may you find your rest where no shadows are cast

codependent 🐰🦊

It feels to me like it all comes from the same place, and that place is the idea that romantic relationships, particularly at the start of a story, can't or shouldn't be straightforward.

Instead, Dracula begins, near enough, with two women who have both met and are set to marry men who they love and who love them in return, and where it seems like there is no intrinsic reason why they shouldn't live happily ever after.

And normally we don't expect that. Certainly these are not the narrative rules of a romance (which Dracula isn't, but bear with me). It's a little bit like if Elizabeth Bennet was actually really into Mr Collins and accepted him right away, if Jane Eyre was blissfully happy with St John Rivers, or if Margaret Hale fell for Henry Lennox. Jonathan and Arthur are the safe choices for Mina and Lucy, and we don't normally expect heroines to want the safe choices.

Mina and Lucy do. Arthur is strategically the best husband for Lucy - good family, pots of cash, no weird job, her mum likes him - but he is also the man that Lucy loves. Mina and Jonathan are utterly besotted with one another, and though Jonathan isn't as wealthy as, say, Jack Seward, his career is also on the up. He's a good choice.

I think this works brilliantly in Dracula, because the later threat is so much the greater for the fact that everyone starts out the novel so strong. The fact that they are so happy to begin with means they have more to lose.

On May 7th, Jonathan writes that Dracula is away for the day, and in the evening Dracula joins him to converse. Jonathan asks him some questions about what happened on his trip in:

...I asked him... for instance, why the coachman went to the places where he had seen the blue flames. He then explained to me that it was commonly believed that on a certain night of the year—last night, in fact, when all evil spirits are supposed to have unchecked sway—a blue flame is seen over any place where treasure has been concealed.

And like. The coachman is Dracula. Dracula was marking the places where the treasure was.

Dracula is looking for the treasure.

Perhaps he even spent part of that day looking for the treasure.

And guys, when Jonathan asks some more questions, like why no one's dug the treasure up already, Drac says (perhaps in an almost frustrated tone):

"Because your peasant is at heart a coward and a fool! Those flames only appear on one night; and on that night no man of this land will, if he can help it, stir without his doors. And, dear sir, even if he did he would not know what to do. Why, even the peasant that you tell me of who marked the place of the flame would not know where to look in daylight even for his own work.

Guys. He can't fucking find it.

But then he asks:

Even you would not, I dare be sworn, be able to find these places again?"

And when I read this line I always imagine Dracula like, leaning forward in his seat, looking very intent.

But then. Jonathan answers with:

"There you are right," I said. "I know no more than the dead where even to look for them."

And I just imagine that Dracula must be shitting his pants at this point. Because this could just be an incidental turn of phrase, but also. To one like Dracula, who is well-versed in delivering threats through implication beneath a thin veneer of cordiality, this certainly sounds like this nobody of a newly-minted solicitor has 1. already clocked you as undead, 2. nonchalantly let you know that he knows that you're undead and 3. just insulted you over your inability to find your treasure to your face.

Jonathan literally doesn't describe any of the conversation after this point, so Drac must have played it cool enough to avoid catching Jonathan's attention but hooo boy. Must have been sweating bullets there wondering who the hell he'd just let into his house.

And of course, it actually is just a turn of phrase, and Dracula does have the upper hand and is free to psychologically strangle Jonathan with it for weeks upon weeks.

And on June 25th, Jonathan gets into the Count's room and we get a conclusion to our subplot:

The only thing I found was a great heap of gold in one corner—gold of all kinds, Roman, and British, and Austrian, and Hungarian, and Greek and Turkish money, covered with a film of dust, as though it had lain long in the ground. None of it that I noticed was less than three hundred years old. There were also chains and ornaments, some jewelled, but all of them old and stained.

thinking very hard about Mr. R.M. Renfield on this day (dracula daily folks who don't want spoilers, stop reading here!)

Harker believes he has successfully squirreled out a few letters to a camp of travelers who will post them for him.

Then our man the Count comes in with the letters and is so expertly and subtly impressing upon Harker just how fucked he is, just how little power Harker has. This, as though past moments haven't been, is the time at which I would lose ALL hope.

Stoker ends the chapter with another banger line: