hey bestie, I just met a hot guy who runs a lunatic asylum who would be great for you if you weren’t married to Jonathan I Will Endure A Castle Of Darkest Hell For Real Estate Harker. anyways the lunatic asylum guy tried to psychoanalyse me and I’m in love with him hey remember when we used to undress and sleep together? good times
Remembered this from my personal traits headcanons thing and man, it also fits so well for Seward. Lucy sees this strange dude that everyone else thinks is creepy and is just enthralled by him. An asylum, how fancy!
“If you weren’t already engaged to your food blogger malewife I have JUST the man for you who may or may not be the villain of a horror movie based on his occupation alone” I’m in love with Lucy Westenra
Jonathan Harker: This is my fiancée Mina, and Minas girlfriend Lucy, and Lucy’s Fiancé Arthur, and Arthur’s Boyfriend John Seward, and Seward’s boyfriend Quincey, and
May 24 - Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, …
[Image ID. Digital Art of Lucy Westenra, surrounded by her three suitors. Jack and Quincey, respectively to her left and right each reach out to kiss one of her upraised hands. Arthur, illuminated above her, places a crown of flowers on her head. Her hair is blonde and worn loose. Her eyes are closed. She wears a lavender dress that is read with what looks like blood spatter turning into the shape of bats at its bottom. End ID.]
I’ve watched “Dracula, The Musical” and it’s the first (out of five!) Wildhorn’s musical that didn’t make me cry – so, what the hell? I came here specially, for crying. Every musical before had at least one and most of the time two songs which squeezed a tear out of me, but here – nothing. Probably you just can’t make a thrilling musical out of such a boring book. By the way, reading the book (the first half of it, but still) helped me dearly to understand the plot, because otherwise, I’d probably be still wondering: “What the hell, there was a guy eating flies?”. Okay, they tried to make it a little more interesting than in the book, I would even say they tried to make a little more “Tanz der Vampire”-ish (this vampire musical appeared a few years earlier, so…) – (Spoilers!) they made Mina fall in love with the Count and him fall in love with her too so that he, not wanting the life of a vampire for her, asks her to kill him and she does and mourns him at the end. I checked – in the book, Harper and Quincey kill Dracula, and Mina was being a vampire and controlled by the count for a short time. By the way, getting back to the music, “The Heart is Slow to Learn” sounds so much like “His Eyes” and “Someone like you” (from “Jekyll and Hyde”) and “If I Could Fly” also sounds so familiar, but I can’t name a particular piece it reminds me of… Probably, I should stop listening to Wildhorn’s musicals for some time…
Imagine if Jonathan Harker went to Texas to sell real estate to the mysterious and vampiric Quincy P. Morris, and one Vlad Dracul, a Romanian noble, was among Lucy Westenra’s suitors.
Lucy, 3 seconds after getting engaged: don’t tell anyone about it except your HUSBAND because I would also tell my HUSBAND important news like a WIFE should, I mean, you and I, as WIVES, don’t have to worry about the immature young people stuff these unengaged toddlers think about (I feel sorry for them :( because they can’t be me), we’re at like another stage in our lives than everyone else our age and maturity is all abo-
Jonathan Harker: This is my fiancée Mina, and Minas girlfriend Lucy, and Lucy’s Fiancé Arthur, and Arthur’s Boyfriend John Seward, and Seward’s boyfriend Quincey, and
Jonathan: Mina is gay but she’s straight for me and she’s gay for Lucy and Lucy’s really gay for Mina. And I hate Lucy.
ok so the suitor squad (1) proposed on the same day to the same woman and (2) are literally best friends who almost certainly have known each other longer than any of them have known lucy. this leaves us with a few possibilities:
the fact that they all proposed on the same day was completely by coincidence. funny in terms of them all reaching the same conclusion that may 25 was The Day, but otherwise kind of a boring option. also very unrealistic. next please
they all decided to just Wing It on the same day. all’s fair in love and war. whoever got there first and got a yes was going to marry lucy. good luck boys. let the hunger games begin
they planned this VERY deliberately. they knew jack would go first, then quincey, then arthur, assuming she didn’t say yes to a proposal before all three men had a chance to propose. this option implies that they themselves, The Boyfriends, knew that jack had the least chance of success and arthur had the most likely positive outcome. (which is the correct assessment, but also…. sorry jack.) also implies that both jack and quincey had to send a message to the group chat along the lines of “no dice. good luck art let’s go buddy”
my personal favorite: they did not realize that all three of them were courting the same woman, and in Bro Solidarity decided to propose on the same day to their three individual girlfriends. unfortunately there was only one collective girlfriend. c'est la vie
We’ve finally arrived at an infamous line from Dracula, and I’d like to share some thoughts before anyone (like many, many critics before them) reads too much into Lucy’s comment about her three suitors.
From what we’ve seen (and will continue to see…I’m going to refer to some things that haven’t happened yet), Lucy’s intelligence is primarily interpersonal. She reads others’ mental states well, she’s strongly empathetic, feels things more acutely than others, and speaks out against what she sees as insensitivity. She has an interesting blend of demonstrativeness and reticence. Although she expresses her emotions readily when writing to her friend and when turning down Seward’s and Morris’s proposals, the way she declares to Mina, “There, that does me good,” after confessing her love for Arthur and thanks Mina for allowing her to be “able to tell you and to have your sympathy” suggests relief at being able to express something held back. She admittedly tries to be “a tough nut to crack” in front of Seward and is reluctant to give even Mina the full details of Arthur’s proposal. As much relief as she finds in emotional openness, she also seems to need to self-censor.
The reason lies in the keynote of her character: her need to please other people. One literary critic I’ve encountered has criticized her for apparently having no life beyond her mother and suitors. Lucy’s suitors do indeed take up a lot of her letters’ content, but before these letters comes a request from Mina: “Tell me all of the news when you write. You have not told me anything for a long time. I hear rumours, and especially of a tall, handsome, curly-haired man???” Lucy obligingly gives her friend the information she knows her to be most interested in hearing. As she tells Mina, “I have nothing to tell you. There is really nothing to interest you” (emphasis added). What we know of Lucy so far is only what she believes is relevant to Mina’s interests.
While she does love Arthur greatly, it’s telling that the first thing she tells Mina about him is “he and mamma get on very well together; they have so many things to talk about in common.” Presumably he and Lucy relate to each other too, but her primary concern is her mother’s approval of her love interest. Once engaged to Arthur, she is careful to tailor herself to his preferences. Likewise, she filters her emotions through the need to please; she admits she’s “very, very happy” at her engagement but considers herself undeserving and vows to “try in the future to show that I am not ungrateful.” Even while struggling with some incredibly traumatizing things herself, she shows concern for Mina’s anxieties about Jonathan and tries to console her. Later, we’ll see that her letters to Mina and her personal diary present very different pictures of her state; she glosses over her own pain to keep her friend from worrying. She similarly tries to “cheer up” to keep Arthur from being “miserable to see me so” and downplays her problems for the sake of her ailing mother. Even her private diary’s last entry ends not with a comment for her own benefit but an address to others: “Thank everybody for being so good to me! Thank God! Good-night, Arthur” It is as if she struggles to conceive of an identity for herself beyond her relation to others.
Given Lucy’s family situation, it makes sense that she would grow up with this mindset. As the only daughter of a widow, she is her mother’s only immediate family, and pressure seems to be placed on her in this relationship. Her mother expects her to marry, and Lucy does so, with attention to which suitor her mother gets along with. Her mother’s will even leaves “the whole estate, real and personal” to Arthur, requiring that Lucy marry him if she is to have any inheritance. Lucy seems reluctant to be open with her mother, judging from her relief at being able to confide in Mina, and her insistence on concealing her increasing struggles from her mother. Although the delicate state of Mrs. Westenra’s health is ostensibly kept from Lucy, she is implied to be aware that her mother is not well and feels responsible for her health and well-being.
This quality places Lucy’s conduct toward her suitors in a new light. Her remark “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?” is commonly interpreted by critics as voracious desire for as many men as possible. Lucy’s rhetorical question is indeed unorthodox, as she acknowledges, and viewed in isolation, it does appear to support a reading of an over-sexualized Lucy. However, placed back into context, it becomes more consistent with her desire to please than any unusual lust.
Lucy begins her account to Mina of the proposals with mixed feelings: “Just fancy! THREE proposals in one day! Isn’t it awful! I feel sorry, really and truly sorry for two of the poor fellows. Oh, Mina, I am so happy that I don’t know what to do with myself. And three proposals!” She is clearly flattered by the validation of attracting three men, but her happiness, as indicated later in the letter, refers to her engagement to Arthur more than to exultation at multiple conquests.
Her intermixed sorrow is not on her own account but on the behalf of the men she must reject. She shows no self-pity. Her empathetic nature takes on the emotions of her suitors in addition to her own; as she tells Mina, “it isn’t a happy thing when you have to see a poor fellow, whom you know loves you honestly, going away and looking all broken-hearted, and to know that, no matter what he may say at the moment, you are passing quite out of his life.” So she feels “so miserable, though […] so happy.” After Quincey Morris’s proposal, she is overwhelmed with guilt for “almost making fun of this great-hearted, true gentleman” as she turns him down. This deep regret at having to disappoint another good, worthy person leads her to bring up marrying multiple men as a means to “save all this trouble” of the rejected ones’ pain and her own sorrow at not being about to please everyone.
Therefore, the emphasis in Lucy’s infamous line is not lust but her own sensitivity to others’ emotional pain. Once she is engaged to Arthur, she shows no sign of wanting the other two back or seeking them out in any way. This is not the behavior of a woman driven by desire for multiple partners. Choosing Arthur pleases her mother and herself, but for someone as committed to taking responsibility for everyone’s happiness as Lucy, a solution that does not satisfy all parties can be difficult to take.
For more on this reading of Lucy, I highly recommend Leah Davydov’s article “Why Can’t They Let a Girl Marry One Man?: The Origins of Lucy Westenra’s Suitors” (Journal of Dracula Studies, vol. 18, 2016, pp. 5-29).
what if i wrote you a letter that said “I am longing to be with you, and by the sea, where we can talk together freely and build our castles in the air” and we were both girls
LUCY!!!! and lucy hyping up seward!! I have always been at that comment about jack being a good match for Mina, because I think there’s some truth to it. full disclosure, my preferred Dracula ships are actually mina/jack/jon as a triad and then arthur/quincey (lucy would be dating everyone except jonathan in this theoretical scenario but…. you know)
Also I love the comment “I do not, as you know, take sufficient interest in dress to be able to describe the new fashions. Dress is a bore.” It goes against the grain of lucy as materialistic and “girly” in the way she’s often implied to be in adaptations– while there is definitely stuff going on wrt lucy and mina as variations on cultural ideals of middle/ upper class white british femininity through the lens of Stoker’s personal tastes, an equally “important” aspect of novel!lucy as far as narrative effectiveness is concerned is that lucy is super likeable. everyone in the story adores her, which is what, symbolism and cultural anxieties aside, makes the stakes so high for what happens to her later. Adaptations that make her overly flirty or flighty or status-focused or otherwise cast her as the whore in their madonna-whore complex actually undermine the impact of that section of the story and add some (more) very yikes misogynistic layers to what eventually happens to her.
anyway canon lucy is a sweetie and I love her like everyone else lucy rights 2k22
