read no “Night Thoughts”—no fustian about churchyards—no bugaboo tales—such as this. In short, I became a new man, and lived a man’s life.

(Emphasis added.) This conclusion lends itself to competing interpretations. It could be that the narrator is in denial, blithely overlooking the still-lurking peril of premature burial. Or perhaps the point is precisely the opposite: that the popular fear of premature burial misses the point of the genuinely eerie spaces where life and death overlap in ways that are not “bugaboo,” the spaces that are explored in Poe’s other stories.

Bloodlust and Desire: Vampires in 19th-Century Literature

The widespread 18^th and 19^th-century concern about premature burial appears to have interacted with older folklore about blood-drinking revenants, leading to a new twist: what if some of the putatively dead were, in fact, undead – and preying on the living? This fear resulted in “vampire panics,” in which people mutilated the bodies of recently deceased relatives or neighbors who were suspected of being vampires, with the objective of preventing predation on still-living community members.¹

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Dante and Virgil in Hell (1850). I regret to report that art depicting male vampires is decidedly inferior to art showing female vampires. The above painting isn’t even of an actual vampire, but it is often considered “vampire art.” Dante and Virgil are the figures looking on disapprovingly at the combat. The vampire-like combatant is the trickster Gianni Schicchi. The batlike creature may be a vampire but is probably a mere devil.

The vampire phenomenon entered English literature in 1819 with a story by John William Polidori entitled, simply, “The Vampyre.” [Spoilers on this story appear in this paragraph.] The protagonist, a young man named Aubrey, falls in love with a young woman who is killed by a vampire. Aubrey later discovers that the vampire is Lord Ruthven, an older man he has admired. Ruthven’s next target is Aubrey’s sister, who has agreed to marry Ruthven. Bound by an oath of secrecy he gives to Ruthven before discovering Ruthven’s true nature, Aubrey finds himself unable to rescue his sister. Aubrey is so frantic at the restraint imposed by his oath that he “br[eaks] a blood-vessel” and dies. When Aubrey finally tells his story shortly before his death, representatives of the family hasten to rescue the sister. But it is too late. As the final sentence of the story tells us, “Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!”

The next major piece of British vampire fiction is Carmilla, an 1872 novella by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. It has an interesting twist: the vampire, Carmilla, is a beautiful young woman who preys upon other women.

David Henry Friston, illustration for Carmilla (1872).

The novella makes explicit what is barely touched upon in “The Vampyre”: an erotic connection between vampire and victim. Vampire fiction appears to have presented Victorian authors with an opportunity to tell stories about the buried-but-undead while also focusing on sexual themes. The combination provided some cover for writing about sex without appearing to condone it, because vampire fiction makes clear that vampire sex is a Very Bad Thing.

Laura, the protagonist and narrator of Carmilla, relates her discomfort at the passion exhibited by Carmilla, who is her family’s guest:

She used to place her pretty arms about my neck, draw me to her, and laying her cheek to mine, murmur with her lips near my ear, “… I live in your warm life, and you shall die—die, sweetly die—into mine. I cannot help it; as I draw near to you, you, in your turn, will draw near to others, and learn the rapture of that cruelty, which yet is love …”

And when she had spoken such a rhapsody, she would press me more closely in her trembling embrace, and her lips in soft kisses gently glow upon my cheek…. Her murmured words sounded like a lullaby in my ear, and soothed my resistance into a trance, from which I only seemed to recover myself when she withdrew her arms….

Sometimes … my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardor of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet over-powering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips traveled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, “You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever.”²

I won’t say more about Carmilla; it’s a quick and entertaining read.

The apex of Victorian vampire fiction is Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Like Carmilla, Dracula explores the erotic connection between vampire and victim. One scene that illustrates this connection occurs when the solicitor Jonathan Harker goes to Transylvania to assist Count Dracula with the purchase of property in England. While Harker is trapped in Dracula’s castle, he encounters a trio of female vampires:

All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips…. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips…. I lay quiet, looking out under my eyelashes in an agony of delightful anticipation. The fair girl advanced and bent over me till I could feel the movement of her breath upon me…. The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and could feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle …. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super-sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited—waited with beating heart.³

I will not go further into this novel now, except to say that the Substack Dracula Daily (link here) takes readers through a communal reading of Dracula on an annual basis. Dracula is a documentary novel: the story takes place almost entirely between May 3 and November 7 of a single year and is told through journals, letters, telegrams, logs, newspaper articles, and the like. Dracula Daily deconstructs the novel by date and sends an email to subscribers on the date in which the events occur in the novel. Using this format, readers can enjoy the entire novel over a six-month period in small, digestible pieces – a great format for those who are too busy to read much. I highly recommend subscribing to Dracula Daily.

1. Information on vampire panics is widely available. You can review some discussions of it here, here, and here.

2. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla (1872), ch. 4.

3. Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897), ch. 3.