Frankenstein, Dracula, and some monster films I recently saw [updated]

As it turns out, this year I’ve seen quite a few monster films, mostly based on or inspired by the myths of Frankenstein or Dracula—let’s not get into a debate on whether vampires count as monsters—so I’d better jot down some brief thoughts. 

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922): Pure monster, no eroticism, no romance. The best Nosferatu film, perhaps the best Dracula film. Orlok’s appearance at the door, Orlok on the ship, Orlok’s shadow on the wall, etc.—the film is full of striking, unforgettable images and Max Schreck remains bone-chilling and sinister after over 100 years. More sinister than Klaus Kinski and Bill Skarsgård.  

Nosferatu (2024): The film focuses on sex and shame, or rather, presents the vampire as an embodiment of sexual desire/ shame/ disgust, which perhaps appeals to fans of monster smut. I don’t like the look of Orlok. I don’t think it’s a good film either. Lily-Rose Depp is impressive but the characters are under-developed, there’s little change in tempo and no sense of pacing, the film feels drawn out.

Dracula (1931): This is another classic, but I don’t like it. Lots of overacting, especially Dwight Frye as Renfield; I don’t even like Bela Lugosi as Dracula (unpopular opinion, I guess?). There are some interesting shots, especially at the castle and the abbey. Can see some influence from Nosferatu. 

Daughters of Darkness (1971): Vampire film, no Dracula connection. Silly film, but Delphine Seyrig is so beautiful and elegant. 

Now that I’ve thought about it, I wonder why I have seen so many Dracula films over the years when I don’t care for horror and didn’t like Bram Stoker’s novel all that much. Off the top of my head: part of Hammer’s Dracula (1958); Brides of Dracula (1960); Count Dracula (1977); Coppola’s Dracula (1992); Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979). 

Frankenstein (1931): Quite different from Mary Shelley’s novel, but it’s an excellent film in its own right. Great cinematography, great production design, great makeup, great performance from Boris Karloff. One of the most visually arresting films in black and white. In a way, the film simplified the story, removing some of the complex ideas about upbringing, education, development, civilisation, etc. but then it gave us the most iconic image of Frankenstein’s monster and solidified the myth—my friend Himadri thinks the film has had more impact on public consciousness than the novel has, and he’s probably right.  

Bride of Frankenstein (1935): Another excellent film by James Whale. I must praise Jack Pierce for not only doing the fantastic makeup for Frankenstein’s monster (Boris Karloff), but also creating the iconic hairstyle for the bride (Elsa Lanchester). 

Young Frankenstein (1974): Not much to do with Mary Shelley’s novel, this is an affectionate pastiche of the Frankenstein films starring Boris Karloff. Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman are wonderful together. A perfect film, very funny, extremely quotable: “It’s Fronkensteen!”, “It’s pronounced Eye-gore”, “What hump?”, “Walk this way”, etc. Did you know Gene Hackman could be so funny? I didn’t. I laughed like a hyena.  

Son of Frankenstein (1939): This film is a sequel to the films by James Whale, but I watched it after Young Frankenstein. It’s quite all right as a film, featuring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi and Basil Rathbone. However, it suffers in comparison: next to James Whale’s films, Rowland V. Lee’s Son of Frankenstein doesn’t have such striking and iconic images; and I couldn’t watch it without thinking about the jokes and the parody in Young Frankenstein; the inspector in particular is so well-parodied that he seems rather ridiculous in the original. 

Poor Things (2023): Based on a novel by Alasdair Gray, inspired by the Frankenstein myth. As one would expect from Yorgos Lanthimos, it is weird and stylistically interesting, but it’s more disturbing than Frankenstein and the more I’ve thought about it, the more I dislike all the ideas about “feminism” and “female empowerment” in the film. Repugnant, even. 

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931): What was in the air that in 1931, Hollywood produced Frankenstein and Dracula and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde? Stevenson’s novella is my favourite of the three books, but again the film is its own work of art—one of the major changes is the creation of two female characters—and it is a very fine film. Fredric March is very good as Jekyll and Hyde, and I especially like that the film gets right Stevenson’s idea that Jekyll and Hyde are not two sides of the same person—Hyde is the concentration of all the evil and dark impulses in Jekyll. 

Addendum: Adding some more stills so you can see how beautiful the B&W is. 

Frankenstein: 

Bride of Frankenstein: 

Son of Frankenstein: 

On not finishing The Lair of the White Worm

Every reader must at some point decide that curiosity is no longer enough, and they have no choice but to stop reading. 
I thought earlier that I would continue reading The Lair of the White Worm, despite everything, just to finish the story, but have now reached the point where interest wears thin and I no longer have any reason to continue. Life is too short. But at least, after going through half of it, I can say I know enough to criticise it.  
The racism, for 1 thing, is shocking. The word “negro” appears 17 times throughout the book, “nigger” 23 times, and the word “savage” is used 7 times to refer to the character of Oolanga. Oolanga is described as unsoftened savage, low, base, malignant, evil, hateful, barbaric, etc. He with his African origins is used as a device, a character who is human but not fully human—a subhuman, a savage, someone from “the swamp and the forest”, and a kind of devil. 
In my previous blog post, I already quoted some revolting passages from Bram Stoker’s book. Now, look at these sentences from the scene where Oolanga expresses his love to Lady Arabella: 

“The circumstances were too grotesque, the contrast too violent, for subdued mirth. The man a debased specimen of one of the most primitive races of the earth, and of an ugliness which was simply devilish; the woman of high degree, beautiful, accomplished.” (Ch.13) 

Imagine that.  
I tried to get past all that, but it’s difficult. Would the racism be accepted as a product of its time (1911) if The Lair of the White Worm were otherwise a well-written book? For a moment, I wasn’t so sure, as I looked at great classic works with some deplorable views on women and/or non-white people. But in terms of racism, it’s worse than any novel I’ve ever read, and as disgusting as the white supremacy propaganda and rhetoric I used to read on my Ethnicity and Immigration in America course. 
Moreover, in this case luckily there’s no dilemma, because The Lair of the White Worm easily belongs in the bin. It is such a bad book. 
The plot is muddled and incoherent, the characterisation is confused and weak, there are too many ideas, mostly crackpot ideas, and Bram Stoker makes a big mistake in switching from Adam Salton’s to the villains’ points of view—Edgar Caswall and Lady Arabella and even Oolanga. Even if they are not narrators, he still comes close to them and switches to their perspective, and he can’t handle the task. The characterisation falls apart. Before anyone protests, of course I’m not expecting any psychological depth, Bram Stoker is not Tolstoy, nor does he try to be, but part of why Dracula works so well is because Dracula is barely there—the distance, mystery, and legend, coupled with everyone’s fear, cause more dread. In The Lair of the White Worm, he fails miserably when focusing on the perspective of the villains. 
Overall, the book is a big filthy confusing mess. Some books require readers to go along with them and figure out what the author was trying to do, to judge them accordingly. The Lair of the White Worm doesn’t deserve that. 
Waste of time and effort.




______________________________________

By the way, if you want to know the plot, this is a hilarious (negative) review: 
https://cassandraparkin.wordpress.com/2011/06/12/adventures-in-trash-the-lair-of-the-white-worm-by-bram-stoker/

The Lair of the White Worm

Anyone who comes from Dracula to The Lair of the White Worm, expecting a nutty book, would still be surprised and baffled because of how nutty it is.
Bram Stoker’s good at captivating our attention—we want to know what happens, how it ends, what the mystery is. But it’s a crazy, baffling, badly plotted, and incoherent book, and I haven’t even finished it. 
Here’s the summary: our main character Adam Salton from Australia comes to England to visit his grand-uncle Richard Salton. There he is introduced to Mr Salton’s friend, Sir Nathaniel de Salis. Together Mr Salton and Sir Nathaniel, but especially the latter, introduce Adam to the area, show him the different sites such as Castra Regis (the castle of Caswall family) and Diana’s Grove, tell him the history and traits of the Caswall family and the legends of the area. 
Then Edgar Caswall, the new heir of the castle, comes home to claim the place after generations. The book so far has 3 villains: Edgar Caswall, his African servant Oolanga, and Lady Arabella March of Diana’s Grove, all of whom share a chilling lack of human feeling. 
The book is filled with myths, legends; pseudo-sciences such as physiognomy; and other crackpot ideas such as Voodoo, hypnotising, inherited personality traits, and so-called “moral metabolism”: 

