LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM was Bram
Stoker’s final novel, published the year prior to his death. Like
DRACULA, the author’s most famous work, LAIR drew upon archaic
folklore, specifically the Celtic story of the Lambton Worm, a tiny
creature that grows to the size of a rampaging dragon. Onto this
slender folktale Stoker grafted a shapeshifter story, in which a
monstrous worm, a survival of ancient times, somehow gains the
ability to take on the form of a human woman.
Had Stoker focused upon this intriguing
presence, LAIR might have been one of his finest works, as well as an
anodyne to his next-to-last book, THE LADY OF THE SHROUD, a dull
Ruritanian romance with mild Gothic touches. Instead, LAIR is a
jumble of mismatching story-tropes, some of which possess great
mythic potential, while others merely serve to express contemporary
prejudices about race and sexuality. LAIR is still better than
SHROUD, in the sense that chaos can be more entertaining than
predictability.
Perhaps because Stoker was already ill
when he penned LAIR, the book’s plot wanders all over the place.
Yet the lack of a rigorous plot is probably less injurious than the
thinness of all of the characters, even though the reader will
observe Stoker re-using some of the character-tropes he employed so
memorably in DRACULA. The dramatis personae include:
ADAM SALTON is a young Englishman long
absent from his native land. He returns in order to be groomed as the heir to an estate in
a territory known by the Roman-era name of Mercia. Though Adam meets
with the current lord of the estate, his grand-uncle, most of his
conversations in the novel take place with NATHANIEL DE SALIS, a
neighboring landowner who knows much of the involved history and
folklore of the land and its various peoples.
One of his neighbors is LADY ARABELLA
MARCH, occupying an estate known as “Diana’s Grove.” For almost
half the novel, she appears to be an ordinary human woman with a few
odd habits, and at first her only motivation is to make a good
marriage to allay the debts of her estate. She wishes to marry—
EDGAR CASWALL, another local lord who,
like Adam, has come to his estate “Castra Regis,’ after having it
managed for years in his absence. However, he shows nearly no
interest in Arabella, focusing all of his attention on—
LILLA WATFORD, one of two
granddaughters of another local landowner. She has no interest in
Caswall, and she receives help against his predacious intentions by
her cousin MIMI WATFORD, whom Adam eventually marries.
Parallels with DRACULA should be
obvious. Adam is a forthright young man like Jonathan Harker, and
Nathaniel plays the part of Van Helsing, instructing the young man on
the theory of ancient “wyrms.” Lilla and Mimi emulate Lucy and
Mina beyond the resemblance of their initials, for Lilla is as doomed
as Lucy while Mimi is a more defiant figure like Mina. Yet Stoker
strayed from the parallel by splitting the book between two
villainous presences. Whereas DRACULA centers upon the depredations
of one monstrous antagonist, a true homme fatale, in LAIR
Stoker includes a human homme fatale and an inhuman femme
fatale. Yet Stoker doesn’t succeed in making either of these
inimical characters a tenth as interesting as the vampire count.
Neither of the villains possesses a
clear goal. When Caswall is introduced, Stoker draws parallels
between the lord and the ancient Romans who conquered Great Britain
for a time, and who left their stamp upon the territory of Mercia.
One of Caswall’s ancestors studied under Mesmer, the father of
hypnotism, and somehow Caswall seems to have “inherited” an
intrinsic ability to dominate the wills of others. However, Caswall
only demonstrates this talent three times in the novel, always while
visiting the home of the Watfords. During these visits, while
pretending to make small talk, Caswall attempts to mentally dominate
the weak-willed Lilla. It’s not even clear whether or not the
cold-hearted aristocrat intends to make Liila into either his wife or
his mistress, for every time he’s there, so is Mimi, who manages to
thwart Caswall with her own willpower. The lord doesn’t make any
other attempts, even financially based, to control Lilla, and for
most of the novel he does nothing but to go fly a kite. In one of
Stoker’s oddest conceits, Mercia becomes victimized by flocks of
migrating birds, mostly doves and pigeons, with a strong implication
that they’re reacting against the presence of a serpentine “devil.”
To scare the birds away, Caswall creates a kite in the shape of a
hawk. The kite succeeds in its scarecrow purpose, but for vague
reasons Caswall becomes preoccupied with this new hobby. He starts
sending “messages” up the kite-string, and Stoker doesn’t
really explain this, though given the conservative Christian
sentiments expressed throughout the book, it may be that Caswall’s
activity is somehow seen as blasphemy against Heaven.
