Stoker

1
Stokers Dracula as a repository of fears

• Fear of
• Disease (esp. syphilis)
• Homosexuality
• Proto-feminism
• Monopoly capitalism
• Decline and reverse colonization
• Jack the Ripper.

2
Bram Stoker (1847-1912)

• Irish by birth, lived in London
• Other works included The Lair of the White Worm
  (1911)
• Married to Florence Stoker

3
Stoker

• Worked for Henry Irving as personal assistant and
  business manager to Lyceum Theatre

4
Erzsébet Bàthory (1560-1614)
5
Vlad the Impaler (1431-1476)
6
Vlad Tepes and victims
7
Vlad Tepes
8
Image of Vlad Tepes from 1700s
9
Russian Boyar
10
Castle Bran
11
Secret Passage in Castle Bran
12
Ruins of Draculas fortress
13
Snagov Monastery
14
Snagov Monastery
15
Snagov Monastery
16
Legends of Vlad Tepes
17
Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian (2005)
18
Inspiration

• My Friend Arminius of Buda-Pesth University (212)
• Legend of Voivode Dracula (212)

19
Notes to Dracula
20
Broadside about Vlad
21
Bram Stoker (1847-1912)
22
Varney the Vampire (1845-47)

• James Malcolm Rymer
• Thomas Preskett Prest
• Serialized novel, published as book in 1847
• The character of Varney

23
Dracula, 1897
24
Murnaus Nosferatu (1922)
25
Bela Lugosi
26
Herzogs Nosferatu (1979)
27
Christopher Lee and Hammer Studios
28
Christopher Lee as Saruman the White
29
Victorian Era (1837-1901)

• Period of growth and prosperity
• Height of Empire
• Rapid population growth in England
• Significant technological and medical
  developments

30
London (Grimshaw, Hamstead Hill, 1881)

• Lucy lies in the tomb of her kin, a lordly
  deathhouse in a lonely churchyard, away from
  teeming London where the air is fresh, and the
  sun rises over Hampstead Hill, and where wild
  flowers grow of their own accord (295)

31
Victorian Era (1837-1901)

• Era of sexual repression or sexual anarchy
• a time when all the laws that governed sexual
  identity and behavior seemed to be breaking down
• Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 1990)

32
London

• 53
• teeming millions

33
Highgate Cemetery
34
Highgate Cemetery
35
Highgate
36
Tombs at Highgate
37
Piccadilly Circus c. 1894 (p. 367)
38
Jack Straws Castle (311)
39
Spaniards Inn
40
Spaniards Inn Interior
41
Whitby Abbey
42
Whitby Abbey
43
Whitby Abbey (64)
44
Steps to Whitby Abbey
45
Lucy and Mina as types of womanhood

• Lucy, pampered, restless in her undead form she
  becomes a sexualized murderess, attacking
  children
• Mina, a more independent, modern woman, but she
  is not a New Woman, she still has very
  conservative values

46
Women in Dracula

• Can we read the first half as an assault on the
  New Woman and the second half as the elevation
  of an idealized woman?

47
The New Woman

• 86what would shock the New Woman?
• 87-- New woman would propose herself
• The New Woman was open to all kinds of freedoms,
  including sexual freedom
•  

48
The New Woman

• 60 Why cant a woman marry three men?
• 158 This sweet maid is a polyandrist

49
Burne-Jones The Vampire

• Painting accompanied Kiplings poem The Vampire
  (1897)

50
Mrs. Patrick Campbell
51
Theda Bara 1910
52
The wicked temptress

• I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that
  they would kiss me with those red lips (42)
• Frank von Stuck (1863-1928), Sensuality

53
The Dead Beauty

• She makes a very beautiful corpse, sir (147)
• Ophelia, John Millais, 1850

54
Toby Rosenthal, Elaine, 1874
55
The Invalid

• Why do we view Lucys corpse and the content of
  her coffin so often?
• Carl Larsson, The Invalid (1899)

56
Frank Dicksee The Crisis (c. 1891)
57
The Household Nun (Dijikstra)

• Abbott Handerson Thayer, Virgin Enthroned, 1891

58
Thomas C. Gotch, Holy Motherhood, 1902
59
Da Vinci, Madonna and Child, 1475-80
60
Domenico Ghirlandaio, Madonna Enthroned with
Saints, 1484
61
Lucys transformations

• 146her voluptuous voice
• 176 Her coffin is empty
• 179 Lucy Un-Dead in her coffin

62
Lucy as sexualized monster

• 188 Calling out to Arthur Come to me
• 192 A nightmare of Lucy
• 192 holy calm that lay like sunshine

