The Ups and Downs of Bram Stoker's Dracula

 

I read this novel for the first time in 1992 or 1993, for a literature class my junior year of college on horror stories and their cinematic adaptations.  I don’t know what about the topic gripped my imagination because I was not a fan of horror films at the time, nor was I a fan of horror literature.  Something about reading classic horror novels like Dracula, Frankenstein, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde hit me in the exact right spot, and while all my essays written for that class were poorly done, the class itself had a huge impact on me.  I’ve watched horror films ever since, and I’ve had a particular interest in the different languages and requirements of cinema and novels.

 

My wife had never read Dracula, and after seeing The Last Voyage of the Demeter (a film that disappointed both of us) she found herself wanting to.  So we took to reading a couple of chapters before bed each night.

 

I found a lot to admire in the book and a few things that sent my eyes rolling.  Let’s start with the ugly stuff.  The politics in this book are deeply conservative and regressive. Bram Stoker is deeply invested in gender and sexual norms.  Women are the seat of all that is good and pure, and the need to save that goodness and purity is the driving force of the male protagonists.  When women become corrupted, they are repeatedly described as “voluptuous.”  They are wanton, sexually aggressive, full of hunger and desire.  Meanwhile the men cannot stop falling in love with each other’s manly virtues.  Vampirism is explicitly heterosexual in the novel.  Dracula only feeds on women, and the women only try to bite men.  That last part is not true—Lucy ends up feeding on children, even though her vampirism presumably gives her the strength to overpower men.  Nevertheless, she only uses her feminine wiles to get her way, entrancing men with her sexuality and children with promises of candy and sweets.  Even the domain of evil respects the hierarchy of men above women, and women above children, feeding down the line of power.

 

At the heart of the narrative, of course, is a foreign man coming to English soil to corrupt their women and undermine the noble society of this white world (there are as far as I could tell, no one in the novel who isn’t white).  The good English men (and one doctor from the Netherlands) have to drive this foreign invader from English soil to save their women and children, chasing him as far as it takes so that he cannot return to topple English greatness another time.  There are additionally references to physiognomy and the natural greatness of the white man’s brain.  Yuck.

 

There is plenty there to scoff at while reading the novel, but I did not find that that hopelessly sunk the reading experience.  Dracula is a wonderful character.  He is cruel and controlling, abusive and self-centered, powerful and intelligent.  He indeed has incredible strength and can scale walls like a fly; he possesses the ability to control the weather, wolves, and bats; and he wields the power to turn into mist itself.  But for all these supernatural powers, he is painfully human in his awfulness.  He may as well be Jack the Ripper or any Victorian serial killer.  When he tells Jonathan Harker to write three letters dated weeks apart to send to England, Harker sees no way out of doing so, and remarks that he now knows the day on which he will die.  And when Jonathan asks to leave, Dracula acts hurt and says that he would never keep him against his will, only to lead him to the front door behind which innumerable baying wolves howl, forcing Harker to “choose” to remain.  The cruelty is ugly and thrilling.  That same cruelty seems to trigger his interest in converting Mina.  While the men wreak havoc in the Carfax Estate, Dracula hits them where they care most, striking out at the one they want to protect.  Dracula’s draw, for me, had nothing to do with his supernatural trappings, and everything to do with how very human he was.

 

Another cool thing about the novel is that Stoker’s decision to use letters and diaries to tell the tale meant that he was forced to show Dracula’s presence mostly by the effects he created, like watching the footprints in the sand made by the invisible man.  Yes, the convention forced him to create silly reasons for different people to write about their experiences (and in ridiculous detail), but the rewards of the form were well worth it.  Dracula of course keeps no diary, so he only makes a few direct appearances.  And because of that, he is incapable of belaboring many connections and activities—he’s forced to trust the reader to make all the necessary connections.  Those connections are not hard to make, but it’s still nice to have them observed and then moved on from.

 

As an aside, it’s fun to think that “found footage” films, like The Blair Witch Project had a progenitor a hundred years earlier.  And just as films inspired by Blair Witch needed to keep coming up with reasons and ways to have a camera recording at those moments, Stoker had to come up with reasons to have his characters keeping detailed recountings of their experiences.

