Van Helsing, Abraham
Van Helsing, Abraham
(pop culture)A major character in Bram Stoker‘s Dracula (1897), whose name has become synonymous with the role of the vampire hunter, Van Helsing was the wise elder scholar who brought enlightenment to the confusing and threatening situation that the other characters, all in their twenties, had become enmeshed. Van Helsing, who lived in Amsterdam, was originally called to England by Dr. John Seward, who described him as an “old friend and master” and an expert in obscure diseases. Van Helsing was a philosopher, metaphysician, and advanced scientist.
Van Helsing’s first task was to examine the ailing Lucy Westenra. He found nothing wrong, except loss of blood, and she was not suffering from anemia. He then returned to Amsterdam. In less than a week, with Lucy’s condition taking a decided turn for the worse, Van Helsing returned. He prescribed an immediate transfusion. He then noticed two marks on Lucy’s neck. Again he returned to Amsterdam to consult his books. Upon his return a few days later, Lucy again received a transfusion. By this time Van Helsing had figured out the cause of Lucy’s problem, but he did not divulge it. He merely took steps to block the vampire’s access by surrounding Lucy with garlic. She improved and Van Helsing returned home.
Lucy lost her garlic several days later, and Dracula returned to attack her in her bedroom. This time a third transfusion could not save her. Quincey P. Morris raised the possibility of vampires. After Lucy’s death, Van Helsing convinced the men, especially Lucy’s fiancé, Arthur Holmwood, to treat Lucy’s corpse as a vampire. He had them observe her movements after she was placed in her crypt to ensure that she did not join the undead. While Holmwood pounded a stake into Lucy, Van Helsing read a prayer for the dead from a prayer book, after which he and Seward decapitated the corpse and filled the mouth with garlic. Van Helsing then turned to the task of learning all he could about Dracula, with the goal of first discovering his hiding places and eventually destroying him. In a meeting with the other principal characters, he received their commitment to join the fight under his leadership. At this gathering he laid out, in a most systematic fashion, the theory of vampires (which had been only partially revealed earlier), emphasizing their many powers and the manner by which they may be killed.
Meanwhile, Mina Murray (by this time married to Jonathan Harker) was showing signs of having been attacked by Dracula. She was pale and fatigued, but Van Helsing and the others were slow to recognize what was occurring. Van Helsing finally realized, while talking to the madman R. N. Renfield, that Mina was under attack and immediately led Seward, Holmwood, and Morris to the Harker house, where they found Mina drinking from Dracula’s chest. Van Helsing drove him off with a crucifix and a eucharistic wafer (consecrated wafers are believed by Roman Catholic Christians to be the very body of Christ). To protect Mina, he held the wafer to her forehead, only to have it burn its imprint there much like a branding iron.
Mina, who had stepped aside so the men could engage Dracula, now became an active participant in the fight. She invited Van Helsing to hypnotize her and thus tap into her psychic tie to Dracula. In this manner, Van Helsing, who had led in the destruction of Dracula’s boxes of Earth (which he needed to survive), discovered that the vampire had left England to return to Transylvania. He accompanied Mina and the men on a chase to catch Dracula. During the last leg of the journey, the group split into three pairs. Van Helsing traveled with Mina, and they were the first to arrive at Castle Dracula. He drew a circle around her with the eucharistic wafers and then went into the castle. He killed the three vampire brides who resided there, sanitized Dracula’s crypt, and finished by treating the castle’s entrances so that no vampire could use them.
Returning to Mina, Van Helsing moved her some distance from the castle entrance to protect them from the wolves while awaiting the others to converge for the final confrontation. Once all arrive Van Helsing held a rifle on the Gypsies as Morris and Harker approached the box in which Dracula rested and killed him.
As Dracula was brought to stage and screen, Van Helsing assumed a key role, the plot often being simplified to a personal battle between Dracula and Van Helsing as the representatives of evil and good, respectively. Interestingly, Hamilton Deane, who wrote the original Dracula play for his theater company, chose to assume the role of Van Helsing rather than Dracula. However, Peter Cushing, who played the part in several Hammer Films motion pictures (pitted against Christopher Lee as Dracula) has been identified with the role of Van Helsing more than any other actor. He not only played Van Helsing at various times, but on occasion also portrayed several of his twentieth-century descendants continuing his fight against vampiric evil.
In both the movies and comic books, descendants of Van Helsing have flourished. Cushing played Van Helsing’s grandson in Hammer’s Dracula A.D. 1972. Other descendants were portrayed by Richard Benjamin in Love at First Bite (1979) and by Bruce Campbell in Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat (1988). Marv Wolfman of Marvel Comics invented Rachel Van Helsing, a granddaughter who continued his search-and-destroy mission against Dracula in the pages of The Tomb of Dracula through the 1970s.Conrad and Adam Van Helsing emerged in the pages of Vampirella as vampire hunters. Most recently, Hugh Jackman portrayed Gabriel van Helsing in the appropriately named Van Helsing (2004). Jackman was also the voice of Van Helsing for the cartoon spin-off prequel of the movie, Van Helsing: The London Assignment (2004).
Several people have been identified as possible models for the Van Helsing character, including author (Abraham) Stoker himself. Some have suggested Arminius Vambéry, mentioned in chapter 18 as a friend of Van Helsing’s. Vambéry was a real person, at one time a professor at the University of Budapest, and the probable source of Stoker’s initial knowledge of Vlad the Impaler, a historical model for Count Dracula. In The Essential Dracula (1979) editors Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu suggest Max Muller, a famous Orientalist at Oxford University, as a possibility. They also suggest that Dr. Martin Hasselius, the fictional narrator in Sheridan Le Fanu‘s In a Glass Darkly, might also have helped inspire Van Helsing.
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