“Strangely, as [Edgar Caswall] yielded to this demoralising process, he seemed to be achieving a new likeness to Oolanga. […] the thing which puzzled [Adam] most was that the forbidding qualities in the African, which had at first evoked his attention and his disgust, remained the same. Had it been that the two men had been affected, one changing with the other by slow degrees—a sort of moral metabolism,—he would have better and more easily understood it. Transmutation of different bodies is, in a way, more understandable than changes in one body that have no equivalent equipoise in the other. The idea was recurrent to him that perhaps when a nature has reached its lowest point of decadence it loses the faculty of change of any kind.” (Ch.13) 

See what I mean? Madman Bram Stoker is.    
The book is also filled with racism. Lots of it. I feel slightly annoyed but can get over the depiction of women—innocent, helpless, dove-like creatures who swoon at the slightest thing, but the racism is quite something else. 
Behold Oolanga’s introduction: 

“But presently his African servant approached him, and at once their thoughts changed to a larger toleration. For by comparison with this man his face seemed to have a certain nobility hitherto lacking. Caswall looked indeed a savage—but a cultured savage. In him were traces of the softening civilisation of ages—of some of the higher instincts and education of man, no matter how rudimentary these might be. But the face of Oolanga, as his master at once called him, was pure pristine, unreformed, unsoftened savage, with inherent in it all of the hideous possibilities of a lost, devil-ridden child of the forest and the swamp—the lowest and most loathsome of all created things which were in some form ostensibly human.” (Ch.4) 

That’s bad, no? It gets worse. Bram Stoker places Oolanga and Lady Arabella next to each other: 

“The girl of the Caucasian type, beautiful, Salon blonde, with a complexion of milk and roses, high-bred, clever, serene of nature. The other negroid of the lowest type; hideously ugly, wanting in all the mental and moral faculties—in fact, so brutal as to be hardly human.” (Ch.5) 

That’s convenient: the author wants a human who is not fully human, a villain who is low, base, savage, a “child of the forest and the swamp”, so he creates an African character. 

“Briefly, this is his history. He was originally a witch-finder—about as low an occupation as exists amongst aboriginal savages. Then he got up in the world and became an Obi-man, which gives an opportunity to wealth via blackmail.  Finally, he reached the highest honour in hellish service. He became a user of Voodoo, which seems to be a service of the utmost baseness and cruelty. I was told some of his deeds of cruelty, which are simply sickening. They made me long for an opportunity of helping to drive him back to hell. You might think to look at him that you could measure in some way the extent of his vileness; but it would be a vain hope. Monsters such as he is belong to an earlier and more rudimentary stage of barbarism. He is in his way a clever fellow—for a nigger; but is none the less dangerous or the less hateful for that.” (Ch.7) 

Whoa. 
I do take the time into account (The Lair of the White Worm was published in 1911), but that is still quite hard to stomach. I mean, disgusting. 
I continued reading the book to get to the end of the story, but that never quite gets out of the way.  
The plot, however, becomes more confusing and less coherent. I’m currently on chapter 14, and chapter 12 is when Bram Stoker starts to lose control and the story takes a random turn and moves in a different direction. Imagine, the story up to chapter 11 has been about the 3 villains, Edgar Caswall’s courtship of Lilla Watford (under Adam’s watchful eyes), and the mystery of the snakes and Adam’s dead mongooses. All of a sudden, in chapter 12, Bram Stoker mixes in Hitchcock’s The Birds, and introduces the odd solution of a kite in shape of a great hawk, which helps shut up the birds but at the same time also brings about a dreadful silence and soundless gloom among the cattle and a depression among the people in the area. He also writes about Edgar Caswall developing a mad obsession with the kite—watching it, associating human qualities with it, trying to communicate with it. 
Then, suddenly, abruptly, and very randomly, Bram Stoker changes direction again—to the collection of curios, mummies, and weapons in the castle, and to a mysterious chest. 
What in the fresh hell is going on? 
I have no clue. This is really bad, a hotchpotch of insane ideas. But I have to read it to the end.

