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sophia_sol) wrote2022-05-12 10:04 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2022-05-12 10:04 pm
Dracula, by Bram Stoker
This book has been on my mind for a while to give a try to, since genarti said she thought I might enjoy it, and then Dracula Daily happened to tumblr and I signed up for it. And then a few days into it I was like "actually I don't like the slow route, I need to read this all at once" so then I did! A fascinating experience. I liked it a lot more than Carmilla, which I read relatively recently and found enormously boring. Dracula has more interest in developing characters, and in having a plot, and so forth, so despite Dracula being far longer, I found it the easier read of the two. (I'm still sad about Carmilla not being as appealing to me as I wanted it to be!)
Dracula is one of those books that's had a perhaps outsized impact on popular culture. A lot of vampire tropes started here! But living in a culture having been shaped by Dracula, it's amazing to see in the original how very long it takes to get to the vampire reveal, since vampires weren't a known staple of the supernatural genre. You'd never hold off the "he's a vampire" so long in a modern vampire book!
Due to the pop culture pervasiveness, one thinks one knows what to expect from the book even before having read it. And....one would be wrong. Or at least I was! I've never actually directly consumed any Dracula adaptations before, and it turns out I knew basically nothing about any of the plot or the characters.
For example, I had the impression the entire book took place in Transylvania? Instead of that just being where the Count is from, with much of the action happening in England, since the entire point of what happens turns out to be that Dracula is trying to expand his range of influence into other countries. Look, the tradition of gothic fiction is that the big old looming house with the dangerous man who's master of it is where the story all takes place! But Dracula's castle is only present at the beginning and at the very end.
Also I knew basically nothing about: Lucy, Mina, Quincy, Seward, Van Helsing, Arthur, Renfield. So there was a lot to discover for me there. SOME of these character I liked better than others.
(Okay I THOUGHT I knew Van Helsing but I was wrong. He's not a hardened and dedicated and ~cool~ vampire hunter, he's an overeducated old man who loves the sound of his voice and thinks he knows everything about everything, and vampires just happening to be one of the things he knows about. And every time he gave extensive speeches with lots of infodumping and yet somehow still keeping important information from other characters, my eyes were basically rolling out of my head. I wish he'd been the one to nobly die at the end instead of Quincy.)
As well as disliking Van Helsing, I found everything about Seward's part of the plot enormously uncomfortable. 19th century understandings of mental illness were.....not good..........and Seward as the head of an insane asylum got to live into everything that Victorians might have thought reasonable and admirable for a man in his position, and that I find NOPE.
I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked Jonathan and Mina and Lucy, they're all charmingly earnest young people doing their best, and was so disappointed when Lucy died relatively early on! Lucy and Mina's friendship was so great!
I was also charmed by how focused on logistics the whole plot was. It was all about "here's how to analyse the information available and carefully plan and then enact the correct actions to defeat Dracula" rather than being about exciting action and fight scenes like one would expect from a modern narrative about a plucky band of people attempting to defeat a great evil. It was great.
There's probably lots of other things one can say about things this book is doing, eg what it's saying about class, and its xenophobia, and it's definitely saying SOMETHING about gender though I can't quite decide what, and this book is enough of a classic that I'm sure many words have been written on these and other topics and I don't think I feel qualified to try to analyse it all myself.
But I'm glad to have read it, and I'm going to enjoy continuing to follow Dracula Daily and the memes and jokes and historical facts that will continue to be put in front of my eyes on tumblr as tens of thousands of people all make their way through Dracula together!
genarti said she thought I might enjoy it, and then Dracula Daily happened to tumblr and I signed up for it. And then a few days into it I was like "actually I don't like the slow route, I need to read this all at once" so then I did! A fascinating experience. I liked it a lot more than Carmilla, which I read relatively recently and found enormously boring. Dracula has more interest in developing characters, and in having a plot, and so forth, so despite Dracula being far longer, I found it the easier read of the two. (I'm still sad about Carmilla not being as appealing to me as I wanted it to be!) Dracula is one of those books that's had a perhaps outsized impact on popular culture. A lot of vampire tropes started here! But living in a culture having been shaped by Dracula, it's amazing to see in the original how very long it takes to get to the vampire reveal, since vampires weren't a known staple of the supernatural genre. You'd never hold off the "he's a vampire" so long in a modern vampire book!
