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Dracula Q7: The characters
There are many characters with significant spotlight time in the book. How well are they portrayed? Do their different voices come through?
What did you think of Lucy's fate, and was her death meaningful? Were you, like me, intensely annoyed with van Helsing's pomposity and verbosity? (I skipped several of his extended pontifications.)
Comments
Yes, van Helsing is surely the prototype of the monologuing villain, even if he is on the good side!
Lucy's death - at least one person had to die, I think, and I suppose Stoker decided Lucy was the one so that we would all want the same fate not to happen to Mina. But to only lose one member of the party, and a fairly peripheral one at that, seems highly fortunate given the presented adversary and his presumed powers. I suppose part of this was that Dracula's actual powers were very slow to implement and take effect, needing lots of "sessions" with a victim in order to finally succeed. So part of the message might be that modern society and culture, ie guns and whatnot, not to mention the ability to track Dracula's ship and get almost instant reports of its location, was always going to prevail against the older, slower ways.
As I mentioned elsewhere, I didn't find the main character voices all that distinctive.
I think Lucy's death was needed to ramp up tension. To my mind, Mina is the main character of the novel. She is first threatened (indirectly) by almost losing her betrothed, Jonathan, then later losing her best friend Lucy. But Lucy doesn't just die - she transforms into something other, and needs to be killed by her own friends.
Then, when we learn that Mina seems to be under the same spell as Lucy, we can imagine one of several fates for her - she will die and be put to rest. Or she will become undead and not die, then maybe haunt her husband. The climax of the book seems to want to resolve whether either of these fates will come to pass for her.
I don't know if you can do that without Lucy dying first. I'm trying to imagine if the story would have been as effective if Lucy and Jonathans fates were switched (i.e. Lucy first encountered Dracula and lived, but Jonathan later died.)
So I read the book aloud to someone who hadn't read it. We read a chapter a session. I thought the voices were interesting because they were all individuals, but in the same way. Van Helsing didn't bother me. I saw it much more a story about a comitatus serving a king and queen (Jonathan and Mina Harker).
EDIT: To make my idea a bit clearer, it is a story about the old Emperor (Lord Goldalming) being overthrown by events, especially the loss of his consort Lucy, and Jonathan and Mina taking his place. So a story where a social change is produced (the Aristocratic class is replaced by the Professional class), but the society remains structurally unchanged.
Also, here you seem to be saying the book is about a class struggle, and elsewhere you said it was about getting people used to war. Are these ideas related?
(Fay Weldon, who wrote the intro to my edition, though it was about Bram Stoker’s squeamishness about women, and menstruation specifically, speculating that he was gay)
Off on a side-note, I spent a good deal of my childhood in Godalming, from about 10 years old until I left my parental home. There is of course no Lord Godalming, and so far as I know there never has been, but Surrey in general has a lot of large landed estates so such a lordship is plausible. For those unfamiliar, Godalming is pretty much half-way between London and the south coast naval and commercial ports of Portsmouth and Southampton.
Now, there's quite a lot of pre-Christian religious associations in the Godalming area (see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godalming_Hundred#Pre-Christian_religious_centre) and allegedly it was one of the last places in southern England to formally convert to Christianity. I have no idea whether any of that subtext was in Bram Stoker's mind, but by making something of a stretch you could argue that Lord Godalming is struggling between his (namesake's) paganism and Christianity, and so potentially has a vulnerability to Dracula's powers, expressed here by Lucy's death. Dracula is unable to get successfully to Lord Godalming himself but is able to make inroads into him through his attachments.
Yes, like a reader as the reader understands his / her self and other selves, which simultaneously unites and disrupts their relations, and is disruptive of "mechanical" control and order, which truly does fail when facing reality. The characters in the book had a level of certainty about their understanding of the cosmos, of their role in the cosmos, and especially about what evidence was the criteria of reality, that was approaching a blind faith. John Seward was the most plodding of them, but even the "open-minded" Van Helsing shared the same method of speculation that was bound to only efficient causes matter. See discussion of social mores in next paragraph.
I saw the basic outline of the plot as being a war-band on a "holy" (justified) mission to improve the world through application violence and death, against the mores that govern ordinary society. In this sense the protagonists and antagonist were the same, but one had lived beyond his time. Perhaps mirroring Lord Godalming's role in society. Also reflecting Irish mythology, Arthurian legend, Troubadour literature, etc.
I thought the book was quite "thick" with meaning, generated by reflection, mirroring, echoes etc. There was quite a bit of a sort of proto-anthropology in it, and discussion of comparative mythologies etc., which was intended to differentiate two things. IMO this kind of move is used to justify setting up the reflection as primary over what it reflects. Here what is being set up as primary is e.g the British Empire (new) over the Ottoman (old).
EDIT to clarify: I thought there were tons of these kinds of reflections in the book, about all kinds of things.
The thing about this is there is a lot of ambiguity produced because reflection is a form of analogical reasoning, which does not produce unitary certainty, but rather conveys how in "reality" things are both similar and different. So e.g. how men and women are the same and different, which gets a lot of discussion in the story, and at the same time is undercut by the story. The most obvious surface example is that being truly Dead is being eternally alive, while being Un-Dead is being truly dead because not dead, so killing is justified because the victim is benefited by having their un-life taken from them, which they merit because they take life from others. There's always a lot of killing on a farm. These are old and powerful concerns in human experience, and probably are beyond our heart's capacity to resolve, so they continue to fascinate.
The book itself is a reflection of a reflection. I thought it was craftily done. My reading was another - thus the hall of mirrors reproduces itself.