 

Something that met at the midway point between eyerolls and admiration, for me, was the relationship between the characters.  This is not a story about interpersonal drama.  In fact, since the characters have to be able to read each other’s diaries, they can’t really talk smack about each other and expect to trust each other and work together.  So Stoker’s format forces him to have all the character admire the holy hell out of each other.  It feels like the characters are constantly being blown away by how wonderful their companions are and continuously promising to be best friends until their dying days. It’s hokey.  But under that hokeyness is something genuinely attractive.  This isn’t the story of a single hero against a single villain, but of a community of people and a Great Evil.  There’s something beautiful in that.  That beauty is sadly undercut by their being a community of white hetero dudes from a colonizing empire—so yeah, it’s a real mixed bag.

 

As for the writing itself, the book has moments that ready smoothly and beautifully, and other moments that can be relatively rough to get through.  Overall, I was impressed and found reading it aloud very enjoyable.

Making Sense of Far-Right Religious Extremism in When the Moon Turns to Blood

 I listened to the first and second season of Leah Sotille’s Bundyville podcast in 2019 and was impressed by her talent for presenting a complicated and upsetting situation in a clear, interesting, and compelling way.  Moreover, she made what seemed to me an impenetrably different way of thinking about the world understandable.  So when I saw that she had a book out, I knew she would bring those same journalistic and personal skills to bear on her new subject.  It didn’t matter to me what the subject was—I had never heard of either Vallow or Daybell before—I just knew it would be worth reading. And I was right.

My wife often listens to true crime podcasts while trying to beat insomnia and slide into sleep, so I offered to read the book to her each night, a practice we have always enjoyed with a well-written book.  Sotille not only has the ability to turn a poetic phrase even when discussing the most awful aspects of human nature and activity, but she writes for the human ear, with flowing, rhythmic sentences.  Given that she is experienced in writing for her podcast, I am not surprised, but I was still pleased with the strength of her prose and structuring.

The book was published on the verge of Lori Vallow’s trial and well before Chad Daybell’s, so none of the book focuses on the trials. Instead, Sotille is interested in the How of the story—how did these two people get to a place where they could kill two children (not to mention one of their spouses and potentially both of them).  She looks at the environment of their upbringing and their social maturation, and the importance of the fringe cultures forming around the Mormon church.  She takes her time to explain the tenets of the church and the difficult tightrope the church walks with some of its most troublesome beliefs.  For example, the faith has at its very foundation a belief that God can give revelations to any member of the church.  So how then does the church help determine what revelations are from God, which are meaningful, and which should be given weight.  The official solution is that your personal revelations should be kept to yourself, that they are indeed revelations but that they are personal and apply to you only.  Sharing them could cause trouble, so don’t do that.  You can see how that has the ability to contain things like a sieve can hold water.  In addition to these personal revelations, the church, coming from a past of being attacked ideologically and physically by others, stresses being prepared for catastrophe, which leaves fertile ground for preppers and doomsdayers to grow within the church.  Add to these beliefs (and many more) the modern technology of online forums and the growing anti-government beliefs of right-wing religious groups and you have explosive ingredients intermixing near roaring flames.

There’s a wild shift in the book that occurs heading into Part Four.  Up to this point, Sotille has been explaining the landscape and history of the tragedy.  Heading into Part Four we understand that Vallow and Daybell have weird and dangerous beliefs.  But nothing that comes before prepared me for the wildness of their beliefs or for the influence those beliefs have over others.  It is a mad tumble down the rabbit hole, a murderous Wonderland where things are topsy turvy and subject only to their own twisted logic.  It was hard for me to tie these two parts together, because the conditions described in the first half get overwhelmed by the particular insanities of the second half.  It’s like getting an overview of the forest and then being suddenly thrown into the trees head first. It was difficult to keep the forest in mind while you are trying to dodge tree trunks.

