May 15th and 16th’s journal entries by Jonathan are extremely interesting in terms of a gender analysis of Dracula because it is one of the clearest examples of Jonathan actually taking on the role of a Gothic heroine
Not only does he compare himself to a young lady of the past who would have occupied the room and done exactly what he is doing (writing to someone they love) and reclining on the comfortable couches, but this narrative turn is precisely the classic Gothic trope of a young woman who has been brought to a big old lonely house venturing out into an abandoned and forbidden part of the house (representing her mind) and discovering something exciting and terrible (sexuality). Think of Jane Eyre or Crimson Peak
The three women place him under a thrall and he is open about while being duly terrified he is also aroused. Notably he is also in a very submissive position which was customary for female characters at the time. Ravishing stories are very common in sexually repressed cultures because resistance to the idea and being in a position of submission gives the woman of the story plausible deniability in the face of sexuality
When the Count comes in it gets no less erotic and actually gets more direct as he verbally claims Jonathan as his and responds that he CAN love when the three women accuse him of being unable to, the implication clear that he will love Jonathan before giving him over to them for “kisses”
Jonathan then wakes undressed in his own bed, his agency removed by literally having been moved away from his progress exploring and back into where the Count is keeping him and allowing him to go
I too have seen people call Mina boring before but using also adjectives such as "sexless" and "passive", and it's in conjunction to describing why Mina as Dracula's love interest is better (because now she has clear dark sexual desires, and also has "agency" and choosing for herself, the latter of which I find very unconvincing given it always involves either reincarnation or soulmates. Her signature song in the Dracula musical is called I Was Born to Love You. Also it always makes her dumb as bricks but I digress)
yeah that's. pissing on the poor i'd say
that's not to say that i am inherently opposed to a storyline about dark sexual desires - if you take a scroll through my blog, that's like 70% of everything I love - but i also firmly believe that a romance plot must take into account the separate halves' complexity in order for the whole to have any meat on it. with that in mind, the principal reason why I dislike Dracula/Mina plotlines is that they erase all of Mina's existing characterization out of hand.
a classic vampire romance is rooted in a number of different subconscious desires/fears, and most prominent among them has always been some form of incompatibility of the love interest with their human existence. Aubrey (The Vampyre) is bored, unfulfilled, and queer. Laura (Carmilla) is lonely (and queer). Ellen (Nosferatu) is markedly odd and out of place in 1922 - and, in addition to that, disabled, isolated, and implied to be queer in 2024. Buffy (BTVS) is trapped by her Slayer duties, arguably queer, and consistently denied happiness or true understanding. You can follow this line of loneliness, boredom, a lack of fulfillment from one vampire story to the next - with the great and notable exception of Bram Stoker's Dracula.
crucially, Mina Harker is not unfulfilled. she loves her life. she is excited for her future and is actively building it with Jonathan, whom she adores, and who loves her well enough to write down recipes for her, collect train schedules, practice shorthand together, and choose an eternity of damnation over losing her. she is not bored. she isn't lonely. she isn't misunderstood or unloved or ostracized - and Dracula, that pompous aristocratic asshole, swans into her life, like a plague, and ruins everything; and the thing is, it isn't even personal.
she is a blip on Dracula's radar. he's only there because he wants to drink blood and live forever. he does not care about Mina Harker. it definitely can be said that for Jonathan, Dracula involves some degree of repressed homosexual desire; but for Mina, it is a contagion story, first and foremost. Lucy is drained by a strange illness nobody recognizes - and no matter how the 1992 Coppola film tries to slutshame her for it, she is killed by an open bedroom window, because her mother did not follow a doctor's instructions. Jonathan disappears and then turns up in a hospital, sick and fevered. when Mina herself is bitten, the action of the final act is about finding her a cure. her experience of Dracula is fundamentally tied to the London-wide trauma of mid-1800s epidemics, and trying to restructure this narrative in favour of a ~dark romance~ inherently undermines and effaces everything that actually made her interesting.
in that context, it is no wonder those people consider her boring. they've made her that way.
