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DRACULA
August 3, 2011
Reading Stoker's "Dracula" (1897),
and trying to see it anew. Many of The Count's best lines
are from Stoker. "Ah, the children
I couldn't get into reading it of the night, what music they make!"
as a kid, the epistolary
nature was very off-putting.
I wonder about taxonomies that
regard "epistolary" and "gothic" They strike me as
as seperate literary categories. different logical
categories:
The dialog is cloying in many One is a device,
places, but then, that's telling a story
Victorian fiction for you. with bogus
documents,
e.g. in the form
of letters, the
Leading off with Harkers encounter other a matter of
with Dracula is interesting: it content, a focus
establishes the sort of thing that's on dark fantastic
going on rather quickly, it brings elements in
the reader up to speed to the point quasi-medieval
where I would guess that they're not settings.
much behind the viewers of the many
movies that descend from this work
("children of the night", indeed).
If I weren't already familiar with this
work, I might take it as a rather obnoxious
attack on Science-- every single piece of
folklore concerning vampires turns out Similarly, Helsing does
to be true. Van Helsing is never faced not measure the spacing
with the need to winnow through it and between vampire Lucy's
experimentally determine which techniques fangs and compare them
are effective and which are not. to the children's
wounds-- a piece of data
I wonder how Protestants felt about the that would be useful in
work when it was first released... save persuading a medic like
for one nod toward reservations about Seward.
the "idolotrous" nature of Catholism,
throughout the story they wield crosses
and holy wafer like talismans (though
more often than not, they rely on
garlic flowers).
Harker and his aquaintences are all bound
up in the Count's activities apparently
just by chance, but this horrible mess of
coincidence is not even remarked upon
by anyone... Stoker doesn't even make a
nod toward covering it, like "What is
Dracula's evil scheme in afflicting
these people?"
Note: Lucy and Mina happen to be
on hand when Dracula's ship
wrecks on the shore... were they
vacationing there because they
were awaiting the arrival
of Jonathan? I don't think
Stoker even makes a nod like that
toward an explanation.
Around Chapter 18, they suddenly discover
the house that Dracula is inhabiting,
but I missed the reasoning behind this.
Is it simply the one that Harker brokered
for him?
As of Chapter 19, the tactics of our brave
team of vampire-fighters are horrible. They Ah, actually they
know Dracula is inactive at night and yet go in at 5 a.m.
they try moving in at night... did it occur So we can have some
to them at all to provide Mina-- left behind dramatic action at
over her objections because she's Just A dawn scenes?
Woman-- with minimal protection (garlic and
cross?)... I gather not. But why not move
in after dawn?
Van Helsing's earlier
screw-up with Lucy is better
handled... he has Dracula
held off, but doesn't yet Other aspects of Helsing's
realize Drac can compel other mishandling of Lucy's case
creatures to clear his way. are less forgiveable, if
perhaps *somewhat*
understandable:
e.g. neglecting to tell
other people in the house
to leave the fucking garlic
flowers alone.
It took me quite some time to notice
this... but isn't Dracula restricted to
moving at night? Somewhat late in the
novel he appears to be flying around at
noon... unless I was really confused
and it was really supposed to be
midnight then. A side-effect of the
epistolary style, you're told dates and
times at the outset of each passage,
and the author feels no need to remind
you of the time of day. There's often
no way direct way to confirm what time
it's supposed to be: Stoker doesn't do a
great job of expressing elapsed time.
The scene where Mina demands to be hypnotized by
Helsing is interesting in a number of ways:
(1) it's Mina's idea... she shifts from victim back
to pursuer.
(2) she doesn't have to explain what it's about
(3) everyone knows that Helsing can hypnotize her.
(4) when she starts picking up telepathic impressions
from Dracula, no one finds this surprising,
or remarkable, or doubts the reliability of the
impressions.
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