Open because, come on! its a hundred years old! I’ve got about 30 pages to go so I should finish it during lunch.
I picked this book up about a week and a half ago while disappointingly browsing the selection at my local library. Truth be told, I actually picked it up the week before but put it back on the shelves. Something compelled me to read it, something not akin to the mesmerizing stare of the centuried Count himself! Or maybe cause it was October
My version is a reprint from 1981 with an introduction from some guy named George Slade. If only they’d put a spoiler notice before that too! As I read the achingly long intro (who writes 10 pages as an “intro” anyway? Bastard!), I became acutely aware of the multiple and horrendous spoilers therein. Faugh! But I could not stop reading, as I have an almost obsessive compulsion to finish what I started.
My reason for reading it was myriad, not limited to the otherworldly compulsion I described but a sense of curiosity at the history of this storied tale, rewritten, retold, and parodied countlessly, I thought it would be a benefit to me to go to the source. Since Vlad Tepes’ grave was unknown to me for exhumation, I thought I’d try this book instead.
As someone reading the book for the first time in 2011, it at first felt odd to me that I was reading a setting unfamiliar to the author and first readers of the book. Just the words “Count Dracula” conjures up innumerable cultural images, from the abomination that is the creature from the silent film Nosferatu to the abomination that is Van Helsing starring Hugh Jackman. So I had to suppress a little familiar recognition when Jonathan Harker describes his trip to the then enigmatic Count in his castle in quite normal-and-not-at-all-suspicious Transylvania. What are we to discover therein (except a hundred years of pop cultural references!)?
This is probably the oldest novel I’ve ever read, so right away I was prepared for some archaic verbosity the likes of which should throw me into a bewildered malaise. But its actually quite readable, I think. Despite the odd turns of phrases, unfamiliar words, and apparently this was written before the invention of some punctuation, I can say that this book stands up to anything I’ve read that was written with a more modern audience in mind. I can see why its lasted so long, it is a spectacular novel! Some things I can’t quite bend my will to ignore though, and I’ve no clue whether this was on purpose, an accident, or a gestalt of writing. There is a page, I think when Jonathan is riding the caleche (and I had to look up what that was) to Castle Dracula where Stoker uses the term “here and there” like 6 times! By the end of the page I was expecting him to break into song!
That’s just one thing I noticed. Another is that Stoker suffers (or enjoys) this weird grammatical tic that I can scarely describe, so I will quote an example:
“See, and the sun is just rose, and all day to sunset is to us. Let us take bath, and dress, and have breakfast which we all need, and which we can eat comfortably since he be not in the same land with us.”
Now an editor might change it, to simply add the word ‘a’ and turn the sentence into: “Let us take A bath…”. And this isn’t the most egregious example. Many times I would expect there to be an ‘s’ behind a verb, for example ‘jumps’ instead of simply ‘jump’, so that to my 21st century eyes the motions and speech of the characters seem stilted and stiff, and the prose inexact in its description. I don’t know what its called, if it was done on purpose, or just how writing was at the time, but sometimes I found myself wishing for a few extra letters. Or as Stoker would have said it, “Wishing for few extra letters”
I’ll admit it, I found the description of Lucy Westenra to be incredibly hot. I don’t know, maybe that’s just me. And for some reason, I kept thinking her name was ‘Westerna’. I’ve never heard of ‘Westenra’, and now that I associate it with a hot vampire chick, I cannot get that image out of my mind. It sounds like the name of a sexy upper class British girl, demure by day, but wild at night. Oh look, there goes the novel’s influence again!
And finally, on page 118 comes the first mention of the only other character, and the only human one, that I could have named prior to reading the book, Professor Van Helsing! For such an iconic part of the whole lore, it was surprising that he’s only in 3/4th of the book. But by the time I got to page 200, his actions had more than made up for his absence. He’s a man of contradictions, venerable, but vigorously youthful, especially in defense of the doomed Lucy. A man of science, smart and brilliant, yet whose open-mindedness allows him the wisdom of superstitions, as they are, according to his words, mankind’s first faith (or something. I forget the exact words and the page he used that description).
