Dracula reading assignment and questions, for discussion on Monday

Please read Chapters 1-4, and Chapters 7, 8, and 15.  (For the second discussion, we will be reading Chapters 16, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25, and 27.)

 

Use one of the following items to generate your short-take material for Monday's class discussion:

1.    
     Consider the figure of Dracula in detail, with an eye to Stoker’s fashioning of horror-effects.  Does Stoker engage moves we have seen before?  Chapters 1-4 offer rich examples for this.  Later images of the dog and of the bat also are important.  And those red eyes!

2.     Critics often highlight the xenophobia inherent in Stoker’s depiction of Eastern Europe and Slavic peoples as borderline or marginal “others” in relation to a British “norm.”  Can you highlight some examples of how Stoker emphasizes the strangeness, the primitiveness, and of course with Dracula, the threatening character of these others?  (In short: how does Stoker demonize the Eastern European “other”?)

3.     And critics have just as often highlighted the role of desire and sexuality in Stoker’s story.  What does the dynamic between Harker and Dracula suggest?  Homoeroticism?  And Harker’s encounter with the three women?  Do you think Stoker is foregrounding the sexuality to build a stronger sense of how dangerous these “others” are?  Could he also be exposing a simultaneous attraction that accompanies the repulsion (Freudian ambivalence)?  Can a Foucauldian "sexuality"-as-construct perspective work here also?

4.      New concept: "Archaic Horror" involves a movement far back in time and often to remote places apart from European civilization, as we will see in Arthur Machen’s fiction, where pre-Christian ancient rituals and practices have survived through millennia.  Does Stoker engage this mode of horror in any way?

6.     
      Let’s talk about BLOOD.  What roles does blood play in the story?  Can you articulate a range of functions and meanings of blood (beyond the obvious fact that vampires suck it)?  A few hints.  Some of the primary values of blood in Western culture: blood involves the purity of family lineages and descents; blood also involves the impure, when it is linked to violence and materiality and especially to women; blood as body fluid also resonates with other body fluids—sexual, nutritive, and so on; blood figures in a well-known rhetoric that imagines kings/rulers and in a later phase capitalism and capitalists as parasitic on the life “blood” of the populace; blood in some religions is the real or imagined substance of rituals/ sacrifices that connect humans with gods/the sacred and so has ecstatic and mystical powers; finally, as a life-fluid that "flows," blood resonates with modern biopolitics and the control of flows of various kinds--urban water and sewage systems, modern transportation and market systems, and perhaps especially fantasies of bioengineering as with 1890s eugenics.

1    Re the above, if we think about  “biopolitics,” this may become yet more interesting: the modern British state/society focuses on maximizing the productive and reproductive life of its citizens.  Is Dracula an extreme example of such focus on life, an allegory of this trend?  Or the vampires a rebellious, resistant  formation?  Ambivalence and mixture here?

7.     Why do you think Stoker stages the arrival of the Demeter (the vampire ship) to England with an extended description of the tempest at sea?  (Ch. 7)

8.       Mina and Lucy’s courtship and marriage anxieties are often intermixed with Mina’s references to “the New Woman,” a late-Victorian term that characterized feminist movements of the day.  What attitudes—approval, misgivings—does Mina (and perhaps Stoker) register towards “the New Woman”?  Does the feminist aspect resonate in any way with the vampire story—Lucy’s seeming independence in reality a fatal sexual victimization?

9.     What kinds of knowledge and power does Van Helsing’s character suggest?  Is he strictly a scientist or something more?  Why does Stoker create a non-English character to play this role?

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