I just finished reading Bram Stoker's Dracula, and I liked it very much! I'm planning a new AP English Literature course for next year on the theme of the monstrous and the humane (a few years ago the FGS English Department started offering a couple of AP Lit courses each year on different themes -- it's worked very well), and I'm thinking about this for summer reading.
There's obviously a ton to say about gender and sexuality in the novel, but I found myself even more interested in technology. Lots of emphasis on typewriters (including travel typewriters), phonographs, Kodak cameras, electric lights, and trains. But I also increasingly thought about the technology of vampirism and of salvation. There are a lot of rules for vampires and what they can and can't do (and I think I'd give that my students the project of coming up with a list of those rules as they read). There's a strong distinction in the novel between the soul and the body, and the vampire hunters' goal is to destroy the body so that they can save the soul. Mina Harker's potential damnation -- even though she is the essence of good Christianity -- was entirely about the technology of vampirism. The blessed communion wafer scorches her forehead, marking her as "unclean" before God, and it is only when Dracula dies and that scorch mark disappears that she can be holy again; her salvation has nothing to do with anything she herself does or believes or says. Fascinating.
I was reading this while visiting my mom, and she wisely asked me, "But do you want to spend your sabbatical preparing for a course? Aren't you supposed to be doing things that aren't all about school?" She is, on the one hand, totally right, and that's the very reason that at first I wanted to wait for another year before offering this new AP Lit course, so that I wouldn't spend my sabbatical doing course prep. But at the same time, summer reading does actually have to be decided before March, and I also actually enjoyed reading Dracula, so I'm happy to do the fun part of school while I'm on sabbatical, as long as I avoid the hard work of grading.
Vampire stuff is way popular... could you also ask them to compare the rules they develop on the book to say, 2 episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or the book/movie twilight? I think that would be way fun (though I understand that twilight is controversial for other reasons unrelated to vampirishness)
Posted by: hypatia cade | January 16, 2018 at 11:40 AM
Like Hypatia Cade, I was thinking about the rules in Buffy. Or the old TV show Forever Knight. It would be interesting to look at those, and then think about them in comparison with some of the rules for encounters with the Devil (as in Faustus, or Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale). (Those tend to have to do with Christian ideas that in order to sin one had to do it knowingly, or it didn't quite count. So the devil can mislead, but can't quite lie.)
Posted by: Bardiac | January 16, 2018 at 04:45 PM
Bardiac, it's that idea of sin that I found so fascinating in Dracula -- probably because I was raised Christian, and so the Faustus idea that you have to sin knowingly is the one that seems "right" to me! Mina Harker has the greatest Christian faith in the novel, and yet something done to her makes her "unclean" in the eyes of God.
Hypatia, I am a devotee of Buffy! And D and I used to joke about the variability in rules over the multiple episodes. How much sun can a vampire take? Well, it depends on the episode!
One of the reasons that I want students to compile the rules in Dracula is that they've probably been so influenced by other vampire stories they will assume those are The Rules, not realizing that each author comes up with his or her own rules, within a certain framework. I also think they've been influenced by the idea of the sexy, tortured vampire, whereas Dracula is just a monster -- he's no Angel!
Posted by: What Now? | January 17, 2018 at 08:44 AM
But Mina has been joined to a different Body, as it were. I haven't read D in ages, but the connection with blood makes me think that Stoker must be working with a sort of 1 Cor 10 hæmotheology…
Posted by: AKMA | January 18, 2018 at 04:45 AM
AKMA, that's interesting. I've just reread 1 Cor 10 and am especially struck by verse 21: "You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too; you cannot have a part in both the Lord’s table and the table of demons." And the Holy Wafer is directly opposed to drinking blood; it's what burns Mina's forehead, and a circle drawn in the earth with a blessed communion wafer becomes an impassable barrier.
Posted by: What Now? | January 18, 2018 at 09:48 AM