I’m often reminded of Freud while reading this, as his psychoanalysis came to being around the era of this book’s setting, and in it I can see what amounts to many instances, some subtle and some not, of the infantasizing of women that male authors can at times be known to write. Lucy’s and Mina’s letters to each other about their respective menfolk, Mina with her betrothed and Lucy with her 3 admirers, are gratefully not as jarring as anything like Lovecraft’s early stories that feature race, for example when he called a cat by a racist moniker, its a little worse than the pleasant naivete expressed by Lucy and Mina. It lasts throughout the book too, and I’ve been debating whether to give Stoker a pass (as if I am worthy of judging him even!) for the sexism when Mina turns out to be so smart and strong a character. And then Mina says something about having the apple in her throat and I think its probably a good idea this book came out before Gloria Steinem.
This book also affords me the opportunity to see what mythicisms were entrenched into vampire lore by Stoker himself, and which ones were invention by later authors or researches of even earlier works when mankind feared all the shadows of nature. So fear of garlic, check. Stake through the heart, check. Turning into bats and people and wolves, check. The crossing of waters I had forgotten but was reminded here, so was the Count’s command of limited weather and the fact that he couldn’t enter a place unless invited. One surprise that did confuse me for a portion of the book was of vampires melting in sunlight. Dracula could walk around in the day, but his powers were limited. He couldn’t transform, nor could he sleep apparently, for much was made in the last third of the book regarding the consecrated dirt he brought from Transylvania, and how he could only rest with it.
And speaking of vampire lore, I have to say this: For since I read it, I had hoped somehow that it was an editor’s mistake, a chip in the printing press, or some otherwise mistranslation (maybe the original Dracula was in Romanian?). But seriously, Sacred…Wafer? Not water? For unless Van Helsing produces a water balloon filled with the stuff in the last 30 pages, I’m to understand that for all this time even other authors retelling the story of Dracula thought the idea of a magic anti-vampire cookie to be a silly as I do? Sure, there is precedent, I’m sure its not a box of Oreos that Van Helsing brought from Amsterdam but probably similar to the communion wafer of Catholocism. But why not use the wine?? The symbolism is there already! Its red, the the “blood” of Christ, this is a vampire novel, its Count Dracula…why not Sacred Water?? That was just really odd…
Speaking of blood, I’m no doctor and I don’t know if Bram Stoker is too, but I winced a little inside when Van Helsing performed 4 blood transfusions for Lucy without checking blood types or rH balance. Good thing for her all of the men were type O!
Something for the Dope; on page 188, it refers to the Count and his “teeming millions”. Is that were Cecil got the term? Somebody ask him!
I know this book came out a while ago, and things were different then, but it was still to me an unnecessary evasion of routine writing when Stoker just would not name the gender of children. In all instances I can remember, children were referred to as “it”. “Its sick” or “its injured” or “protect it” is fine when you’re talking about a cat, but even in an era where perhaps people live by their creeds and that children should be seen and not heard, it is still, to me, a jarring experience that reminded me I’m reading a book. Why not just throw in a ‘he’ or ‘she’? Would that have been so hard? Even if their genders matters little, for such a typical thing, it is worse to remove it and draw attention than to simply abide by the rule. Or maybe Stoker hated children and this book was simultaneously his way of scaring them into never sleeping again and insulting the ones who survive the nightmare unscathed
So! Dracula did have 3 brides, that wasn’t just made up claptrap to stuff 3 actresses into corsets! Now I know!
Lastly, because I’m still unfinished with the book, I hope the mystery of the patient Renfield would be resolved with good speed. The madman’s rantings were devoid of information, though he referred to who else but the Count as Master, but his behaviors ran unexplained and his devotion baffling. Were all his accounts to warn Seward sincere? If so where does his loyalties lie? If it was a craft of his Master’s, then why the change of heart? Or was that yet another trick? And why the need for the Count to kill him? If he count not help anymore as a man, then leave him to rot in his prison. I liked the mystery that the character gave, but not the resolution. Maybe someone can explain.
After lunch, I may have more to say about the ending. I cannot envision such a great book ending in anything less than a satisfying climax, and that will surely overshadow whatever grub I mean to eat as sustenance.
