#dracula meta

One thing I've never quite been able to stop thinking about is Dracula's line:

"Tonight is mine. Tomorrow night is yours."

Because yes, on the surface it's the culmination of something we've known for weeks now. Dracula has repeatedly referred to Jonathan as property.

"This man belongs to me." "When I am done with him you shall kiss him at your will."

By 29 June, Jonathan isn't really being treated as a prisoner anymore. As he notes, prisoners still possess some measure of personhood. Jonathan has become an object to be allocated. Dracula is effectively negotiating property rights over his body while Jonathan stands close enough to hear it, just beyond the closed door.

But I don't think we ask ourselves often enough what "mine" actually means.

Because we know exactly what the women intend to do tomorrow.

"Kiss" in 'Dracula' has never really meant "kiss." Stoker wraps vampirism in intensely erotic language, but when the moment comes, the mouth doesn't descend to Jonathan's lips. It descends to his throat.

Their kiss is their bite.

So if tomorrow night belongs to them...

... what belongs to Dracula tonight?

The novel never explicitly answers that question, which is terrifying.

One reading is fairly straightforward: Dracula simply means Jonathan remains under his protection one last night before being handed over. "Mine" means "my prisoner," "my possession," "my responsibility." The Count still has business to finish before Jonathan becomes disposable.

However, I think the novel complicates that reading considerably. Once the wider context of Dracula's treatment of Jonathan is taken into account, "mine" begins to suggest something much darker than simple custody, especially as the novel takes care to emphasise something very particular about how the Count regards Jonathan.

He is extraordinarily possessive.

When he initially stops the three women. His dialogue is very specific.

"How dare you touch him?" "How dare you cast eyes on him?" "This man belongs to me."

There is no mention of leaving him alone on point of principle, or that their assault violates the unspoken rules of aristocratic hospitality, not even that he is under Dracula's protection specifically. But that Jonathan "belongs" to him.

This naturally raises the question. If we have established that "tomorrow" refers to feeding, what does "tonight" refer to? And why shouldn't it be the same thing?

Another disturbing element is that later on in the text, it is clearly established that Dracula prefers a long meal. Unlike his voluptuous roommates, Dracula rarely feeds only once upon his victims. His preferred hunting strategy resembles nothing so much as a cat playing with a mouse, taking as much pleasure in the act of play and amusement as the inevitable and bloody kill. He has played with Jonathan for months; he is about to embark on a journey upon which he will torment the crew of the Demeter for seemingly no other reason than his amusement (it would certainly be a better aid to his subterfuge to act with more subtlety, but that word seems anathema to the Count); and this is to say nothing of how he will treat poor Lucy and the various other victims he will fall upon in London.

Lucy is fed upon night after night, gradually weakened over weeks before her eventual death and transformation. Vampirism in 'Dracula' is a process and a ritual, one that the Count clearly delights in.

So if that's how Dracula normally hunts, why should Jonathan be any different? Particularly as the Count is seemingly so attached to him.

The more I reread the castle chapters, the more likely I find it that Jonathan has already been bitten multiple times without ever knowing or understanding what is happening to him. He doesn't even have access to a mirror anymore.

Think about how often Jonathan loses consciousness. Think about how often he wakes in bed with missing time. After the encounter with the three vampire women, he concludes that Dracula must have carried him back to his room, undressed him, folded his clothes, and put him to bed - a deeply intimate act if true.

However, he has no actual memory of the event. He simply wakes up afterwards and is left to put together the disparate pieces of the night before, one he already considers a nightmare.

Likewise, Jonathan repeatedly experiences overwhelming exhaustion, which seems at odds with the daily demands of his imprisonment. Although, of course, some grace must be given to the draining state of constant terror he is living in, and that to some extent this fatigue must obviously be to some degree psychological, it does not remove the fact that Stoker repeatedly associates sleep with vulnerability, and that Jonathan's exhaustion is later closely mirrored by the symptoms Lucy displays after nightly drainings.

Every significant supernatural violation happens when Jonathan is asleep. Or nearly asleep. Or hypnotised. Or unconscious.

Sleep is rarely ever just sleep in 'Dracula'.

Sleep provides access to victims in the dark of night for creatures beyond simple fantastical horror, but deep and violating terrors.

In a text so obsessed with recollection, recording, and primary sources, so that they may be presented in such a way that these unbelievable occurrences "may stand forth as simple fact." Any absence is glaring in its conspicuousness.

