Welcome back for another post from the Monday Inspirations series. Today’s post is by Diana Gordon. Diana has contributed two other posts to this series – one on re-reading old favorites and the other on To Kill a Mockingbird. You can check out other posts here.
Listen to them–the children of the night. What music they make!–Bram Stoker, Dracula
I read Bram Stoker’s Dracula for the first time about 10 years ago, and it’s still one of my favorite classic horror books. I studied Victorian and Edwardian fiction for years, and I have a real soft spot for Gothic literature and monster literature. I’m always amazed at how some of our most prolific and enduring monsters were created during the Victorian period.
Dracula is, of course, a story about a vampire, of Count Dracula’s meeting with Jonathan Harker and its fall-out. It is the story of a monster who is overcome. But it is also a story of science and magic, superstition and knowledge. And the story is told in such a way that it reflects modern notions of perspective, as well. Rather than a strictly linear narrative with a single first- or third-person narrator, Dracula is told through a series of perspectives and different documents including journal entries, letters, and telegrams.
Stoker’s era was full of new developments. Telegrams themselves were fairly new. Daguerreotypes were introduced in 1839, and by 1889, we had handheld cameras. Postage stamps were introduced, and the postage industry was standardized in a way that it had not been. Steam power made international trade and travel more possible than ever before. Anesthetics began to be used in medicine. New understandings of how diseases spread led to developments in surgical techniques, disease treatment, and sanitation. These developments created a world in which belief, suspicion, and science co-existed.
Penny dreadfuls (19th century publications that were serialized over a period of weeks/months, generally gory and sensational and inexpensively produced) reflected the growing literacy of the populace and new technologies that made book production and dissemination cheaper and easier. And penny dreadfuls inspired some of the most recognizable fictional characters; they were especially influential to the Gothic genre, inspiring characters such as Stoker’s Dracula and Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Those monsters endure in part because we still need them. We still worry about technology and science, and we’re still finding the line between superstition and reality. Technology and science are rapidly shifting the way we think about society and about the world itself; the internet has changed the way we conceptualize place and communication; and we’re becoming increasingly aware of the pressures that we’re putting on our planet. We’re in a time of upheaval, a time when social structures are changing–as they were when Dracula and Frankenstein were written.
We’re also in a time when women are facing many dangers, despite the progress we have made. Female sexuality is a big topic in Dracula–it is the driving force of much of the novel. There’s very much a Madonna/whore complex in the novel, with Lucy Westenra exemplifying what happens when a woman is no longer pure–after Dracula succeeds in turning her into a vampire vixen, the men in the novel decide that destroying her is the only way to save her purity and goodness–and Mina as the object of their continued fight against Dracula–a fight for her purity and chastity. The three vampire women in Dracula’s castle represent a corruption of female sexuality as they throw themselves at him before being chastised by Dracula.
In so many ways, Dracula speaks to modern issues and modern concerns. And the book is also downright scary, which makes it a perfect October read!
Diana is a native Mississippian, a nerd, a bookworm, a feminist, a mother, a teacher, a worrier, and a social media junkie. She is the administrator of the blog Part Time Monster, and you can follow her on Twitter @parttimemonster or find her on Facebook at facebook.com/parttimemonster. She lives in New Orleans with her son, her husband, and one very energetic terrier.
If you’d like to learn more on the origins of vampires that inspired Bram Stroker, go check out my post on Slavic vampires on Part-Time Monster.
I love the parallels with the issues we face in the modern world, Diana. Makes the book current. It also shows that real classics are timeless. Great way to start a week!
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Thank you! 🙂
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I still have to read Dracula and Frankenstein, I have a copy of each book somewhere, so excuses to not rad them are limited.
Like Gulara I like how you drew parallels with our world.
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Thanks!
You should definitely give them both a read. They’re both still really current and terrifying in a lot of ways.
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I started this one last year and I really hope to finish it before October 31. It is amazing how scary books can be.
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It is! You’d think that books wouldn’t have as much power over our emotions as they do, since they’re not tactile, but words are powerful.
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That’s why I love Words so much.
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I just reread Dracula last month for the umpteenth time. Renfield and Dr. Helsing are my favorite characters. I still shudder over the tragedy of the 1990 movie adaptation of it starring Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder.
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I didn’t even know there was an adaptation starring those two.
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Oh yes, in 1992 I think. And you don’t want to watch it.
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I’ll take your word for it.
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Yeah, that’s a pretty awful version of it. Makes me especially sad, because I quite like most of the cast, but the movie was just not well done.
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I feel the same. Just wish I can erase the memory of it. Because it was that bad, I still haven’t watched the Dracula retelling that came out last year, “Dracula Untold.”
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It’s *awful*. Might be even worse than the Coppola directed one from the 90s.
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Guess, I dodged a bullet.
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I’ve never read Dracula, but I’ll be putting it on hold at the library. I didn’t realize how timeless the themes were re: women. Sounds like an engrossing read.
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It really is, and the way that the point-of-view shifts is a pretty inventive way of making a lot of critiques that the book makes.
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As a fellow Dracula fan, I’m glad to read about your experiences with the original. I found it inspiring, too!
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Thank you! It’s definitely one of my favorites. I remember being so shocked when I read it for the first time and realized how current a lot of the themes and ideas still are…It was a fun moment.
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It’s one of those books I never got to. Perhaps…!
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Oh you should! It’s absolutely worth the read.
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And it is only 99 cents in the Kindle store!
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Great post! This is really interesting. Love the historical context here. (I’ve never read Dracula but perhaps I will try now.) Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this.
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Thank you! I think that historical contexts for books are important, because they help us create some sense of continuity that is more than just facts and dates.
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Yes! Absolutely. 🙂
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I loved the story, much deeper than I expected. 🙂
Anna from Elements of Writing
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It really is—I’m not sure I was expecting something with such nuances when I first read the novel, but there’s a lot to it.
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Really enjoyed the historical context you gave here! It’s been years since I’ve read Dracula (and Frankenstein) and loved both.
It sounds like I’m also in the minority re: the Coppola movie, which I enjoyed. Keanu’s vanishing accent was a bit …. amusing, but I really enjoyed the music in that movie.
I’ll be sure to read your post on Part Time Monster!
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Thanks! 🙂
The Coppola movie was just missing something for me—and I had really high hopes because of all the talent involved with the film.
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