Chris: Hello Catherine and Andrew.

We are underway with Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I know it’s a literary classic with a legacy a mile long. But I am still going to start our monthlong discussion of the book with this perhaps unsurprising sentiment: HOLY SHIT THIS BOOK IS AWESOME. I’ve never read the book before, and at this point, 75 pages in, I am honestly surprised by how enjoyable the read is. We’ll unpack the book more and more as we go, but I just wanted to kick us off with some enthusiasm.

And, for readers, a very brief a recap: The majority of this week’s reading comes from the journals of Jonathan Harker, the lawyer sent to Castle Dracula to provide legal services to Count Dracula. Dracula is buying an estate in England, Carfax, and is using the legal firm of Jonathan Harker’s boss to conduct the transaction. When Jonathan arrives at Castle Dracula he finds a cordial Count, who welcomes Jonathan and serves his needs, only to lock him inside the castle and never let him go. With his time in the Castle, Jonathan discovers a few women who have their way with him in quite a bizarre, sexual encounter, and he sees Dracula sleeping in a coffin, and climbing head-first down the side of the castle.

We also meet Jonathan’s fiance Mina; Mina’s friend Lucy, and the three men vying for Lucy’s hand in marriage. One of whom, Dr. Seward, is overseeing an institution for the insane (basically, right?), where one patient, Renfield, keeps Dr. Seward occupied with his strange activities of collecting and feeding insects and animals to their predators.

Ok. So that’s what’s happening. Another way to say it, in this section, is that very little happens. Plot-wise, we’ve seen only small progressions. But Stoker’s brilliance, in my opinion, is in crafting scenes comprised of such small moments, each with so much significance and gravity that as a reader, I feel like I’m reading the key passage to the novel almost all the time. I’m a big-time underliner and note-taker and my pages are full of circled phrases, my margins are packed with comments. Everything seems crucial.

The structure might in part account for this. Moving from one person’s journals to another, to a letter from one to another, backwards and forwards in time (check those dates!) insures that readers are only ever getting one piece of any individual moment. Which adds to that sense of gravity. Stoker gives you just enough detail, but withholds enough explanation, to build the tension, or horror, or humor of a scene.

So when I read, in Chapter 2, of Jonathan’s first night with Count Dracula, I can’t help but think of how these small, half complete images and interactions will hold weight later. One my favorite moments in this section comes after Harker and Dracula finish their first meal. The men are sitting across from each other at the fireplace, and Jonathan is noticing the hair on the Count’s hands, his long fingernails, etc. Then, for some reason, Dracula leans over Harker and places his hands on Jonathan, because of which Jonathan “could not repress a shudder.” The Count notices, smiles, showing off his “protuberant teeth,” then “sat himself back down on his own side of the fireplace.” That’s it. They sit in silence, listening to the wolves howl.

Dracula is full of interactions like this. Half-complete scenes, necessarily one-sided (this is Jonathan’s journal, after all), and leaving me scribbling in my margins. In this instance it was: WHY DID DRACULA GET UP AND TOUCH JONATHON!?! That’s a reasonable question, right? This is their first night together. What the hell is going on? But there’s no resolution to this moment. It just passes.

There are literally hundreds of similar moments in the first 75 pages of this book. Moments that piece together a picture that’s incomplete but absolutely compelling. It’s all so strange (Seward offers Renfield a Kitten for his mad experiments), and scary (everything in Castle Dracula freaks me out), and funny (Lucy’s introduction is hilarious), and even quite sexy (the sisters encounter with Jonathan is just outrageously erotic fiction). I can’t express enough how much I’m enjoying this book so far.

Anyway. I could really go on and on but I’ll pass it over to you, Catherine. What are you making of Dracula so far?

Catherine: Dracula is an odd little gem of a book and I’m loving it. The author Bram Stoker is great at ramping up doubt and fear, and those two feelings are the two essential ingredients for a good modern supernatural tale. Stoker creates doubt and fear by leaving certain details out. Chris, you mentioned a chilling moment where Dracula gets up and touches Jonathan. Why did Dracula do this? What’s going on?! Stoker left out some necessary details, and our mind spins in fear and doubt for Jonathan. It’s a masterful stroke and Stoker does it over and over with the Count’s actions.

