Daily Dracula

[Inanna]

It’s doing a good job of freaking me out, though.

I’m left wondering what I would do in a similar situation?

[Alatar]

Knowing what Harker will eventually find fills these excursions with dread for me.

Interesting side note. I made best effort to find the most accurate Movie or TV adaptation that tells the story almost exactly as written, and one simply doesn't exist. Even the 70's BBC Miniseries screws it up. THe BBC Radio Play is the best I've found.

[Jude]

When you say "best", is it good and worth checking out, or the best of a bad lot?

[Alatar]

Oh no, its really good if memory serves. I think I have a copy on MP3 somewhere, my original was Cassette

[Jude]

Looks like it's available from the BBC website: link

I'll wait until I've finished reading the installments before checking it out - this is my first time through the novel.

[Frelga]

I wonder if a faithful adaptation is possible, without making the modern viewer go "Yeah, yeah, we get it, it's a vampire, get on with it."

Case in point -

It’s doing a good job of freaking me out, though.

I’m left wondering what I would do in a similar situation?

As a genre savvy modern person, you would probably have already fashioned a stake, loaded up with silver jewelry, and had holy symbols drawn all over the place, until Dracula was forced to get rid of you. Harker doesn't know about any of that, and nor did the original readers.

[RoseMorninStar]

Tales of vampires are hundreds of years old.. far before Stoker's time, as is driving a stake through the heart of a vampire and exposing them to sunlight.

I think a modern tale could get around most of that by either having a very skeptical main character who just doesn't buy into superstition and assumes someone is playing an elaborate hoax for whatever reason, or the 'rules' could be different. Say, the garlic, crosses, and daylight thing doesn't really work, etc..

Does anyone know shorthand? Does anyone USE shorthand? I recall it was taught when I was in high school. I think we went over a little of it when I took typing, but I don't recall any of it/was not interested enough to take the regular course. I would think they stopped teaching it in public school long ago.

[Túrin Turambar]

Tales of vampires are hundreds of years old.. far before Stoker's time, as is driving a stake through the heart of a vampire and exposing them to sunlight.

I think a modern tale could get around most of that by either having a very skeptical main character who just doesn't buy into superstition and assumes someone is playing an elaborate hoax for whatever reason, or the 'rules' could be different. Say, the garlic, crosses, and daylight thing doesn't really work, etc..

Does anyone know shorthand? Does anyone USE shorthand? I recall it was taught when I was in high school. I think we went over a little of it when I took typing, but I don't recall any of it/was not interested enough to take the regular course. I would think they stopped teaching it in public school long ago.

Dracula is interesting because of its historical and cultural context. The western world had moved in leaps and bounds in the 19th century, and steam trains, telegraph, cameras, exploration of the Polar regions and deep jungles, and by the 1890s, film, had made the world seem much smaller, more orderly and logical than it had been. It's not obvious to a modern reader, but the characters are often on the cutting edge of technology (e.g. one later in the book uses a Kodak camera). Belief in the supernatural no longer seems justifiable when science can explain everything. Dracula then shows up as something inexplicable, primeval, irrational, from a shadowy corner of Europe, and suggestive of dark and depraved sexual impulses. All these things made him a terrifying villain for a modern-minded late-Victorian English audience. Stoker is asking: "Given how far we've come, how would we react in this day and age if something horrifying from old myths came to life?"

My Mum could write in Pitman shorthand, which is probably what Jon and Mina use. She learned in secretarial school in the 1960s.

[Frelga]

I remember shorthand being a thing, although I never learned. I asked my son, he never heard of it.

Tales of vampires are hundreds of years old.. far before Stoker's time, as is driving a stake through the heart of a vampire and exposing them to sunlight

True. In the ones I know, though, the vampire was someone the hero(ine) of the story knew well, as in Tolstoy's story. Often it's a spouse or a lover.

One tale has a dead man who is trying to get his bride to wed him and bring her to his grave. The clever girl takes a long time getting ready and putting on all her finery, and even longer to take it off and throw it down to the grave to him. She is down to the last earing when a rooster crows, and the dead man becomes a corpse again.

Stoker having the vampire be a foreigner infiltrating England is a choice.

[Alatar]

Don't forget Stoker was Irish. Who could blame him

[RoseMorninStar]

Don't forget Stoker was Irish. Who could blame him

[Túrin Turambar]

Don't forget Stoker was Irish. Who could blame him

I didn't know that! Interestingly, he didn't seem to consider Dracula to be a particularly significant work in his own lifetime. Working as a journalist, he interviewed Winston Churchill in 1908, and when the book came up in the conversation, he brushed it aside as "a vampire novel I wrote some years ago".

