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

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
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
123 speed of international travel, Van Helssing from Amsterdam overnight, Mina to Hamburg then Budapest quite quickly