Renfield
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- This article is about the character in Bram Stoker's Dracula. For the card game, please see Renfield (card game).
R. M. Renfield is a fictional character in the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker.
A description of Renfield from Bram Stoker's Dracula:
R. M, Renfield, age 59. Sanguine temperament, great physical strength, morbidly excitable, periods of gloom, ending in some fixed idea which I cannot make out. I presume that the sanguine temperament itself and the disturbing influence end in a mentally-accomplished finish, a possibly dangerous man, probably dangerous if unselfish. In selfish men caution is as secure an armour for their foes as for themselves. What I think of on this point is, when self is the fixed point the centripetal force is balanced with the centrifugal. When duty, a cause, etc., is the fixed point, the latter force is paramount, and only accident of a series of accidents can balance it. - From Dr. John Seward's journal
He is an inmate at the lunatic asylum overseen by Dr Seward. Aged fifty-nine, he suffers from a delusional belief system that leads him to eat living creatures in the hope of obtaining their life-force for himself. Being confined to the asylum, and aware of the foolishness of taking on a full-sized hospital orderly, he starts by consuming flies, then develops a scheme of feeding the flies to spiders, and the spiders to birds, in order to accumulate more and more life. When denied a cat to accommodate the birds, he eats the birds himself.
During the course of the novel, he falls under the influence of Count Dracula, and aids the Count in gaining entrance to the asylum after Seward and his fellow vampire-hunters make it their base of operations.
When confronted by Mina Harker, the object of Dracula's obsession, however, Renfield suffers an attack of conscience and begs her to flee from his master's grasp. Enraged by this treachery, Dracula infiltrates Renfield's cell (in the form of fog) and breaks his neck.
Film adaptations of the novel, if they include Renfield, have a tendency to expand his role, making him a twentysomething, more active and long-standing servant of the vampire Count and often depicting his zoophagous mania as a result of falling under Dracula's influence, rather than as a pre-existing condition that made him vulnerable to it. Tod Browning's 1931 film starring Bela Lugosi (with Dwight Frye as Renfield), for example, conflates the character with that of Jonathan Harker, making Renfield the real estate agent who is sent to Transylvania.
Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film Bram Stoker's Dracula expressly states that Renfield (performed by Tom Waits) was Harker's predecessor as Count Dracula's agent in London; it is thus implied that this is the reason for his present madness.
In Mel Brooks' Dracula: Dead and Loving It, Renfield's first name is given as Thomas, and he is portrayed by Peter MacNicol.
[edit] Trivia
In the Goosebumps television series, there is a episode called 'Vampire Breath'. In it, there is a family of vampires whose Family name is Renfield.
| Characters of Dracula |
|---|
| Dracula | Jonathan Harker | Mina Harker | Abraham Van Helsing | Lucy Westenra | Renfield |
| Film Adaptations of Dracula |
| Nosferatu | Dracula (1931) | House of Dracula | Dracula (1958) | Count Dracula (1969) | Dracula (1979) | Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht | Love At First Bite | Bram Stoker's Dracula | Dracula: Dead and Loving It | Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary |
