#the main thing I learned reading the end of Dracula is that...yeah dracula just isnt a good book

[secretmellowblog]

The ending of Dracula SUCKS because it’s both laughably anticlimactic and the peak of the novel’s racism. The biggest plot twist of Dracula is that Dracula is not a good book.

In the climax, because Dracula is asleep(tm) in his coffin, Stoker decides he has to throw in some mini bosses for the gang to fight instead— Dracula’s carriage drivers, a bunch of Romani people.

It’s one of the many areas where Stoker makes the racist subtext explicit text?

We get a “climax” where the heavily armed white heroes violently attack this caravan of sorta-armed Romani people and it’s framed as noble and heroic. (we’re supposed to Assume the driver are inherently guilty/okay to attack because they’re Romani, and other Romani people were helping Dracula in the castle chapters, and we all know Those People can’t be trusted!! etc etc) It's nearly “B*rth of a Nation” level racism.

Also not to roast Quincey— but I do love how this squad of white people armed with GUNS could barely defeat this ragtag little group of barely-armed carriage drivers, and even lost one of their members trying to do it. Stoker’s trying to frame them as noble underdogs but they come across as overpowered hyper-violent incompetent idiots who couldn’t manage a clean attack even when everything was on their side. XD

The entire novel is essentially a fantasy version of “B*rth of a Nation”-style tropes? It’s “the evil foreign race preying on our innocent white woman.” This is made extremely explicit in the scene when Mina compares her predicament to the predicaments of women in war zones who are killed by their husbands in order to prevent the foreign enemy from having sex with them. In the narrative, murdering your wife like this is framed as Good. Mina believes she should be killed like this before a Foreign Man Takes her in order to preserve her purity, and the narrative agrees with her. She is a “good English woman” because she believes she’s better dead than corrupted by a foreigner, and if she is corrupted by the foreigner her soul will be damned forever.

After all, the foreigners are evil! Either your wife is a Mina, a Good Wife who is assaulted by the poor evil foreigner, and whose purity can only be regained if you violently take revenge. … or your wife is a Lucie, a Misled Child who says she’s happy now but it’s because Her Mind isn’t Her Own Anymore and shes going to hell and she’s so poisoned by the foreigner that she needs to be put down like a rabid dog to protect the white English race.

I’ve seen people make comments about how bad it is that adaptations tend to make Dracula somewhat genuinely seductive/lovable to Mina compared to the book, which baffles me? It frustrates me that a lot of analysis is treating Dracula like a real person, rather than a character who was written in a specific way for a specific reason.

Yes it is bad that Dracula-the-person sexually assaults the other characters. But the reason Dracula-the-Character is written that way is because Stoker is writing him as a metaphor for Evil Foreign Races Preying on Our White Women. The reason book- Dracula is written so unsympathetically isn’t because Stoker is making a progressive point about sexual assault, but because he’s using Dracula as a deeply regressive symbol of the evil Foreigners having sex with white women who must be exterminated to preserve the purity of white English children.

Honestly I feel like the reason most adaptations make the Count genuinely alluring/seductive/sympathetic is because there’s really…not much to his character in the original novel, outside of being the archetypal Evil Foreigner who is Evil because Foreign, which is both offensive and also really shallow/uninteresting. Later adaptations are more interested with portraying Dracula as more tragic or sympathetic or at least more genuinely seductive because...well at least that's SOMETHING to add to this nothing character.

There’s a lot of potential in some of the concepts and aesthetics and plot points of Dracula, but most of the “deeper thematic elements” of the book are bigoted, shallow, or both.

It makes sense that adaptations have decided to attempt to give the characters depth, nuance, and interest that they didn’t have in the original novel? Or to take the aesthetics but flat-out reject all of Stoker's takes and argue with him about every single thematic element? and I am completely on board with vampire reimaginings that continuing to spit on Bram Stoker’s legacy. I hope people continue to make him roll in his grave. XD.

And again, I'm kinda surprised there were so many people during the Dracula Daily readalong acting as if the book portraying Dracula as purely evil is somehow more progressive than later adaptations portraying him as tragically sympathetic or seductive, when "questioning why the author chose to write Dracula as the monster" is kinda like "baby's first Dracula criticism." I mean that, in even in Hotel Transylvania (the recent kid's cartoon) part of the central plot is that Dracula's family is hunted down because bigoted people assume vampires are monstrous predators incapable of love. And it's not because Hotel Transylvania is a deep challenging movie, but because "let's question Why we've decided to invent this entire class of foreign predatory monsters it's okay to kill without remorse" is such a normal milquetoast uncontroversial mainstream critique of Dracula that you'll even find it in Adam Sandler children's movies. XD.