Episode 296: Best of Series – Introduction to “Dracula” by Bram Stoker, Ch. 1-2

Summary

The Literary Life Podcast – Episode 296

Best of Series: Introduction to “Dracula” by Bram Stoker, Ch. 1-2
Release Date: September 30, 2025
Hosts: Angelina Stanford, Thomas Banks, Cindy Rollins

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Overview

In this “Best of” episode, the Literary Life Podcast team—Angelina, Thomas, and Cindy—launch into Bram Stoker’s Dracula, focusing on the novel’s opening chapters. Their discussion highlights not just plot points but delves into the art of reading deeply, the historical and symbolic context of the monster tradition, and why modern interpretations of monster fiction often miss the mark. The conversation is rich with literary theory, historical background, and enthusiasm for Stoker’s work, all while maintaining the trio’s witty, insightful, and accessible style.

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Main Discussion Themes

1. Why “Dracula”? (04:34–06:51)

• Dracula is chosen for its richness and relevance to the podcast’s ongoing discussion about “the skill and art of reading,” rooted in literary tradition.
• Dracula allows a distinction between reading deeply (rooted in tradition) vs. reading anachronistically (through modern or Freudian lenses).
• The hosts plan to focus on how monster fiction has changed and what the original tradition can teach us.

2. The Importance of Literary Context & Tradition (08:51–19:34)

• Quotable:
  “You’re going to read this book wildly different if you’re not rooted in the literary tradition.”
  — Angelina Stanford (04:38)

• The crew emphasizes rooting texts in their imaginative and historical context, referencing C.S. Lewis and Tolkien’s admonition that modern readers must “learn to read as the original audience would have.”

• Discussion of how meaning in stories is not arbitrary but connected to transcendent, traditional metaphors and symbols.

  • Notable quote from Jonathan Harker (cited as the episode’s Commonplace):
    “and yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had and have powers of their own which mere modernity cannot kill.”
    — Thomas Banks (08:54; quoting Dracula)

• Angelina gives a passionate mini-lecture on the modern separation of words from their metaphorical and traditional associations due to Freudian and postmodern thought.

3. The Traditional Monster vs. Modern Interpretation (19:34–35:54)

• Exhaustive overview of the monster tradition:

  • Classical: Monsters represent the forces which must be overcome for civilization to flourish (e.g., Hercules slaying monsters, Oedipus and the Sphinx).
  • Medieval/Christian: Monsters are explicitly linked to Cain, sin, Satan, and civilization's threats (e.g., Grendel in Beowulf, St. George and the Dragon).
  • Symbolism: Monsters symbolize fallen nature; the spiritual quest is to slay, not befriend, one’s inner monster.

• Modern Twist & the Anti-Hero:

  • The post-Freudian and postmodern shift turns monsters into misunderstood, traumatized “others,” to be pitied or rehabilitated rather than opposed.
  • The hosts criticize this reading as a projection of modern concerns backwards, which distorts the original meaning.

• Memorable moment (23:31):
  Thomas Banks:
  “Monsters tend to be solitary … enemies of not just the hero, but of the human race and the possibility of civilization.”

• Angelina on the modern approach (34:18):
  “To read the Bible not centering Christ but Satan—to take the monster’s perspective—is destructive to the text’s meaning.”

4. The Gothic Novel & the Enlightenment (37:20–41:24)

• The Gothic novel is positioned as a response to Enlightenment rationalism.

  • Enlightenment emphasized science, perfection, and the “death” of the supernatural.
  • Gothic fiction (e.g., Dracula) reasserts the presence and horror of the spiritual, irrational, and mysterious.

• Key insight:
  The “castle,” the “dungeons,” and the supernatural are all deliberate nods to the Middle Ages—a return to the symbolic and spiritual.

5. The Late Victorian Context (42:57–48:05)

• The 1890s is an age of both optimism (British Empire at its height) and underlying anxiety:

  • Faith in progress, science, and order.
  • Doubts about the loss of spirituality and the consequences of unchecked rationalism.
  • Dracula explores what happens when primal, ancient evils re-enter a world that thinks it has outgrown them.

• Thomas Banks (45:17):
  “There is a deep fear of foreigners in certain parts of English society…so I think xenophobia is kind of an undercurrent in this book.”

6. The Literary Vampire Before Stoker (50:23–54:56)

• Dracula draws on a long tradition of vampire folklore and fiction:
  • German story “Wake Not the Dead” (1800).
  • Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819), inspired by Lord Byron.
  • “Varney the Vampire” (1845, penny dreadful).
  • Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1872, introducing the female vampire motif).
• Stoker’s Dracula synthesizes these traditions but innovates, setting many of the “rules” now associated with the vampire myth.

7. Opening Chapters: Literary Devices & Plot Introduction (56:22–77:22)

• Epistolary Form:
  The use of diaries, letters, and documents roots the fantastic in “empirical” evidence, lending realism and invoking both Enlightenment and medieval literary devices.
• Jonathan Harker, an archetypal modern Briton, is dispatched as a solicitor to Transylvania for business, utterly unprepared for the supernatural.
• The Englishman's casual dismissal of “superstitions” is played for irony—readers are meant to notice the flags he misses.
  • Cindy Rollins:
    “I love when he makes the memo: I must ask the Count about these superstitions.” (66:44)
• The descent into Dracula’s world is depicted as a Dante-like journey into hell:
  • Imagery of serpentine paths, midnight rides, and ominous villagers.
  • Hints abound: dogs barking madly (hounds of hell), red lips, sharp teeth, circumnavigating the castle (circles of hell).
• Stoker’s use of folklore (the invitation to “enter freely,” the absence of mirrors, St. George’s Day, and superstitious villagers) serves both as plot mechanics and as metaphors for the dangers of ignoring spiritual realities.
  • Thomas Banks:
    “For any scary story or horror film to work, people have to be slightly less than ordinarily intelligent, otherwise they wouldn’t walk into those situations.” (67:41)
• The symbolism is apparent: Dracula as the devil, the threat of evil revived in the modern rational age, the castle as prison.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Modern vs. Traditional Monster Reading
  “The monster is not the wounded person…the monster is the wound. When a monster is fighting a human being, it’s as if the human is fighting their own trauma—that trauma needs to be defeated so that person can heal.”
  — Angelina Stanford (35:34)

• On Reading with Traditional Context
  “For thousands of years that was not even an option. People just knew that words had a traditional, metaphorical meaning. Everyone knew it. It’s why all the poets use the images and metaphors the same way.”
  — Angelina Stanford (16:17)

• On Jonathan Harker as ‘Watson’ Figure
  “Watson is pitched just below the reader, and that gives us a sense of: I’m so smart, I figured it out before Watson did…That’s what [Stoker] wants you to think about Harker.”
  — Angelina Stanford (62:46)

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Key Timestamps

• Intro, show format, literary purpose – 00:00–04:31
• Why read Dracula? – 04:34–06:51
• Commonplace quotes – 08:51–11:49
• Literary theory & the meaning of meaning – 11:58–19:34
• History of monsters in literature – 19:34–35:54
• Gothic fiction and Enlightenment responses – 37:20–41:24
• Victorian context and optimism – 42:57–48:05
• Development of vampire literature – 50:23–54:56
• Dracula’s opening chapters: storytelling devices & themes – 56:22–77:22
• Discussion: Harker as narrator, symbolism, fairy tales – 62:36–77:22
• Closing reflections and previews – 82:41–87:25

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Tone & Style

• Witty, warm, and scholarly. Frequent asides, literary jokes, and personable stories. Hosts reference their own teaching experience, family in-jokes, and pop-cultural touchstones (e.g., comparison of Dracula “camp” to Sesame Street’s Count).
• Accessible yet deep. The hosts unravel literary and philosophical theory for general listeners, urging everyone to try “rooted reading” of classics.

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Further Reading / For Next Week

• Chapters 3–7 of Dracula
  Continue reading and reflecting as the hosts guide listeners through the deeper waters of the novel.

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Memorable Closing

Cindy Rollins (82:41):
“To me, it read very Dickensian … a little obviously darker, but same sort of wordy, kind of enjoyable read.”

Angelina Stanford (86:00):
“Hang in there. Even if you think it’s a little scary, it’s just a fantastic story and it will be very satisfying. … Keep crafting your literary life, because stories—not vampires—will save the world.”

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Poem (87:25)

Thomas Banks closes with Elizabeth Jennings’ “Ghosts,” reinforcing the episode’s themes of haunting, omission, and the shadowy edges of existence.

