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(SFF Bingo): Dracula, by Bram Stoker
Nov. 25th, 2022 11:36 amI tried to get involved with the "Dracula Daily" liveblog on Tumblr, but while the real-time conceit/reorganization was cool, the pacing didn't really work for me. So I just sprinted through it after the fact so I could understand the memes everyone was talking about. ;)
I had not seen any of the adaptations so I was not familiar with any of this. The only thing I knew was that "van Helsing" = "good guy, vampire hunter" and "Renfield" = "evil human who works with the vampires but is not himself a vampire," and the only reason I know that was from...online werewolf games. And the generic "vampires are scared of garlic" stuff where I wasn't, and still am not, sure whether this was the trope maker or just the trope codifier.
Dracula is an epistolary novel that knows it's an epistolary novel. We begin with the diary of Jonathan Harker, a British man who's recently passed the bar exam and is very proud of it, going to Transylvania to help Count Dracula purchase some property in England. Oops. Later, Dracula winds up in the seaside town of Whitby, England, where by a spectacular coincidence Jonathan's fiance Mina is visiting her extremely close friend Lucy ("I love you with all the moods and tenses of the verb..." Okay.) and Lucy's three (!) love interests, all of whom propose to her in a matter of hours. (I don't think there's ever any IC reason given for why Dracula just happens to wind up here?) Mina and Dr. Seward, one of the jilted suitors, take turns writing in their diaries as, unbeknownst to them, Dracula has bitten Lucy and made her one of his victims. Dr. Seward knows something is up, so he writes to his mentor/teacher from Amsterdam, Dr. Van Helsing, who comes and tries to investigate the case. Sadly, despite everyone's best efforts, Lucy dies of vampirism. Even worse, she comes back from the dead and starts biting young children. So Van Helsing has to provide evidence to her actual fiance, Arthur, as well as the other men that something is up. With the help of garlic, crucifixes, and a stake, they're able to defeat vampire-Lucy once and for all and ensure that her soul passes on in peace.
Meanwhile, Jonathan escapes from Dracula's castle, traumatized by his experiences. When creepy things start happening, Mina reads his diary and the group works to put the pieces together, by typing up copies of the previous documentation so that everyone has access to the story as revealed in letters. Everyone is impressed with Mina's shorthand knowledge. But oh no, we can't have women going into danger to fight the vampire! So we leave Mina behind to...get bitten. The group destroys Dracula's London hideouts, but he escapes back to Transylvania, so they have to follow him and it goes back and forth between "we must share information, we are all on the same team" and "Mina could be mind-controlled by Dracula so we can't tell her anything."
So some of it is frustrating, because all these men are in love with Lucy, but it's not enough to save her. Then Mina gets bitten, and it's basically starting the whole "we are so chivalrous that we will fight for the good and pure woman" thing over again. Like, at least do things a little differently! Also, we almost never get Van Helsing's POV, and he's the vampire expert, so a lot of it is just dramatic irony--the readers know something's up, but the characters don't. At one point Van Helsing even lampshades this to Seward, like, "You've had so many clues, both from the evidence you've seen and from me, don't you realize what the deal is?"
The end is kind of an annoying timeskip--"don't worry, both the young guys who survived are married now" (if you read it fast it sounds like 'to each other'!) Like, the guy who was engaged to Lucy just gets married to a nameless character because Epilogue Heterosexuality? Meh.
I enjoyed the humor, which was kind of Dickensian in a dry way. Like, Jonathan is such a big deal because he's been to ~law school~, and the contrast between him and the working-class people is a running joke--"hauling coffins around is such hard and laborious work that we tend to develop a thirst, perhaps you could give us some financial remuneration to assist in this quest" ie "buy me a beer, dude, and we'll talk." There's a part about "if you want to break into a house, don't just do it violently, act like you're a lord and ask a locksmith to help you access your property--the police will figuratively, and literally, open doors for you!" which was not quite Hugo-scale, but still funny. There's a morbid elderly fellow from Whitby whose accent nobody understands half the time, including the characters, and a man who drops his H's and then hypercorrects. Renfield is a male version of the old lady who swallowed a fly; first he eats flies, then spiders, then birds, and is working his way up to cats.
The characters point out "yeah it's sure great to have money"--there are no bad guys (except maybe Renfield, and it's not clear how much he is a victim of circumstance), just loving and good and grand and heroic fellows being virtuous. Which was nice, but makes things relatively easy!
