Spent the weekend reading Stoker's Dracula instead of any of the newly arrived poetry collections I'm wanting to get to, and not because I'm in the Halloween spirit (wish I were--somebody give me a sound kick in the ass), but because apparently, thanks to my T.A.'s interests, I'll be teaching the novel next term in my Intro to Literature class. You might think Dracula would be right up my alley--19th century, bloody, sexy, perverse, but here's my confession: it happens a little late in the century for me (1897 folks!), so if I've read it before, I don't remember it. Before nearly finishing the novel last night, I had only a weary residual sense of its plot from one of the bad Count Dracula films made in my lifetime (If anyone can suggest a good one I can screen for this class please please do).
There's an obvious 19th century Gothic precursor to Dracula I do know well. It was written and published in 1818 by a girl the age of some of my youngest first-year babes and was revised by a woman--a grieving widow nearly a decade by this time--thirteen years later, in 1831, just six years before Queen Victoria took the throne. I've taught Mary Shelley's Frankenstein almost as many times as years I've been teaching, which is a little excessive considering that most of my students have been exposed to it in high school or elsewhere by the time they get to one of my courses. I know a commitment to teaching Frankenstein (again) is a lost opportunity to introduce students to something less canonical, say another of Mary Shelley's novels or one of Joanna Baillie's dramas, but I love how Shelley's book canvasses so many other texts: Milton's Paradise Lost, Rousseau's The Social Contract and his Emilie or On Education, Goethe's Faust, Promethean mythology, David Hume's Treatise on Human Nature, Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Paine's Age of Reason, and on and on, until the novel is itself a treatise on political institutions, social hierarchies, religious doctrine, education, reason and empiricism, and yes, fatherhood.
But here's the point: I teach the 1818 version of Frankenstein--and never the 1831 revision--because I'm much more familiar with the 1818 contexts. In 1818, for example, incest is relatively common as a subversive theme in Gothic literature--though scandalous of course--but by 1831, Shelley has ostensibly revised it out of her novel. The incestuous in Dracula takes place in polygamy and adultery, rather than between blood relatives. Bloodletting and decapitation in early 19th century writing still invoke Robespierre and his Reign of Terror. But in Dracula bloodletting and decapitation are engendered by the voraciousness of the feminine body, where blood infects like disease or procreates like semen, and decapitation is at once castration and the restoring of masculine order--still political, yes, but it's going to take me awhile to come to terms with who it is that fathers the violence: what is Dracula? I really have no idea--no good idea. Everything I think I know makes for a somewhat conventional vampire. Dull dull dull. I have a lot of homework to do in the coming Days of the Dead if I'm going to make it interesting.
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"Although it can be tiring to confront yet another 'vampirism as _____' metaphor..."
I see your point, Charlie.
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