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Summary compiled for listeners seeking depth, context, and lively engagement with Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Transcript

[Thomas Banks]

Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. We've grown quite significantly since our debut in 2019, and we've had many requests to highlight older episodes that new listeners may have missed, as well as revisit listener favorites. To honor that request, I present to you this episode of the Best of the Literary Life podcast.

[Angelina Stanford]

This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the skill and art of reading. Well, explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen and your commute. The Literary Life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life podcast.

[Cindy Rollins]

Foreign.

[Angelina Stanford]

Hello and welcome back to the Literary Life podcast. Today we are going to launch a series on Bram Stoker's Dracula. And I am so excited about. So joining me today are always my two partners in crime, but hopefully not supernatural crime. I've got the mysterious Mr. Banks here. Hello, Mr. Banks.

[Thomas Banks]

Ms. Stanford.

[Angelina Stanford]

We'll see which of the, which of the men in this book I'll, I'll nickname you his face. You'll, you'll find out why his face because he's so afraid I'm going to call him Jonathan Harker. But that will make sense once we get into the book because he and I have been discussing Jonathan Hart. He doesn't want to be Jonathan. And we also have with us, fresh from her European jaunt, Cindy Rollins. And Cindy, I'm hoping you're going to be able to chime in here as now that you're an expert on European train travel, you can just open up this whole section of the book for us.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. I have to be careful what I say though, because every. I did learn a lot about European train travel and I did learn that the Swiss are very, very good at European train travel. What I didn't know is how good they were until I got to Italy.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

So you had your own like reverse Jonathan Harker experience. Yes. Yeah. So Cindy is back from Switzerland, not the Carpathian, so she can't call it as a tax write off for Dracula research, but you should plan this better next time.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, no, I, I think I can stretch it like a similar, you know, something similar there it really is too.

[Thomas Banks]

Bad that we're not doing Frankenstein, because then I know Switzerland would have worked perfectly and. Yeah, that would have been a free trip anyway. Yeah, we'll.

[Angelina Stanford]

We'll plan this better. We need. We need. If someone listening out there is an accountant and a tax advisor, talk to us about how we could better, better plan this. That's right.

[Cindy Rollins]

And maybe we can plan our next year's podcast around where we would like to travel.

[Angelina Stanford]

There you go. There you go. Literary tourism. I am so down for that, though. No kidding. I would absolutely be down for that. We could actually arrange tours. Our listeners could come. I should stop talking. This is going to take on a life of its own. Frankenstein. It's monster idea I'm unleashing on.

[Cindy Rollins]

We will make our own monster.

[Angelina Stanford]

I am so excited to talk about Dracula. This has been a book that has been bounced around many times in our Facebook group. And then, of course, Cindy, you're. You were listening to it, reading it on your own as part of that. The Daily Dracula. And I've read.

[Cindy Rollins]

I wasn't doing the Daily Dracula. I just read it. No, I just was reading it.

[Angelina Stanford]

Coincidence.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right. Well, a lot of people were reading it because of the Daily Dracula emails. And of course, I've read this many times. I took a class on this, on vampire fiction. I've taught Dracula many times. So I'm. I could not be more excited about this. And Mr. Banks was. He was reading it excitingly yesterday, looking over me, grinning, saying, this is so good. I forgot how good this is. And I was kind of feeling it too. It's been a while, so I'm excited.

[Thomas Banks]

It's been probably 20 years for me.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, yeah, maybe me too.

[Thomas Banks]

Maybe even longer. I think high school. I think I was a teenager when I read this.

[Angelina Stanford]

Maybe even longer. I taught it several times at the beginning of my teaching career, which was 30 years ago. So it's been. It's been a while for me, too. This is such a good book for us to pick because it is going to highlight the different ways of reading that we keep talking about in this podcast. And you're going to read this book. Wildly different if you're not rooted in the literary tradition. And we're going to talk about that and talk about why Dracula is so different than the modern vampire novel, which is all related to this question of how do we know what things mean and where does meaning come from? So we'll be introducing that today. Today is mostly going to be introduction, rooting us in the background as Lewis And Tolkien so firmly believed that this is the way to learn how, learn what books mean. You must root them in their imaginative context to be able to understand it like the original audience would have. And so that's what we're going to try to do today. And then we're going to take a, a pretty attentive look at one and two chapters, one and two, so that we can prepare ourselves for the, the goodness that is to come. But before we get started with that, Mr. Banks, while Cindy's been off on, you know, European vacationing, it. That's right. I made that a verb. You've been hard at work putting together a Henry VIII webinar. Tell us about that.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, it all began I was, I was thinking of doing a. Oh, getting into sort of marriage counseling or something like that. Doing, doing, you know, a webinar on the joys of marriage and principles of, you know, domestic bliss. So anyway, since I'm, since I, you know, I'm not expert in those things.

[Angelina Stanford]

So that led you to research.

[Thomas Banks]

Led me down to Henry vii, master himself, who was monogamous so many times over.

[Angelina Stanford]

Who could know more about a marriage than a man who's been married so many times.

[Thomas Banks]

Exactly. So, so yeah, I'll be talking about, I mean, the religious conflicts in Henry's time, the wars and naturally the marriages and why, I think the, the popular picture of Henry is maybe a little bit distorted. So he was, yeah. Not a man I necessarily admire greatly, but a very interesting one. And his, his, like that generation in English history, I think is one of the most exciting to read about.

[Angelina Stanford]

And you, you told me that you're going, your take on this is going to be that this is kind of the birth of the modern.

[Thomas Banks]

Very much so. Oh, very much so, yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

So this will be really helpful for someone who wants to get a sense of like, what is the pre. Modern world? What is the modern world? What's the divide there? You'll, you'll help to sort it out.

[Thomas Banks]

I will do my best. On November 17th.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right. And if you're interested in that, of course, everything we do is live. Or later you can go to HouseOfHumaneLetters.com click on the webinars tab, and we've got all the information right there. And you can join us live or you can watch the recording later. And of course, everything we do is lifetime access.

[Thomas Banks]

Huzzah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Indeed.

[Cindy Rollins]

That would be the lifetime of you. Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

The lifetime of the Internet and me and, you know, my heirs. Sorry, that's like if that's a personal joke to me because I. I'm always talking in my classes about Tolkien's heirs and how his, you know, his son Christopher devoted his entire life to protecting everything his father did. And, you know, every little scrap of paper with half a note on it, he lovingly edited it and published. And so it's a running joke in my family about how my kids are not going to be. That they're going to be the opposite of that.

[Cindy Rollins]

So burn those papers.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, they're. They're. I don't think there's a Christopher Tolkien in my family who's going to lovingly go through my marginalia. They. They. They know about books, and they also like to tease me. I can't imagine where they get their sense of humor from. So one of their. One of their things that they think is hilarious to say is to look at me completely deadpan and say, mom, the body won't even be cold before we're dragging your books to the edge of the street.

[Cindy Rollins]

So these children sound like Dracula.

[Angelina Stanford]

So, yeah, no Christopher Dolgan in my. In my group, Mr. Banks, if I go first, you must protect the library from my barbarian children. Of course they're joking. They're joking. Everyone, before you get upset with my kids, we like to laugh in our family. All right, well, shall we jump in with some commonplace quotes and then get down to business with Jacula?

[Thomas Banks]

Great notion.

[Angelina Stanford]

Let's do it. All right. Would you like to go first, Mr. B?

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. So my commonplace for today, I was kind of lazy, and I just took it from Dracula itself.

[Cindy Rollins]

So has this ever been done in our podcast history?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, I cry, fall. I cry, fall.

[Thomas Banks]

So this is. This is Jonathan Harker speaking here. Early in the book, he says, and yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had and have powers of their own which mere modernity cannot kill. Oh, that's such a pregnancy.

[Cindy Rollins]

Wow, that's a great quote.

[Angelina Stanford]

That is going to get to the heart of so much of what we are going to see today. I mean, not just today, over the next next few weeks, as we jump into the Dracula waters. All right, Mrs. Rollins, what might you have for us today?

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, let me just say this. We. We talk a lot about virtue and all that stuff around it, and we confuse people a lot. We get a lot of questions. So I have another helpful quote from Charlotte Mason, which I think will continue this conversation and maybe help moms try to figure out where we're coming. And actually, I'm thinking of this quote When Mr. Banks was talking about Henry VIII, I thought this really kind of applies to some of the formation of his character. So here is what Charlotte says, and this is a little bit of a longer quote. So anyway, that children should have the peace of God as a necessary condition of growth is a practical question. If we believe it is their right not to be acquired by merit nor lost by demerit, we shall take less upon ourselves and understand that it is not we who pasture the young souls. The managing mother, who interferes with every hour and every occupation of her child's life, all because it is her duty, would tend to disappear. She would see with some amusement why it is that the rather lazy, self indulgent mother is often blessed with very good children. She too will let her children be, not because she is lazy, but being dutiful. She sees that give children opportunity and elbow room and they are likely to become natural persons, neither cranks nor prigs. And there here is the hope for society. Children so brought up are hardly likely to become managing persons in their turn, inclined to intrude upon the lives of others and be rather intolerable in whatever relation.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that's good.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, she's so good. But I thought of Henry VIII there because he was rather intolerable and inclined to intrude in the lives of others. And he was quite a managing person also.

