#drac 1

I know “Dracula is built on a lot of Orientalism” isn’t exactly a Hot New Take, but wow?? Harker’s obviously in full 19C Middle Class English Traveler mode, boggling at the Quaint Locals and reeling from the overwhelming shock of actual spices, and all the unfamiliarity of the place and the language of this society obviously works to make him more vulnerable, since he doesn’t have a sense of Normalcy and doesn’t really know how to ask the people around him about things.

But it’s sort of striking to me that Jonathan is not --or not just--in extra danger here because this is a spooooky Not British Place, but because he’s foreign -- and in Full British Traveler Mode, yet. The peasants he’s traveling with obviously care about the danger he’s facing, and they do try to warn him! Almost everyone he meets tries to warn him! They even directly use words that mean “vampire” !  But no matter how directly they speak to him, no matter how fearful they are, he reacts to them as...well, as Superstitious Foreign Peasants.  So kind! So simple! Such quaint customs!  I don’t know if they could possibly have explained the situation to him in any way that would make him take them seriously enough to call off his plans. And then, of course, they’re putting themselves at risk of vampiric retaliation even doing what they’re doing-- and he just will not pick up the anvils they’re dropping. I don’t know if Stoker meant  Harker’s oblivious confidence to be the Greatest Foe, but it’s sure feeling like it here. 

Burger’s Lenore!  The line quoted in the carriage-- “the dead travel fast”-- is one I associate with one of Gautier’s articles about Gerard de Nerval (roughly quoting/translating here: ”the dead travel fast”, they say, but they do not travel so fast, those beloved spectres. that we do not turn to see them once more...”).   It’s weird for me to see that a line I associate with grief and loving remembrance put here in a mood of terror. 

..WHAT is going on with the blue flame, and the endless repeating road? This is really very mysterious to me!  Is the Count’s Castle supposed to be behind a kind of Faerie/Otherwordly veil and these are the rituals to pass through? I can’t recall any sort of myth that ties into this!  And what the heck is Dracula even playing at here?  He doesn’t want Harker eaten yet, and he can clearly make the wolves stay away; why keep letting them mess with the coach?