63
Sexual symbolism and Lucys demise

• No man knows, till he experiences it, what it is
  to feel his own life-blood drawn away into the
  veins of the woman he loves (119)
• 192He looked like a figure of Thor
• (Contrast with The Mysterious Stranger)

64
Monstrous motherhood

• The Counts women attack children (48)
• Lucy terrorizes the children of Hampstead
  (159)the bloofer lady
• A white figure holding a tiny child (177)
• Lucy flings the child to the ground (188)

65
Mina

• Works as assistant schoolmistress practices
  shorthand (55)
• Wants to protect Jonathan (163)
• Not of a fainting disposition (198)
• Mans brain and a womans heart (207)

66
Mina

• Is Stoker trying to give us a woman who is the
  best of the new and old Woman?

67
The attack on Mina and notions of purity

• Represented as a type of rape (247)
• Unclean (248)
• Dracula will use her as wine-press and then
  companion (252)
• Called by the three woman (317) who have attacked
  Jonathan (42ff)

68
Dispensing with Lucys corpse

• Why mutilate her body without need? (149)
• Opening her grave is like stripping off her
  clothes (176)
• May I cut off her head? (183)

69
Lucys body

• Until 1823 Anatomy Act, convicted murderers were
  doomed to dissection.
• Lower class readers may have viewed the scene
  where Lucys corpse is dealt with differently
  than others (Williamson, Lure of the Vampire,
  2005)

70
Lucys corpse

• Lucys vampiric corpse, it seems, is a
  repository of all that the patriarchal medical
  and legal establishment loathed and desired
  (Williamson, 21)
• Lucy is more virtuous after death vampirism in
  Dracula does not challenge marriageit inculcates
  the restraints of marriage in a reluctant girl
  (Auerbach, 160)

71
Sexuality and Disease

• Syphilis
• Fifteen hundred infants died annually from STDs
  between 1880 and 1900
• Syphilis often passed to wives and children
• Parallels to syphilis tainted women, diseased
  blood, quack cures

72
The threat of the homoerotic

• This man belongs to me! (43)

73
Stoker and Wilde

• Stoker begins writing Dracula a month after Wilde
  is convicted (May 24, 1895)
• Dracula as a ghoulish inflation of the current
  view of the homosexual as seducer of young boys

74
Stoker, Wilde, Dracula

• Dracula (193-3)
• Description of Wilde by an acquaintance of
  Stoker There was something oily and fat about
  him that repelled me. His hands were flabby,
  greasy his skin looked bilious and dirtyhis
  appearance filled me with distaste. I lay stress
  on the physical repulsion, because I think most
  people felt it.

75
Dracula and homosexuality

• Dracula as a metaphor for the life of a
  homosexual in Victorian England the need for
  secrecy, shrouded curtains, no servants,
  nocturnal visits (Shaffer)
• Stokers depiction part of a general fear of
  decline and degeneration

76
Dracula and Homosexuality

• McCrealooks at Stoker as closeted writer
• Dracula, I want to suggest, is a novel about
  heterosexuality as it is viewed from the gay
  closetas an exotic foreign world, at once
  alluring and frightening (253)

77
Dracula and Occidentalism (Arata)

• Novel as an engagement with the Eastern
  question
• Carpathians known for cultural upheaval and
  radical shifts in imperial control

78
Dracula and Occidentalism

• Van Helsing vampires always follow conquest
  (463)
• Dracula traces his own powerful bloodline (35)
• His vampirism is woven into his conqueror status

79
Dracula and Occidentalism

• Dracula trains himself to conquer England, as a
  Western Orientalist would train
• His victim is Lucy Westenra light of the West
• The white Lucy is a civilizational cause
  (Wicke, 481) her suitors have served in exotic
  places

80
Dracula and Occidentalism

• Vampires come in the wake of imperial decay
• Dracula chooses England because it is in decline
• Jonathan fears unleashing Dracula on Londona
  type of reverse colonization

81
Dracula and Occidentalism

• If in this novel blood stands for race Lucy and
  Mina, women in general, become vehicles for
  racial propagation (Arata 468)
• Counts practice is a perverse mirror of
  Orientalism

82
Whitechapel Murders, 1888 (Jack the Ripper)
83
Antisemitism and Dracula

• smelled old Jerusalem (201)

84
Science of Physiognomy (see page 296)
85
Science

• Vivisection
• Sleeping draughts
• Transfusion 113
• Charcot 171

86
Physiognomy

• Jonathan notes Draculas very marked
  physiognomy (23)
• Appearance of the Counts women (42)

