very much obsessed with dracula being narrated with what jonathan chooses to write down rather than a perfect admission of thoughts. like he spends however many days writing that everything is well, all is fine, he’s doing wonderfully! but he’s been wearing the crucifix under his shirt all that time
HI I’m crawling out of my Tumblr lurker hole bc I simply have to post these doodles I’ve been drawing with every entry we got so far. Hope to continue as we go on!
Hey, so I’m super excited that Dracula Daily is a thing, but I feel like I should warn people that one of the main characters in the novel is a guy that runs a lunatic asylum, and his scenes might be kinda hard to read for anyone who’s been through psychiatric abuse.
I would appreciate it if people reblogged this post and didn’t tag it with spoilers or put trigger warnings on it, since it’s important that this warning is seen by the people who need to see it. Thanks!
There’s something so unironically funny about the fact that Tumblr is latching onto Jonathan Harker, a character from a work of fiction from 1897, as their new blorbo. Like there are all of these new, exciting pieces of media and Tumblr is like, no, I want the dumbass with a paprika intolerance and unhealthy dedication to his real estate career
Mina: It must be so nice to see strange countries.
Johnathan: Oh no! I’m TRAPPED in this castle and I can’t shave! I must use all my wits to escape this place. … I know! I’ll get Dracula (my friend?) to give me a history lecture! Yes!
i emailed dracula daily to tell them they’re big on tumblr and send them some memes and y’all… they did not know (ID in alt text)
update
[ID: screenshots from an email conversation, reading: From [email protected] Date May 5, 2022, 12:25 AM Uh, I was NOT aware of the Tumblr activity and it has MADE my day. Thank you! The notes and memes are incredible, I’m so glad people are, enjoying the book so far. It’s really a textbook case for the greek sense of “dramatic irony,’ - even if you have never read, Dracula, you know Jonathan is like, NOT PICKING UP THE CONTEXT CLUES here, because… I guess because he doesn’t know he’s in Dracula. I’m delighted that people are having the same fun with it. Thanks so much for sending the memes. I have an old Tumblr account, I’ll have to try to find my password. - Matt Several memes are attached to the thread.
A follow up email is sent at 10:57 AM, reading “P.S. - You’re the number one trending topic on tumblr this morning!” with a screenshot of the tumblr trending page.
jonathan harker when he is given terrible omens, driven round in circles for hours, meets the weirdest guy on earth, is isolated in a creepy castle: well this is odd :/
jonathan harker when his shaving glass is thrown out the window: i am a prisoner!! i have been trapped i am like a wild animal!!! how will i be able to shave?? through the reflection on my pot or watch case???? oh my prison guard is SOULLESS and i am DISTROUGHT
three romanian authors to read with ur dracula daily
dracula is an orientalist text conceived at the height of british empire, grounded in distortions of a region that stoker never visited. sadly (and unsurprisingly) i found very few romanian authors who have been translated into english online, so here’s a meagre list of recs:
1. luminița cioabă
romanian roma author, famous in romania as the daughter of bulibasha (the king of the roma nation), she forged her own path as a writer of short stories in the oral roma tradition which portray in vivid detail the history of the roma people of romania
from humble rural romanian roots, he wrote under the oppressive ceausescu government. in a national ironic tradition he very famously said: "Just as I can’t give up smoking because I don’t smoke, I can’t give up writing because I have no talent.“ some of my favorite poems:
jewish romanian poet from bucovina. i recommend this beautiful essay by ilya kaminsky, who like celan was forced to flee eastern europe due to antisemitism, deconstructing various translators’ attempts to adapt celan’s texts and experience of the holocaust. these are all poems from a 1971 poetry collection
in the wake of dracula daily and subsequent ongoing discussions of the antisemitism that drives the book, i thought i’d throw together a verybrief primer based on little strands of research i’ve done in the past around some of the history that scaffolds dracula.i’m not trying to scold people for participating in the more lighthearted end of this cultural moment – i love dracula,i’m also reading dracula daily and enjoying everyone’s little jokes about jonathan harker and his paprika and so on – but i amtrying to provide what i hope is a somewhat useful resource for deeper engagement with the text, a necessary critical skill if you want to have anything meaningful to say about it. i’m not really interested in coddling people’s feelings about antisemitism, and i think it’s in everyone’s best interests to provide a little bit of a framework for how we approach and think about and talk about what is a pretty unambiguously bigoted book.
