The Mystery of the Sea

Bram Stoker

Bram Stoker was born on November 8, 1847 in Dublin, Ireland. He was brought up in a Protestant middle-class household, and was a sickly child.[1][2] However, Stoker eventually grew out of his illnesses and attended Trinity College, where he studied science and mathematics. Stoker became a civil service clerk in Dublin for a short time, but was always interested in literature. He wrote short fiction and edited an Irish newspaper, publishing his first story, "The Crystal Cup", in 1872. He also submitted work to a magazine called the Shamrock, based in Dublin.[2] In 1876, while volunteering as a drama critic for the Dublin Evening Mail,[2] met actor Henry Irving. In 1878, Stoker moved to London to serve as manager for Irving's Lyceum Theatre.[1][2] Stoker was an adept administrator and introduced a number of new practices into the theatre, including numbering seats and advertising a season or selling tickets for shows in advance.[1] Stoker was quite busy while he worked for Irving, and much of his writing had to be done on holidays and in his spare time.[2]

However, Stoker's business often proved to be helpful to his writings. Stoker's position at the Lyceum had a direct influence on his novels, particularly in terms of travel and setting. Company tours between 1883 and 1904 took him to America regularly.[2][3] Although The Mystery of the Sea takes place in Scotland, Stoker's travels to America are important considering that the main female character of The Mystery of the Sea is American. The Lyceum tours likely provided some background information (and stereotypes) for the character of Marjory, as well as for some of Stoker's other notable American characters like Quincey Morris in Dracula.[3] Stoker also was drawing from personal experience when he wrote about Cruden Bay, being a frequent visitor there.

Cruden Bay

His first trip to Cruden was with Irving to research for a production of Macbeth in 1888 (incidentally, Stoker finished writing Dracula in Cruden).[4] Carol A. Senf argues that Archibald Hunter, the protagonist of The Mystery of the Sea, is an autobiographical character because of his repeated visits to Cruden as well as the hints he gives of an invalid past and an "enthusiasm for…technology" which Senf identifies as a characteristic shared with Stoker.[4] Archibald also mentions having studied law, which Stoker did too, although he never practiced.[1][2] The character of Gormala also had a real-life inspiration; in 1901, while on holiday, Stoker was at the seaside and met a strange old woman. Locals thought she had supernatural abilities, and Stoker was inspired to write the short story "The Seer", which would later grow into The Mystery of the Sea.[5]

Stoker worked at the Lyceum until 1902, and his professional experiences and personal friendship with Irving led to the 1905 publication of Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, a two-volume work dedicated to Irving that is one of the most important sources for people wanting to learn about Stoker's life.[1][2] Beginning around 1897, as Irving was in decline, Stoker had depended increasingly on his writing for money. Stoker worked as a journalist and also wrote eight novels during this time, including The Mystery of the Sea (1902).[2] While Stoker is known today for Dracula, he wrote seventeen other novels as well as many short stories and pieces for periodicals.[6]

The Mystery of the Sea was first published in 1902 by the London firm W. Heinemann. The same year, it was published in America by the New York-based Doubleday, Page, & Co.[7] A digitized copy of this version is available from Google Books and is linked below. In 1903, a two-volume version was released as part of a series called The English Library, published by Leipzig, Heinemann, and Balestier.[8] This particular series was an effort to bring English fiction to the continent, and Stoker himself invested in the company.[2] Heinemann published another edition of the novel in 1914, as did the London company Rider.[7] The beginning of the book was published as a short story called "The Seer" in The London Magazine in 1901.[5] There have been various reprints and e-book editions of The Mystery of the Sea during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries,[7] many of which are accessible online.

