Sans titre

I (20s-30s, M) am currently the guest/solicitor of an important Count (???, M). The visit started alright, just some minor issues concerning the townspeople acting as if I was headed towards a great evil, strange events in the forest, a run-in with some wolves, and my host pretending to be his entire household staff. Things began to get odd the longer I stayed, however. The Count cannot be seen in a mirror, he crawls along the walls of his estate in a most curious fashion, I have not seen him eat, he is never active when the sun is present, etc etc.

Finally I did some—admittedly imprudent and possibly rude—exploring of the castle (which I have been locked in, by the by). I fell asleep on a sofa I should not have and had a very strange encounter with a group of ladies and the Count, ultimately culminating in me becoming aware of facts which I should not have been concerning my host. Also, I believe the women ate a human child, but I was a bit in shock, so forgive me for not checking.

Following this evening, the Count has asked me to pre-write several letters assuring my loved ones that I am safe and on my way back to England. I am not, I should note, currently on my way back to England. This was all very odd, and I have reason to suspect that I shall die here, on the date of the last letter.

All of this to say, I have recently tried to send some letters, one of which was to my fiancée telling her of the danger I find myself in (though not the specifics, or else I may be thought crazy). It was written in shorthand, which I’m led to believe the Count cannot read. These were sent off in attempted secrecy, but they ended up in the Count’s hands. He is allowing the normal letter to my boss to be sent, but the one to my fiancée he has declared “a vile thing, an outrage upon friendship and hospitality.” He seemed quite upset.

TLDR; AITA for trying to send my fiancée a letter warning her of the danger I find myself in behind my host’s back?

Jonathan’s experiences in Transylvania are subverting the idea of the superiority of an educated Westerner by making him look like a fool who is ignoring massive red flags. His Orientalist viewpoint is a hinderance. Similarly there is an absurdity to him trying to reason his way out of a dangerous supernatural situation.

Part of the reason that the Gothic appeals to us as modern readers is that it subverts the triumph of reason and science. It suggests that the emotional and superstitious is not something that Western culture has escaped. 

quincy p. morris: hey wanna hang out I love my friends

i recently did an assignment for my jews in modern europe class abt the confluence of jews and homosexuals in the late 19th century european imagination - how they are seen as dangerous because they are able to pass unseen in "civilized" society, but there is always something slightly off, slightly wrong, that keeps them from being able to fully integrate

i think that dracula (and vampires in general) is overall a metaphor for the fear of foreigners, but there's also something there that more specifically applies to the implicit danger of people, like jews and homosexuals, who can pass unseen and unnoticed in polite society. dracula, of course, reveres england and english culture, but although he speaks perfect english he is aware that despite knowing "the grammar and the words", he "know(s) not how to speak them". despite any attempts to assimilate, he will always be a dangerous and subversive element who is assumed to hold more loyalty to his own kind than he ever could to england, simply because of his blood (and homosexuals were often seen as a "race" at that time).

vampires appear mostly as human, with just enough differences to give the slight sense of wrongness - just like physiognomists trying to index biological traits of jews and homosexuals to establish their "inherent" differences as something that can be catalogued and understood. vampirism, in this context, is something that allows dangerous outsiders to enter unseen, while at the same time being evidence of their inherent wrongness. it's the mark of the "other", of a people who don't and will never belong wherever they go, the eternal outsider to civilization.

Photo ID: a screenshot of a tumblr user’s tags reading: #dracula daily #bram stoker: accidentally write a horror comedy with queer main characters #dracula End ID

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Now I’m not coming after this person or naming them cause it’s not their fault at all but I am begging y’all to understand the queer allegories are not a mistake. They are not a coincidence.

This isn’t a fuddy old timey white man accidentally walking into making an incredibly queer book.

Bram Stoker was most likely a closeted queer man. He started writing Dracula a month after Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment, who was someone he knew personally. He and Walt Whitman wrote very homoerotic letters to each other. It was rumoured he had a massive crush on his boss, Henry Irving, who he wrote a biography on and who he heavily based Dracula’s appearance on (sans the hairy palms and pointy ears lol)

That is the context Dracula was written in. So when Mina and Lucy are galpalling it up, when Lucy’s three weed smoking boyfriends seem very close, when Dracula is jealous and protective of Jonathan and wants to stay up all night talking, please don’t run away with the idea that those are coincidences, or that Stoker was somehow blindly stumbling his way through this.

what makes them so compelling is that they're just some girls. Lucy is rich, kinda naive and ditzy, super sweet, and everybody loves her and thinks she's so nice. Mina is rather dorky, a nerd, a working class woman who's super in love with her equally dorky boyfriend.

neither is the madonna and neither is the whore. they're literally just women.

Lucy is friendly and nice and sweet and remains a virgin, and her reward is being preyed upon by a monster that turns her into one of his kind, a shriveled husk of a girl, a walking corpse devoid of personality that can only crudely mimic the person she used to be to further devour literal children. her body is twisted and her mind is destroyed, and she did absolutely nothing to deserve that other than being the essence of all that's good in this world. Because Dracula wants to destroy all that's good in this world.

Mina is spunky and transgressive. She is hard-working, and wants to further study and work to be a good wife, which in her books involving learning skills that women had only begun to learn at the time. She's a proto-feminist and literally complains that the moral standards of the time don't allow her to have premarital sex. Mina is just a regular woman who gets married and has sex and enjoys is, and, get this, she still gets preyed upon by Dracula. Because Mina also represents goodness, but in a different angle- she's weird, and smart, and loves science and technology, and she's helping a crew of amateur vampire hunters. Of course Dracula wants to destroy her as well.

Lucy represents the goodness lost to everything Dracula is a stand-in for (illness, war, conquest, ignorance; we also have to be aware that he's also a stand-in for the Scary Foreigner, for jewishness, for the East, etc). Mina represents the ultimate triumph of science and good.

The blatant racism here is how the Romani are portrayed. They are "without religion, save superstition," i.e. Godless heathens, i.e. their religion isn't a version of Christianity so it isn't a legitimate religion. They're ignorant for only speaking their own language, even though Jonathan doesn't speak or understand it and doesn't understand most of the foreign language he's encountered on this trip. They act overtly deferential and subservient to Jonathan. They take his money and then sell him out to the Count.

If this narrative had only used the word Romani or the name that this particular group of Romani used for themselves (I'm seeing meta that Szgany is a slur, too, but I haven't looked into it), this depiction would still be racist. While it is important to update our language as we gain better information, I think terminology is ultimately less important than whether a marginalized character or group is being portrayed as an offensive racial stereotype. I see all kinds of writing by modern writers, professional and amateur, that uses all the correct 2020s terminology but still portrays characters as the invulnerable black woman, the submissive Asian woman, the predatory brown man, the Jewish moneylender, etc. Again, I'm not saying terminology doesn't matter and shouldn't be critiqued in older writing, I'm just saying we shouldn't let terminology distract from content.