There are so many moments in this book that blew my mind, looking into the lives and thoughts of a world well outside my own.  Sotille provides a glimpse at a whole slice of American life that is otherwise inaccessible to those of us outside of it.  This books may be about a specific set of crimes and the world that birthed them, but it is also about what is happening among the far-right religious groups, what is motivating them, what they take to be facts, and what they understand to be happening around them.  It is terrifying, but it is important to know.

Sotille never offers a solution to what’s happening. But there is, I think, a suggestion that the churches and organizations that house these rapidly radicalizing groups of people need to face the constituents and members directly.  They need to nip the paranoia and fear where it breeds, rather than watering it, or even ignoring it.  People outside these groups cannot convince them that their thinking is dangerous and harmful.  Only the authorities they trust and guide them out of the dark places they have been inhabiting.  I suspect that the Church of Latter Day Saints will react negatively to the look this book takes at them. I can only hope that instead of being angry at their portrayal, that they look inward and ask themselves what they can do to prevent the fanning of paranoia’s and fear’s flames.

H.G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon

I am not proud of the way that I came at this novel.  I wasn’t exactly reading to find faults, but I apparently wasn’t feeling especially generous either.  I was interested to see Wells do his magic, but several stories in the past had made me wary of a couple of unpleasant political leanings I had caught glimpses of.  “The Land of the Blind” particularly stuck with me like a splinter of wood beneath my fingernail.  The narrator of The Time Machine also sat uneasily with me.  So when The First Men in the Moon opened with a narrator running from his creditors, writing a play to make a quick buck, I was unenthused.  I read the majority of the novel with my shield in one hand and my sword in the other, as it were.

My edition, the Penguin Classics edition, first published in 2005, has an introduction by China Mieville.  I saved the introduction until after I had finished the book, to avoid potential spoilers.  On the one hand, this was a good move, because it was indeed full of spoilers.  On the other hand, I could have used Mieville’s insight and good sense while reading the novel!

Mieville’s introduction is thoughtful, well-researched, and invigorating.  If I were writing one of my usual analytical reviews, I would just want to quote everything Mieville says, because they are the things that I wish I had been thinking and seeing while I was reading.  Instead, I got a burst of information and analysis that cast the book in a new light, that let me look over the path I had followed and reinterpret it, more wisely now.

While reading, I kept looking to make sense of Bedford and Cavor as moral characters.  I don’t know why I did this—probably to get a glimpse behind the mask of who H.G. Wells was at this time in his life.  It is uncommon for a writer to make their main character a complete ass (uncommon but certainly not unheard of), and while the Wells novels and stories I have read certainly have flawed, limited, and human narrators, it did not occur to me that Bedford might be someone Wells disagreed with completely, someone he was mocking and expecting us to be in on the joke. I was appalled by much of his character, but I assumed that Wells was not, and that’s what I mean by reading with my sword and shield in hand.  I couldn’t interpret openly and honestly, enjoying what was there before me.  I was dancing around it as though in a duel.  It compromised both my enjoyment and my understanding.

Before reading the introduction, I would have told you the book, politically and philosophically, was a muddle and a mess.  But the more generous reading of that is to observe the beliefs that are in tension within the novel, to see what is at war in the very soul and imagination of the author.  What is rotten at the core of the Imperial and Industrial world of Britain, and how do you save it?  What does that look like?  How do we have the progress and quality of life experienced by some without the cost that such a life inflicts on many?  Wells is trying to work that all out while creating honest and living fiction.  In Mieville’s eyes, I see the book as something much more beautiful and searching than what I saw before.  And I am thankful for his guidance.

The Beauty of Sherwood Anderston's Winesburg, Ohio

 Winesburg, Ohio is a quirky, beautiful, strange little book.  It is a collection of short stories, each one focused on a different character living in the town of Winesburg, Ohio in the 1910s.  There is no real overarching story although the characters and tales have some overlapping, and we get a particular focus on George Willard, the boy who is becoming a man.  Sherwood Anderson began writing the short stories that would comprise Winesburg, Ohio, in 1915 and published the slim volume in 1919.