Dracula has taken Jon's means of communication. I believe this is punishment for his attempts to communicate last entry. drac probably did it whilst setting Jon's bed, an established thing that dracula does (which he likely did use as an excuse to be in Jon's room).
also, those travel and train memoranda were totally intended as a gift for Jon's beloved train fiend. drac either took them to rub salt in the wound, or because he feared Jon would use it to figure his own way home.
and finally, everything that Jon would find useful has been taken, along with Jon's travel wear. drac can use it all to make his own travel easier, and to make it appear that jon has been seen after drac plans to have the guy killed, away from drac's castle. i mean, he shows Jon's papers and dresses like Jon and nobody will have reason to doubt that he is Jon. but also, this means Jon has been left high and dry, practically stranded even if he does manage to escape.
I'm currently reading Dracula: The Postcolonial Edition, edited by Cristina Artenie and Dragos Moraru. The former is a Dracula specialist and the latter is a literary theory specialist.
According to Universitas Press:
For scholars interested in decolonization in literary studies this is a prime example. Jonathan Harker’s colonial adventure and Bram Stoker’s imperialist discourse are restored to their original context of British economic and political involvement in East-Central Europe. This edition relies both on British and Romanian sources and exposes the cultural appropriation and distortion of Romanian history and folklore. Among the many threads the editors have followed is the very significant one related to the superimposition of the vampire onto Romanian beliefs.
I picked up this edition because it was mentioned in the notes of my post about the murkiness of Dracula's ethnicity. For anyone else who is similarly curious, I am noting all the mentions made of Dracula's identity/nationality/ethnicity/race/etc.
This is a long post, so the TL;DR is that this analysis of Dracula identifies him as the historical figure Vlad Țepeș, which would make him Romanian.
From the introduction:
The explanatory modality [of Dracula criticism] came under heavy pressure in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when many critics studying Stoker's research notes for Dracula...became convinced that the novelist only very loosely based his vampire on a historical character also called Dracula...
As often happens in revisionist perspectives, commentators have gone from one extreme to the other, overlooking the many textual clues indicating that the Count is really supposed to be the 15th-century Romanian monarch.
From Chapter II, in reference to Dracula's high aquiline nose:
Two of Stoker's sources speak of the "aquiline" nose of Romanians...[Johnson] watches a two-hour-long "trades' procession"...and is impressed: "This splendid, well-arranged, and most interesting show...proved what an enterprising, progressive people the Roumanians are. Their aquiline Roman features show that blood will out—and so will noses." Mazuchelli similarly describes the "aquiline noses of the male descendants of the Dacians"...
In the same chapter, when Dracula refers to himself as boyar:
Stoker knew very well from his sources (Wilkinson and Johnson) that this was a title used in Romania, but not in an Austrian province like Transylvania...This is a first indication that Dracula, although a Székely Count, may also consider (or remember) himself as Romanian.
In the same chapter, Dracula's reference of falling into his "country's habit of putting your patronymic first" is from one of Stoker's sources on Hungary:
Stoker found the information in Crosse and summarised it as follows: "In Hungarian the Christian name comes last—Buda Adam not Adam Buda"
In Chapter III, when Dracula refers to the blood of Attila flowing in his veins:
What [Dracula] implies, however, is that the "Ugric tribe" from the North mixed with the Huns to give birth to the Székelys and his own ancestors.
In the same speech, when Dracula repeats the phrase "Dracula indeed":
The repetition of the phrase "Dracula indeed" in the space of three lines will be later echoed in Van Helsing's insistence that the Count "must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula."...the only other surviving note that [Stoker] took about 15th-century Wallachia is that of a footnote about the name of Dracula..."Dracula in the Wallachian language means Devil. The Wallachians were...used to give this as a surname to any person who rendered himself conspicuous either by courage, cruel actions, or cunning." None of this [regarding the name's meaning and bestowal] is actually true.
For the sentence "Was it not this Dracula, indeed, who inspired that other of his great race who in a later age again and again brought his forces over the great river into Turkey-land; who, when he was beaten back, came again, and again, and again, though he had to come alone from the bloody field where his troops were being slaughtered, since he knew that he alone could ultimately triumph?":
The next note taken down by Stoker is a little unexpected: "1600. After abdication of Sigismund of Transylvania, this principality became tributary to Emperor Rodolphus [of Austria] who appointed Michael VOIVODE"...The first sentence is taken almost verbatim from Wilkinson, who also writes that Michael "fixed his residence" in Transylvania...The novelist [Stoker] seems intent on finding a connection between Dracula, a ruler in Wallachia, and the neighbouring province of Transylvania. His next note is, in fact, about the late-17th-century "Voivode Constantine Brancovano Bessarabba...of Wallachia...Emperor Leopold made him Prince of the Roman Empire and gave him landed estates in Transylvania."
