Dracula reading assignment and questions for Wednesday class meeting

Please read Dracula, Chapters 16, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25, and 27.) 

Questions for short-take discussion below:

1.     
     Consider the further elaboration of the vampire image as the novel continues.  Dracula as creeping mist; Dracula as bat; Dracula attended with swarming rats—what sorts of horror-effects do these suggest and how do these support the demonization function (which in turn supports 1890s British xenophobia, slavophobia, and maybe homophobia)?

      Essay a feminist reading of Dracula, with Mina Harker your main case-study.  Stoker invokes the
     “New Woman” of 1890s feminism ,and issues of agency are highlighted in the story (should Mina be protected and play a passive role or should Mina participate in the hunt for Dracula and play an active role; is Mina under Dracula’s control and not to be trusted or is Mina able to break free of that control; and so on).  In your view, does Stoker endorse a feminist perspective where women are conceptualized in terms of active autonomy and equality with men?

3.     Zeroing in on matters of sexuality and gender, what do you make of the manner of Dracula’s attack on Mina, involving Mina’s sucking blood from his chest as well as Dracula’s bite to her neck, all of it later described as Mina’s having been “infected”?  Do you see a late-Victorian male fantasy of feminine purity dramatized here?  How might such a fantasy serve to uphold and reaffirm male domination over women?

4.     Comment on the following statement from Mina, near the end of the novel: “Thank God for good brave men!”  In your view, what idea or ideal of men and masculinity does Stoker’s novel promote?

5.     Consider the following statement, from the account of Mina’s infection and in light of her becoming one of Dracula’s “Un-dead” mates: ”We men were all in tears now…we wept openly.”  In your view, how does this moment of what was considered feminine behavior fit in with Stoker’s story of brave men saving England from the invasion of foreign demons?

6.     Think about what hypnotism does in the novel in terms of horror-effects.  What is especially disturbing about the hypnotized subject (e.g., Mina, Lucy, Jonathan, Renfield)?  The horror aspect here?

7.     A reading against the grain: are there any ways a postmodern reader might see in Dracula and the vampire motif a line of resistance or revision in relation to mainstream ideologies that, say, privilege the heterosexual family unit and heterosexuality as absolute “norms”?  So that, for example, some of the feminist or gay or queer resonances of a contemporary vampire story like True Blood can be traced back to things that were potential in Stoker’s Dracula?