I first read the book in the mid-1990s during my graduate studies at Boston University.  I had moved from studying the British Romantics and was trying to find what part of American literature I wanted to focus on. I don’t remember who exactly pointed me to Sherwood Anderson’s book, but I’m glad it wound up in my hands.  It was one of those texts that struck my in the heart instantly, like it was an aesthetic and perspective I had been hungering for.  My Oxford World’s Classics edition is full of marginalia and underlining (both from my initial reading and from when I taught parts of the book in a composition class).

The basic thematic thread running through the stories is the pain of loneliness and isolation that we each feel by virtue of our very humanity.  We are all necessarily isolated in our own heads, experiencing the world and our thoughts and our emotions alone, trying to understand who and what we are.  Each character is looking for a way to connect with others around them, to communicate what’s inside them, to open their heart and their soul, to be seen and heard and understood.  That desire is checked by the coexisting fear that they will be rejected, railed against, laughed at, and feared.  The author shows us their humanity and what moves them.  He makes sense of the odd ways they attempt to tolerate the unbearableness of living alone among others.  And of course, we understand because we recognize the truth of this beautiful and cursed human condition.  I imagine that readers either love the book or reject it entirely.

In the first short story, The Book of the Grotesque,” an old man has a dream that he then wakes up and writes about:

That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague throughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.

The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not tr to tell you all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and profligacy, of carefulness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.

And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.

It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood. (9)

This provides a lens with which to view the other stories and the grotesques that populate Winesburg, Ohio, each lifting a concern or thought above all others, believing that one thing to be central to their life.  But of course that is more reductionist than the rest of the novel.  The characters sometimes threaten to become two-dimensional in their desires and pain, but the love that Anderson feels for them each, and the love we as readers are encouraged to feel for them, saves them from such a fate.

The book is important, historically, for a number of reasons.  According to the forward in my edition, written by Glen A. Love, this book marks a major change in the focus of short stories in American literature.  Before this point, short stories were often built around plot, like those of O. Henry or Edgar Allen Poe.  Anderson’s short stories look inward, built instead of the emotional situation of the lead character.  Thing happen, most certainly, in the stories, but those happenings are about the inner journey of the character, their mental and emotional landscape.  Anyone who reads contemporary short stories knows that this is still the prevailing way to structure short stories.

In addition, as you can see from the passage I quoted above, Anderson uses simple sentence structures and a plain affect as narrator.  You will not be surprised to learn that Anderson influenced Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver.  And while syntactically his writing is nothing like William Faulkner’s, he also influenced the southern author.

But for me, the historical importance of the novel is not the reason I treasure it or reread it.  It is the writing that I enjoy.  Anderson’s prose may appear businesslike, but it is laced with poetry. Looking through the book to find an example, I’m a bit stymied, because the poetry is contextual.  It’s not like grabbing any passage from Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, where every line is poetry disguised as prose.  No, here, even as Anderson has some beautiful turns of phrase, the poetry is in communicating the profound with an unassuming simplicity.  For example:

Their bodies were different as were also the color of their eyes, the length of their noses and the circumstances of their existence, but something inside them meant the same thing, wanted the same release, would have left he same impression on the memory of an onlooker. (182)

I am of course a different person than the one who first discovered the powerful beauty within these pages 30 years ago.  Revisiting the book now, I found those moments of aching beauty, but without the strength that I felt in my 20s.  I am aware of how much more complicated life is than I once thought.  I see cracks in the beauty, such as the sameness of the pain that plagues the women in the book, while the men have a greater variety.  I see something dark in the story of Wing Biddlebaum.  The work is entirely fiction, of course, and what the author says must be regarded as truth, but characterization of the “half-witted” “loose-hung lip[ped]” boy who “imagined unspeakable things and in the morning went forth to tell his dreams as facts” (15) smacks of ableism and a standard defense given to so many who have actually victimized children.  Similarly, so many of these stories dismiss the mental health of the characters, confusing neurodiversity with the same longing that someone like George Willard has.  George’s mother needs love, understanding, and connection, certainly, but I can’t help but feel that she is equally in need of pharmaceutical and professional support.  Of course I don’t expect Sherwood Anderson to write anything other than he wrote, but from my perspective now, the enjoyment of the narrative is complicated by my wider view of these things.

Even with those complications, I love this book.