[RoseMorninStar]

The Wikipedia article on Stoker is interesting. It states, in part:

Before writing Dracula, Stoker met Ármin Vámbéry, a Hungarian-Jewish writer and traveller (born in Szent-György, Kingdom of Hungary now Svätý Jur, Slovakia). Dracula likely emerged from Vámbéry's dark stories of the Carpathian mountains.[21] However this claim has been challenged by many including Elizabeth Miller, a professor who, since 1990, has had as her major field of research and writing Dracula, and its author, sources, and influences. She has stated, “The only comment about the subject matter of the talk was that Vambery 'spoke loudly against Russian aggression.'"

While Elizabeth Miller may shrug off the influence of Ármin Vámbéry, I humbly beg to differ (generally speaking). If one has ever met someone from a vastly different culture, especially a culture so steeped in superstition as those from the Carpathians, I cannot help but think there was some influence. River and I discussed this when she recommended 'The Tiger's Wife'. While my family was not from Hungary they were from the Carpathians and they have all kinds of strange (to me) rituals and superstitions. It makes an impression.

[Túrin Turambar]

Drive-by post as I’ve started re-reading the book to catch up.

The scene at the Inn where Harker reacts with “how quaint!” to the villagers having terrified conversations filled with references to Satan and hell nicely sets up his journey in Book I. To him (and to many Englishmen of his background and generation) the Eastern Europeans of the time come across as somewhere between civilised and uncivilised. He actually describes the Slovaks as ‘barbaric’, although he didn’t seem to mean it in a pejorative way. And, like a modern and educated Englishman, he dismisses their fear of the supernatural as superstitions among people not yet advanced enough to see things rationally and scientifically. It is ironic – and probably unsettling for Stoker’s contemporary readers – that the superstitious peasants are right and the sensible English lawyer is hopelessly naive! There is actually a bit of self-deprecation in Stoker’s depiction of Harker, as Stoker himself was a rationalist and enthusiast for science.

The events of the early chapters take place in the extreme east of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, hence the fact that the characters can communicate in German – the Empire’s official language. A significant number of Germans settled in the Carpathians since the Middle Ages, but they were expelled by the Red Army in the closing months of the Second World War. Dracula himself points out the neighbourhood is defined by layers of conquest – Romania gained it in the First World War and it remains part of Romania today.

The absence of servants at Castle Dracula is one of its most obvious oddities. Curiously, Harker is impressed by both the food and the quiet and efficient housekeeping. This means that Dracula, aside from being a supernatural being of immense and sinister powers, is also a good cook and housekeeper.

[Frelga]

This means that Dracula, aside from being a supernatural being of immense and sinister powers, is also a good cook and housekeeper.
Re: Daily Dracula

And, we learn in a recent chapter, would make a good solicitor himself.

I do wonder where he learned to cook. Was it just for Harker?

I must admit that yesterday's chapter was very effective horror even by modern standards. Is it more or less effective because Harker still doesn't know what the blond girl was about to do, but the modern reader does?

[Alatar]

Its also very sensual and sexy in a way that modern movies would completely overdo. The sense of anticipation and hunger (both kinds) is palpable.

[RoseMorninStar]

This means that Dracula, aside from being a supernatural being of immense and sinister powers, is also a good cook and housekeeper.
Re: Daily Dracula

I do wonder where he learned to cook. Was it just for Harker?

I must admit that yesterday's chapter was very effective horror even by modern standards. Is it more or less effective because Harker still doesn't know what the blond girl was about to do, but the modern reader does?

I would imagine Harker is has not been the first 'guest' in centuries. I do wonder however that more was not made of the lack of servants. Dracula mentioned on the first night that the servants had all gone to bed but obviously there are none. Harker writes 'those awful women, who were—who are—waiting to suck my blood.' so he must be aware of what they were about to do, even if he is unaware of the consequences.

Its also very sensual and sexy in a way that modern movies would completely overdo. The sense of anticipation and hunger (both kinds) is palpable.

Agreed. When one's own senses have to do the work (and it is not all laid out for us) it is much more effective.

[Túrin Turambar]

Bram Stoker obviously didn’t invent vampires, but they had always been portrayed in fiction and folklore as completely repulsive and monstrous. Stoker, as far as I know, invented the sexy vampire trope, and made the predatory behaviour of his vampires explicitly seductive. The scene with the three female vampires is masterful because he makes them both alluring and horrifying – I love his description of the blonde’s breath invoking in Harker thoughts of both honey and blood.

As a language geek, I can’t help but notice around this point that Stoker seems to have forgotten that his characters speak different languages. The fact hat Harker can understand the dialogue between the vampires implies either that they considerately speak in English in front of people whose blood they plan to drink, in his dream-like state he could understand their language, they’re speaking in German, or Stoker simply forgot that they shouldn’t be speaking English!