The book is quite explicitly Christian--vampirism is a fate worse than death, you need to be killed off for real in order for your soul to return to heaven where it belongs. Even more, it's about Catholicism versus Protestantism. In the beginning, Jonathan is dismissive of the mainlanders' "superstitions" like crucifixes and the rosary. But it's Van Helsing who's able to come to the rescue and say "okay, you need a crucifix, you need the sacred power contained in the communion wafers." (In general, Catholics make a bigger deal about how, when the priest says the words of institution, the wafers/bread are fundamentally transformed and become the body of the crucified and resurrected Christ, whereas Protestants are more handwavey about "eh maybe it's symbolic, whatever.") However, the Protestant English characters still have their own ritual in the liturgy--Mina says "we found an English pastor who was able to perform the marriage ceremony even way out in Hungary," and "I'd appreciate it if someone read the Burial Service for me while I was alive, just in case I become a vampire." Van Helsing mentions that "oh of course every country has their own vampires in history, Ancient Greece, Rome, India, China..." and I'm curious what methods they use to fight against them. Even if you believe that Christianity is a uniquely true and meaningful religion, that nothing really expresses God's love and hope in the same way the cross and the Eucharist do...maybe garlic is a cultural universal?
On a related note, it's also interesting that Dracula has a lot of second language anxiety. He complains to Jonathan about "I still speak English with an accent, I'll never sound like a native speaker," and Jonathan is like "you're fluent, your syntax is perfect" but that's not enough. Felt contemporary. In contrast, Van Helsing speaks with a very thick accent, and nobody is fazed by him.
Sometimes you have tropes you love that run up against the line between "very hot" and "squick." For me, Dracula mostly stayed on the hot side of the line, but I can imagine it being weird. The trope in question is "I love you, and you love me" (in this case romantically, but could be platonically), "so I trust you and I'm asking you to kill me if need be to spare me from a fate worse than death." "Uh..." "Look, by definition, death is preferable to a fate worse than death." Lucy dies and un-dies before she can have that conversation with anyone, unfortunately, so Van Helsing has to do it for her: "look, who loves her enough to do this...okay I know you all do, bad question, who would she have chosen." Mina is lucid enough to have the talk with Jonathan, who's hesitant. But she points out "where there's life there's hope, I'm not gonna ask you to preemptively kill me before we set out on our quest, that would be bad mkay." Which is also a great point!
"'Euthanasia' is an excellent and a comforting word! I am grateful to whoever invented it." Seward the linguistics nerd, but also kind of yikes. Also, definitely not Jonathan's reaction, either.
(The trope works here because we know that vampirism is terrible, undead Lucy goes around sucking the blood of small children and trying to kill them too. Very bad! Van Helsing cites some academic authority to say "yeah when you're a vampire your soul is lost to God, only once you become post-undead can you go to heaven, for sure a fate worse than normal death." I like this trope when it's in the context of something supernatural or torture by human enemies that we know is bad. When it gets into RL-adjacent disabilities or illnesses is where it becomes a Nope for me.)
And the characters (Mina particularly, since she has firsthand experience, but everyone else too) take this seriously enough that they kill off all of Dracula's other sidekicks, as well as the guy himself, and see brief looks of peace on their faces! Even Dracula isn't outside God's reach of love and redemption, once he's no longer undead! I appreciate the consistency here.
Some other random fun facts:
"It seems to me that the further east you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?" - Jonathan complaining about those crazy Europeans and their ways. George Orwell has a very similar passage in "Homage to Catalonia."
The "if you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake, pinch yourself" trope is already common, Jonathan references it as if everyone would know what that means.
A couple other Hugo parallels/coincidences besides the classism; Dracula as the one competent leader among peasants reminded me of Lantenac, and the cry of a woman pleading for her child (who he's kidnapped) then sounded like Michelle Flechard. Unfortunately Dracula is, by this point, much less human than Lantenac. :(
Lucy's love life. "Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?" And Mina: "Some of the 'New Women' writers will some day start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing and accepting. But I suppose the New Woman won't condescend in future to accept; she will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will make of it, too!"
Van Helsing speaking in chess allusions ("Check to the King!")
There were a couple Tumblr posts about autistic icon Mina. "You forget...that I am the train fiend. At home in Exeter I always used to make up in the timetables, so as to be helpful to my husband. I found it so useful sometimes, that I always make a study of the timetables now." Train fiend!
And her real name is "Wilhelmina," hahaha.
