Line #17 Fridge/Dracula


1	!! The novel
2	[[AC:FridgeBrilliance]]
3	* In retrospect, having Mina's and Jonathan's son born on the anniversary of Quincey Morris' death in ''Literature/{{Dracula}}'' serves an additional purpose besides just being a sweet coincidence. It means that their son was born, at the very earliest, ''12 months'' after the team destroyed Dracula -- further meaning that, contrary to the ridiculous EpilepticTrees planted in {{Fan Sequel}}s, [[{{Jossed}} there is absolutely no way]] Dracula is the father of Mina's son.
4	* Regarding the awkward representation of {{Funetik Aksent}}s: The story is told as a series of diaries kept by late 19th century toffs and aristocrats, who would naturally have some difficulty transcribing the working classes by themselves. Still doesn't excuse Van Helsing when he repeatedly falls into German (instead of Dutch, which supposedly is his mother tongue).
5	* Also regarding the {{Funetik Aksent}}s: Dr. Seward's diary was kept in phonograph, meaning that while he recorded Van Helsing's dialogue, he was mimicking the Professor's accent. Additionally, Van Helsing's lapses into German may be the result of the English characters not knowing enough of either Dutch or German to transcribe the former language properly.
6	** In the time the book was written, German was considered the language of medicine, with translated texts being rare, requiring some amount of German literacy to become a truly skilled doctor. Aside from the [[WatsonianVersusDoylist Doylist]] explanation that Bram Stoker was more likely to find someone who spoke German to translate the occasional snippet than to find someone who spoke Dutch, it might also indicate Van Helsing's level of skill at his job.
7	* When Van Helsing kills the now vampiric Lucy he fills her mouth with garlic, puts a stake in her heart, and then beheads her. [[NoKillLikeOverkill Going overboard?]] [[SubvertedTrope No]]: contrary to later representations Van Helsing is simply a doctor who happens to be knowledgeable on vampiric lore, so he's trying three different ways to kill a vampire to see which one works.
8	* Mina's diaries from the second act notes that Jonathan occasionally has flashbacks that start and end suddenly, often caused by some sort of trigger (most notably seeing the Count himself, only younger, on the streets of London), and causing him to completely freak out. Sounds awfully similar to PTSD, doesn't it? Although post traumatic stress disorder wouldn't become a formal diagnosis until the 1970s, being known under several other terms before then, the symptoms of it were already known in that time.
9	* The novel is cobbled together from newspaper clippings, letters, and diary entries, all contributed by the main characters. Some observations:
10	** Van Helsing only writes letters or memos, and his personal journal is never revealed. The Doylist explanation is to preserve the mystery, but the Watsonian explanation is that he wrote it in Dutch.
11	** Quincey Morris contributed the least, only writing a few telegrams to the other characters. Since he dies, his possessions would be sent to his family overseas, which would include his diary and any letters he received (they'd still have the letters he sent, but they either gave them back or figured they couldn't include just half the conversation). With telegrams, both parties record the full conversation.
12	** Lucy dies too, but with no other living family, her possessions went to her widower Arthur. This would include her journal and any mail, so a fair portion of the novel (at least up until her death) includes her writings.
13	* Quincy is somewhat infamous for having a very overblown and exaggerated American accent. Which could be explained by him not being a viewpoint character. We only hear his dialogue through the lense of Englishmen who are writing it down or recounting it after the fact, and may have exaggerated it in their memory.
14	** Lucy comments in her letters to Mina that she suspects Quincy of exaggerating the American slang because it amuses her and that he's actually very well-educated. It's possible that he was exaggerating slightly around the rest of them as well.
15	* Van Helsing comes in for a lot of finger pointing over his decision to totally cut Mina out of their plans and leave her ignorant and alone in her bedroom for a couple of chapters, but consider his backstory. He has a wife back in Amsterdam who is implied to have gone mad or been driven mad. Is it too much of a stretch to guess that Van Helsing visited his wife during his last lightning trip to Amsterdam (he does say he has set his affairs in order) and come to the conclusion that he must protect Mina from the same kind of horrific mental torture that broke his own wife? Yes, it's a big mistake, but possibly not made without some reasoning.
