Dracula or, So Totally About Mina, OMG, Did You Hear About Her?

So this week I read Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker, which, I'm gonna level with you, is one of my favorite books of all time. It is, of course, the most important vampire book ever written--the most famous, the most adapted, and the most beloved of the genre. It is so famous that we encounter the same problems with it as we did with Frankenstein: we know "the story" so well that we neglect the novel.

But the story of Dracula isn't quite what we expect it to be. Even Nosferatu, the first film adaptation (even as bootlegged as it was) changes, subtracts, and re-imagines what the novel is about. The vampiric "rules" as we understand them, don't apply to Dracula. So every time that he appears in later works, he must be dealt with; in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he's adept a gypsy magic, in other works, he's just ancient.

There's a whole list of issues that Dracula brings up: the first, and arguably most accessible, is the issues with invasion and foreignness. We have the invasion of the Oriental danger--it's no accident that Dracula is from Eastern Europe, i.e., THE EAST--fought off by our stalwart and trusty Englishmen.

Then, we have issues of gender in Victorian, and arguably contemporary, society. Mina is ignored by the "big brave men" and finds herself under attack by Dracula--even though she's the one transcribing the damn novel.

Finally, we have issues of sexuality. The contemporary understanding of sexuality--Freud--leads the reader to some very awkward conclusions about Dracula's method of drinking--and sharing--blood. Mina's very erotically-charged encounter with Dracula makes for a lot of intellectual fodder.

All right, for serious lastly, Dracula remains one of the most pop cultural vampires. Why? The Victorians read the book as a purely adventure story, yet modern (and some contemporary) readers recognized the novel as a work of "literature". And even as the novel is read as literature, it enters the mainstream. Why? For one, it is a better telling of the Carmilla story (although, sadly, without lesbians), i.e., Overcoming the Monster. For another, Dracula's sexiness [even though he is sooo unsexy] calls out to both the Victorian sensibility and the Postmodern sensibility--that is, the era of Science is a fan of the un-scientific.

So, as a finale of sorts, next week, we will continue our exploits with Mina in Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999), which is a graphic novel starring many of our Victorian (and Gothic!) heroes,

The Vampyre and Carmilla, or We've Finally Gotten to Vampires. Geez That Took Forever. I Mean Really.

So this week I read two novellas about that most famed abhuman figure, the vampire. Polidori's The Vampyre (1819) is a literary relative to Frankenstein and both it and le Fanu's Carmilla (1872) are, obviously, ancestors to Stoker's Dracula. What I find most fascinating about the two works is the way in which each takes the time to explicitly spell out what, exactly, a vampire is. I mean, they obviously aren't new, per se, but Polidori and le Fanu are taking a figure of folklore and distilling it into a literary figure. Reading from a modern perspective, I'm again struck by how un-ironic the presentations are. I mean, yes, each vampire book spells out exactly what kind of vampire we're dealing with, but at least Polidori is making history with his description. From that moment on, we all know what a vampire is.

Furthermore, I'm also thinking about the very different way that these two works treat women in comparison to Dracula. Here, the women are again be acted on rather than acting. It feels like we're backsliding, even though we aren't, simply because we've just read Braddon and Alcott. Clearly, the discussion of the New Woman wasn't all one sided.

Speaking of gender, the discussion of sexuality presented in the two works is also fascinating, given that vampires are often analyzed as metaphors for sex. Carmilla's sapphism is especially interesting in the context of a Dracula/Jonathan subtext. If we were to explore vampires as the sexual Other, there's plenty to go on. The sexual-predatory nature of Lord Ruthven is clearly followed in other vampire fiction, i.e., Lestat, Angel, Edward, Dracula. And the use of the vampire as the Byronic hero (or villain) is well documented also.

So, things that these sire texts teach us about vampires: drinking blood with pointy teeth, damsels in distress, ennui and languidness, decapitation, tombs, sleeping in blood, crazy professor guy, aristocratic, shape shifting, moving through walls, etc. The entirety of vampire fiction rests on these two texts as foundation. The fact that Twilight moves us so far away from these traditional aspects is only possible in a postmodern literary world.

A Long Fatal Love Chase, or It's Jane All the Way Down

So this week I read A Long Fatal Love Chase (1995) by Louisa May Alcott, famed writer of Little Women. In regards to this class, this novel is unique in many ways from the other novels that we're reading. First, it is an American novel, though American in the style of Henry James, and second, this novel was published for the first time in the 1990s.

In regards to other novels, however, Love Chase is hardly unique. There are great similarities to Jane Eyre in terms of the novels content--the criticism of the Byronic Hero, the theme of bigamy, and the feminism embodied by the protagonist. The constant flight and chase seems to parallel Jane's flight in the middle of her novel, as does the relationship with the priest (or the priest-like figure of St. John). There are, however, striking differences between the two novels. For one, this novel is a tragedy, ending in the death of our protagonist. There is no redemption allowed for the Byronic Hero--here, unlike Rochester, playing antagonist--and Tempest remains a selfish monster to the end. In this respect, Alcott seems to be calling on the characterization of Heathcliff--perhaps positing, in the way similar to fan fiction, "What if Jane had met Heathcliff instead?"

The striking feminism of the novel is also, at least partly, due to Jane's influence. For all the novel's faults, Alcott gives us an active, round protagonist that does things, rather than having things done to her. The constant leaving, the willingness to put principle over pleasure marks Rosamond as Jane's literary sister. This marks Rosamond as exhibiting characteristics of the Byronic Heroine: not content to be merely persecuted, as in Udolpho, nor locked away as a madwoman, even metaphorically, as in Jane Eyre. Rather, Rosamond occupies a characterization that mixes parts of the two, while adding a great deal of agency, much like, again, Jane does.

The religious aspect of the novel is also, arguably, more pronounced than in Jane Eyre. While Jane does believe in God, I'd be hard-pressed to call her a religious person, whereas a great deal of Rosamond's motivation is the belief that she should do as God would want. Rosamond acts from a religious impulse while Jane acts from one of personal pride. The equation of Tempest with a Satan figure, while fairly heavy-handed on the part of the author, underscores both Rosamond's motivation and the Gothic tone of the work.

All right, so next week we're reading two books: Polidori's The Vampyre (main character based on Byron) and le Fanu's Carmilla (lesbians! vampires!), and we return to the supernatural elements that have been rather under-represented since Frankenstein.

Lady Audley's Secret, or The Byronic Heroine in the Madhouse

All right. We need to start by stating that Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon is one of the best novels I’ve read in the preceding year. Braddon has definitely earned her place next to the Brontes and Dickens, and the fact that she is under-read is a testament to the unbalanced nature of the traditional Western Canon. It is a fabulous read.

That said, the novel does remain problematic for multiple reason that call out for discussion. First of these is the treatment of madness. We haven’t much discussed madness in this blog heretofore, so we’ll need to become serious for a moment. The appellation of insanity has no place in the psychologist’s office; it is a meaningless, legal term that does not act as a true barometer of a person’s ability to interact on a societal level. That said, Lady Audley does exhibit several sociopathic characteristics which may have necessitated her confinement in the masion de santé; that’s as may be. But the way in which Braddon characterizes her confinement is incredibly problematic, i.e., that she must be sequestered in order to protect society; I’d like to see a man in a similar situation be so treated.

Furthermore, Lady Audley’s character reflects certain classic elements of the Byronic Hero; so much so that I feel it fully justifiable to call her a Byronic Heroine, along the lines of Jane and Cathy. She is devious, secretive, with a dark past, ravishingly beautiful, possibly or partially mad, a bigamist (Rochester) and finally sort of evil (Heathcliff). Her actions, meanwhile, are no worse than theirs are; none of them directly kill another, for example. The way that the text treats her, however, seems somewhat misogynistic.

