History Headscratchers / Dracula

When Van Helsing explains that vampires can't change their form when the sun is up, does he mean that the sun causes ModeLock, trapping the vampire in whatever form they were in at the time, or that the sun triggers ShapeshifterDefaultForm, returning the vampire to human form?

** Jeez, sexual liberation, where do they get this stuff? Breaking through someone's window at night and forcing her to drink your blood is not sexually liberating them. It can't even be read as that. Lucy and Mina don't willingly go with Dracula. They try to resist him in fact, and do their best to keep him out. Mina is HappilyMarried to Harker, Lucy was in love with Godalming, and neither of them wants anything to do with Dracula who, I repeat, breaks into their homes and tries to rape/kill them. He's not a metaphor for the dashing foreign rogue. He's a metaphor for the abhorrent serial rapist. The themes of sexual liberation and women's rights aren't even touched on. I know you want to ship the vampire with something, but jeez, stick with ''{{Twilight}}'' okay?

* I think it's because [[AdaptionDecay so many people saw the movie Bram Stoker's Dracula when it came out and immediately substituted it for the canon of the book]]. I know very few people who have read the actual ''Dracula''.

* The boxes are the easiest question to answer. They are boxes of earth as Dracula must sleep in the soil of his homeland/original grave/consecrated earth. The year is a bit trickier as the dates and information can be VERY contradictory. Popular speculation suggests either 1890, 1893, or 1888. the first for the simple reason that the afterword of the novel states "seven years later". Implying that the events happenex around seven years before. The second is gathered from at least two different instances of the novel. One in which a date is given as a Tuesday and another where Van Helsing laments the death of a felow physican named Charcot who died in that year. The last one is often an attempt at working with the first one and linking the events of the novel ot that of the Whitechapel murders.

[[WMG:Which year this novel is set in? And what are exactly the boxes in Dracula's house?

* Because [[ValuesDissonance female sexuality was seen as a bad thing back then?]] Women weren't supposed to have sexual desire - it's quite possible Stoker was thinking along the lines of "dirty hot-blooded foreigners coming over here, stealing our women - it must be their evil corrupting ways! No woman could ever feel desire of her own accord!" And don't forget that Lucy starts acting more sexual as she turns into a vampire. Yes, it's obviously rape, but it's sort of BeingRapedMakesYouSexuallyLiberated... which just adds to the UnfortunateImplications. SoYeah.

* Creative nonfiction can explain the dramatic use of ellipses. And from reading first hand accounts from the Edwardian era, people back then really did write like that. If someone talked funny, they damn well wanted to record it for future embarrassment. Also, ellipses were used as a writing trope in journals to pass over unmentionable things. In many WWI narratives, ellipses are used to pass over sources of intense trauma.

*** Though to a Briton, a white American can safely be included in "Us," as can a brilliant Teutonic man from the Low Countries. Slavs and Romanians are a whole other class of people to the Victorian-Edwardian mind, something barbaric and overly influenced by the decadent Ottomans and the backwards Russians. Victorians were very good at sorting people into tiers and classes of acceptability. It rarely came down to "we and we alone are good; they're all bad."

* We can still be surprised in other ways. For example, we knew the first time we read it that Mina Harker survived but not that Quincey Morris didn't. Actually, we only know that the person survived the events chronicled in the entry we're currently reading; until it's the last entry, we never know which entry up ahead will tell us of someone else's detah besides that author.

* But what we're reading aren't the original handwritten entries, as Jonathan laments at the end; they're Mina's typewritten transcripts. While typing the part where she remembered how she hesitated to write the word "vampire," she could have added ellipses to capture the effect. Also, Dr. Seward recorded his spoken diary on a phonograph, complete with pauses and stutterings that Mina had to translate into print somehow. She had to (well, she at least wanted to) express the act of hesitation within the limits of the print medium. If I were writing about a conversation I had with someone and remembered them or myself stuttering, I would indicate so in my writing, too.