"That other of his race" mentioned by the Count must be Michael the Brave (1593-1601)*, a descendant of Țepeș...Later in the novel, Van Helsing and Mina will conflate the deeds of the two warriors into a single account, understanding that the Count can sometimes sleep for a century, then re-emerge as one of "his race," of the "Dracula blood," or as one of the "great men" in his family mentioned in Chapter XVIII.
*This date range refers to Michael's reign, not his lifetime.
In reference to "when, after the battle of Mohacs, we threw off the Hungarian yoke," the annotations note that, despite one of Stoker's known sources (Johnson) describing the "ruthless hand of the Moslem" in Transylvania and the "frequent sacking" of frontier towns:
...Stoker chose to see the Turkish conquest as a kind of liberation from under the "Hungarian yoke," a formula that seems very unlikely coming from an anti-Ottoman warrior like Dracula. Rather, this expresses Turkophile sentiments very common in Victorian England.
Regarding "we of the Dracula blood were amongst their leaders," the annotations state:
Several prominent Transylvanian aristocrats of the time were descendants of Vlad Țepeș and of his brother Vlad the Monk (1482-1495). Dracula's progeny survived through female descendants who married into Székely nobility...
When Dracula says "Ah, young sir, the Székelys—" toward the end of his speech:
This is the last time Dracula is identified as a Székely. From now on he will be exclusively associated with the already mentioned 15th-century ruler of Wallachia and with (alleged) Romanian legends and superstitions. There is no contradiction, however, in this dual identity. The descendents of the Romanian Dracula lived as Transylvanian Székelys well into the 19th century, when a scion of the family, Claudine Rhédey, married Duke Alexander of Württemberg and gave birth to Francis, Duke of Teck, a personal acquaintance of Bram Stoker.
Regarding the female vampires:
The women's noses, just like Dracula's, identify them as Romanian.
In Chapter XVIII, regarding Van Helsing's statement "I have asked my friend Arminius, of Buda-Pesth University, to make his record; and, from all the means that are, he tell me of what [Dracula] has been. He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land. If it be so, then he was no common man; for in that time, and for centuries after, he was spoken of as the cleverest and the most cunning, as well as the bravest of the sons of the 'land beyond the forest.'":
First Arminius confirms, then Van Helsing and Mina Harker will infer on their own that Count Dracula and the historical character known by the same name or as Vlad Țepeș are one and the same person.
In his research notes, Stoker took down an erroneous footnote from Wilkinson stating that the name of Dracula means "Devil" and that the sobriquet can be applied in the Romanian language "to any person who rendered himself conspicuous either by courage, cruel actions, or cunning." Curiously, he never mentioned explicitly the alleged meaning of the name (although Dracula will soon use "De Ville" as an alias) and here he replaced "cruel actions" with cleverness. Stoker could have found Vlad Țepeș mentioned in many other English books, published in the second half of the 19th century. At least two of them are somewhat sympathetic, even though they mention Vlad's cruelty...
In the same chapter, regarding Van Helsing's statement "There have been from the loins of this very one great men and good women":
When Stoker began writing the novel, Francis, Duke of Teck, a descendant of the Draculas, was married to Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge, a close friend of Henry Irving. They had three sons and a daughter, "Princess Mary Victoria," as Stoker calls her, who married the Prince of Wales's son and, by the mid-1890s, had given birth to two sons (the future kings Edward VIII and George VI).
In Chapter XX, when Dracula uses the alias Count de Ville:
This is the first time (through an alias) that Dracula identifies himself as a count (the name he has chosen, "de Ville," is an all-too-obvious reference to the devil which, as Stoker thought, may be called "Dracula" in Romanian). Francis of Teck was a Duke, and then a Prince, but had been born Count of Hohenstein, a name he used again in the mid-1880s, when he was living incognito abroad, hiding from creditors.
In Chapter XXI, when Dracula refers to himself as "me who commanded nations, and intrigued for them, and fought for them, hundreds of years before [Mina's allies] were born":
Dracula confirms Arminius's report and Van Helsing's conclusion that he is the historical character he has previously mentioned only as an ancestor. He makes it even clearer by invoking an argument of countries like Hungary and Romania that they were "champions of Christendom against Mahomedan invasion" (Mazuchelli) and fought against "enemies of Christianity" (Wilkinson).
