Brief Exam Notes: Bram Stoker - Dracula
As I'm reading through my exam list, I've been alternating through texts I've already read and those I should have already read (I know, John Galsworthy, I'm coming for you). One of my favorite books of all time came up in the rotation this week: Bram Stoker's Dracula.
I've read this book more times than I can count and I've written and presented at conferences about it, so I went into the text not really expecting to find anything new or different this time around. The text has some useful things to say about medicine, gender, and perceptions of Empire, but these topics have been addressed pretty well over the years. The ties between emotion and gender may also be important in establishing something of a test case in my sentimentalism question, although it falls just outside the Edwardian period, so I'm reluctant to make that connection as of yet.
Where I'm continually struck, particularly after reading Prelli's Rhetoric of Science this week (which I'm hoping to write on tomorrow) is how scientific/medical/technological and legal rhetorical boundaries break down in the face of the supernatural. While the protagonists want to wield their professional skills as tools against Dracula (this argument is nothing new. I've seen this argued in other contexts both in books and at conferences), their professional allegiances and their terministic orientations prevent them from recognizing the legitimacy of the evidence of Dracula's influence. Some of the Crew of Light's powers of resistance come from their ability to name and classify Dracula and/or the physical symptoms he produces. His abilities or the symptoms fall outside their understanding of the world as manifested in these orientations, causing a good deal of flailing around for solutions; when they can't name him or qualify his actions, he gets the upper hand. We see this when Seward tries to treat Lucy or Renfield particularly. (I'm also interested whether we could say the same of Jonathan's perspective as a solicitor, since his devotion to his profession blinds him from recognizing the patterns of behavior so obvious to the readers in his professional dealings in Transylvania). Particularly, I'm interested in contrasting these orientations in Van Helsing and Seward, since Van Helsing trained Seward yet holds a vastly different terministic orientation. Science and the supernatural aren't mutually exclusive for him, which is something I'm hoping to explore at a later stage, whether it's during the dissertation or later.