mr. quincey morris is so character!! he’s a cowboy. he proposed to a girl and when he got rejected he continued being bffs with her AND her fiancé. he shot his horse before it could turn into a vampire with seemingly little concern. he stood up in the middle of a conversation to shoot a bat (and missed it!!). he was revealed to be rich and willing to blow it all on funding their dracula hunt. he talks in weird american slang to mess around with europeans. he used a teeny tiny knife to fend off an immortal vampire. he is the love of my life.
Now that all of tumblr has gotten a taste of him, I will now continue to go on my rant at the sheer bafflement that Quincy Morris is almost always excluded from nearly every single adaptation of Dracula over the past 125 years.
Seriously, a narrative gives you a cowboy, nice and wrapped with a pretty little bow, and you throw it out? Not even the old hollywood movies touched him, and that was old hollywood! They loved cowboys! They couldn’t get enough of those fuckers! And yet here we are.
LOVE the implication Quincey overplayed being an American abroad and is nevertheless willing to commit to the bit forever just because the girl he loves finds it charming even though she fully suspects he’s full of it
There is a lot to be laughed at and make memes out of in Quincey’s proposal (and in Bram Stoker’s idea of how Americans speak in general), but I also would like everyone to appreciate the lines “Little girl, your honesty and pluck have made me a friend, and that’s rarer than a lover; it’s more unselfish anyhow” and “Won’t you give me one kiss? It’ll be something to keep off the darkness now and then”, because damn, that’s beautiful </3
[ID: An illustration of Jack Seward, Arthur Holmwood, and Quincey Morris. Each of them are featured with the lyrics of their respective part of “Misery x CPR x Reese’s Puff’s”. Jack is a young man with light skin, black hair and glasses. He wears a double-breasted waistcoat, trousers with a houndstooth pattern, a green necktie and a white collared shirt. He is hunched over, crying into a microphone. Arthur is a young man with curly, dark blond hair, light skin and a short beard. He wears a purple waistcoat with an Albert chain, a white collared shirt, a bowtie and striped trousers. He poses with his hip and chest jutting out and his hands behind his head. Quincey is a young Black man with a short anchor-style beard. He wears a burnt sienna waistcoat and trousers, a western bowtie, a gun belt, a cowboy hat, a white collared shirt and sleeve garters. He leaps into the center of the frame with a hand outstretched in a finger-gun gesture. END ID.]
So Lucy said that Quincey normally doesn’t talk in such a slangy way, he was just doing it to amuse her, yet in this letter to Arthur he’s all “we both want to mingle our weeps over the wine-cup” and “be at my camp-fire to-morrow night.”
Theories about Quincey P. Morris’s way of communicating:
a.) He started talking like this to impress Lucy and now can’t stop
b.) He’s actually more comfortable talking like this and was code-switching to sound more proper for his fancy hosts, but has abandoned this since getting turned down.
c.) He’s trying to see if this routine works on other people, like maybe Arthur…?
d.) This is the non-slang way of talking that Lucy considered “well-educated and [indicative of] exquisite manners.”
e.) He gets one consistent way of communicating because Bram Stoker already has a lot of character voices to manage.
it’s so funny to me that everyone depicts Quincey Morris as this rooty-tooty-point-and-shooty cowboy stereotype when Lucy specifies in her letter that he’s actually very well-educated and doesn’t use “Texan slang” around most people
just like
modern Quincey as the American exchange student who’s from Austin and went to Harvard for undergrad, but wearily trots out the Yeehaw™ when his very sweet, very earnest British crush asks him to
big love for Quincy P Morris who gets home from having his heart broken and instantly gets to work making sure it won’t hurt his friendship with Jack and Arthur. this man said fuck romantic rivals, fuck toxicity and Straight Guy competition, we are best friends and we are getting drinks, yours as ever and always
his letter today feels so pivotal to me. you see it in the proposals too, Jack and Quincey both assuring Lucy that they’re her friends and want to be there for her regardless of who she chooses, but Quincey Morris solidifies the sentiment by reaching out to Arthur like this. My dear Art… We promise you a hearty welcome, and a loving greeting because that’s who Quincey is, the man is all heart.
narratively, we need them to be friends, we need them to love each other and Lucy deeply, regardless of the proposals. if it had become a bitter rivalry (or more likely, if they had gone their separate ways with Quincey riding off into the sunset and Jack shutting out everything but work), there would have been no hope. they need each other, and I can’t imagine them staying close without him. Quincey’s letter feels hugely important to me as a way of setting up the heroes and forming them as a group built on love.
an interesting parallel to keep in mind with qunicey is that, he’s effectively a reverse dracula. where the vampire is ancient, aristocratic, and comes from the eastern edge of the western world, quincey is young, captialistic, and comes from the western edge of the western world. if dracula is read as the past looming over a modern london, quincey may be the future
Yknow. I love that the first way we meet Quincey is through his proposal to Lucy. I think it showcases his thoughtfulness and intelligence and care for Lucy so well.
I think someone described an American to Bram Stoker, and Stoker did his best. Follows the fine tradition of medieval artists who had lions described to them.
I haven’t been keeping up with Dracula Daily, but I’d like to remind everyone that Quincey Morris is a descendant of Trevor Belmont and Sypha Belnades in the Castlevania lore.
Very excited for you Dracula Daily people to discover Quincey Morris, because he’s been cut out of almost every media adaptation because screenwriters are cowards.
Everyone says “Bram Stoker has no idea how Texans talk lmao” but we do get told that Quincey is making shit up to make Lucy giggle:
“…but he found out that it amused me to hear him talk American slang, and whenever I was present, and there was no one to be shocked, he said such funny things. I am afraid, my dear, he has to invent it all, for it fits exactly into whatever else he has to say.”
Which is the cutest shit and I refuse to let us interpret this scene without it.
Imagine if you will a complete inversion of a boorish American on St. Patrick’s Day. Imagine an Irishman who aggressively celebrates the Fourth of July with unabashed gusto, who desperately tries to claim the significance of some alleged 1/32 American heritage, who wears a shirt with an eagle turning into an American flag and who drinks a specialty red, white, and blue novelty beverage until he collapses in a pool of tricolor vomit. Imagine some guy so invested in a superficial, touristy version of Americaness that he will nervously call the side with his $20 “authentic” hamburger “freedom fries” out of fear of offending. Imagine a guy who upon meeting any American will try to strike up a friendly conversation by asking them what their favorite gun is and talking about how personally inspiring he finds Abraham Lincoln.
You must understand, as you prepare to read the May 24th entry of this novel, that this Irishman is Bram Stoker.