Bram Stoker’s horror stories

Everyone needs a bit of escapism once in a while (especially now when elections are coming up in the UK and my facebook newsfeed is flooded with idiocy), so these days I’ve been reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories. My copy is a Penguin Classics, which includes The Lair of the White Worm. 
In short, 4 years after Dracula, I’m reading his horror stories. Guess what, I prefer them. 
So far, of the 9 short stories, I’ve read 7. My favourites are “The Judge’s House” and “The Squaw”. There isn’t much to say about these stories, as (most) horror stories are to be read, not analysed. The plot is relatively simple. “The Judge’s House” is about a science student who goes to a strange town and stays at a house for peace and quiet, which turns out to be a haunted house of a cruel judge. “The Squaw” is a revenge tale in which an American tourist kills a little kitten by accident in front of its mother and is followed by the cat. 
The plot is simple, but Bram Stoker’s brilliant at creating atmosphere and building up tension. “The Burial of the Rats” is a good example of tension and suspense, as the story’s written from the point of view of a tourist being chased in the dark by a group of silent murderous rag-pickers. “Dracula’s Guest” is also good, which could be a draft, an original opening, a deleted episode, or just a story on its own (it’s complete on its own)—an enjoyable read for those who want a bit more of Dracula. But the best stories here are “The Judge’s House” and “The Squaw”, especially in the use of the uncanny. A rat has baleful eyes, and a cat stares with hatred.

Dracula: The ending

Yesterday I lost lots of blood. Had a tiny accident at work and there was blood everywhere, on the table, on the sink, in the kit box, all over all of my plasters- it was a deep cut, the blood kept flowing and flowing and flowing with no sign of stopping until I covered it up.
Dracula would have liked it.
There was also another kind of bleeding.
Anyway....
I finished reading Dracula late last night. Still puzzled by Bram Stoker's novel, especially the last page. Questions: Why is the Count not there for most of the book? Does anyone else feel bothered by the way Arthur is often off-stage when many significant things happen, especially those involving Lucy? Is it just me or Quincey Morris seems like a superfluous character? How should we feel about him? And his death? How are we to interpret the lines "It is an added joy to Mina and to me that our boy's birthday is the same day as that on which Quincey Morris died" and "His mother holds, I know, the secret belief that some of our brave friend's spirit has passed into him", when we know that it's also the day Count Dracula dies? Why does the book end with Van Helsing's talk about Mina Harker and about "how some men so loved her, that they did dare much for her sake"? What's the meaning of the men's devotion to Lucy and, later, to Mina? What's up with number 3, in 3 female vampires and 3 male suitors? There must be a deliberate parallel between the devotion to goodness (Lucy, Mina, humanity) and to evil (Dracula, vampires, blood-sucking), between voluntary and involuntary devotion.
Maud Ellmann's introduction is quite interesting. She mentions and discusses several different readings, and sums up in the last paragraph: 

"... Dracula has been interpreted as a figure for perversion, menstruation, venereal disease, female sexuality, male homosexuality, feudal aristocracy, monopoly capitalism, the proletariat, the Jew, the primal father, the Antichrist, and the typewriter..." 

Each interpretation has nice arguments, but I don't find any of them strongly convincing. Have to think more about it. 

