Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897)

General Notes

• Types of documents: journal, diary, letters, telegrams, phonographs, photographs, newspaper clippings -> Dracula as archive
• it's hard to tell at a glance but it appears that in the late c19 Romania was an independent kingdom but Transylvania as a region was part of Austria-Hungary until WWI - cf Wiki Lands of the Crown of St Stephen
• also worth thinking about this narrative in terms of the more outward-looking foreign policy of the 80s and 90s (cf. Kucich's intro to Victorian novel handbook)
• 11 he's pretty anxious from the get go
• 21 tension btwn novel form and narrative form ("ch 2" / "JH's journal (cont.)")
• 22, 24 descriptions of the count's appearance,
  • 59 younger,
  • 148,
  • 184 JH sees him in London looking young,
  • 281 Sam Bloxam describes him as older again
  • 300 en deshabille in Harkers' room
  • 305 Mina's description
  • 337 sailors' description
  • 370 "queer lookin' old man"
  • 400 final, fearsome description
• 26 dracula's English library
• 30 per penguin note, Harker's Kodak camera puts the narration at least in 1888
• 32-3 no reflection and the incident with H's razor
• 41 Dracula climbing the wall
• 43 Hamlet -- not even a complete ref to Shakespeare, familiarity is assumed (and fits with journal form too)
• 44-6 the count's 3 women
• 52 count dresses as harker
• 53 embodied dust motes/hypnotism, again on 154
• 57 allusion to Pope's translation of Homer
• 61 "Mina is a woman, and there is nought in common." Isn't there?
• 62 Mina as New Woman (or influenced by them as she states herself)
• 66 Desdemona - Shakespeare's Othello
• 68 seward's diary kept on phonograph - novel gesturing toward multimedia
• 69 how came renfield to seward's sanitorium? Within the gothic storyworld the most far fetched thing seems to be that the sanitorium and Carfax should be next to each other
• 70 Scott marmion whitby
• 120 how the mental capacity for memory, especially of those like Harker and Lucy who are under Dracula's power, is so tenuous and incomplete compared to their hysteria, but the formal multimedia archive seems to offer a complete picture of the events. It is an archive of mental states and events that are beyond the capacity for the realist novel to contain and manage. Is this thematic patterning and the formal patterning then somehow at odds?
• 121 Seward says "I had better tell you exactly what happened" as did harker and Mina, again on 143
• 123 speed of international travel, Van Helssing from Amsterdam overnight, Mina to Hamburg then Budapest quite quickly
• 130 van helsing: knowledge stronger than memory -- tie to textuality/media?
• 146 Pall Mall gazette - add periodical to list of media forms
• 152 "the blood is the life" and then Van H's late telegram (a modern version of the lost letter trope from naturalism/melodrama)
• 154 again the pillar of dust, this time compared to African "simoom"
• 168 the laborers' "dusty" work bringing the boxes of earth to Carfax
• " Mina is an orphan?
• 173 Thomas Hood
• 175 Byron
• 184 Dracula on London st during day
• 186-7 VH on "King Laugh"
• 189 "bloofer lady" (beautiful) ref to Our Mutual Friend bk 2 ch 9
• 191 Mina wondering about the veracity of JH's written record
• 194 again Mina says she wants to record her meeting with VH "verbatim" -- the representational pressure of technological modernity (?)
• 200-1 VH's letter as having curative powers for JH's doubt
• 202 Westminster Gazette, which Jonathan knew "by the colour" -- what color was it?!
• 204-6 VH's critique of scientific positivism and the faith we put in it (I'm not sure his reasoning would hold up to much examination)
• 205 Victorians' sense of their own historical modernity:

'Good God, Professor!' I [Seward] said, starting up. 'Do you mean to tell me that Lucy was bitten by such a bat; and that such a thing is here in London in the nineteenth century?'

• 213 seeing l in the tomb -- "are you convinced noe"
• 237 "that is a wonderful machine, but it is cruelly true." Mina on the phonograph
• 252ff explication of vampires
• 264 "an indexy kind of way"?
• 268 "an accurate examination of the place"
• 284 Aerated Bread Company - chain of tea rooms
• 287 VH wants "accurate knowledge of all details"
• 291 why are they at such pains to mention/narrate Mina's exclusion? Harker and Seward both
  • perhaps to account for the conditions leading to her being vamped by Dracula
• 293 "let me put down with exactness all that happened" -- in a highly neurotic narrative this is one of the most recurrent neuroses
• 304 all the Ms. and phonographs burned by Dracula
• 312-3 vh's strange story about the illegal auction performed by a burglar: it is odd but seems to tangle objects, duplicity, capital, commodities together Ina suggestive way
• 322 dracula's advanced knowledge but subpar memory, according to vh
• 331-2 hypnotizing Mina to get at her idea, again memory is so tenuous
• 336 a greater sense of reality coming from rereading diaries, says harker
• 350 Harker wants Seward to keep "an exact record"
• 354 one of the only (if not only) times we are aware of the fact that seward's account is recorded audio transcript is when he is overcome with emotion here
  • again memory overwhelming the exact record
• 356 powering toward the conclusion the narrative becomes syncopated by the telegrams, urging the reader on
• 381 striking for the reader and for Jonathan in such an "in touch" text to have the others of the group out of touch
• 377 Mina hesitates to write: "the...the...the...Vampire. (Why did I hesitate to write the word?)"
• 401 "the whole body crumbled into dust"
• 402 ending on documentary evidence

I took the papers from the safe where they have been ever since our return so long ago [7 years]. We were struck with the fact that, in all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic [i.e., handwritten?] document; nothing but a mass of type-writing, except the later notebooks of Mina and Seward and myself [Harker], and VH's memorandum. We could hardly ask anyone, even did we wish to, to accept these as proofs of so wild a story. Van Helsing summed it all up as he said, with our boy on his knee: - "We want no proofs; we ask none to believe us!"

Theme Tracking

Narrated reading/writing

As opposed to narrational writing, which is the whole framing form

Technology

Information, communication, else

Shakespeare References

• they are usually narrated by Seward it seems
• 43 Hamlet's tablets
• 66 desdemona
• 73 sir oracle midsummer dream
• 78 hamlet method
• 240 Lear that way madness lies
• 286 Renfield's Malvolio smile (twelfth night) (Seward)
• 287 hamlet "cruel to be kind" (Seward)
• 288 Lear "rats and mice and such small deer" (renfield)