One of my favorite scene is with the wives of Dracula. Jonathan runs into these ladies when he stumbles into a once beautiful room while exploring the castle. The room and furnishings lie thick with dust so you’d think no one lives there anymore. But you’d be wrong. One of the favorite ways for the undead ladies to get around (and the Count) is to turn into swirling dust motes. And wow, who knew that swirling dust motes could be so terrifying?! Well, Stoker knew. And the dust motes nearly get Jonathan a few times. But those ladies…they are the epitome of hammer glamour (sensual and beautiful women who starred in old horror flicks). During their fight with the Count over Jonathan’s body (or blood) they cry out to the Count, “You yourself never loved; you never love!” and it’s a super weird line. What does love have to do with fighting over a man? It’s a bigger line then just a “give us our meal aka give us the man” complaint. Or…huh? Later on, when the history of Dracula is (somewhat) revealed and the Count has more capers, those line makes a lot more sense. But in the moment, it’s unsettling. The Count has a great history, and while some is revealed, much more is hinted at and lots of it is never revealed. It’s a masterful stroke that pulls the reader along.

There are tons of mysteries in the book that keep us going. Like, why does Lucy sleepwalk? Is Dracula causing her to sleepwalk? Or is it he not? Or is she…? or why does…? And let’s talk about how Lucy’s and Mina’s favorite place to look out at the sea is in a graveyard. And their favorite bench has a gravestone for a footrest. What do you think is going to happen if you spend your days in a graveyard?! But yet, it’s a popular meeting place and they talk to a lot of people there. Obviously, the Victorians felt differently about death then we do today and designing cemeteries to look like parks was their invention. But it was hard for this modern mind to wrap around spending happy leisure time among the dead (without becoming morbid). Best of all, Mina’s notes mentions how sensitive and sweet Lucy is and how she feels everything yet she has no problem propping her dainty booted toes on a dead man’s tombstone. Because really, what else are tombstones for? What do you think, Andrew?

Andrew: The thing that strikes me about Dracula at this early point in the text is not how good it is—though it is fantastic—but what a thrill it is to feel as though you’re standing at the headwaters of a great cultural phenomenon as you’re reading. Transylvania, garlic, crucifixes, mirrors, gothic castles, and even the name “Dracula” itself: these things come to us rich with decades’ worth of cultural allusions, countless retellings, inspired-bys, and parodies that color our understanding of these tropes. But to the novel’s original audience, this was the first time they were reading much of this. They hadn’t yet heard Bela Lugosi say “Listen to them, the children of the night, what music they make!” (Nor had they seen Leslie Nielsen send up Lugosi in Dracula: Dead and Loving It—the lucky bastards). To them, Dracula was just a creepy-sounding last name. To us, it’s so much more. And this novel was the beginning of that.

The book itself I find strangely compelling, as do both of you. Stoker’s horror is a slow burning one, but when the story bursts open into flame—watch out. So far we’ve had a couple of brilliant set-pieces that could serve as wickedly effective standalone horror stories in their own right. Jonathan Harker’s trip up to Dracula’s castle, the flashes of lightning illuminating the circling wolves, and the vampire himself keeping the beasts at bay. The weirdly sexual scene of Dracula’s three women fighting over Jonathan Harker, over the right to devour his blood. Or—my personal favorite so far—the story of the Demeter, the ship on which Count Dracula sails to England, the crew disappearing one by one until only the captain is left, lashing himself to the wheel.

It’s all just great stuff.

Beyond that, all I have are questions. The primary one being: just what kind of monster is Dracula? So far in the text, Dracula has evoked many typical Victorian fears: the fear of foreigners, of sexual desire, and of queer sexuality. Those Victorians were a neurotic bunch, and the book’s way of playing on their retrograde anxieties makes this text, to use a word so common in the Internet school of pop culture criticism, problematic. The Stake practices this kind of criticism regularly, and so on this blog it simply must be said: this book contains attitudes both implicit and explicit that we must vehemently reject.

And yet, the fact that a book like Dracula has survived the decades and spawned an entire horror sub-genre—a tradition that gave rise to everything from Twilight to Buffy to Dark Shadows—is a testament to the way that the meanings generated by pop culture texts such as this one always overflow the bounds prescribed by history, ideology, and even the personality and views of their authors. How a text can be so completely of its time, evoking the problematic fears and anxieties of a particular moment in human history, yet also reverberate powerfully beyond its time and those historical particularities—it’s the great mystery of pop culture criticism. Among others, it’s the mystery I’ll be meditating on as I continue to read Bram Stoker’s Dracula with you this month.

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