Dracula: the character and the book

Dracula: The character's bigger than the book. I'm not referring to the classic-ness of the book or its significance; I'm not thinking of all those adaptations and sequels, prequels, spin-offs and comic books and video games and Halloween costumes and references in popular culture nor the whole vampire subculture the book inspired.
What I mean is something else. If you think about it, the Count is barely there, in the book. He appears the 1st time on page 10, but doesn't come forward as Count Dracula until page 16. This is Jonathan Harker's journal- Jonathan and we, readers, are with him until page 52 (the 1st part of the journal ends on page 53, followed by Mina's letter to Lucy). From then on, Dracula's barely in the foreground. He rarely appears, and each time it's very brief- sucking Lucy's blood, passing by and being seen by the Harkers, attacking Mina, controlling Renfield... His depiction is built on the things that suggest his presence (e.g. wolves, bats, boxes, etc.), the things that he affects/ ruins/ destroys (e.g. Renfield, Lucy, Mina, etc.) and the things that show people's terror (e.g. the cross, the crucifix, etc.). In addition is Van Helsing's telling of the myth about vampires and the Draculas. The character's almost always in the background though the name's almost always in the foreground- people think about him, talk about him, tell each other about him and plan to kill him. The book is an elaboration of the vampire myth, and a creation of the Dracula myth. The Count is in a sense outside the book, bigger than it and beyond it.
And of courses afterwards the character gets larger and larger and a lot larger beyond Bram Stoker's novel. That's apparently the highest achievement of the book. 







I'm on page 327. The story will end on page 378. The Count just had a brief appearance and has gone again. 

Reading Dracula with distance

Why am I reading Dracula when the horror genre isn't my thing? 
The same way I can't help comparing her to Tolstoy, Flaubert and Jane Austen when reading George Eliot, I've been silently making comparisons between Bram Stoker and Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Shelley and Wilkie Collins. Dracula is a classic, sure, but is it serious literature? Never mind. That's probably the wrong question. What matters is that I don't think it's on par with Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which is a brilliantly written, perfectly controlled and tightly packed work or art, and Frankenstein, which is a fascinating and marvellously rich novel of ideas. I don't mean that Dracula is bad, but I see it as a story, or an elaboration of a myth, more than as a work of art. For example, think about the epistolary form. Dracula is made up of not only journals and letters (traditional in novels) but, as written in the introduction, also "memorandums, telegrams, title-deeds of property, railway timetables, dictionaries, newspaper cuttings, monumental inscriptions, notebooks, phonologically recorded case-notes of psychiatry, and a ship's log translated from the Russian"*. That is very interesting, but I'm afraid that Bram Stoker hasn't made use of all the potential of the form. 1st, I haven't seen any unreliable narrator. 2nd, this can be a means of characterisation. In The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins exploits the form for the creation and depiction of 2 of the most fascinating characters in literature- Gabriel Betteredge and Miss Clack; in The Woman in White, it's Count Fosco and Mr Fairlie. In Dracula, the characters' voices are not very distinctive and distinguishable. 3rd, there's no clash of perspectives. We all know that in life the same thing is seen and experienced differently by different people, and sometimes 2 versions of the same incident can be different beyond recognition. There's no such obvious conflict in Dracula, at least not yet. 
Should I read faster and consume it whole instead of taking it slowly and critically? No, perhaps I shouldn't speed up- I'm highly unlikely to read the book again. 
At the moment I find myself more fascinated by Renfield than by the Count and his prey and his hunters. Renfield's the most intriguing, colourful and mysterious character in the novel. 






*: written by Maud Ellmann. 