16	* On the Demeter, the Captain tied himself to wheel and made sure he had a rosary secured to his hand. While one interpretation is that his Second-In-Command killed everyone else, thus explaining the Count's frustration, if you choose to believe Drcula was the killer, the frustration may be due to the rosary keeping him from the wheel and being able to steer the ship properly, forcing him to use his weather manipulation to try and blow the ship to where he wants to go which would have been more difficult than it would have been if he had been able to access the wheel.
17	* The novel contains examples of all of TheFourLoves. Lucy and Mina share ''storge'' (Affection[=/=]Family), considering each other to be as close as sisters, and it can be argued Mina is more family to Lucy than Lucy's own mother. Arthur, Quincy, and Seward share ''philia'' (Friendship), being bros who have shared adventures, and even though all of them pursue Lucy, when she chooses Arthur, Quincy and Seward celebrate their friend's happiness. Seward and Van Helsing also have a very close student/mentor/colleague relationship. Arthur[=/=]Lucy and Jonathan[=/=]Mina are obviously ''eros'' (Romance). And the hunters band together to end Dracula's threat less for revenge over what he did to Lucy (though that's certainly a factor) and more out of concern for everyone else who will share her fate if Dracula is not stopped, demonstrating ''agape'' (Unconditional Love, compassion for the entire human race above their own safety). The Four Loves are pretty much the core emotions on which the rest of the story hangs.
18	* Where did Jonathan get a [[KukrisAreKool kukri]]? While kukris were popular amongst Englishmen at the time, Jonathan seems to be quite skilled with it for a real estate lawyer. [[https://www.tumblr.com/see-arcane/749555450137182208/i-am-almost-fine-with-people-saying-he-has-one?source=share This Tumblr post]] makes a very good argument that, given Jonathan and Mina are very heavily implied to be on the lower rungs of social and economic status, and all we know about Jonathan's parents is that they've apparently been dead most of his life, it's quite possible Jonathan, Mina, or both are non-white or mixed race, and Jonathan's kukri is something he inherited from his biological parents. Nothing in the text supports this hypothesis, but nothing contradicts it, either.
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20	[[AC:FridgeHorror]]
21	* If Dracula hadn't been killed, Jonathan may have become a vampire ''regardless'' of whether Dracula ever committed attacks on Mina and Lucy or even came to England, because the text ''heavily'' implies that Dracula also drank from Jonathan at least once during Jonathan's captivity in Transylvania. During Jonathan's first encounter with the three vampire ladies, Dracula tells them that Jonathan is his, but when he is done with Jonathan they may "kiss" him. On Jonathan's last night in Castle Dracula before he successfully flees, Jonathan is in his bedroom writing in his journal when he thinks he hears the three vampire ladies and Dracula whispering together right outside his door. Dracula tells the ladies that tomorrow will be their night, but tonight is his. Jonathan opens the door in a frightened rage and on the other side are the three vampire ladies licking their lips, who laugh and run away (confirming that the conversation was not Jonathan's imagination and implying that Dracula, though unseen, is also near), afterwhich Jonathan returns to his chamber and details no further events until morning. Jonathan's next entry makes no mention of the previous night, but narrates Jonathan waking up, praying, and then heading into Dracula's crypt in an attempt to steal the key to escape - whereupon he observes that Dracula looks bloated, far younger than he did the night prior, and has fresh blood on his lips. Given Jonathan had been keeping track of when Dracula leaves the castle and that there were no other living people around, and further, given Dracula's own words outside Jonathan's door just before Jonathan ceased writing, it's almost certain that the blood came from Jonathan while he slept. While it doesn't seem as though Jonathan went through what Dracula would later do to Mina (given that Jonathan never shows signs of vampirism himself), this does imply that Jonathan had been infected much like Lucy and the children Lucy bit. This means that, had Dracula not followed Jonathan to England and drawn enough attention to provoke a hunt for his head, Jonathan would have returned to live out his normal life in England yet inevitably become a vampire upon his natural death.
22	* There’s quite a lot of evidence that Harker may well have been bitten and infected.
23	** In the scene where Harker goes down to Dracula’s crypt and almost makes the novel considerably shorter by chopping the vampire’s head off with a spade, he only misses because Dracula makes eye contact with him, the spade ‘somehow’ twists in his grip, and he immediately suffers a tremendous headache. The eye contact and the immediate headache also appear in the scene where Lucy sees Dracula sitting on her and Mina’s favourite seat above Whitby, which is implied to be where Dracula reaches through the link forged by drinking her blood to plant the suggestion that she should open her window later that evening so he can safely feed on her.
24	** While there's plenty of evidence that Jonathan was fed on by the Count while in Romania, there isn't any evidence at all that the Count forced Jonathan to drink some of his own blood - which seems to be necessary to become Un-Dead post-mortem. Van Helsing isn't worried about the children Lucy fed on for just this reason.
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26	* Harker’s total memory blank regarding the events prior to his escape from Castle Dracula could be put down to PTSD, but the scene where he sees the Count in Piccadilly and goes through a process of mental fireworks, trancelike sleep and then amnesia suggests instead a post-hypnotic compulsion not to remember or discuss Dracula similar to the ones binding Renfield and Mina.
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28	* The scene where Harker’s hair changes colour in seconds is often dismissed as narm, but another character’s hair changes colour as well: Lucy Westenra, who goes from blonde to brunette after she becomes a vampire.
29	* The fearless vampire hunters manage to kill Lucy before any of her child victims die, and Dracula himself is killed before Mina can turn, which is all well and good. But the novel tells us that Dracula has been stalking other prey during his sojourn in London (the beautiful young woman he follows from outside the jewellers in Picadilly just being the one we're told about) and he's there for over a month, presumably feeding every night. How many other victims have wasted away and been buried through late August and September who didn't have a Dutch professor with an interest in folklore at their bedside? There are, after all, quite a few burials taking place at Kingstead Cemetary alone during the course of the novel. Maybe they didn't catch them all, and London remained a hotbed of infection after Dracula's death.
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31	* Dracula's decision to hire an Exeter-based law firm to handle the purchase of an Essex property for him makes no sense, until you add-up all of the weird connections and coincides that litter the novel (Dracula's decision to land at Whitby where the best-friend of Harker's fiancé just happens to be holidaying, Mr Hawkins' choice of the newly-qualified Harker to handle probably the most prestigious case in the firm's history, Mr Hawkins' very timely decision to leave everything to the Harkers just hours before he dies, and then his insistence on being buried in London) and realise that Mr Hawkins has been in communication with Count Dracula for some while, knows full well what the Count is, and has himself been 'gifted' with the vampire virus so he'll rise from the grave young and vigorous once again. That's why he had to be buried in London alongside his brother - it's the family plot, their ancestral soil, he HAS to be buried there for the vampire transformation to work.
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33	* The nature of the Sisters. Their relation to Dracula is very ambiguous with and many readers have assumed them to be his mistresses. Jonathan notes that the two younger, dark haired ones resemble Dracula which suggest that they are his children or at least close relatives, which have made some think the blonde one his wife. But the sisters talk about the blonde one in terms as being their elder as if older sibling or the first one to be turned it does not seem to fit that she is his wife. Later they refer to Mina as their "sister" as she is turning. This seems to support that their sisterhood primarily is as vampires and that the love Dracula claims to have showed them is of a sexual nature. Then again, given two seem to resemble him enough to make Jonathan think they are related, it does heavily imply [[VillainousIncest they are incestuous]].
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35	%% Place Fridge Logic in Headscratchers
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Context Fridge / Dracula