While Lucy has the benefit of a dedicated and informed medical team, we never get insight into who examines Jonathan. He is completely isolated, and the first time he would have any semblance of aid is at the Hospital of St. Joseph and Ste. Mary, in Buda-Pesth. We can read between the lines that Agatha and her fellow sisters may be more informed than they are willing to let on to the kind and gentle Englishman's wife; however, we as the reader have little to no insight as to Jonathan's true journey to recovery. It is never confirmed either way whether Jonathan bears bite marks, and especially as the novel continues and Jonathan's own, more subtle transformation surfaces, that uncertainty feels very deliberate.*

On a more sobering note, there's another layer to all this that I find deeply unsettling. Modern readers and analysts often talk about the vampire women as representing sexual danger. I would go as far as to say that that is explicit in the text. What is (only slightly) more subtle is the Count's sexual possessiveness, particularly regarding Harker. His unbridled rage ("Never did I imagine such wrath and fury, even to the demons of the pit.") is almost entirely and explicitly due to his insistence, not that he objects to what they are doing, but that he has exclusive access that they are not entitled to. The language is incredibly territorial and possessive. It is undeniable that Jonathan is "claimed", and that he is ignorant of what that actually means.

There is a reason Christopher Craft titled one of the most foundational essays on 'Dracula', "Kiss Me with Those Red Lips."* One of his central arguments is that Dracula repeatedly displaces homoerotic desire rather than eliminating it. The Count violently interrupts the women at precisely the moment they are about to penetrate Jonathan's body with their teeth, only to declare that Jonathan belongs to him instead.

Whether one accepts every part of that reading or not (spoiler for the footnote below, but I don't), the possessiveness is undeniably there. However, I think "desire" is actually far too soft a word for what is happening. Nothing about that scene (or indeed anything in that castle!) is consensual. Jonathan is not caught between competing lovers. He is caught between competing owners. And the most horrifying aspect of that dynamic is that it is not simply that the women desire him, in the most literal sense, but that later on in today's entry (June 29th), after the bombast and fire of the first confrontation, Jonathan overhears four vampires calmly negotiating who gets to use his body first, laughing and giggling all the way.

The true horror of Dracula's castle has never been the blood-sucking monsters, but the systematic and practised manner in which the Count spends weeks stripping Jonathan of every marker of autonomy.

By the time Dracula has confined his freedom, destroyed and counterfeited his correspondence, stolen his clothing and his legal identity, impersonated him to implicate his guilt in crimes he had no capacity or desire to commit, eroded his concept and relationship to time and place, and even, to some degree, using the knowledge once freely given, stolen his voice and accent (articulated beautifully and brought from subtext to text in Re: Dracula), he has destroyed (or attempted to destroy) every aspect of Jonathan's personhood.

By the end of June, his body is the last thing he has left, and now even that is being divided up for spoils.

Stoker deliberately leaves this night ambiguous.

Maybe Dracula simply keeps Jonathan locked away until morning. Maybe he feeds on him one last time (or for the very first time, having left his dessert for last). Maybe he begins whatever process would eventually transform Jonathan into an actual vampire. Maybe a lurid combination of all three.

We will never know for sure.

Jonathan is left exactly where Gothic fiction so often leaves its victims: asleep.

Unconscious and unable to remember.

Jonathan has become an unreliable narrator through no fault or desire of his own, but because Dracula has systematically deprived him of the ability to be a credible witness to his own life. Large portions of his experience are literally unknowable to him. The diary, which began as a meticulous record of travel observations and light-hearted "food blogging", has gradually become an archive of absence rather than presence: missing hours, missing memories, missing letters, missing clothes, and missing agency. If the diary is Jonathan's attempt to preserve reality through writing, Dracula's greatest victory is not merely imprisoning Jonathan's body but making parts of his own story impossible for him to tell.

We are left with a terrible and dread cold conclusion. For all that Jonathan and his friends do witness, perhaps the greatest dangers and deepest traumas are still left in the dark, where no one is awake to record them.

Footnotes:

Let it be noted that I only really agree with Craft as far as his homoerotic reading goes in this paper. He really lost me in the second half. Be warned: if you do read it, he has a quite violent (and, in my opinion, misguided) interpretation of the patriarchal underpinnings of the Crew of Light and their intentions.

It's not a wholesome interaction of course. Part of the enjoyment he gets from their interactions is derived from the way he toys with Jonathan. But it does definitely go beyond simple necessity. He really goes out of his way to spend time with Jonathan, often speaking with him all night - i.e. the whole time that he gets to be awake. And he also goes out of his way to protect him from the vampire women in the castle, even after he's outlived his usefulness. And he becomes increasingly possessive of him - "this man belongs to me" and "tonight is mine" are certainly telling. It seems that initially Jonathan was just going to be fed to the vampire women right away, but then Dracula changed his mind and decided he got first dibs, something that wasn't initially in the cards.

So I wonder if this would have been an easy decision to make... or if there would be a struggle. On one hand they have learned bitterly that they must share everything and keep no secrets from each other. On the other hand, the boy is born after they have achieved the reason they had documented everything. Would there have been a temptation to burn it all and protect innocent eyes? Someone completely ignorant reading such a horrific true story will be completely altered in their worldview and be terrified, would it be in character for them to want to destroy or bury it all?

