So was anybody going to tell me ahead of time that the cowboy’s name in Dracula is the same as my shihtzu’s even though it’s spelled different. was anybody going to tell me that for the whole book I’ll be thinking of the dog i call “stinky baby” looking like THIS:
[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.]
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
I like how much Dracula feels like someone’s historical horror RPG, where everyone’s gone to a lot of effort to create realistic characters who all have ties to each other and fit into the setting…
Except one player, who just shows up and is like “I’M A COWBOY! HOWDY HOWDY HOWDY!”
But he’s just so damn enthusiastic that they let him join the party anyway.
The funny part is that the American cowboy is a stock Exotic Foreigner™ archetype in Victorian popular fiction, so if you’re into the genre you run into the exact, weirdly specific scenario described here constantly.
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.
the legend around qunicey morris that you might not know is that bram stoker was inspired by a meeting with buffalo bill and decided dracula needed a wild west gentleman in it. this is just so incredibly funny. imagine seeing a fake cowboy ride a horse around and shoot birds out of the sky and thinking, “By Jove, i simply must have this gentleman fight an Undead creature!”
I really appreciate that Bram Stoker knew right off the bat that he was not going to be able to write accurate cowboy slang. And so wrote himself a convenient Get Out of Jail Free card.
Oh I’m sorry is “regulate the fixin’s of your little shoes” not something Texans say? It’s fine, he’s just making shit up to amuse Lucy.
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