I am not sure what is being referred to with the mention of Dracula invoking countries like Hungary and Romania. This may be a reference to his lineage speech in Chapter III.
Those are all of the relevant annotations relating to Dracula's ancestry and ethnicity.
My own personal thoughts:
I absolutely agree that Count Dracula is meant to be of both Romanian and Hungarian heritage. I further agree that the intermarriage of Székely and Wallachian peoples was well-documented throughout history. Whether Stoker viewed his character as Hungarian or Romanian, it's clear that Dracula identifies with both sides of his ancestry. He may prefer the Wallachian side, given his mention of "throwing off the Hungarian yoke." Even so, he brags about his Székely blood.
Personally, however, I don't believe that Dracula stating he commanded and intrigued for nations is proof positive that he is Vlad Țepeș, and I also don't believe that Arminius or Mina's statements support this view. To my perception, Van Helsing is the only individual who connects Dracula with Vlad Țepeș, and that could have been a mistake on Van Helsing's part (he certainly makes many throughout the book) or on Stoker's, forgetting which Dracula he meant to compare with the Count. It wouldn't be the first time Stoker erred either. I also don't recall any evidence in the novel that Dracula will "sometimes sleep for a century, then re-emerge as one of his race."
None of this means that Dracula wasn't intended to be Vlad Țepeș, of course. Short of resurrecting Bram Stoker, we'll never known for certain how much the real Dracula inspired the fictional one. But I've always taken the "other of his race in a later age" to be Count Dracula, inspired by Vlad Dracula's actions just as Stoker was inspired by his name.
With that said, I've just been flipping through the book looking for annotations about Dracula's identity, but the introduction of this edition and the other information I glimpsed was all fascinating. The Postcolonial Edition definitely offers a perspective that I think the work has always needed, and I encourage checking it out.
Describing Jonathan Harker's hair going white as his "magical girl anime transformation" to my friend. Now I need a Sailor Moon style clip of that but at the end it says "Trauma!" Underneath.
One thing I’m seeing on this re-read of Dracula Daily that I’m already really enjoying, it’s all the little details we didn’t catch before
When we first started we didn’t know who Jonathan Harker was and to us he was just a silly little British man who was ignoring the obvious warning signs, so there was a comedic element to the dramatic irony of him going to Castle Dracula
But now that we know who Jonathan is and we care about him, it hits much harder all the subtle horror elements we missed while focusing on this good friend telling us about his travels
From the first entry, people picking up on the dog barking under his window and being like “is that Dracula? Does it start this early?” Being skeeved out by Dracula’s overly familiar letter to Jonathan, which at first seemed perfectly reasonable except for the name attached at the end, and picking up on all the terrible foreshadowing for what will be Jonathan’s living hell over the next month in his Castle.
And people this time picking up on the bravery of the wife of the innkeeper who gave him a crucifix, begging him to stay or wait, to not go to the castle, of the terror of knowing that Dracula was in correspondence with her husband to get the letter to Jonathan and the sort of subtle threat they must be under at all times, of the significance of “for your mother’s sake” knowing what Dracula does to children. She is no longer perceived as a random background character, but an active player forced to be a bystander who is trying desperately to help this ignorant soul in any way she can even if she knows it might be useless.
I love people realizing Jonathan is skeptical and off-put, but not enough to deter his mission. He’s not oblivious, just making an effort to remain open-minded to the culture and superstitions and beliefs he is not familiar with, since he’s aware it will be wildly different from his own (to the best of his ability for being an Englishman from the 1890s) and pointedly dismissing the things that might be red flags as an attempt to rationalize because nothing truly concerning has happened yet to provoke him to leave, and he doesn’t want to be deterred by something he’s getting worked up for for no reason yet, he couldn’t do his job otherwise and people are depending on him
Idk, I just like this deeper analysis and thought now that people are already familiar and attached to his character, and now know what happens, so they can properly point out when something is foreshadowing later events or themes in the novel, and they can pick up on it quicker
Even something as simple as people noticing the other meals mentioned in the first entry because of all the focus on Paprika Hendl last year makes me happy :)
I like that they are giving our protagonist more credit now, knowing the character he turns into later in the novel (a badass)
I can't believe that Tokyo Ghoul has a much better representation of Jonathan Harker than actual media depicting Jonathan Harker
This isn't phrased as a question, but I assume what you're asking is something along the lines of, "why is this random dark fantasy manga from mid-2010's Japan a better representation of Jonathan Harker than any of the actual Dracula adaptions?"