for what it’s worth, i find the most productive way to approach this text, as with any text that emerges from a tradition of immense violence (ie. pretty much any work of english literature from the nineteenth century, all of which write from the heartlands of imperialist plunder and the formation of nationalist cultural norms) is as a historical document. there’s a difference in these discourses between a piece that’s made today, where we might ask whywe’ve allowed particular cultural conditions to facilitate the telling of narratives that are attempting to naturalise conditions of bigotry, and one created in 1897, where our relationship to that historical moment should be one of self-reflection and analysis with an eye to informing our understanding of present-day violences. my point is that a text which locates itself within the british antisemitism of the late nineteenth century is one which can enhance our understanding of that antisemitism and its present-day legacy.
i also want to clarify that i don’t intend to reduce the bigotry of draculatojustthe antisemitism – it is clearly shaped by broader strokes around racism and imperialist race science in particular, but the specific british-jewish cultural history within which it is grounded happens to be the one that i have a relatively coherent understanding of, and wanted to share. i don’t at all intend to frame this as a complete account – i’m more just putting what i have to hand out into the world for others to do with what they will and ultimately come to their own conclusions about the text and how best to engage with it.
i think it’s worthwhile to also touch briefly on the fact that draculais by no means alone in invoking antisemitism where vampires are concerned – what often gets missed in discourses around what vampires can represent (parasitic capitalism being an incrediblycommon discursive invocation, to the point where it’s kind of embarrassing that so-called marxists can’t make the very short leap) is that much of the vampire mythos is shaped by antisemitism. the draining of blood closely resembles a blood libel, ie. the smear that jews drink the blood of christian children; the state of being repelled by a crucifix should be self-explanatory; the construction of the vampire as a parasite leeching off of communal social formations forged within white imperialist societies closely reflects anxieties regarding the allegedly parasitic presence of jews both in eastern + central europe andnew immigrant communities in britain. the vampire is immortal as the jew is eternal – the ‘eternal jew’ is a nazi smear drawing from the antisemitic canard of the ‘wandering jew,’ which in turn dates back to the thirteenth century. the vampire threatens the national body and so does the jew. the rush to point to the vampire as an apt metaphor for the parasitism of capitalism too quickly falls into the mire of discourses that entwine capitalist violence with jewish populations (jews are all moneygrabbing leeches and so on), and redirects anger towards capitalism into antisemitism. whilst the history of the vampire as a folkloric figure is far richer than just ‘jews bad,’ it is undeniable that this cultural scaffolding exists,and informs draculaeven before stoker comes to personally intervene in discourses of antisemitism specific to the conditions from which he was writing.
this excellent paperondraculaand the gothic response to anxieties of imperialist decay – ie. fear of a ‘reverse colonialism’ – that did the rounds on this website a few days ago covers a lot of important and helpful ground for this text, and i would highly recommend giving it a read. what it misses, however, is that draculais rooted not only in these abstract notions of imperial decline and external threats to ‘britishness,’ but in the very definite, concrete historical moment in which new discourses of antisemitism were emerging in britain – and that is the history that i want to touch on now.
in 1882, in the wake of the assassination of tsar alexander ii for which the jewish population of the russian empire were scapegoated, a set of highly repressive laws known as the ‘may laws’ were passed. in short, these laws heavily restricted jewish freedom of movement within the empire, almost entirely limiting jewish settlement to the pale of settlement (a portion of land in the westernmost part of the russian empire, encompassing modern-day belarus, lithuania, and moldova, and parts of poland + ukraine) and restricting property ownership + establishing strict administrative quotas across various sectors that severely limited jewish participation in russian society. this in turn brought about expulsions of portions of the jewish populations of moscow and st petersburg where these quotas were exceeded. crucially, these repressive laws were tightened over the next decade, which, alongside a series of brutal pogroms, caused mass emigration of the ashkenazi population from the russian empire. one significant epicentre for jewish settlement at the end of the nineteenth century was the east end of london. this was, of course, coterminous to the writing of dracula,in which an eastern european man imbued with a number of antisemitic smears attempts to inculcate himself within the population of london and imitate britishness with the eventual intent of sucking it dry – you see the very obvious lines being drawn here.
it goes without saying that the establishment of a new immigrant population in london would stoke the sort of reactionary sentiments that we can locate in dracula; however, we might look beyond just a loose historical correlation and consider the possible relationship between the whitechapel murders (colloquially known as the jack the ripper murders – whitechapel is located in the east end if you didn’t know) and stoker’s novel (published seven years after the last of the murders) amidst the adjacent discourses that said murders generated. in addition to the fascination with an ‘underside’ to victorian society in which sexual + social moralising was inverted and voyeurised by the moralist bourgeois class that these murders, targeting poor sex workers, amplified (think the kind of sensationalism we see with true crime culture today – very much the prototype of that), the projection of sensationalised sexual degeneracy and lechery onto the murders in turn invoked antisemitic discourses in which the east end’s jewish population became a nodal point of sorts where these spectral anxieties could be projected. a physical description of jack the ripper at one point included a dark beard and a foreign accent, with a sketch that added a hooked nose, and the famous goulston street graffito in 1888 which read ‘the juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing’ has, though unproven, been treated as though it were written in connection with the whitechapel murders. john pizer, a jewish man, was at one point arrested for the murders (and later released), and police reports around this referred to emergent broader anti-jewish sentiment in whitechapel. the point is, there’s a case to be made for the whitechapel murders having amplified already-extant antisemitism in the east end, and a furthercase to be made for this specific blood libel adjacency to have shaped bram stoker’s novel. (to compare; this is, for example, the same discourse that scaffolds the joke in what we do in the shadows about laszlo being jack the ripper.) whilst we don’t knowthat stoker consciously, explicitly had jack the ripper in mind, 1) it is a theory that has been critically posited before, and 2) at the very least, the novel’s unambiguous antisemitism that locates itself most prominently within a blood libel would have been informed by discourses specific to london, of which this was a major one.
that dracula himself is something of an antisemitic caricature is, i would hope, obvious; and of course, the text is laced with the language of physiognomy and the fear that an immigrant might sufficiently imitate britishness to the point of being able to pass himself off as british wholesale. to take this further, we might, for example, think about how stoker depicts lucy westenras – a ‘blonde, demure’ white woman representative of the british imperialist fantasy of white womanhood becomes a vampire and feeds off of the same children that she (as a white woman) is socially conditioned to care for and reproduce, thus rendering the vampiric threat as one that targets white women and their reproductive roles within the imperial social formation. we might similarly point to the whitechapel murders and the simultaneous sensationalising of sex workers’ murders against the figure of the ‘good’ bourgeois white woman + the subsequent anxiety that the jewish population of the east end might represent a real, immediate threat to london’s womanhood.i don’t want to be overly didactic about this book, and i think that after a certain point this scaffolding is such that people can go away and do the work themselves – like, i’m not going to sit here drawing out point after painstaking point about how draculais peppered with the language of race science and imperialist anxiety at points x, and y, and z. my intention here was to provide a bit of specific background context for how & why this novel came about, from the relatively meagre well of information that i have to hand. my closing remarks might be that we could use all of this discourse as a launchpad for thinking about the points of convergence of subjugation within the vampire myth, and what that can tell us about how imperialism refortifies itself + against which values it does so – in dracula,in sheridan le fanu’s carmilla,in samuel taylor coleridge’s christabel,and in the broader corpus of myth to which all of these texts are responding, we can identify repeated convergent themes of othering the jew, the irish population (le fanu was anglo-irish and a popular reading of carmillais as representative of the colonisation of ireland), the homosexual (draculais incredibly homoerotic, and both carmillaandchristabelare fairly explicitly lesbian), the racialised + colonised populace, and the projection of lechery and sexual degeneracy onto all of these subjects in the ultimate interest of reifying white gentile imperialist sexual formations. the somewhat effete feminising of dracula comes against the masculinising of the imperial british man, for example; the ‘othered’ populace exists in threat & opposition to the imperial norm (and the feminised jewish man is a classicof antisemitism, eg. as far back as the medieval smear that jewish men menstruated). all of these figures clustered under the broad umbrella of the vampire are rendered as threats to reproductive white heterosexuality, and as such, to the reproduction of the imperial order, and to capital, and i’ve always found this to be the most elucidating angle from which i can engage with the text critically. i hope at the very least this is a helpful little conjunction of Thoughts that people can do something with?
love this. love the hand-in-hand journey we can have of jokes and goofs as well as critical analysis.
ok, yes, yesterday’s post was so good because, yes jonathan does not feel safe and feels uneasy, but it would be WILD for him to make the jump from “i feel very uncomfortable in this space” to “wow, i bet those villagers were right and something is going to happen to my soul!”
it would be like going to visit a politician, and on the way you run into qanon people who tell you the politician sacrifices children to satan, and you rightfully shrug that off and keep going. then you meet the politician and he is skeevy and awful. you still aren’t going to go “oh shit, qanon was right!”
On one hand, listening to an audiobook in big chunks at a time works better for me on my re-read of Dracula. On the other hand, it means when I get ahead of folks doing Dracula Daily I have to wait days before I can gossip with everyone else about our dear friend Johnathan Harker.
What I’m really looking forward with this whole Dracula thing is when we get hiatuses. Just a few weeks of radio silence where it slips under the radar followed by, I’m expecting, an absolute explosion of content when we get an update again. Like a recurring surprise party.