An example of the type of sensationalized journalism that moved popular opinion against the Spanish

As suggested by the reviewer's reference to a "recent controversy", the Spanish–American War was only recent history when The Mystery of the Sea was published in 1902. The Spanish–American War began in 1897 with America's involvement in the Cuban insurrection against Spain.[10] Cuban revolutionaries had begun fighting Spanish rule in 1895,[11] and Spanish troops were sent to Cuba, where they set up camps known as reconcentrados, meant to contain the rebels. Conditions in these camps were very poor, and they became fodder for "yellow journalism" in the United States, provoking sympathy and outrage on behalf of the Cubans.[10] Many American politicians supported the idea of going to war, and some even wanted to annex Cuba to the United States. Tensions with Spain intensified upon the publication of a letter from the Spanish minister that insulted President William McKinley, calling him weak.[10] However, the event leading up to the war that caused the greatest public uproar and bears particular significance to The Mystery of the Sea was the explosion of the battleship Maine in Havana in 1898. This caused an outpouring of public sentiment against the Spanish, even though the explosion was most likely not the result of a vicious attack.[10] Popular headlines and slogans like "Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain"[12] suggest that the character Marjory's attitude is a representation of the broader American public attitude during the Spanish–American War, and adds significance to her decision to use her fortune to buy a battleship for the U.S. Navy to use against the Spanish.

Sir Francis Drake

The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 was a major victory for England, and, in a larger sense, for Protestantism. Philip II of Spain had hoped to use the attack to incite a rebellion against the English Protestant monarchy under Elizabeth I.[13] By this point in English history, Elizabeth was firmly establishing her Protestant rule (the Church of England had been established under her father, Henry VIII). She had already beheaded her Catholic cousin, Mary Stuart, and had taken several hostile actions towards Catholic Spain. These included authorizing Francis Drake to attack Spanish ships and ports and supporting the Dutch against Spanish rule in the Netherlands.[13] There are two connections here to the novel's heroine, Marjory Drake. First, Marjory is revealed to be a descendant of Sir Francis Drake, the same pirate (or hero, depending on which side one is on) who was so closely linked to Queen Elizabeth's successes. Second, in buying a battleship, Marjory is aiming to support the Cuban rebels against Spanish domination, just as Elizabeth was on the side of the Dutch against the Spanish.

The Armada

The actual defeat of the Spanish Armada occurred in August 1588 when the British and Spanish ships met at Gravelines. The British victory over the strong Spanish fleet had more to do with logistical issues for the Spanish and favorable winds than it did with English naval prowess, but the British Protestants took it as a moral (and even a divinely ordained) triumph.[13] The buried treasure that figures so prominently in Stoker's novel was supposedly granted to one of the sailors of the Armada by Pope Sixtus V after the Armada's defeat to use in further actions against England. The characters are still haunted by this treasure, and the conflict is perpetuated when the American heiress, Marjory, comes into contact with Don Bernardino, the Spaniard whose family is in charge of the treasure. Scholar Andrew Smith argues that the interactions between these two characters are very "politicised" due to their positions in the Spanish–American War,[11] but also sees The Mystery of the Sea as an exploration of Catholic-Protestant conflicts on a wider scale (possibly having to do with Stoker's Irish background), incorporating the earlier tensions from the Elizabethan conflict.[14] Ultimately, Smith observes a unifying of Catholics and Protestants in both time periods due to the use of the Baconian Cipher (a Protestant-invented device) to convey a Catholic message and the collaboration between the Catholic Don Bernardino and Protestant Archibald Hunter as they work to defend Marjory's honor, among other reasons.[14] Regardless of specific interpretation, there is a sense throughout the novel that political and religious struggles can endure far longer than the people who start them.

Smaller-scale public events of Stoker's own time also play a role the novel. One of the detectives working to find Marjory notes that one of the kidnappers was probably involved in the A.T. Stewart ransom case.[15] A.T. Stewart was an immigrant who came to America from Belfast in 1818.[15] He became a millionaire working in the dry-goods business, but after his death, his body was stolen from its tomb in 1878. The original people arrested for the crime were not actually the perpetrators, and the body was never found.[16] Scholar Lisa Hopkins points out that this case is an "ominous" one for Stoker to reference while the men in the novel are searching for Marjory because it involved a corpse rather than a living person and the mystery was never quite solved. Hopkins also indicates some notable parallels to Dracula when Lucy has become a vampire and is "able to escape from a locked tomb". All of this, according to Hopkins, creates "a powerful atmosphere of the uncanny" and "a sense of the odds that are stacked against the novel's hero".[17] The fact that the Stewart case proved too much for even the Pinkerton Detective Agency to solve also could be an opportunity for Stoker to detract from "the American reputation for efficiency" and thus "incriminat[e] Marjory".[17]

