Ways the Count is better date than Eric

- can cook

- does not demand spiritual connection

- no artistic ambition

- hates to see you injured

- seeks to expand one‘s horizon

Ways in which Erik is a better date than the Count (and the Viscount):

Cram-it Daroga, I gotta see if Jonathan Harker is going to finally put 2 and 2 together here.

Now that „The Vampire‘s Daughter“ is finished, he needs some new reading material 😬…

More (possible) references to Dracula in the Phantom of the Opera

May 7

Jonathan Harker reports that, yet again, Dracula does not eat with him:

Christine Daaé too, must eat alone. 

It should be noted that Christine realizes immediately that she is Erik’s prisoner while, as of May 7, Jonathan still thinks he is on a perfectly respectable work trip. 

Erik himself suggests that he goes through periods of time in which he does not eat (living on music alone). In this passage he is peak drama, referencing both his coffin-bed and his ability to live without food or sleep for “years at a time”:

Jonathan reports that there are no mirrors anywhere - what an inconvenience! 

Christine also notices the lack of mirrors at Erik’s house on the lake. She does not yet know that Erik actually has an entire room full of mirrors, but she will. One day.

I do not know if these details from Phantom of the Opera are actually references to Dracula. I don’t even know if Gaston Leroux read Bram Stoker’s Dracula or when it was first translated into French. But there are so many small details that Erik shares with Dracula that it seems to be intentional. 

Erik is not a vampire. But he likes to play up his macabre appearance when he’s in a mood. He doesn’t need to sleep in a coffin or to refrain from food the way Count Dracula does; we all assume he has no mirrors in his home because he doesn’t want to look at himself, not because he would have no reflection. Erik does these things for affect. He wants to disturb people - even Christine. And Leroux wants him to disturb us, the reader. 

As Dracula was published in 1897, past the time when the events of the Phantom of the Opera should have occurred, in the mid-1880′s, it might not make sense for Erik to be self-aware of the Dracula references himself. As a character, Erik seems to intentionally reference Edgar Allan Poe’s 1842 story with his Red Death costume but we can’t make the same assumption that Erik has read Dracula, as the dates don’t line up. Although, Leroux’s 1909 novel has lots of other anachronisms, so maybe I’m overthinking this and Erik really is meant to be a fan of Dracula. Leroux certainly seems to be one. 

I am also wondering how much of those might be actual „Dracula“ references, or a case of both works referencing common vampire motifs. Apparently, „Dracula“ was only translated to French in the 1920s. But that does not necessarily mean Leroux couldn‘t have read it. He certainly included actual vampire characters in his writings, for example in his 1923 novel „La poupée sanglante“. We need to keep in mind though that long before Stoker‘s „Dracula“ came along, vampires had already experienced a huge surge in popularity in France. Nodier‘s dramatization of Polidori‘s „The Vampire“ introduced the figure of the byronesque, blood-sucking aristocrat - and with it, gothic romanticism - to French literature.

And with all the parallels, it is also important to remember how differently Leroux and Stoker treat similar themes. There may be parallels between Dracula and Erik, but they are fundamentally different characters and serve different purposes within their respective narratives.