But if Caswall ends up seeming more
dotty than dangerous, Lady Arabella comes off as a monster without a
cause. For half the novel, Stoker plays it cagey. Arabella has a few
odd snakelike aspects—for instance, when Adam brings in mongeese to
exterminate ordinary snakes, the mongeese show unreasoning hostility
toward the noblewoman. Then, in the latter half of the novel, the
author drops the whole megillah on the reader. Arabella may look like
a human being, and she even married a now-deceased lord in order to
gain control of Diana’s Grove. But in reality, she’s a giant worm
who has lived beneath Diana’s Grove for thousands of years. Though
the Nathaniel character goes into great detail to justify the
existence of such an antique survival, no one in the novel explains
how a giant worm can change into a human woman, either via biology or
Satanic magic.
But as noted earlier, Arabella, like
Caswall, has no raison d’etre. In DRACULA, Stoker gave his royal
Rumanian a forceful characterization, so that he continued to
dominate the novel despite his being offstage for most of the
narrative. But Stoker refuses to tell the reader anything about the
internal workings of Arabella’s mind, except in one section, where
she’s seen to share the xenophobic prejudices of contemporaneous
Englishmen (more on that later). What does the Worm-Woman want? The
readers won’t be able to tell from what Stoker provides them. The
author strains to convince readers that the White Worm is a
biological creature—she’s even “white” because of burrowing
through caves of white clay—but he never bothers to address the
question of what the Worm feeds on to keep its bulk together. Stoker
might’ve done better to make the Worm a creation of The Devil
himself, for certainly the creature’s associations with the
underworld give her a diabolical aspect. Though a serpent-woman would
seem to suggest all sorts of psychosexual undertones, Arabella is
never a sexual threat to anyone, though it's hard to believe that
Stoker didn’t name his protagonist in keeping with the associations
between a certain serpent and the original “Adam.” There’s one
scene in which Adam convinces himself to marry Mimi because he thinks
the act of marriage will protect Mimi from Arabella somehow, but
Arabella makes no moves on Adam, and maybe the marriage is meant to
protect Adam from some concealed lust on his part. After the
marriage, Arabella does try to kill both Adam and Mimi, but the
motivation behind the attempt is to keep Adam from revealing her
snaky secrets. Because Arabella is such a black hole as a character,
Stoker has her do things that make no sense, just to fill plot-holes.
The worst appears at the conclusion, when the two villains bring
destruction on themselves. Caswall attaches his kite to his mansion
by a metal wire, insuring that Castra Regis will be destroyed in a
thunderstorm. Adam witnesses Arabella extending the metal line to her
own home—which means that the storm’s fury will destroy both her
and Diana’s Grove. Why Stoker didn’t just have his protagonist do
this, instead of one of the villains, is more than I can speculate
upon.
Backtracking a bit, the only time
Arabella shows real emotion is when she apparently forgets she’s an
inhuman creature and reacts with indignation when a crude African
servant dares to propose lovemaking to a “white woman.” Said
servant is Oolanga, brought to Castra Regis from Africa by Caswall,
though it’s never clear what the black man’s duties for Caswall
might be. Oolanga is a former “witch finder,” and he shows a
propensity for “sniffing out” scenes of death past and present.
Stoker makes no bones about his contempt for Negroes, calling Oolanga
(among other things) “ostensibly human,” while Adam jokingly
calls the servant a “Christy Minstrel.” Presumably this is
wishful thinking, because the death-obsessed Black African is
certainly not as subservient as a character in a minstrel-show, given
that he tries to initiate sex with a woman above his station. In
fact, after Arabella scornfully refuses Oolanga’s suit, Adam and
Arabella are briefly allied against the violent African, and Adam
first witnesses Arabella’s transformation when Arabella drags
Oolanga down to death in her underworld. Oddly, though Stoker can’t
stand Black people, he does make Mimi “half-Burmese,” though
apparently the author only did this so that he could work in a
reference to Burmese snake-charmers.
There are a few powerful moments in
LAIR. One is the “plague of birds,” of doves and pigeons whose
“cowled” appearance Stoker likens to the habits of Christian nuns
(even though Stoker was raised as a Protestant). Nathaniel’s
ruminations about the Celtic traditions about underworld dragons and
“worms” are modestly compelling, Stoker was clearly trying to
construct a multi-leveled metaphor regarding human beings being
seduced, if not by Satan himself, by devilish impulses. Yet, to
invert William Blake’s encomium on Milton, it seems Stoker was too
much “of the angel’s party” to really delve into the realms of
the forbidden, particularly that of serpentine sexuality. Perhaps the
shadow of DRACULA doomed Stoker’s last novel, making it impossible
for him to venture ever again into those realms of transgressive
feeling.