[Thomas Banks]

Indeed, indeed.

[Cindy Rollins]

And all because of his virtues, really. But. But we're not talking about Henry. So.

[Angelina Stanford]

One of the real struggles we have in the modern world is because we see everything in these kinds of either are harsh dichotomies and we don't understand that the terms of the category has been set by modernity. No categories drawing. The lines we're drawing themselves are wrong. And that's why we get confused. And so what ends up happening is when you and I say don't do X, people hear. So you're saying, do Y? No. Yeah, yeah, they do Y. Right. So we're trapped in this false dualism. So when we say don't moralize to your children, they hear. So don't do anything. Don't parent. Just let them run wild. Nope, didn't. Yeah, but the fact that we can't envision another way to be then didactic and controlling speaks to how modern we think.

[Cindy Rollins]

Very well said.

[Angelina Stanford]

So along those lines, get out your bingo card. Angeline is going to give a backstory. So I have a fellowship going where I am working with a handful of specially selected, shall I say curated. I curated some human beings. That's a joke to everyone listening Are.

[Thomas Banks]

They in a glass case now?

[Angelina Stanford]

I can't stand the word curate. It just drips with pretension. So I curated some fellows. They're, they're all cackling as they hear me say this. And we are taking an absolute deep dive into literary theory and it has led us to some very interesting places. And I will try to summarize a little bit here. We are getting really to the question of how do you know what words mean? Where does meaning come from? And this is very closely connected to what we talk about on this podcast about bad ways of reading. Because moderns and all of us have grown up in this world, in modernity. It's been going on for a few hundred years now because moderns have rejected the historical, Christian and classical idea of where meaning comes from. That has created a whole bunch of problems in knowing how to read. Namely, we think, well, the author is giving the story meaning or the reader is giving the story meaning. And so we, we tend to think any way we can read it is valid, which has led us to any number of complet. Completely insane. Thank you, Charlotte Mesa, forgiving me with the word crank. So literary criticism goes in between cranks and prigs, but we do know where meaning comes from and it comes from the transcendent. Now, I talked about this in my Back to School talk at the Back to School conference, which you can find on Cindy's website, morningtime for moms.com that the meaning comes from the transcendent realm and it comes from God and it comes from nature and it's embedded in reality. And, and this was something everybody knew and understood until the Enlightenment. So today we're going to talk about why it is that people read monster fiction completely wrong. And so this quote will be connected to this. So anyway, we are all, me and my fellows are just deep diving into every little scrap of anything Lewis and Tolkien wrote, because of course, they are a huge proponents and advocates that meaning comes from words and that is connected to a transcendent meaning and it means something and it's fixed. And, and this idea we have that words are arbitrary and we're all just sort of naming whatever we want, that that is wrong and dangerous. And I'll stop summarizing there because really, I'm going to open up a huge can of worms that I absolutely cannot explain on this podcast because, I mean, we are spending weeks and weeks and weeks going over this stuff. So this is just a brief summary. Anyway, go deep diving one of my fellows today. We're sharing. We started A class bibliography where every time we find some little, a footnote or something where Lewis and Tolkien are talking about where meaning comes from, we're writing it down. And so this was one that was found today by Kendra. Shout out to Kendra. So this is A book review C.S. lewis wrote on Dorothy Sayers, the Mind of the Maker. And he says this, this is not my commonplace quote. This is still the backstory. So everybody just calm down. He praises the very badly note A, which states something well known to anyone who has written the humblest story himself. But maddeningly, maddeningly, oh, goodness, help me mad.

[Thomas Banks]

Maddeningly.

[Angelina Stanford]

Thank you. It's funny because when she was reading this to me, she also could not say the word. So now we've jinxed ourselves, misunderstood by nearly all modern criticism. So of course we had to go find this quote. So Lewis is saying Dorothy Sayers points out something that is self evidently obviously true to anybody who writes anything. But it's insanely misunderstood by nearly all modern criticism. And this is really going to go to the heart of what I'm going to talk about today. So here's the note he was referencing from the Mind of the Maker. And this is from a chapter called Idea, Energy and Power. Men of science spend much time and effort in the attempt to disentangle words from their metaphorical and traditional associations. The attempt is bound to prove vain since it runs counter to the law of humanity. So that is Sayers in her very clear way, saying, this is what modern man has done. They are disentangling words from their metaphorical and traditional associations. So a lot of times when I'm doing a metaphorical reading, people will say, oh, well, you know, that's what you think it means. But somebody else might think it means something else. And I think, oh, hello, modernity. For thousands of years that was not even an option. People just knew that words had a traditional metaphorical meaning. Everybody knew it. And it's why all of the poets use the images and the metaphors in the same way. And, and many, many, many, many scholars and poets have written books about the fact that they recognize that until very recently, everybody used these images in the same way, these metaphors, and was because it was connected to a transcendent reality. And I'm going to explain that a little bit later today. But one of the things that has happened is in the modern world, especially the post Freudian world, we have divorced words from their traditional associations. And we think that words can mean anything that we say that they mean. And so one of the things that that means is that when we say, well, some word has a symbolic or a metaphoric meaning, we think that means it's open season to make that metaphor mean anything we want it to mean. So because of Freud, a lot of times we are reading Freudian meanings into those things, but Freudian meanings is not traditional. Freudian meanings are five minutes old. And he's wrong. And he made up new meanings for things that had traditional metaphorical associations. So one of the things that you see, and I know some of you already at home have Googled a little bit of grad Dracula criticism and have been just horrified. Well, welcome to Freudian symbolism. People are reading this book Freudian, but Bram Stoker's not a Freudian and he's not tapping into that tradition. He's writing something else. So we can't bring these new, made up, brand new innovated meanings and throw it onto this old book and say, see, it means this. Because no, it does not. So we'll talk about that today a little bit more in just a few minutes when we talk about the role of the monster in literature and how the monster is commonly understood in our culture versus how it has been historically understood. And you're going to see there's a huge difference there.

[Cindy Rollins]

You know, that reminds me of C.S. lewis's studies in Words. His opening chapters kind of go over that concept that you just.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, oh, yes. That is one of the many places where he is emphasizing this. He and he and Tolkien both. And. And one of the things that they were fighting was IA Richards. And if you've listened to the Abolition of Man episodes, you remember that IA Richards is the person Lewis calls out by name as the person who is propagating the ideas that are going to lead to the abolition of mankind. And IA Richards wrote a book called the Meaning of Meaning, in which he argued that meaning is arbitrary, that we are assigning meaning to words. And Lewis was like, nope, of course, IA Richards was a Freudian. Surprise, surprise. And doesn't. Doesn't understand that there's a historical, a metaphorical meaning. So that it's really hard for moderns because one of the principles we have embraced that is wrong is that meaning is arbitrary. Which is so ironic to me that Christians have also jumped on this bandwagon because Christians are somebody who says, christ is the Logos. What does that word mean? Means word. He's the word, capital W. He's the word made flesh. And that. And he is the source of all meaning and the source of the metaphors and the source of the traditional associations. All right, well, I will get off my soapbox for that. And let's switch. It's so hard to know where to start. I have a list of things I want us to cover here, so why don't. Actually, why don't we just address monster fiction? One of the things that has been fascinating to me is our Patreon is full steam ahead on Dracula, and they've been blowing up up in our private forum with their comments about this, and they are doing a fantastic job reading this, and I'm so proud of them. But they've been talking about how having read extremely modern contemporary vampire novels and monster fictions has really disordered them. And they were really surprised to read this book because they kept waiting for the modern twist. They kept waiting for, we gotta have Dracula's sympathetic backstory. We've got to. We got to feel sorry for him. Dracula just needs to be loved. Yes. Give Dracula a hug and we'll see how that works out for you. And that. That's not this book at all. In fact, they were saying, it's so refreshing. You have clearly good and evil clearly, you know, demarcated, and it's not confusing. And. And they were talking about especially many of them were using the word disorder. Their imaginations have been disordered. So this is not going to be a modern monster story. And I want to talk about why it is. We have misread this, but let's go all the way back and the monster in classical mythology, classical stories, and in the Middle Ages, and we'll work our way to how it is that we end up seeing the sympathetic, he's just misunderstood monster of today's stories. So let's start with our resident classicist, Mr. Banks. Tell us about the monster in classical myth.

[Thomas Banks]

So the monster in classical myth, monsters are actually older than humans in the Greek and Roman mythic imagination. I mean, the. The gods are the, you know, the first war they have to fight is the war against the Titans. And, you know, the. The various offspring of the Earth, of Gaia and Uranus. So such things as, you know, Echidna and Typhon and other such, you know, monstrous beasts. And then later, after the gods have established their power on Olympus and the first generations of men are roaming about, the heroic generations of men, monsters are what have to be destroyed before the basic life of civilization, the life of the city, can flourish. So, you know, Hercules has to, you know, kill the various, you know, monsters of his labors before.

[Angelina Stanford]

And there's something unnatural about these monsters. Yeah, they're associated with unnaturalness.

[Thomas Banks]

They tend to be, yeah, the offspring of the earth itself sprouted out of the womb of Gaia. I mean, the Sphinx, for instance, of course, you know, Oedipus has to kill the Sphinx before he can become master of Thebes. So, yes, they are enemies of not just the hero individually, but of the human race and the, I guess you could say, just the possibility of civilization. Oh, another thing, monsters tend to be solitary. If man is a political, as man is a social animal, according to Aristotle's telling, monsters like Polyphemus, for instance, in the Odyssey, Homer makes a point of telling us that the Cyclops lives alone, that he does not have friends or associates, that he is not a city dwelling being, that he is a man apart.

[Angelina Stanford]

So there is something in the classical mind about the monster has to be conquered before we can thrive as human beings.

[Thomas Banks]

Exactly.

[Angelina Stanford]

So. And so then when you get to the Middle Ages, of course, now you're in the Christian age and they build on this idea of the monster and redeem it, shall we say. We see a more explicitly Christian connection with the monster. So in the Middle Ages, the monster is specifically associated with Cain. So Grindel, for example, the poet who wrote Beowulf, goes out of his way to tell us that Grindel is the offspring of Cain. So specifically, monsters are connected with sin and the fallen state, and they are also an enemy to civilization. In Beowulf as well, you also begin to see in these old stories an association between monks, monsters and Satan. So sin and Satan, those things start to be connected. And so monsters are not just unnaturalness, but the sinful, fallen state, the enemy of man, specifically associated with Satan and Sin.

[Thomas Banks]

St. George and the Dragon.

[Angelina Stanford]

St. George and the dragon, which we'll talk about that. Yes, and Edmund Spencer and the fairy Queen specifically connects it with that as well. So all the various monsters then in literature are associated with Satan. So you have the serpent in the garden and you have, you know, lots and lots of serpentine imagery. And of course, the serpent in the garden becomes the dragon in Revelation and the dragon moderns like to say things like dragons are just dinosaurs. And so, like we're imagining a T. Rex or something. And that completely misses the point because that is not what dragons look like in the medieval imagination. If you see a painting of a dragon, like, if you look up St. George and the dragon, it's a giant snake, it's a serpent and it's got little tiny arms and it's got wings and it's like, it's like A, A fire breathing serpent. And the way that it has been portrayed, the dragon. Why the dragon? You know, the medieval knight goes on a quest to conquer the dragon. The dragon becomes the, you know, standard symbol associating it with Satan. And it becomes this idea that we are all on this spiritual quest to slay the dragon. So the dragon is the enemy. He's the oldest enemy. It's Satan. It's sin. Now, there are some variations of that, but that's the basic idea. So the monster is associated very clearly with evil, and the people who are trying to conquer it are on the side of good. Of course, Tolkien is going to use this in the Hobbit. Lewis is going to use it with the witch in Narnia. But witches and dragons and vampires and werewolves and bats and serpents, all of these sort of dark animals are all metaphorically and traditionally associated with, with Satan. And again, Lewis makes this point. I can't remember if this is in a letter. I think this is in a letter about using the witch. Okay. And again, addressing the fact that moderns think these symbols are just. The authors are just making up what these mean. And so he was asked, what does the witch mean in Narnia? And he says, there's no sense in asking what the witch means. The witch is Lilith, the witch is Cersei. Every child is born knowing who the witch is, which again, points out what we're saying. These have long history, these meanings, long traditional meanings. This is why you always see these types of characters again and again. So when you read an old story and it's got a monster in it, the monster is clearly connected to Satan. All right, so now you fast forward and you've got. And we. And when we did Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, we showed that that Hyde was the fallen nature of, of Jekyll. That's what it was. It was his sin nature. And lots of people get in there and try to read Freudian things about Mr. Hyde, not understanding that Lewis is working in this old tradition. Robert Louis Stevenson, that Lewis, in modern stories, though, it has become, gosh, almost cliche now, right? To make the monster have a sympathetic backstory, that it's wrong somehow to see the monster, whether it's the witch, the vampire, the werewolf, whatever, as inherently evil and associated with Satanic. They're just misunderstood or they've been wounded and they need to be loved. Now, there's a number of reasons why that is the perspective one has to do with. Okay, I gotta think about how to summarize this, because this is a huge, huge can of worms to open. But one of the reasons is because. So I'm going to say there's two reasons. The rise of psychology and thinking that meaning comes from psychological understanding and to the language wars. So in the postmodern age of the 60s and 70s, you have a French philosopher named Jacques Derrida who starts to argue that words don't have any meaning. And so he is building on the work of IA Richards, the meaning of meaning. And he's taking the opposite position of Lewis and Tolkien. So there is no transcendent, there is no Christ, the logos, there is no meaning. Everything is nothingness. And so he starts popularizing language deconstruction. And we need to get in there and deconstruct the language and prove that the language means nothing. And one of the things that he did was talk about that in books there's a perspective that's centered in the book and then there's a perspective that's othered in the book. And so he starts to popularize this idea that in books we need to be looking for the other. So building on these horrifically bad ideas which have simply unraveled the world we live in right now, I hear my fellow shouting, amen. Building on those ideas, we have been taught this postmodern literary theory. We don't even know that's what we've been taught. And we read looking for, thanks to Jacques Derrida, we look to the other. And so the monster then has become the other instead of the satanic symbol. Oh, go ahead.

[Thomas Banks]

I was going to ask. Do you think the problem in some ways has roots that reach back further in time than Derrida? Because here's a thought experiment. Do you think in some ways, perhaps the idea of the sympathetic monster is a natural corollary of the growth of the anti hero in various types of.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, yes. I mean, I am.

[Thomas Banks]

When you have. Absolutely.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm trying to trace an idea, but there, there are parts to this. Yes, I would agree with that. And we can even talk about that as we get into the book here.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, I would like to talk about that later if we could, because I'm curious when this idea of the anti hero was born.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I mean, I think. Well, okay, it comes to the fact that it. It is connected to the fact that the romance becomes a parody. And we're going to talk about the romance. Okay. This book. So we can definitely. We can definitely talk about it then. That. Those are. Those are excellent points. So anyway, we start getting trained to look at the other. And the monster now becomes the other. And so according to Derrida and his disciples, the monster now no longer associated with Satan, it's just the other. What the other that we're obviously afraid of. So the other race, the other gender, the other sexuality, the other political party, the other economic system, etc, ad infinitum. Fill in the blank here. And so, because we've been trained not to despise the other, which. That's not a bad thing. I don't think we should be despising other people. We have decided then that it's not right to despise the monster because the monster is not Satan. He's just this other person who's a little bit different than us and misunderstood. So that is happening at the same time that the rise of psychology. Now there's been a lot of work done in the field of trauma, which is. Which is good work that realizing that a lot of the pain we carry around is because we're wounded and we have trauma and, and even sometimes we act monstrous. But it's just that we have these unhealed wounds and we need to work through our trauma and we need to heal these ones. That's all true, true. The problem is, that is not how these old books are written. They are not written with a new idea of trauma. And when you try to take these new ideas and force them into these old books and ignore their actual association, then you have this problem. So you get all of these modern books which. Which portray the monster not as an evil to be defeated, but as a wounded person that needs to be understood and loved. Mr. Banks was telling me about a Facebook post he saw recently of a therapist on Facebook saying, what I really want to know is what happened to Sauron in Lord of the Rings as a child? What. How did he get like this? And our. And she also went on to say, shelob, the spider, it just needs to be hugged. And, and that's crazy because Sauron is not a misunderstood, wounded person. Sauron is a fallen angel in Tolkien's universe. He is Satan. He's a Satanic figure. We can't go around asking, what happened, what happened to Satan? How. How unloved does Satan feel that he wanted to rebel against God? That's. That's very misguided. Oh, I saw.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, I. I can. I cannot tell you who. What bureaucrat came up with this idea, but it was, it was actually a lesson plan. This is a, I guess a standard lesson plan in some states, public schools for early elementary Students, it was an exploration of the story Jack and the Beanstalk, and tell the story to the students in the traditional way, but then from the point of view of the giant and then from the point of view of Jack's mother and get everyone's perspective in the story. Because who is to say whether Jack is really the hero and the giant is really the villain? I mean, maybe the giant was just defending his beanstalkers. I don't know.