Bingo: I was planning on using it for Name in the Title. Could also be Standalone, No Ifs Ands or Buts. As I look at the list, though, I see that it also works for "Shapeshifters," which is something I was still looking for, and I think it'll be easier to browse for "name in title" than "shapeshifters." Yay for, um, being able to turn into bats!
I had not seen any of the adaptations so I was not familiar with any of this. The only thing I knew was that "van Helsing" = "good guy, vampire hunter" and "Renfield" = "evil human who works with the vampires but is not himself a vampire," and the only reason I know that was from...online werewolf games. And the generic "vampires are scared of garlic" stuff where I wasn't, and still am not, sure whether this was the trope maker or just the trope codifier.
Dracula is an epistolary novel that knows it's an epistolary novel. We begin with the diary of Jonathan Harker, a British man who's recently passed the bar exam and is very proud of it, going to Transylvania to help Count Dracula purchase some property in England. Oops. Later, Dracula winds up in the seaside town of Whitby, England, where by a spectacular coincidence Jonathan's fiance Mina is visiting her extremely close friend Lucy ("I love you with all the moods and tenses of the verb..." Okay.) and Lucy's three (!) love interests, all of whom propose to her in a matter of hours. (I don't think there's ever any IC reason given for why Dracula just happens to wind up here?) Mina and Dr. Seward, one of the jilted suitors, take turns writing in their diaries as, unbeknownst to them, Dracula has bitten Lucy and made her one of his victims. Dr. Seward knows something is up, so he writes to his mentor/teacher from Amsterdam, Dr. Van Helsing, who comes and tries to investigate the case. Sadly, despite everyone's best efforts, Lucy dies of vampirism. Even worse, she comes back from the dead and starts biting young children. So Van Helsing has to provide evidence to her actual fiance, Arthur, as well as the other men that something is up. With the help of garlic, crucifixes, and a stake, they're able to defeat vampire-Lucy once and for all and ensure that her soul passes on in peace.
Meanwhile, Jonathan escapes from Dracula's castle, traumatized by his experiences. When creepy things start happening, Mina reads his diary and the group works to put the pieces together, by typing up copies of the previous documentation so that everyone has access to the story as revealed in letters. Everyone is impressed with Mina's shorthand knowledge. But oh no, we can't have women going into danger to fight the vampire! So we leave Mina behind to...get bitten. The group destroys Dracula's London hideouts, but he escapes back to Transylvania, so they have to follow him and it goes back and forth between "we must share information, we are all on the same team" and "Mina could be mind-controlled by Dracula so we can't tell her anything."
So some of it is frustrating, because all these men are in love with Lucy, but it's not enough to save her. Then Mina gets bitten, and it's basically starting the whole "we are so chivalrous that we will fight for the good and pure woman" thing over again. Like, at least do things a little differently! Also, we almost never get Van Helsing's POV, and he's the vampire expert, so a lot of it is just dramatic irony--the readers know something's up, but the characters don't. At one point Van Helsing even lampshades this to Seward, like, "You've had so many clues, both from the evidence you've seen and from me, don't you realize what the deal is?"
The end is kind of an annoying timeskip--"don't worry, both the young guys who survived are married now" (if you read it fast it sounds like 'to each other'!) Like, the guy who was engaged to Lucy just gets married to a nameless character because Epilogue Heterosexuality? Meh.
I enjoyed the humor, which was kind of Dickensian in a dry way. Like, Jonathan is such a big deal because he's been to ~law school~, and the contrast between him and the working-class people is a running joke--"hauling coffins around is such hard and laborious work that we tend to develop a thirst, perhaps you could give us some financial remuneration to assist in this quest" ie "buy me a beer, dude, and we'll talk." There's a part about "if you want to break into a house, don't just do it violently, act like you're a lord and ask a locksmith to help you access your property--the police will figuratively, and literally, open doors for you!" which was not quite Hugo-scale, but still funny. There's a morbid elderly fellow from Whitby whose accent nobody understands half the time, including the characters, and a man who drops his H's and then hypercorrects. Renfield is a male version of the old lady who swallowed a fly; first he eats flies, then spiders, then birds, and is working his way up to cats.
The characters point out "yeah it's sure great to have money"--there are no bad guys (except maybe Renfield, and it's not clear how much he is a victim of circumstance), just loving and good and grand and heroic fellows being virtuous. Which was nice, but makes things relatively easy!