National identity is an important feature in The Mystery of the Sea; Stoker often seems to be raising the question of whether one's nationality or individual personality is the primary determining factor in personal identity. Nationality also is closely tied into the political backstory of The Mystery of the Sea, with an ancient conflict between Spain and England providing tensions that last all the way up to the days of the Spanish–American War. Andrew Smith sees this conflict of national interests as a manifestation of a deeper Catholic-Protestant rift,[14] while Lisa Hopkins calls Cruden bay in the novel "a miniature melting-pot in which a variety of tensions between different races and nationalities can be ultimately resolved by displacing nationalized conflicts onto gendered ones [i.e. seeing the female as more of a threat than the foreigner]".[19] These issues are most clearly presented through the characters of Marjory and Don Bernardino. Marjory is an American heiress, constantly asserting her American-ness through references to her independence, her level-headedness, and her fighting streak. Archibald, too, notices that she is different from most British girls. She hates Spaniards with a passion, and makes no secret of this hatred during her initial meeting with Don Bernardino. Don Bernardino, like Marjory, is very proud of his national heritage, but instead of stressing his personal independence as she does, he emphasizes his role in a long family line and the importance of maintaining his honor and fulfilling an ancient trust. Marjory and Don Bernardino clearly have different sets of values that are strongly influenced by their respective nationalities, but as the novel progresses, some of these stereotypes are supplanted by emerging individual personality traits. Marjory, for example, has a soft side and comes to appreciate Don Bernardino, while the Spaniard decides that helping Marjory can make up for his failure to fulfill the trust (although this still has to do with motives of honor). This new understanding between Marjory and Don Bernardino could easily be a reflection of the political atmosphere of the time. While American forces had been wary of the Spanish during the initial period of the war, there were high levels of "fraternisation between the Spanish and their captors [the Americans] during the occupation of Cuba because the Americans had noticed the "heroism and honor" of the Spaniards.[25] Political differences also decrease in importance as the characters come to appreciate each other as individuals. The main English character, Archibald Hunter, is not as overtly tied to his national identity as the Spanish and American characters and is for most of the novel a passive observer of national traits in others. However, he does sometimes make statements regarding what it is to be English, often in contrast to the characteristics of Americans.

Cuban soldiers, 1898

Race in a broader context is also addressed in The Mystery of the Sea, but to a much lesser extent than nationality. Smith connects the theme of race to the political context of the Spanish–American War, arguing that Americans constructed "fantasies of conflict" in order to transform the war into a "moral crusade against the Spanish".[11] In the popular imagination, Cubans were presented as white, while the Spanish were imagined as "swarthy", adding a racial dimension to the fighting.[11] This ideological (and inaccurate) racial construction was largely unsuccessful after American forces had actually gone into Cuba,[25] but these ideas, namely judgment based on skin color, are important in The Mystery of the Sea. Stoker paints the character of the "negro" kidnapper as inherently depraved and inferior to the white men (Archibald even goes so far as to declare that he is "the active principle of whatever evil might be"), and Archibald fears that this dark-skinned man is going to rape Marjory. Smith sees this man as a representation of the Cubans, a "common enemy" of both Catholic and Protestant forces as the Spanish–American War progressed.[26] Archibald eventually murders this man while saving Marjory, exulting in the murder and soliloquizing at length about how a justified murder is an exhilarating deed. It is unclear whether this apparent justification stems from the fact that the potential assailant was black or from the crime he was about to commit, but Stoker nonetheless presents only a negative picture of people of African descent, and one that is in accord with the tensions of the time period.