[Angelina Stanford]

Actually, yeah, that's an exercise in. To deconstructing the text. Because, Derek, I would say Jack's perspective is centered and we need to consider the perspectives of the others, like the giant. But that is like saying poor giant that. That we read the Bible not for Christ's perspective, but for Satan's perspective. We need to stop centering the Bible in Christ and we really need to see it from the other, which would be Satan's perspective. And I hope our audience can see just how destructive that idea is. So I want to talk about. Just let me. Let me conclude this about the monster, because some of you might be saying, but why can't it be both? Why. Why can't it be Satan in the old stories and. And trauma and all of that? Because even to say Shelob is a traumatized, wounded spider and needs to be loved is misunderstanding still the symbol. If you want to apply modern understandings of trauma to the monster, then what you need to understand is that the monster is not the wounded person. The monster is the wound. So when a monster is fighting a human being, the. It's like the human being is symbolically fighting their own trauma. And that trauma needs to be defeated so that that person can then heal and move on and have this healthy life. So. So while. While a modern person might say, no, the monster is just this wounded person that needs to be loved, they're misunderstanding the symbolism here. It's the person being attacked by the monster who's the one who needs to be loved and supported. The monster itself is the trauma that must be defeated. So it still works the same way. If you look at these associations. So.

[Thomas Banks]

The monster might be something much worse than trauma.

[Angelina Stanford]

Absolutely. My husband and I just said it's Satan. I'm just saying if you apply the modern view of trauma, they're still getting it wrong.

[Thomas Banks]

Sure, that's.

[Angelina Stanford]

They're still getting wrong. And I. Sometimes people point to Frankenstein and say, well, Frankenstein's monster is the first sympathetic monster. But that is also misunderstanding the symbolism there. Because the reason why we hear the monster's perspective in Frankenstein, and that we pity him is because the whole point is the monster is the trauma and the wound and the evil that Victor Frankenstein is afflicting all the world, and he is refusing to take responsibility for it. So, but it's still. It's still, you know, the monster is the thing that Victor has unleashed in the world that then destroys everything he loves, which is what a lot of unhealthy people do. And so it's. Victor has to be the one who has to be corrected here. Anyway, I feel like I'm digressing a little bit. So that. That's what's going on with the monster. It's our fallen nature, which is not to be loved and understood, but defeated and into Satan, which is constantly trying to get us. It's, it's, it's. These monsters are the oldest threat that there is the serpent in the garden, the dragon of Revelation, and that is the world that Bram Stoker is working in. Now, alongside this, though, we should probably say something about the Gothic novel and the rise of the Gothic novel, because this is also a Gothic novel. That's the form. You want to say anything about that?

[Thomas Banks]

I was going to say, I mean, by the time he writes this In 1897, the Gothic novel is by no means new. It's century old. Century.

[Angelina Stanford]

We covered that. Jane Austen mocked it. She satirized it in Northanger Abbey. We did a podcast series.

[Thomas Banks]

So it's old enough that people can recognize the cliches.

[Angelina Stanford]

Absolutely, absolutely. So the first Gothic novel is the Castle of Ontranto by Horace Walpole. Almost said Hugh Walpole.

[Thomas Banks]

I confused them also.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, Hugh Walpole, totally different guy. And. And so, yeah, you have these conventions. And one of the things that the Gothic novel is trying to do. Let me get my. Let me get my notes here. Actually, let me back up. Let's talk about the Enlightenment. This is going to be. Because you can't understand the Gothic novel if you don't understand that it's a response to the Enlightenment. So this is going to be something we're going to develop along the book. But in the Enlightenment, they break with what they perceived as the age of superstition, which is the age of Christianity, and they embrace this hyper rationalism and science and technology, an optimism about the perfectibility of man, et cetera, et cetera. The Gothic novel was part of, like, a romantic, a general romantic movement of people who wanted to get back to the Middle Ages and who thought that the Enlightenment had. Well, you know, what's that Keats line with a With a ruler we have, he says, we're going to unweave the rainbow. I should know this by now. With a line and ruler, we're going to draw out every mystery.

[Thomas Banks]

Philosophy would clip an angel's wings.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's it. Thank you. Philosophy. Philosophy would clip on angels. Philosophy, meaning natural philosophy, which was science, when it would unweave the rainbow. So there was this concern that all of this heavy science and technology emphasis and this rationalism and, you know, there is no God, there is no supernatural realm. Everything that is to be known can be known by man with, you know, a telescope and a microscope and the scientific method. There's this feeling that we had lost something really important about our humanity and about the reality of the world and the supernatural realm. And so the Gothic novel was an attempt to play with that idea. And it's one of the reasons why Gothic novel. The Gothic novel trope is a castle and dungeons. That's a medieval setting. And we see, of course, that's happening in Dracula too. So there's gonna be. We'll see what Bram Stoker is going to do with that. How. How is he playing with this idea of the Gothic novel and the Middle Ages versus the Enlightenment? We're gonna. We're gonna see. We're gonna see that. That. I'm not sure there's anything I want to add about that, but the Gothic novel uses the monster and. Oh, wait, I did have something I wanted to say about that. Sorry, guys. I have so many different.

[Thomas Banks]

The monster specifically associated with an older stage of human existence or a past phase of history. So often, I won't say always, but very often in a Gothic novel, the monster is going to represent the invasion of the present by the past in a particularly harrowing sort of way.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I think we've pretty much covered here.

[Cindy Rollins]

What about the invasion of the future into the present?

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I guess, like some. I. I can't think of an example. Did you have any in mind, Cindy?

[Cindy Rollins]

No, I was just thinking about how horrible that would be.

[Thomas Banks]

That. Yeah, that's an interesting thought. The future could be dreadful also, in its own ways.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

It's unknown. The past. I guess so, yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

The Gothic novel, we're talking about the late 1700s. So, like you said, it's been over a hundred years by the time Bram Stoker writes this because it's 1897. The principal aim of the Gothic novel is to evoke chilling terror by exploiting mystery and a variety of horrors. The best of the Gothic novels present the Realm of the irrational and of the perverse impulses and the nightmarish terrors that lie between beneath the orderly surface of the civilized mind.

[Thomas Banks]

She's quoting from her own notes there, by the way. That's like 18 Angelina.

[Angelina Stanford]

Not quite 18 year old Angelina, but this old, I can say, reading pretty great. He loves my young self and so now you've made me forget what I was going to say. Oh, the reason why you see that in the gothic novel, actually we see the same thing happening now. The more that you argue that the only thing that is real is that which can be experienced through the senses, but you can see and taste and touch and feel, the more that you see stories playing with. Maybe there are things that you can't explain, maybe there are things that are real that you can't see and touch. Right. And we see the same impulse now. We, we in, in an age in which we are hyper rationalist and you know, when nothing is more laughable than saying you believe in God and angels and yet we love paranormal TV shows and horror things and we like to explore in terrifying ways, what if we're wrong? What if there are things we can't explain and know? So that that impulse is going to be running through here, but Bram Stoker is going to be doing something so amazing with it and I'm not going to spoil it for you, but that's coming too. All right. Now this book is written in 1897, which means it is a late Victorian novel. Mr. Banks, talk to us about the late Victorians. We talked about this when we did our series on Oscar Wilde and how he was sort of humorously playing with this. And Bram Stoker of course knows us. They're, they're good friends. So tell us a little bit about the late Victorian period and then we'll talk about Bram stoker in general. General.

[Thomas Banks]

So I mean, this year, 1897, witnesses the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. Victoria by this point would have been Queen for exactly 60 years. Oldest reigning monarch up till very recently. Yeah. And there was staged for her a, this, you know, Triumphal March in 1897, which was a celebration not just of her and her contribution to, to the well being of her nation, but also kind of an advertisement not for England, the nation, but for Great Britain, the empire at large, you know, the, the empire in which the sun never sets so on and so forth. And so, yeah, he puts this novel out when Britain is really at the height of her material powers and military powers at any rate. And it's the English People that you meet in it, I think, are very, very typical people of their time in class in a lot of ways, and find themselves interacting with darker forces of the world which are very, very alien to everything that they and their place in the modern world stands for.

[Angelina Stanford]

I don't want to say anything more about that.

[Thomas Banks]

I should say also, and I. I don't want to say that this book is all about race relations because that would utterly vulgarize it, and that's not true at all. But the fact that the monster in this novel comes from a much older and kind of comparatively obscure part of the world, part of Europe, is. I think it's appropriate to mention that this is a time of great ethnic tension in Britain. There's. I mean, this is during the time of what's called the Yellow Peril. There was a great fear of, you know, the growth of the Eastern powers. Japan, amongst others, is becoming very militarily aggressive in, In Eastern Asia, the, The Boxer Rebellions going on in China. And there's. There is a deep fear of foreigners in certain, certain parts of not just English, but certainly English society. So. Yeah, so I think. I think xenophobia is kind of an undercurrent in, in this book.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, you're pointing to a larger thing that's happening so in the Victorian era is marked for its great scientific and technological advances. The British economy is doing well. The Imperial, The Empire is doing well. And there's a great deal of optimism in England. It's an optimism, actually, that's not going to be popped until World War I time. And, you know, you have the Crystal palace, which is like the World's Fair showing, you know, like, you know, like, like the Epcot Center. You go in and see the home of tomorrow and it's got all the latest technology, because of technology and scientific advancements in like, water purity and sewage systems. I mean, cholera outbreaks are done. People are just living healthier lives, more prosperous lives. The Industrial Revolution has brought all this good things. Yes.

[Thomas Banks]

I was going to say it's the first time in history when social reformers really become national heroes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. So you have political reforms, education reforms, poverty reforms, and it just starts to look like England's got it figured out. We are on our way to heaven on Earth. And that's one of the impulses happening in England. There's a second impulse, though, that is saying by the time you get to the late Victorians, a little bit of the shine is starting to worn off for some people. Like, like, okay, the, like we saw in Hard times. The Industrial Revolution is great for some people, but not for everybody. There's a lot of people who are falling through the cracks. There was also this concern that because of technology and industry, that England had become a prefab society, that everything was throwaway and mass produced and there was no more beauty and there was no more art. And people were.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes, I was going to say rep. Curtains and. And, you know, the aspidistra and all the. All the decorative features that we associate with. With bourgeois middle class.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, for the first time, goods were cheap and everybody could buy things just like that. You go to Hobby Lobby and everybody's houses look the same. The Victorians started that because it used to be only the wealthy aristocrats could afford these kinds of things because they were so expensive to make. And now because of mass production, everyone could have nice stuff, and so they did, but it was this kind of cheap knockoff stuff. And so then you have William, people like William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement at the. In the late 1800s coming and saying no. I mean, it's so funny in a lot of ways they sound like hipsters. We need to get back to, like, handcrafted things and may have natural light in our homes. Window, natural services, wood, unpainted wood, things like that. So these. These two tensions are going on at the same time. This whole, like, we are on the path to progress and we are going to get heaven on earth. And then there's another impulse happening. Let's return back to simpler times, to a time that was more stable and orderly. Let's return to the Middle Ages. And boy, are you going to see that in this book big time.

[Thomas Banks]

Because, yeah, we'll see that some things in the. From the Middle Ages you don't necessarily want to go back to. But. Yeah, disagree.

[Angelina Stanford]

You shall see. You shall see. All right, so I think that is everything I wanted to say. Oh, tell us a little bit about Bram Stoker and how this book came about.

[Thomas Banks]

Bram Stoker was. It's sort of interesting that he wasn't really a professional writer. That was one thing he did. But he was a theater manager, an actor's agent. He represented the great Victorian actor Henry Irving, amongst others. He was not English, he was Irish, grew up. He was acquainted with Oscar Wilde, amongst other.

[Angelina Stanford]

I remember learning in my vampire class that Bram Stoker's mother and Oscar Wilde's mother were best friends.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. They also were in love when they were both young men. They were in love with the same woman, I think, who ended up Marrying Bram Stoker. So I don't know if they got over that or not. But also, Dorian Gray is, I think, about five years before this. So they're both writing about the monstrous.

[Angelina Stanford]

Underbelly of the Victorian world. Yep. And Robert Louis Stevenson is doing the same thing with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hobbs.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. These are all within a decade, I think.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. So. So you see that all of these guys are, like, perceiving, like. Yeah, on the surface, we're. We're the most perfect society the world's ever seen, but underneath, maybe not. Not so much. So there was one more thing I forgot I want to talk about, which was the vampire story and how this fits in. So. So Bramstocker did not make up the vampire. You have a long history of vampire in folklore and legend, which, of course, you know, just like werewolf stories. And all of that comes from a blend of so many things. You know, real life things like wolves attacking children, you know, in towns and that, giving rise to certain legends. But. But also because of, you know, the oldest story, the Serpent and the Dragon. And, you know, you hear Lewis saying, don't ask where the witch came from. Everybody's born knowing the witch. It's kind of like, don't ask where the vampire came from. Everybody's born knowing the vampire. And you're going to see why when we really look at how. And I don't want to. I'm not going to give spoilers, but we're going to see what Bram Stoker is going to do with the vampire image. I know it's not a spoiler because Dracula is so iconic. Everybody knows Dracula's a vampire, but the Dracula that you think you know is not the Dracula in Bram Stoker.

[Thomas Banks]

Here, even, like the physical representations of him in film are actually quite different from how he's described in the book.

[Angelina Stanford]

So the literary vampire, though, comes up in the early 1800s. So in 1800, there is a vampire short story called Wake not the Dead. And it was, of course German, because the German Romantics, of course, are playing with this Nosferatu for you. But it was published in England in 1800. The author is. Is Johan Ludwig Tieck. And then 16 years later, Lord Byron started writing a vampire story. Actually have the fragment of that. And he didn't finish it because. And this is the famous story by which Frankenstein comes about. So he has this dinner party with Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley and him. Not dinner party. It was a whole summer of decadence that they were together, and his doctor and friend John Poliadori was there and. Well, it's a long story, but to entertain themselves, they had a contest. Let's each write a scary story. And so Mary Shelley writes Frankenstein and Byron is working on his vampire thing, and John Paliadori writes a vampire story which becomes published. And that. That story is called the Vampire with a. With a Y, V, A M, P, Y, R, E. Now that. Hold on, let me finish. Look at you about to.

[Thomas Banks]

I was about to dive in.

[Angelina Stanford]

You were just. Let me finish.

[Thomas Banks]

Frank.

[Angelina Stanford]

Santa's place famously, though, the vampire in John Polidori's story is very Byronesque. He's obviously Lord Byron. In fact, the whole tall, dark, and.

[Thomas Banks]

You know, dig at his boss or something.

[Angelina Stanford]

Sexy, stranger kind of Twilight vampire. That comes from Lord Byron. It comes from this story. But I read that Byron famously said publicly I wrote that story and Poly Adori stole it. And then they. Their friendship broke out over that and he fired Polygon Polly Adori.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay.

[Cindy Rollins]

And also Polydori. I did look this up because I had just finished that biography of the Rossettis. He is actually the brother of the Rossetti, Christina Rossetti and Daniel Dante Gabriel. Their mother was his Polidori sister.

[Thomas Banks]

She was their uncle. Yeah, like great minds think alike. Cindy. I was going to jump on that myself.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, sorry. Thank you for saving me one.

[Angelina Stanford]

My one piece of.

[Cindy Rollins]

Of knowledge.

[Thomas Banks]

Not at all.

[Angelina Stanford]

No. Oh, I did not know that. That's so exciting.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, I kept hearing that name and I kept. I had just done the Rosetti's biography, which is Polidori Polidori. And I'm like, surely there's got to be some connection.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that. That explains how he was in that circle. I never understood that. And it also explains why he. Byron got irritated with him because he's very much like a hanger on who was officially. He was like Byron's handler and personal physician. Byron had a lot of health issues issues, but he also was like an aspiring poet and writer. And that makes way more sense now. So this is one strain of the literary vampire is going to come from this polyodori slash Byron story where the vampire is this kind of sexy, tall, dark and handsome, you know, Twilight. The other one is going to come, though, from a novel written in 1845 called Vorny the Vampire. And Vorny the Vampire is not high literature. It was a serial. It was a penny dreadfully for a penny. You got the latest install this vampire and he's kind of campy.

[Thomas Banks]

I was gonna say. Is it meant to be funny? Like, how could it not be with.

[Angelina Stanford]

That title, Barney the Vampire. Or the subtitle is the Feast of Blood.

[Cindy Rollins]

And you're saying Barney with a V, Not Barney.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, V, A, R, N, E, Y. Barney the Vampire. He. The guy. The guy, the author, James Malcolm Reimer. He pulled it out for two years. 109 serials on Varney the Vampire. And from what I understand, I have not read them myself. We talked about them in my class. They're campy and then they're kind of cheesy and. And so. But Bram Stoker is going to do something. Something different.

[Thomas Banks]

Here's another.

[Angelina Stanford]

And a lot of what we think of as these are the rules of the vampire is, Is Bram Stoker.

[Thomas Banks]

I always forget the name. There's an Irish writer, it's a. It's a French sounding name, but it's an Irish writer who writes a book about.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, Sheridan Le Fanu.

[Thomas Banks]

Le Fanu, yes, that's right. Carmel, which is where the. Yeah, the female vampire.

[Angelina Stanford]

The female vampire comes from Cornell. That's 1872. Yeah, so that's another one that's.

[Thomas Banks]

I'm sure Bram Stoker must have known.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, I know somewhere I ran across that he did know Sheridan Leffen. Yes, we can. We can confirm that. So one of the things we know about Bram Stoker is that he researched like crazy for this thing.

[Thomas Banks]

It really shows in the opening chapter.

[Angelina Stanford]

I mean, man. But he is. But he's also not necessarily bound to the folklore. So he just deep dives into all of it. But he is doing, doing, you know, the literary vampire is. It's its own thing. It's not the same thing exactly as folklore. And so he's going to set the rules of how his vampire would work. But he, you're going to see, he's going to be tapping into the folklore as well as tapping into the metaphorical associations. So. You look like you want to say something.

[Thomas Banks]

No, I was going to say. I mean, his research is such, like the opening chapter, in a way I had forgotten. It almost reads like something from a travel book. It's like Rick Steves guides to Gothic Europe.

[Angelina Stanford]

This wonderful recipe. I've got to send this home.

[Thomas Banks]

I know.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay.

[Thomas Banks]

As a kid again. And Rick Steves, if you were listening to this, this is nothing against you, but I remember as a kid I always like, was put off by how positive he was. Like he never had anything bad to say about any country. I just. Yeah, I remember as a small child, I suspected Rick Steves was just like a fraud or something. I don't know why.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm just too happy.

[Thomas Banks]

It's just like. Too happy. Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

Like trains always ran on time for.

[Thomas Banks]

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, surely.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, he did.

[Cindy Rollins]

It does say he had a book. He read a book called the Land beyond the Forest, which sounds so interesting. It was a popular book on, on that car, you know, the car. What are they? The Carpenter.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh yeah. That's what Transylvania means, right?

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

The land beyond the forest.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, Yeah. I thought that sounded. I, I kind of want to read that book now after those first chapters.

[Thomas Banks]

I'm guessing there will be fewer bitings in that one. Probably.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, let's start off with our first principle of good reading, which is that front matter matters end. And a big part of the device he's using for the storytelling here is this idea that these are eyewitness accounts that have been put together after the fact and you will find out how they came to be put about together in one volume as you, as you read through the story. So I'm going to try not to spoil too many things, except that the original audience would know right away that this is a vampire. But let's. So he starts off here, how these papers have been placed in sequence we made manifest in the reading of them. All needless matters have been eliminated so that a history almost at variance with the possibilities of later day belief may stand forth as simple fact now. And he goes on, simple fact means the scientific method. So this is a. So right out of the gate he's saying, I'm about to tell you something super fantastical. But it's true, this is, it's scientific, it's been scientifically recorded, it's empirical, we are eyewitness accounts. These are the facts. So there you go. We. So he's got this, you know, rooting it in. You can trust me, it's true. But this is also a medieval device, this saying that this is a story I heard and it's. The romantic writers as well as the gothic writers picked that up so that romantic writers like Alexander Dumas at the beginning of Count of Monte Cristo says this is a story I heard. So that. Trying to like weigh the authority for something fanciful you're about to say and that, you know, you can find this documented elsewhere. He's doing that. So here in the opening line you've got the nod to the Enlightenment. And this is. And we're going to do this very scientifically and we're just going to stick with the facts. But it's also a medieval device. And then so okay, so the form is going to be epistolary. And the original novel, you know, the 17th century sentimental novel was epistolary of somebody body writing letters and the diary entries and things like that. And it takes a really long time for the third person narrator to get invented. I mean, you see, even in the early 1800s with Jane Austen's novels, even something like Pride and Prejudice, where most of the time she has a third person narrator, she also relies a lot on letters when she wants to know, you know, what does Mr. Darcy think? Oh, here's a letter he left behind. So. So it just takes a while to develop that. It's really not until you get to Dickens and Elliot see it in, you know, the golden age of the Victorian writers that you start to see the third person narrator really mastered. But Bram Stoker is not doing epistolary novel because he doesn't know how to write third person. This is all part of his. You can trust me. These are eyewitness accounts. So we're going to start off with Jonathan Harker's journal here, chapters one and two. Oh, and, and the, the volume I have has an author's note from the following year, 1898, which I was. This was new to me. And in he quotes Hamlet. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. And I think that that gives us a nice framework for understanding how to read this, that maybe enlightenment guys, there's more to heaven and earth than you think.

[Thomas Banks]

And of course, Hamlet says that to Horatio when there's a dispute over whether the ghost in Hamlet is real, whether the otherworldly really has impinged on this world.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

And so this is, this is going to be supernatural reality trying to make itself known in an enlightenment world that denies it. So we'll see it.

[Cindy Rollins]

So I, I just thought it was funny that he said, kept in shorthand, like, of course we wouldn't believe he'd write all this out.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, how this stuff is recorded actually becomes a plot point. So I mean, you're going to see this, that. But again, it's that idea of, you see, see how you see how precise and scientific we've gone about here. Everything is mentioned here. So the book starts off in order, moving into disorder. Jonathan Harker is on a train and he is headed east. And the first thing we know is that the train is late. And he's going to mention this a few times. What about the trains? What about the trains? And there's a. There's a few different reasons for that. Of course, it gives it that kind of realistic nod. But the English trains running on time was almost the most perfect symbol of the perfectibility of English civilization. Our trains run on time. And so the fact that the trains are not running on time is a sign that he is moving away from civilization, which is also going to be indicated by how he's moving into the world of superstition too. So away from civilization, away from scientific mindedness and towards backwardsness and superstition. Of course, we also know that time works differently in a fairy tale world. And so that's, that's an interesting nod as well because he specifically says, the impression I had is that we are leaving the west and entering.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, I mean, I mean it's kind of odd to think of. This is, this is something I have a hard time doing imaginatively. But imagine living in a world where there are no clocks, where I mean you probably are self, well, self employed, you're a small farmer and you don't have to be to work on time per se.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's not until the Industrial Revolution, minutes or hours, but it's not until the Industrial Revolution that there's an idea of on time. There is no idea of on time before the factory model.

[Thomas Banks]

Sure.

[Angelina Stanford]

So you, so you're. So. Yeah, he's entering the world that is not run by the Industrial Revolution. And as we said, he's got all these mundane details, all these, this practical stuff. This is all to be setting up a huge con. Contrast between the old world and the new world. So he's a New world guy, he's practical, he's writing things about timetables and trains and recipes. And he starts to have weird dreams though. And there's this sense of doom and foreboding that he's. That, that he's moving into something bad. Now you had an interesting theory about Jonathan Harker here, Mr. Banks, because obviously the reader is reading this and saying, what is wr with you, you idiot? Everybody's crossing themselves that you hear Dracula, they give you a crucifix. He's obviously a vampire, tends not to know who he.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, he's kind of a Watson like figure in some ways. I mean, he's not stupid exactly, but I mean in his own way he's very observant of small details.

[Angelina Stanford]

And Watson of course is the one who records.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, so I mean he's so he's a little bit slow, A little bit slower than the audience is.

[Angelina Stanford]

So, so Dorothy Sayers points out in one of her Essays on the. I think it's on the history of detective fiction. She. She's the one who pointed this out about Watson. And I think it's so good that Watson is. And she says that every detective story since then has used this device. Watson is pitched. His intelligence is pitched slightly lower than the readers, and that the effect there is for the reader to be less smart than Sherlock Holmes, but smarter than Watson. So you. So the reader figures out the solution just. Just slightly before Watson does. And that gives us a sense of, oh, I'm so smart. I figured it out before Watson did. And it's a whole narrative setup. And I thought that was really, really good that you brought that out with Jonathan Harker. I think that's exactly how he's using it here. Of course, Sherlock Holmes famously has a detective, a vampire story as well, but he's using it that way where Jonathan Harker's like, what's going on? Why are they giving me a crucifix? Why are they all freaking out and crossing themselves every time I say Dracula crossing. Course the audience gets it.

