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
• 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
• 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

Theme Tracking

Narrated reading/writing

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

Technology

Information, communication, else

Shakespeare References

• 43 Hamlet's tablets
• 66 desdemona
• 73 sir oracle midsummer dream
• 78 hamlet method