British colonial and Imperial actions in Africa could also be seen as contributing to this negative portrayal of African heritage; indeed, the passages describing the "negro" bear some similarities to the heavily racist language in famous works associated with imperialism, such as Conrad's Heart of Darkness (which predates The Mystery of the Sea by only three years). In both novels, the black characters are portrayed as atavistic and savage, but Stoker's portrayal is much more simplistic, pinning the origin of evil directly on the "negro". Regardless of how the reader reacts to Conrad's and Stoker's respective descriptions of dark-skinned people, it is important to recognize that The Mystery of the Sea is part of a larger discourse on race that was influenced by the vitality of the British Empire. Indeed, racism has been characterized by some as "colonialism brought home",[27] which fits in with Archibald's thoughts on the one black character in the novel as well as the larger political and imperialist themes of the work. Archibald is not directly involved with the conflict in Cuba, nor is he involved with colonization (although colonial implications could possibly be drawn from the fact that he is an Englishman living in Scotland). However, despite Archibald's lack of immediate involvement in British Imperial schemes, he is an embodiment of popular perceptions of race and "civilization" as the British knew it. He feels no qualms about killing the black man, recognizes an active evil in this racial "other", and triumphs in rescuing the purity of his white beloved from the threat of her dark-skinned attacker.

There is an ongoing conflict between fate and the natural course of events versus human actions in The Mystery of the Sea. The natural and the supernatural are in constant collision and interaction. The Seer Gormala MacNeil continuously warns Archibald against trying to disrupt fate, and Archibald himself begins to accept the presence of forces above humanity and even admits that he is "content to be an obedient item in the general scheme of things".[28] Carol A. Senf notes this tension between the natural and the supernatural, describing Gormala as one who "haunts Hunter throughout the novel, frequently reminding him of his own occult abilities and reinforcing for the reader that science cannot provide the answer to everything".[29] The natural is seemingly governed by the supernatural, but rather than there being a defined separation between the two, they merge into one another, especially for the Seers (Archibald and Gormala). As Archibald gains understanding of his gift of Second Sight, he becomes less and less skeptical of the mysterious and more questioning of the things he used to know. Looking back on his first experience of a vision, Archibald notes that

"all of the forces of life and nature became exposed to my view. A thousand things which hitherto I had accepted in simple faith as facts, were pregnant as new meanings. I began to understand that the whole earth and sea, and air—all of that of which human beings generally ordinarily take cognizance, is but a film or crust which hides the deeper moving power or forces".[30]

Archibald now believes in a "purposeful cause of universal action"[30] seemingly over and above, yet directing, the concerns of humans and their endeavors. Despite all of the political scheming and brave actions of individual adventurers, the force of fate lies underneath every event. Archibald Hunter is much more optimistic in his tone about the presence of fate than some characters in other novels of this genre and era who have had to confront the shortcomings of science or order in the natural world in the face of fate. H.G. Wells' Edward Prendick in The Island of Dr. Moreau, for example, sees a life without meaning once he observes the disorder caused by Moreau's science. Stoker's own Van Helsing from Dracula questions his medical knowledge once he realizes that he is dealing with an evil that cannot be cured by any medical remedy. Archibald does not seem to see the supernatural or fate as working against him—most of his immediate problems spring from political tensions and other human beings. Although Stoker takes advantage of the ominous effect that can be derived from invoking fate and supernatural forces, fate is ultimately portrayed as a force over and above the flaws of individuals and as something that can make amends for foolish human errors. The kidnappers are drowned, Don Bernardino regains his honor in death, and the mysterious Seer, Gormala, meets her end near the same bay where she first met Archibald Hunter, lending a sense of justice and closure to what could have been a dark story.

As with nationality, The Mystery of the Sea often addresses gendered conceptions of identity, and presents an ambivalent view on the roles of women. David Glover asserts that Stoker's "writings can certainly be placed within the antifeminist backlash of the [late Victorian] period",[31] while Lisa Hopkins recognizes the tensions in Stoker's work regarding the New Woman and notes how Archibald Hunter must confront "menacing and insubordinate females".[32] Marjory, the female protagonist, is a crossing point between the ideal mid-nineteenth-century woman and the idea of the New Woman, which had taken shape at the end of the century. She is brave, independent, and defiant, as exemplified by her purchase of a warship, her evasion of the diplomats who try to protect her, and constant assertions that she has a fighting spirit. Mrs. Jack, her companion, represents more traditional views of womanhood, as shown when she lectures Marjory on her duties to her husband. Marjory eventually listens to Mrs. Jack's advice, and her somewhat exceptional behavior ultimately does not interfere with her "feminine" weaknesses. Marjory is deeply in love with her husband and ends the novel saying she will never leave his side. She occasionally betrays fear and even expresses longing for some of the more traditional feminine characteristics apparently typical of non-American women. Archibald loves her and is enamored with her fierce spirit, and admires her "coolness of head" but this does not stop him from noting that she possesses "the little morsel of hysterics which goes to make up the sum total of every woman".[33] Hopkins observes that Archibald feels that he ultimately has the advantage by being a man, and notes that gender is "the one arena in which Stoker's men… can always win".[34] Despite the apparent power of Marjory's "new" brand of femininity, it is ultimately flawed in Stoker's representations. The strongest example of this contradiction between the strength of the New Woman and more traditional feminine weakness is Archibald's assertion that "my Marjory, though a strong and brave one, was but a woman after all".[35] Throughout The Mystery of the Sea, women are shown to be intelligent and generally more useful than passive; however, this does not stop the narrator from characterizing women as best suited to being subservient, pleasing companions to men.

There are some notable similarities between portrayals of women in The Mystery of the Sea and Stoker's more famous Dracula; Mina Harker and Marjory Drake both begin as assertive, intelligent women with some almost masculine qualities by Victorian standards (for instance, Mina knows the train schedules, and Marjory recognizes that Archibald must reduce the cipher in order to crack it). Hopkins compares Mina Harker and Marjory Drake by designating them both as "uneasily poised between New Woman and proper wife", and by pointing out that "Marjory…like Mina, explicitly disavows any sympathy with the most prominent of the New Women's aims".[36] Thus, the New Woman in Stoker's novels appears to be more of a tantalizing threat than a tangible reality. The somewhat rebellious qualities of these heroines are ultimately little more than pleasing additions that add interest to females who become more passive and surrender to the authority of their husbands. In general, Archibald (and presumably Stoker himself) is attracted to the New Woman, but wants to subdue her rather than to allow her to continue her independent existence.

Despite the importance of nationality and political loyalties in The Mystery of the Sea, Stoker presents honor as a force that can transcend both of these things. As with the tensions involved in nationality, Don Bernardino and Marjory are the most important characters when it comes to notions of honor. Don Bernardino is convinced that he has forfeited his masculine honor when he has failed to beat Archibald to the treasure. He warns Archibald that he may even resort to dishonorable tactics to win the treasure back, and the two men almost duel. However, when Marjory's womanly honor is in peril, Don Bernardino sets aside his concern for the treasure and sees a surer way to regaining his manly honor through helping to rescue Marjory. Andrew Smith recognizes this action as embodying "a notion of honor which is outside religious, political and moral sentiments",[37] asserting that Stoker's view of possible reconciliation above national lines is "short on political pragmatism but big on nebulous notions of honor which are 'naturally' provoked by a sense of fair play".[38] In many ways, this notion of honor contributes to the undermining of the New Woman in The Mystery of the Sea and is another remnant of the conventional Gothic within the novel's modern (for the time) political landscape. Honor is closely associated with gender ideals; Marjory is seen as needing protection from men who could steal her honor (although she does her share of fighting back), and Don Bernardino and Archibald are able to forget their differences to protect her honor while realizing their own. This gendered conception of honor persists to the very end of the novel; Don Bernardino dies in his noble efforts towards rescuing Marjory and reclaiming the treasure from the kidnappers, and is buried in the vault of his ancestors. Marjory, on the other hand, decides to rein in her independence and become a dedicated wife.