This is such a shallow interpretation of Dracula the novel, so shallow that it prevents answering its own rhetorical question. It's especially noticeable since the post goes on to discuss Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde quite a bit better. Dracula is like a blind spot for analysis for this poster.
So let's be blunt here: Dracula is a racist, anti-semitic, anti-immigrant book. It's about an evil count pretending to be a peaceful immigrant but actually he is an evil eastern european jewish rapist who is coming here to rape and corrupt good white englishwomen.
It's a bit offensive to describe this literal bloodsucking jew character as some anti-capitalist metaphor, as the screenshotted post seems to imply.
All this is fairly obvious to me, who has read the book many times, and even more obvious to just about any literary scholar who has read this book. Now it might not be obvious to the general public nowadays, who I think might not fully understand the novel since it's almost 130 years removed from the present-day context. For example, people reading it today might simply not understand what Stoker means by describing Dracula's face as "aquiline." They might not understand the word means in its most basic sense, and just skip over it. And such readers are even less able to understand that Stoker is clearly coding Dracula as jewish.
A lot of it also has to do with how popular Dracula is despite it's age. There is a strong fandom here on tumblr, of the book itself, as the Dracula Daily craze a few years ago proved. So there is the usual fan's reluctance to admit that the work they love is racist. It takes an unusual fan to admit that "I love this book, this book is racist", but I'm that fan.
Anyway, once you understand Dracula is an uncomfortably racist text about the evil foreigner rapist, then you can finally answer question asked in the screenshotted post.
The reason adaptations like the Francis Ford Coppola film change Dracula to a sympathetic, tragic figure who is Mina's lover, despite that being the opposite of the original story, is because that original story is racist.
It's one easy way to subvert the racism of the story, and fairly common in horror media. Turning the monstrous outsider (a trope that is inherently racist and xenophobic) into a sympathetic and misunderstood tragic figure, unfairly persecuted by the forces of normality and turning the rape of the (white) female lead character into a consensual relationship, it's a standard way of subverting an old racist horror story.
See The Shape of Water for a movie that does the same to The Creature from the Black Lagoon. These films are unfaithful, but they are engaging with the themes of the work.
And it's probably for the best that a Dracula adaptation is unfaithful. A faithful adaptation can't help but reproduce the racism inherent to the story. See Robert Eggers's Nosferatu (2024) for an uncomfortable example (it deserves its own post).
Dracula in Coppola rapes Lucy. Multiple times. On-screen, very graphically, he rapes her as a werewolf.
His (extremely orientalist) brides rape Jonathan.
Among other things that he does in the movie in which he has "a consensual relationship with Mina", is feed on his own people (who all fear and hate his guts and do their best to save Harker), kill babies of his own people, kill an entire ship full of Russians, and (and I cannot emphasize this enough) rape Lucy.
Saying that the movies like Coppola's make Dracula have a consensual (doubtful, since he keeps hypnotizing Mina) relationship specifically to battle xenophobia is frankly ridiculous. Dracula does the exact same things, and even worse ones, the only difference is that he also has a love interest now.
I mean feel free to misinterpret the reincarnated wife movies all you like, but they are very much not made To Own Xenophobia. Be so for real.