Due to the pop culture pervasiveness, one thinks one knows what to expect from the book even before having read it. And....one would be wrong. Or at least I was! I've never actually directly consumed any Dracula adaptations before, and it turns out I knew basically nothing about any of the plot or the characters.
For example, I had the impression the entire book took place in Transylvania? Instead of that just being where the Count is from, with much of the action happening in England, since the entire point of what happens turns out to be that Dracula is trying to expand his range of influence into other countries. Look, the tradition of gothic fiction is that the big old looming house with the dangerous man who's master of it is where the story all takes place! But Dracula's castle is only present at the beginning and at the very end.
Also I knew basically nothing about: Lucy, Mina, Quincy, Seward, Van Helsing, Arthur, Renfield. So there was a lot to discover for me there. SOME of these character I liked better than others.
(Okay I THOUGHT I knew Van Helsing but I was wrong. He's not a hardened and dedicated and ~cool~ vampire hunter, he's an overeducated old man who loves the sound of his voice and thinks he knows everything about everything, and vampires just happening to be one of the things he knows about. And every time he gave extensive speeches with lots of infodumping and yet somehow still keeping important information from other characters, my eyes were basically rolling out of my head. I wish he'd been the one to nobly die at the end instead of Quincy.)
As well as disliking Van Helsing, I found everything about Seward's part of the plot enormously uncomfortable. 19th century understandings of mental illness were.....not good..........and Seward as the head of an insane asylum got to live into everything that Victorians might have thought reasonable and admirable for a man in his position, and that I find NOPE.
I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked Jonathan and Mina and Lucy, they're all charmingly earnest young people doing their best, and was so disappointed when Lucy died relatively early on! Lucy and Mina's friendship was so great!
I was also charmed by how focused on logistics the whole plot was. It was all about "here's how to analyse the information available and carefully plan and then enact the correct actions to defeat Dracula" rather than being about exciting action and fight scenes like one would expect from a modern narrative about a plucky band of people attempting to defeat a great evil. It was great.
There's probably lots of other things one can say about things this book is doing, eg what it's saying about class, and its xenophobia, and it's definitely saying SOMETHING about gender though I can't quite decide what, and this book is enough of a classic that I'm sure many words have been written on these and other topics and I don't think I feel qualified to try to analyse it all myself.
But I'm glad to have read it, and I'm going to enjoy continuing to follow Dracula Daily and the memes and jokes and historical facts that will continue to be put in front of my eyes on tumblr as tens of thousands of people all make their way through Dracula together!
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And let's not even get started on Seward. :V
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Yeah, this is one of the most fun things about seeing someone read the book for the first time--they think they know what's going to happen, but they do not!
found everything about Seward's part of the plot enormously uncomfortable. 19th century understandings of mental illness were.....not good..........and Seward as the head of an insane asylum got to live into everything that Victorians might have thought reasonable and admirable for a man in his position, and that I find NOPE.
YEAH.
I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked Jonathan and Mina and Lucy, they're all charmingly earnest young people doing their best, and was so disappointed when Lucy died relatively early on! Lucy and Mina's friendship was so great!
Agreed!
and it's definitely saying SOMETHING about gender though I can't quite decide what,
To me, one of the most interesting things about the book is that it's easy to read it as incredibly misogynistic...or proto-feminist. Both are reasonable readings!
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YES, exactly!!!! it's so weird and interesting! and it makes me want to know more about Stoker's opinions about women so that I can know what he INTENDED at least
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