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.