Dracula

It's been a long time since I last read Dracula, and in that time I apparently forgot just about everything I'd read.

I enjoyed the experience of reading this classic horror novel again, but I was stunned by the level of complex misogyny that attended the plot of the book.  The male characters -- Van Helsing, Harker, Morris, and Seward -- essentially stymie Mina Harker for the entire book. She is on the path to becoming a vampire, thanks to Jonathan Harker's early encounter with the Count where he shows Dracula her picture, and despite all evidence that Mina is a smart, capable woman, the men shove her aside for much of the novel.  There is some sense to this -- they are trying to keep Dracula from figuring out their ongoing plans to capture/kill him and she is a direct line to him -- but nonetheless, Mina is not helpless. She may in fact be the most talented and capable member of the group, despite her lack of physical strength. There is constant mention of her physical beauty, and since the men's treatment of her is representative of the time period, I'm not all that surprised; beauty is what was most often valued about women during the Victorian Era.  I do understand why the men treat Mina in this way in a cultural sense: women were thought to be fragile at the time and men were meant to protect them from any and all harm.  But I wish it weren't so.

The crossover between Dracula and Hollywood exists in a multiplicity of styles, but the most direct is the Francia Ford Coppola adaptation.  (Unfortunately, the most obvious style of Dracula that exists today is likely Twilight, but that's a rant for later.)  The Coppola adaptation, as a straight-up film of the novel's events, isn't bad; most of the events of the progress of and hunt for the vampire are accurate and compelling.

Here is the creepy-as-f*ck Dracula, as played by Gary Oldman. As scary as this image is, this is pretty darn close to how Stoker describes the Count in the original novel.  There is nothing sexy about him at all that would suggest future iterations of the vampire legend.  

But the novel itself apparently is not good enough for Hollywood; romance must flourish for the masses to truly appreciate this horror story.  And so, the movie adds romance where previous there was none.  This just kills me.  The original story approaches perfect in a horror story; the Hollywood version includes a "bad boy" perception of Dracula that rejects the common man -- a turn of events, let me add, that did not exist in any form in the book.  According to Stoker, no character -- male or female -- reacts to Dracula with anything except hatred, disgust, or violence. There is no love. Yet Hollywood can't deal with that, which suggests that the American population at large also cannot deal with that.

The much sexier version of Dracula (at least in comparison), also played by Gary Oldman in Coppola's  version.  Mina  Harker and Dracula, for the record, never get busy in the novel, yet I found a distinct pic from the new movie where she's licking Dracula's nipples. Not okay, Hollywood!

When I shared Jonathan Harker's journal with my British Literature students, they (for the most part) enjoyed it.  Of course, they begged to watch the movie, which presents some problems.  There is obviously the above Hollywood-ized issue that I just cannot bring myself to propagate in my classroom.  And there's a lot of nudity and sex in the film -- once again a result of Hollywood getting its paws on a perfectly chaste novel and sexing it up for a modern audience.  But the deeper issue of why I cannot show this film in my classroom is what my students simply don't understand the value of the book, and they won't, not unless I could teach the entire 500+ page novel (which they likely wouldn't read) or they read it on their own (come on, they're 17-18). We read approximately 60 pages from the beginning of this novel; that is nowhere near enough of this classic for my students to understand it as source material for so much of what is popular in television and movies today.  Sure, they get that Dracula is the first popular vampire and thus the origin of Twilight and True Blood and whatever else is out there.  What they are missing is how seductive and spectacular vampires originally were, how scary the stories really are, and how so much of what they know as vampirism has been adapted for a tween audience (aka, Twilight. Glitter: ugh. Kill me.). They are missing out.

I wish I had the time and energy to teach a 500 page novel, because Dracula has so much to share with my students, so much to offer.