my lawyer told me "you're very honest in a way that I'd want you to talk in mediation but not in court" and I wasn't sure what that meant until 10 minutes later when I, completely unprompted, referred to myself as a "pathological responsibility hoarder" and immediately was like oh, okay, I get it now
âIâm fighting alone, every day. I fight with the hell that I survived. I fight with the fact of my own humanity. I fight with the idea that death is the only way of escaping this fact.â
-dont go to the emergency room with dental problems. go to the dentist
-bagged greens are cheaper than pre-made salads
-taco bell is NOT worth the money anymore. 1/4 cup mayo, 1/4 cup sour cream, 3 tblspoons pickled jalapenos+2tblspoons of the jar liquid, 2 tsp paprika 1 tsp cumin 1 tsp garlic powder 1 tsp onion powder salt+pepper. all in your blender. creamy jalapeno sauce
-dont quit your job unless you have a bunch of job interviews lined up immediately after
-use resources. food bank, unemployment, housing assistance, financial aid, etc. yes there will be paperwork. but Do It
-dont stay awake longer than 20 hours. you Will start to become impulsive and cranky. resting for 20 minutes is better than trying to stay awake
-for every 2 hours you spend looking up close at screens, spend 20 minutes looking at something far away from you. stretch your wrists a lot
-dont do that yoga stretch where you roll your head around your shoulders. youre grinding down the joints in your neck
-be nice to your friends, bullying them as a joke gets old. if you need a ride somewhere at least offer them gas money
-brush your teeth at any time of the day but especially before you sleep. dont snack in bed if you can help it. make your bed the Clean Teeth Zone. keep floss picks by your bed
-dont tell your boss youre adhd/autism/depression/suicidal. dont trust your coworkers with that. you NEVER know how people will take it and its none of their business
-train your pets to go to the front door when they hear a fire alarm
the thing about being "good with kids" is all it takes is literally just not trying to control and mould them with every interaction. it's just being a normal person and engaging with them through normal interactions like having conversations and playing games. it's just being genuine and friendly and not perceiving them as lumps of wet clay you are there to shape. "oh you're so good with kids" thanks it's because I think they are people
And now that I've established some background for The Pale Lady, it's time for my sequel pitch. Dramatis Personae:
(Yes, that's right, the frame narrative of The Pale Lady is set in the 1830s, The Silliest Decade Of Fashion. More on that later)
You may notice I've given Gregoriska glowing eyes. Yes, we're making him a vampire too. Their whole family line is cursed, and anyway, he had it coming courtesy of his own mother:
âWell then, Gregoriska, I wish to know whether we will bear my son to his fatherâs side without the oath having been sworn; whether, in other words, I can weep in peace, like a woman, relying on you â a man â to carry out the punishment.â
âJust name my brotherâs murderer, madam, and give the order; I swear to you that within an hour, if you so request, he will have ceased to live.â
âGo ahead and swear, Gregoriska, swear, on pain of my curse â do you hear me, my son? Swear that the murderer will die, that you will not leave a single stone of his house still standing; that his mother, his children, his brothers and his wife or his betrothed will perish at your hand. Swear, and as you swear, call down on you the wrath of Heaven if you fail to observe this sacred oath. If you fail to observe this sacred oath, then doom yourself to misery, the execration of your friends and your motherâs curse.â
Gregoriska stretched forth his hand over the corpse. âI swear that the murderer will die,â he said.
Yeah, he's careful about the oath he actually swears, but listen. Family curse. I'm vampiring that boy.
So Gregoriska and Kostaki both revive from the dead, because they're vampires and thus extremely difficult to kill, and have a tense confrontation in the tomb. Gregoriska would like to reunite with Hedwig, and is very much in denial about having become a bloodsucking monster. That sort of thing doesn't happen to good Christians. (Lol, lmao even)
In the end, they both go looking for Hedwig.
Now I need to bring up something I left out of my synopsis post, a little scene which occurs near the end, while Gregoriska is dying. From Gregoriska to Hedwig:
"...but let us waste no time: take a little of this earth impregnated with his blood and apply it to the bite that he inflicted on youâthis is the only way that you will be able in the future to protect yourself from his horrible love."
Hedwig obeys this unsanitary directive, presumably giving her some kind of magical protection against Kostaki biting her. What this means is that in our sequel, the roles of Kostaki and Gregoriska are reversed - Gregoriska is now the dangerous one, and Kostaki, who has been magically rendered harmless against Hedwig, is the only one who can protect her.
On God I will turn this dynamic into a love triangle and it WILL be an improvement on the original. This is what these characters were made for.
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