87
Physiognomy

• 163
• 168
• Dracula has a child brain a criminal brain

88
Van Helsing

• First mention 105
• Man of Science with an Indulgence (187)

89
Class

• 134serving women and the drink
• 135customs of the lower classes
• 150stolen crucifix

90
Modernity and Dracula

• It is nineteenth century up-to-date with a
  vengeance. And yet, unless my senses deceive me,
  the old centuries had, and have, powers of their
  own which mere modernity cannot kill (Harkers
  diary)

91
Modernity and Dracula

• Good God, Professor! I said, starting up. Do
  you mean to tell me that Lucy was bitten by such
  a bat and that such a thing is here in London in
  the nineteenth century? (Dr. Sewards Diary
  172)
• our scientific, skeptical, matter-of-fact
  nineteenth century (210)

92
Horror in/of (?)the age of mechanical reproduction

• Phonograph
• Typewriter and reproduced narrative
• Stenography
• Photography
• Journalism

93
Photography

• Jonathan brings Kodak photographs to Dracula
• Kodak meant eye-witness proof at the turn of
  the 19th century
• Linked perhaps to the idea of the
  touristJonathan is involved in a type of tourism
  gone desperately wrong

94
Phonograph

• Invented by Edison in 1878 and perfected in
  1888
• 197a wonderful machine ,but cruelly true
• 198Mina hears the story of Lucys death

95
Technology and narrative

• Mina and Seward exchange stories through the
  phonograph and typewriter

96
Typewriter

• First mass produced in 1870s by the Remington
  Company
• Typewritten text was seen as the pre-eminent
  symbol of modern truth (Richards 449)
• But how it that truth viewed in Dracula?

97
Stenography

• Part of the new and growing professionalism
• A code Dracula does not know
• A way of capturing speech

98
Journalism

• Technological innovations make near-real-time
  news relay and mass production possible
  (Richards)
• Huge growth in journalism during 19th c.
• Journalism becoming increasingly professionalized
• Stoker includes newspaper accounts

99
Journalism

• Mina gathers newspaper accounts
• Use of newspaper accounts, assembled by Mina,
  gives authority to the other voices in the text
  (Richards, 454)

100
Technology and narrative

• How is this story told?
• Epistolary? Journalistic?
• Jonathan assembles accounts seven years after the
  fact

101
Technology and narrative

• We were struck by the fact, that in all the mass
  of material of which the record is composed,
  there is hardly one authentic document nothing
  but a mass of typewriting, except the later
  notebooks of Mina, Seward and myself, and Van
  Helsings memorandum. We could hardly ask any
  one, even did we wish to, to accept these as
  proofs of so wild a story (326)

102
Narrative and Technology

• What is the status of modern technology in this
  novel? Is it an engine for truth and a tool for
  good? Is its status questionable and
  inauthentic?
• Kittler Stokers Dracula is not vampire novel,
  but rather the written account of our
  bureaucratization. Anyone is free to call this a
  horror novel as well (74).

103

• Walter Benjamin In even the most perfect
  reproduction, one thing is lacking the here and
  nowits unique existence in a particular
  placethe here and now of the original underlies
  the concept of its authenticitythe whole
  sphere of authenticity eludes technologicaland
  of course not only technological reproduction
• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
  Reproduction--Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner
  technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (1936)

104
Technology

• What are the limits of technology?
• The group uses technology to defeat Dracula, but
  they have limits
• Mina makes copies, but it is her analysis that
  triumphs her eyes have seen where ours were
  blinded

105
The Professions

• How are the characters experts/professionalswhat
  is the significance of this role?

106

• Mina I have been working very hard lately,
  because I want to keep up with Jonathans
  studies, and I have been practicing shorthand
  very assiduously. When we are married I shall be
  able to be useful to Jonathan, and if I can
  stenograph well enough I can take down what he
  wants to say in this way and write it out for him
  on the typewriter, at which also I am practicing
  very hardI may show it to Jonathan some day if
  there is in it anything worth sharing, but it is
  really an exercise book (55)

107

• Mina and Jonathan are engaged with keeping
  accurate records (198dates are everything)
• Mina believes that accuracy will give them power
  over Dracula (Richards, 448)

108
Forms of Reproduction

• Vampires creating new vampires
• Mina and Jonathans son (whose blood runs in his
  veins)
• Technology as a way of reproducing (Minas
  typewriter, for example, has a Manifold
  function)

109
the nature of the vampire

• 210-211

110
Sources

• McCrea, Barry. "Heterosexual Horror Dracula, the
  Closet, and the Marriage-Plot." Novel A Forum on
  Fiction 43.2 (2010) 251-70. Print.
• Dracula page numbers from Norton