The Time Machine

 

After reading the collection of H.G. Wells’s short stories, I wanted to revisit a couple of his longer pieces.  I had read The Time Machine a while back, and I remember reading it quickly.  It was a short book, and I knew it was an adventure story, and I wanted it to move quickly, so I moved through it as such.  My other memory of reading the book last time is that my head was filled with what I already knew about the book, and those images and ideas covered the very words I was reading like a translucent layer of onion skin, allowing me to read but not to clearly see.

 

I have often said that the least wonderful part of any work of fiction is the plot.  What happens happens, and it’s interesting and even gripping, but it’s rarely the rich and rewarding part of any given reading experience.  You can get the plot from hundreds of sources on the internet (bound to be close to accurate), or from one of the many cinematic adaptations (bound to be wildly inaccurate in some places).  What is compelling, rather, is the language of the text.  What the author actually says and how they actually say it, that is the actual meat of any reading experience.  For me, at least.

 

For this read, I slowed down, and I didn’t worry about where the story was going.  The first two chapters have all the fun theory about time, and the scientific foundation for the wild tale.  These are gripping chapters, like short stories unto themselves.  In spite of the many characters gathered around the time traveler, the conversation is easy and fun to follow.  The richness really kicks in with chapter three. Wells possesses an unusual gift for bringing his imagined physical world to life.  Here’s his description of moving forward in time:

 

I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensation of time travelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback—of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash.  As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. The dim suggestion of the laboratory seemed presently to fall away from me, and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. I supposed the laboratory had been destroyed and I had come into the open air. I had a dim impression of scaffolding, but I was already going too fast to be conscious of any moving things. The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me. The twinkling success of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue.

 

We are used to seeing movie magic today, used to someone turning a concept into a brilliant visual to amaze us.  Again and again I am stopped by Wells’s ability to do that same thing with words—and to do it in a time when no one had ever seen special effects in films.  He had to come up with those details himself and then paint the picture such that we could see it with him.  He applies his skills to moments of drama, like the movement through time, but also to the quiet descriptions of the landscapes of the future.

 

If you care about the plot and spoilers, I would stop reading here.

 

The plot itself is interesting and moves well.  Like most great classic plots, it moves forward with a simple, driving arc.  The narrator, stuck in the future because his time machine has been seized, needs to locate his machine and find a way to get it back.  He investigates, gathers resources, endures a few close calls, all of which educate him about his antagonists, makes a daring attempt for his machine and narrowly escapes danger.  In his desperation while fleeing he flies further into the future and comes as close as one can to the death of the planet before returning home.

 

The philosophical argument is not nearly as gripping as the writing or the plot.  There is a warning that the comfortable class is getting to comfortable and will become effeminized and infantilized until they are defenseless and little better than lambs.  The fate of the working class is not much better.  They maintain some ingenuity, but they become beastlike and not much better than predatory animals themselves.  There is a whiff of political concern about class division, but Wells’s sympathies are so clearly with the sad fate of the rich and well-off that I can’t even muster the interest or strength for any thorough analysis.  I’m sure many such analyses already exist out there.  There is also the stench of racism surrounding the Morlocks, but I didn’t see any need to prod into that either.

 

Even more problematic for me, on this read, are the parts of this sociological construction that don’t make any sense. The structures built to house the Eloi are, if not sophisticated, elegant and pretty.  We don’t see the Morlocks displaying any such interest in architecture beyond these homes.  Similarly, the narrator suggests that it’s the Morlocks who make the clothing for the Eloi, but again, we don’t see them displaying any other textile skills or interests.  And why both to clothe and elegantly house the Eloi instead of creating a simple pen in which they could sleep.  The narrator suggests that the houses give them some genuine protection from the Morlocks, but why would the Morlock’s do that, instead of building a structure that allows them easy access without traumatizing their livestock.  As easy as it was for me to see and feel the physicality of Well’s world, it was difficult to swallow the social structures existing within the physical ones.

 

All in all, I enjoyed the book less than I expected, mostly because of the political and social beliefs (or lack of beliefs) that failed as tentpoles to hold everything aloft.