Oh, this is a good question. It is possible it could vary by the survivors... but in the end I do think they would all want to keep it. Here's my justifications (first individual, then overall):

[Image ID: a screencap from Google listing August 8, 1898 as a Monday. /end ID]

When we first started we didn’t know who Jonathan Harker was and to us he was just a silly little British man who was ignoring the obvious warning signs, so there was a comedic element to the dramatic irony of him going to Castle Dracula

But now that we know who Jonathan is and we care about him, it hits much harder all the subtle horror elements we missed while focusing on this good friend telling us about his travels

From the first entry, people picking up on the dog barking under his window and being like “is that Dracula? Does it start this early?” Being skeeved out by Dracula’s overly familiar letter to Jonathan, which at first seemed perfectly reasonable except for the name attached at the end, and picking up on all the terrible foreshadowing for what will be Jonathan’s living hell over the next month in his Castle.

And people this time picking up on the bravery of the wife of the innkeeper who gave him a crucifix, begging him to stay or wait, to not go to the castle, of the terror of knowing that Dracula was in correspondence with her husband to get the letter to Jonathan and the sort of subtle threat they must be under at all times, of the significance of “for your mother’s sake” knowing what Dracula does to children. She is no longer perceived as a random background character, but an active player forced to be a bystander who is trying desperately to help this ignorant soul in any way she can even if she knows it might be useless.

I love people realizing Jonathan is skeptical and off-put, but not enough to deter his mission. He’s not oblivious, just making an effort to remain open-minded to the culture and superstitions and beliefs he is not familiar with, since he’s aware it will be wildly different from his own (to the best of his ability for being an Englishman from the 1890s) and pointedly dismissing the things that might be red flags as an attempt to rationalize because nothing truly concerning has happened yet to provoke him to leave, and he doesn’t want to be deterred by something he’s getting worked up for for no reason yet, he couldn’t do his job otherwise and people are depending on him

Idk, I just like this deeper analysis and thought now that people are already familiar and attached to his character, and now know what happens, so they can properly point out when something is foreshadowing later events or themes in the novel, and they can pick up on it quicker

Even something as simple as people noticing the other meals mentioned in the first entry because of all the focus on Paprika Hendl last year makes me happy :)

I like that they are giving our protagonist more credit now, knowing the character he turns into later in the novel (a badass)

We know that Dracula, and vampires as a whole, have to be invited into a residence before they can enter it. Van Helsing tells us this, and the narrative shows it.

But it's just occurred to me that I don't get how the invitations work.

In Whitby, Dracula fed on Lucy by having her open the window and lean outside. He then drank from her in bat form. He likely did this because a) Mina had locked the room and hidden the key, so Lucy could not walk out to where Dracula was, and b) Lucy did not own the house at the Crescent and was not a permanent resident there, so she could not invite him in.

Then there's Hillingham. Presumably, Dracula never compelled Lucy to invite him into Hillingham. If she had, he wouldn't need to break a window; he could just phase through the wall. The first time we know for certain that he entered the house was on the night of September 17th, and he did not enter until Mrs. Westenra was dead.

Okay. So we should be able to safely assume, given the events at Whitby and Hillingham, that Dracula has to be invited by the homeowner, or there has to effectively be no homeowner (Arthur presumably did not receive the title/deeds/etc. to Hillingham until at least a day after Mrs. Westenra's death). Otherwise, Lucy, being a permanent resident of Hillingham, would have been able to invite Dracula inside.

But then we have the asylum, and Renfield, not Seward, invites Dracula inside. Renfield is not the property owner or the head of the hospital. He's arguably a permanent resident, at least for the foreseeable future, but if Renfield counts for an invitation, why didn't Lucy count? Maybe invitations that are coerced through mesmerism don't work? Except Dracula was clearly influencing Renfield when Renfield invited him in: And then a red cloud, like the colour of blood, seemed to close over my eyes; and before I knew what I was doing, I found myself opening the sash and saying to Him: ‘Come in, Lord and Master!’

Ah, that wonderful Madam Mina! She has man's brain, a brain that a man should have were he much gifted, and a woman's heart.

and I was thinking how this was gradually introduced, but then actually, no

she has been our dear mina forever, but her full name is masculine in roots: wilhelmina. a female derivative of wilhelm (wilhelm, or william, the conquerer is the first who jumps to mind). and you know what the name means? resolute protection. she has always been there, a quiet warrior, a true protector, even when she herself was being protected – and she never asked her men to protect her. they just collectively decided to, and it was bittersweet and wholesome, but mina was anxious for action too. she, in fact, kept working her best to protect her mancrowd in the meantime. she was giving instructions, using imperatives right and left, strategizing like a war general.