Stoker isn’t entirely clear on Dracula’s origin. He explicitly bases him on Vlad III, a Wallachian (i.e. Romanian) ruler, while Dracula in the book claims to be a Szekely, a member of Hungarian sub-group. His native language would be Medieval Romanian in the former case or medieval Hungarian in the latter. Dracula refers to “throwing off the Hungarian yoke”, which would be an odd viewpoint for a Szekely to have. Stoker seems to have done a lot of research on Transylvania to give Harker’s travel diary verisimilitude, but he didn’t have Wikipedia, and may have confused the various ethnic groups of the Carpathians. They all would have sounded suitably distant and exotic to his English-speaking audience.

As a side note, in his film adaptation of Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola has the vampires speak among themselves in Romanian. Coppola’s Harker (played by a hapless youthful Keanu Reeves doing his best effort at an Oxbridge English accent) hence can’t understand them.

[RoseMorninStar]

As a language geek, I can’t help but notice around this point that Stoker seems to have forgotten that his characters speak different languages. The fact hat Harker can understand the dialogue between the vampires implies either that they considerately speak in English in front of people whose blood they plan to drink, in his dream-like state he could understand their language, they’re speaking in German, or Stoker simply forgot that they shouldn’t be speaking English!

Stoker isn’t entirely clear on Dracula’s origin. He explicitly bases him on Vlad III, a Wallachian (i.e. Romanian) ruler, while Dracula in the book claims to be a Szekely, a member of Hungarian sub-group. His native language would be Medieval Romanian in the former case or medieval Hungarian in the latter. Dracula refers to “throwing off the Hungarian yoke”, which would be an odd viewpoint for a Szekely to have. Stoker seems to have done a lot of research on Transylvania to give Harker’s travel diary verisimilitude, but he didn’t have Wikipedia, and may have confused the various ethnic groups of the Carpathians. They all would have sounded suitably distant and exotic to his English-speaking audience.

An astute observation regarding the languages. I wonder if that will be be explained or revisited at some point. The reason I wonder is because there were several other odd things in that passage which wouldn't need to be there unless there were a reason. For example, Harker writes (regarding the blond), "I seemed somehow to know her face, and to know it in connection with some dreamy fear, but I could not recollect at the moment how or where." and also the 2 dark haired females say, "Go on! You are first, and we shall follow; yours is the right to begin." Why is it the blonds right to begin? There seems to be going more going on here.

As for Dracula's origins, several Wikipedia entries are interesting including this one on the History of the Székely people. If Dracula has lived for centuries, he likely would have gone through several periods of political upheaval and alliances and clashes. Also, if they lived on the edge of any empire and were often a 'buffer people' they would likely be familiar with several languages in the region. Dracula certainly seems to show an interest in and have an aptitude for language.

[Túrin Turambar]

As a language geek, I can’t help but notice around this point that Stoker seems to have forgotten that his characters speak different languages. The fact hat Harker can understand the dialogue between the vampires implies either that they considerately speak in English in front of people whose blood they plan to drink, in his dream-like state he could understand their language, they’re speaking in German, or Stoker simply forgot that they shouldn’t be speaking English!

Stoker isn’t entirely clear on Dracula’s origin. He explicitly bases him on Vlad III, a Wallachian (i.e. Romanian) ruler, while Dracula in the book claims to be a Szekely, a member of Hungarian sub-group. His native language would be Medieval Romanian in the former case or medieval Hungarian in the latter. Dracula refers to “throwing off the Hungarian yoke”, which would be an odd viewpoint for a Szekely to have. Stoker seems to have done a lot of research on Transylvania to give Harker’s travel diary verisimilitude, but he didn’t have Wikipedia, and may have confused the various ethnic groups of the Carpathians. They all would have sounded suitably distant and exotic to his English-speaking audience.

An astute observation regarding the languages. I wonder if that will be be explained or revisited at some point. The reason I wonder is because there were several other odd things in that passage which wouldn't need to be there unless there were a reason. For example, Harker writes (regarding the blond), "I seemed somehow to know her face, and to know it in connection with some dreamy fear, but I could not recollect at the moment how or where." and also the 2 dark haired females say, "Go on! You are first, and we shall follow; yours is the right to begin." Why is it the blonds right to begin? There seems to be going more going on here.

My interpretation is that the three female vampires (the 'Brides of Dracula' as they're called in fandom) are women Dracula turned to vampirism, and the blonde was the first one he turned, and hence was the 'eldest' or most senior. Which leads me to wonder how many victims he would have had over the centuries. There couldn't be too many, or Europe would be full of vampires due to exponential growth!

As for Dracula's origins, several Wikipedia entries are interesting including this one on the History of the Székely people. If Dracula has lived for centuries, he likely would have gone through several periods of political upheaval and alliances and clashes. Also, if they lived on the edge of any empire and were often a 'buffer people' they would likely be familiar with several languages in the region. Dracula certainly seems to show an interest in and have an aptitude for language.

Indeed. And it makes the most sense to put him in a 'buffer' region where he wouldn't have clashed with authority in the way he would have in a more central location.