Renfield

:"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.

In the novel

A description of Renfield from the novel:

R. M. Renfield, aetat 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 or a series of accidents can balance it. - From Dr. John Seward's journal

He is an inmate at the lunatic asylum overseen by Dr. John Seward. He suffers from delusions that lead 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 it is discovered that he is under the influence of Count Dracula. The vampire, whose abilities include control over animals such as rats, bats and spiders, comes to Renfield with an offer: if Renfield worships him, he will provide Renfield with an endless supply of food.

However, when confronted by Mina Harker, the object of Dracula's obsession, 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 when Renfield lures the Count by assisting his entrance to the asylum, the base of Seward and his fellow vampire hunters, Dracula breaks his neck.

In other media

Film adaptations of the novel, if they include Renfield, have a tendency to expand his role, making him a long-standing servant of the vampire Count, often depicting his 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, for example, conflates the character with that of Jonathan Harker, making Renfield (played by Dwight Frye) the real estate agent who is sent to Transylvania and falls under Dracula's (Bela Lugosi) power. The 1922 silent film "Nosferatu" presents Alexander Granach as a Renfield similar to that of the novel, but gives him the name Knock, and in a deviation from the novel, survives only to be caught and trapped in prison where he is unable to help his master escape the morning sunlight.

In "Count Dracula", Klaus Kinski (who potrayed a Count Orlok-style Dracula in "Nosferatu the Vampyre") played Renfield as unspeaking. Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film "Bram Stoker's Dracula" suggests that Renfield (portrayed by Tom Waits) was Harker's predecessor as Count Dracula's agent in London; it is implied that this is the reason for his present madness.