Scattered thoughts on Dracula, on the plot, devices, character types, parallels

In Dracula, everyone keeps notes of some sort (mostly journals) and nobody tells anybody anything. The plot of Dracula depends on the characters' silence, or to be precise, their decision to keep information to themselves; especially the 2 persons who know the most, Jonathan Harker and Dr Van Helsing. Their refusal to share information and warn others, similar to Frankenstein's, is necessary for the plot. Bram Stoker needs some other tools to keep the story going. We have Lucy Westenra, who sleepwalks and falls victim to we-know-what. A pure woman, perfect according to Victorian standards, she's reminiscent of Laura Fairlie in The Woman in White. Then we have Mrs Westenra, the silly woman who means well but ruins everything, like Mrs Michelson and Mrs Clements in The Woman in White. 
On page 136. Will write more later, I'm trying to put together some pieces. Perhaps Lucy isn't so pure and lovely after all- she studies her own face, and when telling Mina about her 3 proposals in 1 day, she asks "Why can't they let a girl marry 3 men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?". 
If we ignore the way the people in Dracula have blood transfusions without regard to blood type, there is something quite erotic, in Bram Stoker's description, about the men giving blood to the woman they love. 
Also, I wonder if there's any significant parallel between Lucy and the 3 suitors, and Jonathan and the 3 female vampires in Dracula's castle. 

Dates, lapses in time, confusing bits in Dracula

Dracula begins with the journal of Jonathan Harker, who is a diligent diarist. There are entries for 3/5, 4/5, 5/5, 7/5, 8/5, 12/5, 15/5, 16/5, 18/5, 19/5. Suddenly there's a jump straight to 28/5, followed by a 31/5 entry. Again there's a lapse, the next entry is dated 17/6, then Harker writes on 24 and 25/6, then 29 and 30/6, and Harker's narrative ends. 
Perhaps on those days he doesn't write. Or maybe the entries have no relevance as documents and are disregarded altogether. It makes me wonder, however, about what he does during those days; in fact, what he does the whole time he's at the castle. At the beginning he does write down, in details, the paperwork and discussions with Count Dracula. Afterwards, there is no more- what does he do when not watching the weird creatures of the castle or trying the locked doors? 
After Harker's narrative is the correspondence between his fiancée Mina Murray and her friend Lucy Westenra between 9/5 and 14/5. This placement is an understandable choice, because Bram Stoker now introduces a bunch of new characters and a different setting and another storyline. There's another shift with Dr Seward's diary (kept in his fancy phonograph) and the introduction of Renfield. The date is 25/5. 
After some exchanges between the men, Stoker gives us Mina's journal. The 1st date is 24/7, about a month after the last entry in Harker's journal. After that is 1/8. This is when she mentions Jonathan. 

"Lucy and I sat awhile, and it was all so beautiful before us that we took hands as we sat; and she told me all over again about Arthur and their coming marriage. That made me just a little heart-sick, for I haven’t heard from Jonathan for a whole month." 

Then her narrative, before we know much of her, is cut off. Stoker directs our attention to Dr Seward and Renfield. The dates in the diary are 5/6, 18/6, 1/7, 8/7, 19/7 and 20/7. We're hooked. At least, I'm hooked. This business with Renfield is fascinating, I don't know what he has to do with anything in the plot, but it sure is fascinating, but before anything happens, Stoker brings Mina back. Now the date is 26/7, followed by 27/7. Here she talks about worries for her fiancé, and for Lucy's sleepwalking. What is this moving back and forth? The next entry is dated 3/8. 
Why this arrangement? I'm quite confused. 

Dracula and The Woman in White

Dracula makes me think of The Woman in White. 
Both are novels-as-documents. How many novels of this type have I read lately? Frankenstein is slightly different- the book is a series of letter from Walton to his sister, but embedded in this narrative is Frankenstein's narrative, which in turn frames the creature's narrative (reminiscent of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall- the whole novel is 1 letter from Gilbert Markham to a friend, and within this letter is Helen's diary). Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde isn't strictly an epistolary novel, though there are 2 chapters at the end that are letters. Only The Moonstone is another novel composed of a series of documents: reports, letters, diary excerpts, articles, etc. Like Dracula and The Woman in White. 
It can be felt that in Dracula, the various writings are not put together by Bram Stoker for the benefit of the reader (multiple viewpoints) like A Hero of Our Time for instance, but collected and organised by the people in the book, as in the 2 novels by Wilkie Collins. 
Another thing that unites Dracula and The Woman in White on the surface is the terror, or rather, the mystery and suspense. There are more similarities. Jonathan Harker coming to a strange house and becoming imprisoned in it is reminiscent of Marian and Laura being imprisoned in Percival Clyde's house. If Harker is Bram Stoker's Marian, his Count Fosco is Count Dracula. Fortunately our Jonathan Harker isn't as dim-witted and slow to understand as Marian Halcombe. He observes and notices everything and understands things quickly, which a few times makes me wonder if it's plausible- I mean, if any intelligent person under such circumstances would come to such conclusions, or it's only Bram Stoker answering questions he previously raised and making it easier for us. No, it's probably logical- I can't say because I have something akin to hindsight, I know what Dracula is.
Anyway, I must write again, Harker's smarter than Marian. Look at chapter 3, entry for 15/5: 

