Yeah, I’m forgetting “Varney the Vampire”, but come on.
I retired recently, but I have considered knitting model airplanes on the side.
Nitpick: “bloofer lady”, which was apparently Stoker’s attempt at a child’s mispronunciation “beautiful lady” by way of a Cockney accent. From what I’ve read, it doesn’t actually match any real dialect.
Go for it.
Thanks for the correction. I’m glad that 19th century Cockney speakers are still around.
Side question, in the same vein-Do any of the vampiric mythologies discuss the effect of modern embalming on a soon-to-be vampire?
Err, except she wasn’t buried, she was interred in a coffin in an aboveground crypt. Dracula was originally in a crypt too, the soil he used was dug up from the crypt/desecrated chapel in castle Dracula (it’s unclear if this is below ground or just in a ground chamber not accessible except from within the castle). In the novel Lucy is starting to become a vampire even before her death, although it seems to take some passage of time after her death and interment before she can become active.
What’s really inconsistent is who becomes a vampire as a result of being bitten. Van Helsing at one point says that every child bitten by the turned Lucy will eventually upon their deaths become vampires unless she is destroyed first. But Dracula subjects Mina to a special corruption of being forced to drink some of his blood, which seems to be slowly converting her into one of his “brides”. The sailors aboard the Demeter simply vanish, presumably over the side.
Consistency was not Stoker’s strength. He could come up with interesting ideas and look at their implications, but he didn’t always follow his own rules. For instance – vampires in the daytime. He actually shows us Dracula walking around in daylight, in London and elsewhere. But at the beginning of the book, in Transylvania, Dracula apparently has to be in his coffin during the day, and he’s in a sort of catatonic state, completely unable to move (although aware. And he psychically keeps Harker from killing him. But Harker still manages to gash his forehead). Maybe the rule was that once a vampire goes to sleep in his coffin he needs his full eight hours before he can get up and walk around, or something.
And, of course, even in Stoker vampires aren’t dissolved by sunlight, or ultraviolet light. But that’s a topic I’ve addressed at considerable length elsewhere.
I thought that was just due to Dracula being in a relatively weakened state. At the beginning of the novel, he’s old and tired and isn’t getting enough fresh blood. After gorging on the crew of the Demeter, and in the rich hunting ground of c. 1890s London, he’s at full strength, and capable of roaming abroad by day, and only needs brief rests in his native earth.
No, you’ve got it reversed. A vampire is an undead abomination that is repelled by what is righteous and holy. A Jewish vampire could drink as much blood as it wished, but would be repulsed by kosher food.
So you really need to hang some kosher pastrami next to your garlic to keep the vampires away.
Or just eat these and cover all your bases.
Don’t they kill him with a bowie knife and sunlight?
No, in the novel they kill him with a bowie knife through the heart and a kukri slashing his neck (possibly beheading him - the novel states that Harker uses a kukri to “shear through the throat” of Dracula). His body then crumbles to dust (ala the later cinematic convention), but sunlight doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it. As @CalMeacham correctly notes, in the novel Stoker depicts Dracula as walking around London during the day, in full daylight. Van Helsing does make some comments to the effect that Dracula is weaker during the day, but, again, as @CalMeacham correctly notes, the novel is not very clear (or consistent) on what that actually means, and the idea that sunlight actively harms a vampire is a later cinematic contrivance not present in Stoker’s novel.
In fact, the sun is setting as Harker and Morris open his coffin for the final confrontation, and far from being harmed by the sunlight, Dracula “saw the sinking sun, and the look of hate in them turned to triumph.”
Thanks, gdave.
In “The Dracula Tapes”, “An Old Friend of the Family” and his other novels where Dracula is the protagonist and a Good Guy, Fred Saberhagen has him wearing heavy boots, the hollow soles filled with his native earth to go about during the day.
Several people (including Fred Saberhagen, just cited above, and Leonard Wolf (in The Annotated Dracula)) have suggested that this means that Dracula really wasn’t killed, because the formula wasn’t followed, and he basically turned into a dust cloud to avoid true death. I personally think they’re reading too much into it, Dracula really was killed, and Stoker was being his usual inconsistent self. But read it however you wish.
I mentioned this pretty recently in another thread, but in the Dracula Dossier table-top roleplaying game supplement, Kenneth Hite notes the discrepency with how vampires are killed earlier in the novel, and speculates that Quincey Morris might have intentionally botched the kill.
(In that case, Hite is pretty explicitly and deliberately misreading Stoker just to get a cool game scenario. I’m pretty sure he would actually agree with you on what Stoker actually intended in that scene, as do I).
When my kids were quite young, the topic of whether breastmilk was of concern actually came up in a discussion list (as in, whether it was OK for a nursing baby to also consume meat). IIRC, it was supposed to be OK. Probably for much the same reasons as discussed in that link. The commentary went on to talk about non-animal “milk”: if you serve it at the table when you’re serving meat, you need to have it in its original container so it couldn’t be mistaken for animal milk.
Needless to say, this devolved into how one would serve breastmilk at the table…
The Chabad link does not mention the whole logic behind telling whether an animal is OK to eat: cloven hooves, chews cud. Since us humans neither have cloven hooves, nor chew our cud, cannibalism is right out. I would extrapolate that to consumption of blood; animal blood is forbidden, human meat is forbidden, so it makes sense that human blood would be forbidden.
Long story short: Dracula-stein is gonna have to starve, or join a Reform congregation.
My husband is fond of this tale: A vampire attacks someone. That person, being quick-thinking, grabs a nearby crucifix and holds it up. The vampire pauses, laughs, and says “Oy veh, bubbe, have you got the wrong vampire!”.
As seen in Roman Polanski’s Fearless Vampire Killers (aka Dance of the Vampires):
Leslie Klinger, who did The New Annotated Dracula, makes a similar suggestion, as part of his extended Holmesian conceit (which almost amounts to fan-fiction) that Dracula really existed, survived the encounter with Van Helsing and Co. in Transylvania, and subsequently coerced Bram Stoker into falsifying the true events in order to produce the novel that we know today.
And in kind of the reverse, Kitty Pryde (who is Jewish) vs. Dracula (who is not):
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUh8Vc4XQAEbNI7?format=jpg&name=large
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUh8Vc4XkAArqa3?format=jpg&name=large