I will try to answer that question as best I can :)
On the most basic level, it's because Dracula has the curse of most of its adaptions being straight up terrible. Sorta like if Tokyo Ghoul had a hundred Root A's (as terrifying as that thought is lol). So the bar is quite low. I mean, literally the only good Dracula adaptions that I'm aware of are re: Dracula, which is basically just a VERY elaborately produced audio book of the original text, and the Michael Pink ballet. (Just ask my friend @catwingsthespatula, one of Tumblr's resident Dracula experts). So if you think about it, Tokyo Ghoul doesn't really have to do *that* much work to make Kaneki a better Harker than most adaption Harkers lol.
The other thing is that Tokyo Ghoul the manga (note, NOT the anime: like Dracula, Tokyo Ghoul was somewhat cursed with a bad adaption that has soured a lot of people's perspective on the source material), actually plays pretty heavily into some of the really old-school, Victorian-Gothic vampire characteristics, *without* overdoing some of the vampire-specific tropes that have accumulated in the media over the years. So, ghouls need to feed on human lives to survive, like vampires. They can, in some cases, be very seductive, and seem to represent the darker side of both hunger and sexual desire, much like vampires historically have. Ghouls, like vampires, are strongly coded as minority Other, whether that Other be a religious, racial, or lgbt-adjacent minority. Some of them, like Tsukiyama and his Gourmet Club buddies, are very wealthy, refined, and aristocratic. But Ishida's ghouls are not the chilly, hypersexual, wealthy and privileged, uniformly evil, heartless creatures of the typical vampire mythos either. They're a bit more like Mina Harker during her partial transformation into a vampire, genuinely struggling to value human life and have a conscience despite needing to kill and eat fellow sentient creatures to survive. They're very human, which makes Tokyo Ghoul such an utterly refreshing take on the urban fantasy and vampire genres.
Tokyo Ghoul also has some pretty distinctly Gothic undertones. Anime News Network's reviews of the series repeatedly point out parallels with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, one of the first works of Gothic horror and a literary precursor of sorts to Dracula, and I can't say I disagree. The psychological drama in Tokyo Ghoul of the innocent protagonist coming to terms with his position as Monstrous Other is somewhat Gothic-coded. And Kureo Mado, the revenge-obsessed CCG agent whose vicious vendetta against the innocent young Hinami proves that humans can be just as much of monsters as ghouls, feels an awful lot like a psychotic, evil version of van Helsing. Apparently Ishida is a big fan of the writings of Franz Kafka and Osamu Dazai. I honestly would not be surprised if he had also at some point read a Japanese translation of Bram Stoker's Dracula and derived some inspiration from it. After all, a lot of Western literature is surprisingly popular in Japan, and vampires are a pretty common theme in manga, so this is quite plausible.
Anyway, that was a lot of text, but thank you for giving me an opportunity to nerd out about Tokyo Ghoul and Victorian Gothic literature at the same time, it was greatly appreciated.
24 Aug: Lucy journals that she is dreaming and weak again, and it's noticeable enough for Arthur to worry
25 Aug: Lucy heard flapping at the window, had bad dreams, and wakes pale and with a sore throat (clearly was attacked that night)
30 Aug: Lucy responds to Mina’s letter about her wedding, says she is healthy, full of life, and no longer sleepwalking: “I think I have not stirred out of my bed for a week”
31 Aug: Arthur is so worried about Lucy that he asks Seward to come check on her. He says “she looks awful, and is getting worse every day.”
So options are:
1. Lucy was getting better but Dracula attacked again the night of Aug 30th (which is possible, it’s been five days since the last known attack, but Arthur’s description of her illness doesn’t sound like a sudden change)
2. Lucy was lying to Mina so as not to worry her, especially in her own time of happiness (which is pretty consistent with what we’ve seen so far)
I think both options can work and honestly both are sad. Finally hopeful and looking forward to a happy future only for a sudden change for the worse, or more of the suffocating propriety and emotional secrecy leading Lucy to isolate herself even more. There is one cool thing that comes of it though, which is that Arthur sees through it all, pushes past her reluctance to care for herself, and makes sure something is done about her illness. I just think it's really sweet that Lucy, who prides herself in being hard to read (especially by someone like Seward who kinda does it for a living) and literally practices hiding her emotions in the mirror, is in love with and being cared for by the man who sees and accepts all of her.