That said, I’d be hard-pressed to call this work anti-feminist. Yes, we have woman as our antagonist [if we posit that Robert is our protagonist] but the language that Robert uses in regards to women, the fully-fleshed characterization of the women, and the neutrality that the narrator maintains while Lady Audley enters the madhouse, all speak to the (possibly half-hearted) feminist elements of the text. Yes, the treatment of women in this novel is incredibly complex.

Our insight into the character of Robert, meanwhile, labels him as less of a Byronic Hero and more akin to a Pathetic or Anti Hero. I mean, the narrator has no compunctions about calling out his shiftlessness or laziness, yet he is fully prepared to act when given a good enough reason. Braddon has a talent for characterization.

All right. Next week, we’ll be discussing Louisa May Alcott (of Little Women Fame) and her work A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866/1995).

The Monk: A Romance, or Satan?!

So to start off this week's discussion of Matthew Gregory "Monk" Lewis's The Monk: A Romance (1796), we have an interesting fact: this novel was written while Lewis was still 19, in less than three months. Interesting, yes? Especially when you consider that, unlike the two previous novels of this course, The Monk has some very interesting (and literary) things to say. First, there's the very beginning of the novel; rather than haphazardly leaping into a death (I'm looking at you, Walpole!) the novel gives time to establish its characters before being horrible to them. Conversely, unlike Radcliffe's doorstopper, Lewis begins the novel right in the middle of the action--no Victorian wasting disease in sight.


Furthermore, we return to the authorial justification that we saw at the beginning of Otranto; this time, in the mid-book. Lewis whines about the difficulty implicit in writing a book--the way that each reader "judges" the quality of the work, etc--through Alphonso explaining the "thousand mortifications" that an author faces. This short passage of the novel is interesting in light of the self-parodying aspect of the Gothic novel.


I also found the treatment of the supernatural in this novel to be very interesting. Even given that the main (tragic?) hero is a priest (and minor characters act as clergy) the hugely Catholic nature of the novel is staggering. The Spanish setting is not incidental to this aspect of the novel, but the Bleeding Nun and Wandering Jew episode are extremely unexpected, given the previous two novels. Of course, they only act as a lead in to the arrival of Lucifer and the use of witchcraft later. They serve to strengthen the Suspension of Disbelief that is so necessary for a Gothic work (perhaps more so than other works?) to function--if ghosts, then Wandering Jews, if Wandering Jews, then Lucifer. What's very interesting to me is that there is no definite "good" supernatural to balance out the bad. If the Great Mogul is the Wandering Jew (and as the narrator doesn't comment to the affirmative, we merely speculate) then Jesus would logically have existed, but where is he? Where is the angel to lead away from temptation? The lack of the God side of the morality binary is certainly a play with the "morality tale" that Lewis is referencing--an interesting one, given the severity of the Catholicism.


The treatment of women, meanwhile, is ambiguous at best. Each female character acts more as a device--Antonia, our persecuted "heroine"? She's one-note in her innocence, which eventually kills her. Matilda? transvestic witch. Interesting on paper, but her all consuming love of Ambrosio is essentially her entire characterization. Oh, and she's Lucifer's emissary. A seductive Eve figure. Leonella? Flighty, vain gossip. Interestingly, the character Agnes, for me, read as more of a heroine figure, given that the main narrative is a morality tragedy. However, she's a pregnant nun who wants to marry Alphonso. In fact, the best female characters seem to be Elvira and Marguerite--but only for the way they are treated by men. I can believe a 19 year old boy wrote this novel.


The way that The Monk influences its literary children--its contribution to the Gothic tropes--are fairly numerous. The evil priest character is nearly ubiquitous after this point. The lack of divinity is also apparent--a Gothic universe is one of an uncaring (or at least un-intervening) God. Ambrosio's contribution to the Byronic Hero is almost immeasurable, though I would more likely characterize him as Villain Protagonist. Also: a Gothic novel with some actual literary merit? I would say so. The questioning aspect of the novel--is there a god?--definitely allows for a more nuanced interpretation of the work.


So, next week, I'll be reviewing Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein (1823). Published in France! And I'll also look at the Hammer Horror version of Frankenstein and how it relates to the actual novel.