The book is quite explicitly Christian--vampirism is a fate worse than death, you need to be killed off for real in order for your soul to return to heaven where it belongs. Even more, it's about Catholicism versus Protestantism. In the beginning, Jonathan is dismissive of the mainlanders' "superstitions" like crucifixes and the rosary. But it's Van Helsing who's able to come to the rescue and say "okay, you need a crucifix, you need the sacred power contained in the communion wafers." (In general, Catholics make a bigger deal about how, when the priest says the words of institution, the wafers/bread are fundamentally transformed and become the body of the crucified and resurrected Christ, whereas Protestants are more handwavey about "eh maybe it's symbolic, whatever.") However, the Protestant English characters still have their own ritual in the liturgy--Mina says "we found an English pastor who was able to perform the marriage ceremony even way out in Hungary," and "I'd appreciate it if someone read the Burial Service for me while I was alive, just in case I become a vampire." Van Helsing mentions that "oh of course every country has their own vampires in history, Ancient Greece, Rome, India, China..." and I'm curious what methods they use to fight against them. Even if you believe that Christianity is a uniquely true and meaningful religion, that nothing really expresses God's love and hope in the same way the cross and the Eucharist do...maybe garlic is a cultural universal?
On a related note, it's also interesting that Dracula has a lot of second language anxiety. He complains to Jonathan about "I still speak English with an accent, I'll never sound like a native speaker," and Jonathan is like "you're fluent, your syntax is perfect" but that's not enough. Felt contemporary. In contrast, Van Helsing speaks with a very thick accent, and nobody is fazed by him.
Sometimes you have tropes you love that run up against the line between "very hot" and "squick." For me, Dracula mostly stayed on the hot side of the line, but I can imagine it being weird. The trope in question is "I love you, and you love me" (in this case romantically, but could be platonically), "so I trust you and I'm asking you to kill me if need be to spare me from a fate worse than death." "Uh..." "Look, by definition, death is preferable to a fate worse than death." Lucy dies and un-dies before she can have that conversation with anyone, unfortunately, so Van Helsing has to do it for her: "look, who loves her enough to do this...okay I know you all do, bad question, who would she have chosen." Mina is lucid enough to have the talk with Jonathan, who's hesitant. But she points out "where there's life there's hope, I'm not gonna ask you to preemptively kill me before we set out on our quest, that would be bad mkay." Which is also a great point!
"'Euthanasia' is an excellent and a comforting word! I am grateful to whoever invented it." Seward the linguistics nerd, but also kind of yikes. Also, definitely not Jonathan's reaction, either.
(The trope works here because we know that vampirism is terrible, undead Lucy goes around sucking the blood of small children and trying to kill them too. Very bad! Van Helsing cites some academic authority to say "yeah when you're a vampire your soul is lost to God, only once you become post-undead can you go to heaven, for sure a fate worse than normal death." I like this trope when it's in the context of something supernatural or torture by human enemies that we know is bad. When it gets into RL-adjacent disabilities or illnesses is where it becomes a Nope for me.)
And the characters (Mina particularly, since she has firsthand experience, but everyone else too) take this seriously enough that they kill off all of Dracula's other sidekicks, as well as the guy himself, and see brief looks of peace on their faces! Even Dracula isn't outside God's reach of love and redemption, once he's no longer undead! I appreciate the consistency here.
Some other random fun facts:
"It seems to me that the further east you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?" - Jonathan complaining about those crazy Europeans and their ways. George Orwell has a very similar passage in "Homage to Catalonia."
The "if you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake, pinch yourself" trope is already common, Jonathan references it as if everyone would know what that means.
A couple other Hugo parallels/coincidences besides the classism; Dracula as the one competent leader among peasants reminded me of Lantenac, and the cry of a woman pleading for her child (who he's kidnapped) then sounded like Michelle Flechard. Unfortunately Dracula is, by this point, much less human than Lantenac. :(
Lucy's love life. "Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?" And Mina: "Some of the 'New Women' writers will some day start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing and accepting. But I suppose the New Woman won't condescend in future to accept; she will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will make of it, too!"
Van Helsing speaking in chess allusions ("Check to the King!")
There were a couple Tumblr posts about autistic icon Mina. "You forget...that I am the train fiend. At home in Exeter I always used to make up in the timetables, so as to be helpful to my husband. I found it so useful sometimes, that I always make a study of the timetables now." Train fiend!
And her real name is "Wilhelmina," hahaha.
Bingo: I was planning on using it for Name in the Title. Could also be Standalone, No Ifs Ands or Buts. As I look at the list, though, I see that it also works for "Shapeshifters," which is something I was still looking for, and I think it'll be easier to browse for "name in title" than "shapeshifters." Yay for, um, being able to turn into bats!