"When I had written in my diary and had fortunately replaced the book and pen in my pocket, I felt sleepy." 

That's the way to do it, Marian. Hide your writing away before you may doze off. Why leave everything there for the Count to see. 

Reading Dracula: obstacles

Wish I could say, after some time's silence, "Back from [some fascinating city]", but can't. I've been busy, that's all- sunbathing, working, watching films, catching up with fb, following a murder case in VN, dealing with some problems (lots of things happened, and there was a creep)... In spare time I read a Tolstoy short story collection, and Flaubert's 3 Tales, just didn't write about them. As you can see, Effi Briest has been put aside.
I'm reading Dracula at the moment.
One cannot have a "fresh" reading of Dracula, everyone knowing something about it. The same goes with Frankenstein or Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, both of which I read earlier this year. The feeling is strange- the consciousness that I'm reading for the 1st time a very famous and influential book, the expectation of finding it as good as it is said to be, the wish to compare it to the preconceptions created by popular culture. Sometimes they turn out to be misconceptions. Take Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, discussed here, here and here- Jekyll and Hyde are not 2 beings in the same body, 1 good, 1 evil, and Hyde is actually smaller than Jekyll. Or Frankenstein, discussed here, here, here, here and here, Frankenstein is the scientist, not the monster, but Frankenstein is a monster, and the experiment is in fact not a failed experiment as people suggest.
Luckily my so-called knowledge of these 3 books comes from who knows where, not from film adaptations (if I've watched one, I've forgotten it). Tom at Wuthering Expectations once wrote "How many first-time readers miss the actual story on the page in front of them while looking around for Igor and the pitchfork-wielding peasants and "Puttin' on the Ritz"?" That isn't my problem here. My problem is something else.
Look at the 1st chapter of Dracula. Bram Stoker uses lots of details and images to create a horrifying atmosphere:
- A dog howling all night under window.
- Queer dreams.
- People's looks of fear, and whispers ("Satan", "hell", "witch" and "werewolf" or "vampire").
- St George's Day.
- The sign of the cross, a charm or guard against the evil eye.
- The gift of a crucifix.
- The prevalence of goitre.
- Peasant's cart with long, snake-like vertebra.
- Dark firs that stand out against the snow.
- Great masses of greyness.
- Steep hills, ghost-like clouds.
- The driver's haste, and fellow passengers' excitement.
- Dracula's man, who has "a hard-looking mouth, with very red lips and sharp-looking teeth, as white as ivory", and strong, cold hands.
- Feeling that the calèche goes over and over the same ground.
- A dog howling, "a long, agonised wailing, as if from fear", followed by several other dogs.
- Wolves.
- Horses trembling, snorting and screaming with fright.
- A heavy cloud passing across the face of the moon; darkness.
He causes fear and builds up tension and prepares readers for greater horror ahead. Foreshadowing device. Victorian readers didn't know what was coming, they were scared and their imagination was filled with possibilities and they tried to guess what was going on and what was going to happen next and were eager to find out. I have a faint idea. To Victorian readers, Dracula is only a name, which they take and accept neutrally. To me, the name carries with it so many associations and images, the name is tinted, and tainted. I'm reading it, but at the same time, I find myself looking for something.
Let's see how it goes.