* That's a trope common to '''ALL''' {{Epistolary Novel}}s; it's a side-effect of the medium itself. [[WutheringHeights Mr. Lockwood, Nellie Dean]], [[TheTenantOfWildfellHall Gilbert Markham]], [[{{Frankenstein}} Robert Walton]], and others all share the Harkers' iron-clad memory. WillingSuspensionOfDisbelief. Now, if some author in the future wanted to {{deconstruct}} this and show what the authors' recollections of past events would realistically look like, that would certainly be interesting...

* That's a trope common to '''ALL''' {{Epistolary Novel}}s; it's a side-effect of the medium itself. [[WutheringHeights Mr. Lockwood, Nellie Dean]], [[TheTenantOfWildfellHall Gilbert Markham]], [[{{Frankenstein}} Robert Walton]], and others all share the Harkers' iron-clad memory. WillingSuspensionOfDisbelief.

* That's a trope common to '''ALL''' {{Episotlary Novel}}s; it's a side-effect of the medium itself. [[WutheringHeights Mr. Lockwood, Nellie Dean]], [[TheTenantOfWildfellHall Gilbert Markham]], [[{{Frankenstein}} Robert Walton]], and others all share the Harkers' iron-clad memory. WillingSuspensionOfDisbelief.

Third, what's with the written stuttering? One character chokes up at the end of one of the entries, but s-stuttering t-typically isn't s-something you *write* down. And there's a part where Mina hesitates, triple-dots and all, to write the word "Vampire". When a person hesitates to write something, they stop their hand for a moment; they don't express the hesitation in the actual writing. I can't help but be reminded of the Monty Python line "Well, if he was dying, he wouldn't have bothered to write 'aaaAAAuuUGH', he'd just say it!"

When Van Helsing explains that vampires can't change their form when the sun is up, does he mean that the sun causes ModeLock, trapping the vampire in whatever form they were in at the time, or that the sun triggers ShapeshifterDefaultForm, returning the vampire to human form?

* It's "Being Raped Makes You Sexually Liberated" if scholars interpret the girls' metaphorical rapes by Dracula as sexual liberation, but A) there's no reason to make that connection, and B) if so, then it's the worst of UnfortunateImplications to ship Dracula with Mina like so many fans and adaptations do; there wouldn't be any UnfortunateImplications if they ''just didn't do that!''

* Because [[ValuesDissonance female sexuality was seen as a bad thing back then?]] Women weren't supposed to have sexual desire - it's quite possible Stoker was thinking along the lines of "dirty hot-blooded foreigners coming over here, stealing our women - it must be their evil corrupting ways! No woman could ever feel desire of her own accord!" And don't forget that Lucy starts acting more sexual as she turns into a vampire. Yes, it's obviously rape, but it's sort of BeingRapedMakesYouSexuallyLiberated... which just adds to the UnfortunateImplications. SoYeah.

What Dracula does to Mina is clearly analogous with rape. In the novel, he's not shown liberating women from sexual repression; he enslaves them. How can this be rationally spun as a good thing, let alone a feminist thing (outside of FetishFuel)? What Dracula does to Lucy and Mina robs them of their free will and even mobility (look at how much more time Mina spends sleeping as the novel progresses); their human male friends are the ones trying to liberate them (which they can't do effectively until they abandon the StayInTheKitchen strategy, so points for that, Stoker).

*Ok, in the novel it's implied that Renfield ONLY eats his prey alive. It's also implied that he doesn't eat them right away but saves them for later. I can see how this would work for sparrows, and maybe spiders. But how does he preserve the flies?
** Well, he was catching them using sugar.
***That doesn't answer my question. I know how he was catching them but how was he preserving them? its implied that he saves them for later but he couldn't keep them for more then 24 hours without them dying.
**** Why can't he? As long as they're still hanging about his cell, there will be more and more flies and thus lives. They needn't be the same flies.