[Cindy Rollins]

We.

[Angelina Stanford]

We're smarter than he is. And I. I think some of the. Some of our Patreons reading it were like, what's wrong with this idiot? That's exactly the right attitude. That is that you're reading it correctly. That's. That's what he wants you to think. All right, so, Cindy, jump in anytime here as I'm just going through the pages here. But he gets his note from his friend Dracula. So he. This is very English. He's on a business trip.

[Thomas Banks]

He's a solicitor.

[Angelina Stanford]

He's a solicitor. He's taking care of some paperwork for the purchase of some real estate state. This is just as mundane and English as can be. But he is going into some mysterious, dangerous world. And of course they're saying, do you know what day it is? Don't go, please. They're on their knees begging him. And he's like, but business. You know, an English businessman doesn't just freak out. And he's also dismissing a lot of this.

[Thomas Banks]

We should go into what day it is.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. But he dismisses a lot of it as superstition, which, of course is how England views all of these things. This is just all backwards superstition. There's nothing true to that. Yes, it is St. George's Day. You want to tell us about St. George and the Dragon?

[Thomas Banks]

So St. George, one of the patron saints of soldiers, the original Christian dragon slayer. There's a famous. I think the most Famous version of the story is from Jacobo di Veragine's golden legend. And in it George saves a village from a dragon which dwells in a swamp by. It saves a princess also, I think, who is being offered up to the dragon. And there's a superstition in some parts of the world that on Saint. The Eve of St. George, evil spirits, particularly vampires, particularly vampires, are free to roam about and have the. Have the run of the place, so to speak.

[Angelina Stanford]

Kind of like a Halloween thing.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

And I'm gonna really bite my tongue here because I'm gonna let Bram Stoker reveal to us all of these connections. We'll just obs that it is happening on St. George's Day. And that's St. George. To any Englishman who's reading this instantly, you know, St. George is the dragon slayer, but the word Dracula itself is the Wallachian word for devil. So we are definitely having all of that associated as he goes. And of course he's being given again, quote unquote, superstitious protection, like crossing yourself and a crucifixion. Crucifix. And now he has this interesting inner monologue of, well, I'm Anglican, I don't know if I can take a Catholic crucifix. That's idolatrous. So again, we're just going to notice that Bram Stoker is, is having Jonathan Harker dismiss everything that's happening as superstitious and idolatrous.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, I love when he makes the memo. I must ask the Count about these superstitions.

[Angelina Stanford]

Superstitions, yes. And I mean, again, Bramstock is making it very clear here. They're, they're saying words that mean Satan, hell, witch, vampire, werewolf. And he's just like, what, what charming little superstitious people we have here. Of course, I'm from Louisiana. I'm like, that's voodoo. You best run, boy, because, you know. Oh, the quaint little voodoo witch doctor. Nope, not at all. Get out of there. There, that's. That's real.

[Thomas Banks]

And this also, this seems like this kind of has to happen in every. Any suspense or gothic. You have to be warned. The character who goes into a distant situation like this is going to be warned by the villager or their modern equivalent that, yeah, don't go up, don't go into that part of the woods, et cetera.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, we're about to see here that this is a long description of a descent to Hades. And it is kind of Dante esque here. Actually.

[Thomas Banks]

It reminds me of from the film critic Roger Ebert, he said that for any scary story or any, any horror film to work, people have to be slightly less than ordinarily intelligent, otherwise they wouldn't walk into those situations. So. Exactly.

[Angelina Stanford]

Here we.

[Thomas Banks]

Here we go. We have the original horror movie. Slightly less intelligent than I heard.

[Angelina Stanford]

Let's go out one at a time, 10 minutes apart, and investigate it. Yeah, exactly the left. Exactly right. So some of the indications, my middle school students would be all of this. How do we know this is a descent to Hades? Okay, so he's on this like wild midnight ride and they're following a serpentine way.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, snakes. Oh, really?

[Angelina Stanford]

Like, that's like, Pat, what could be happening there? It's getting darker, it's getting cold. They're all freaking out and crossing themselves.

[Thomas Banks]

With some picturesque local wildlife as well.

[Angelina Stanford]

There you go. And then the, the carriage driver says to him, no, no, don't get out. The dogs are too fierce. And I thought, is this like a hound of hell kind of reference here? You're nodding. See, they can't hear you nod, honey. You gotta say yes. Well done, dear. So again, all this superstitious stuff, everywhere he goes, they're all crossing themselves. Everybody's screaming. And this, this coachman comes from, from the count, who's got red eyes and he's on these black horses and he's all dressed in black. And this is super ominous.

[Thomas Banks]

He's also very strong. Well, not yet. No, he, no, he says he's very strong. I think he mentions that, doesn't he? That he helps Jonathan Harker up onto the.

[Cindy Rollins]

Maybe his hand is iron grass.

[Angelina Stanford]

Man, I thought that's when he shakes Dracula's hand, when he goes in then also.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay, I think it happens twice, but.

[Angelina Stanford]

I mean, obviously, yeah, this is the same person. Okay. Yeah. And so the horse is all freaking out as the carriage comes up. The horses are supposed to be super sensitive to vampires. So that's why, that's why they're freaking out. And of course, the reason that the carriage driver was going so fast is he was trying to get there before midnight because, of course, I mean, it was almost Halloween here. It'll be Halloween when this airs. And, you know, midnight is the witching hour and all that stuff. So he comes out and he's got very red lips and sharp looking teeth. Nothing ominous there at all. And again, vampire folklore has been around a long time, but Jonathan's a very enlightened Jonathan.

[Thomas Banks]

The thing of it is, I mean, he knows. It seems that he knows a fair bit about this part of the World from books, anyway. But as for its religious customs, it's folklore and things like that. He seems absolutely at sea. And even like Dracula's physical appearance, I mean, he finds it strange at first, but it takes him a while to. It takes him a while actually to become afraid of the guy, you know.

[Angelina Stanford]

So on this path they are going in a circle. Hello, Dante. Hello, Descent to Sades. He's the circle, the going down the circles to hell. So it circles. That's a snake like path, path. Some kind of weird ritual is happening. And then they finally go in. So chapter two. What sort of place had I come to? And among what kind of people? What sort of grim adventure was it on which I had embarked? Was this a customary incident in the life of a solicitor's clerk? And they said, oh, no, I shouldn't say that. I was promoted. I'm a solicitor. It's just. It's almost funny because he's so dumb now. He keeps talking though, that, oh, here it is. You're right. He does talk about the strength before he meets Dracula. You're right. This idea that I'm asleep, this is all a nightmare. I'm pinching myself. There's a lot of symbolism there too, that he's entered the nightmarish world, the hellish world. And he's literally having nightmares too. So he. He knocks on the door and Dracula does not come out and says, welcome to my house. Else, enter freely and of your own will. So everyone who knows vampire lore knows that that's how vampires work. You can't enter, they can't drag you in. You have to come in of your own free will. And he's going to stress this a few times. And. And there's a. There's a spiritual meaning of that as well, you know, Christ has bound Satan and he can't just attack us willy nilly. You have to invite. You have to invite the devil in. That's why you shouldn't be playing around with dark things. Because you know he's. You're opening the door to. To him. So he says it twice. And I know this is supposed to be so spooky, and it is spooky, but I also had to laugh. And he says, come, welcome to my house. Come freely, go safely and leave something of the happiness you bring. And I thought, why is that not a Hobby lobby sign? Put that on my door. No one would even. Nobody would even know where it came from, be so funny. So he's thinking to himself, is this the same guy that. That drove the cart and what's going on there. So there's a bunch of weird stuff happening in chapter two. He doesn't eat. He's got these weird sharp teeth and he's. He. Well, he's described very canine, like, right. So he's got the pointy canine teeth. His ears are pointy.

[Thomas Banks]

Keeps odd hours.

[Angelina Stanford]

Keeps odd hours. And so one of the things is that in, in, in folklore there is a werewolf vampire connection. So he's being kind of described in both ways. They're both these creatures of the night. He's also got hair in the center of his palm. And that was a.

[Cindy Rollins]

To me, that would have done it.

[Angelina Stanford]

That would have done it.

[Cindy Rollins]

So that, I mean, okay, all this other stuff. But hair on his palm.

[Angelina Stanford]

Hair on the palm would have been an instant indication that there was something unnatural about this guy in the Victorian mind. We'll just, we'll just leave it at the. That something else about him that's off is he says that can you hear the beautiful music of the wolves? So this is a guy out of harmony. So he's in this castle that's super, super old and there are no mirrors. But he gets excited when he goes in the library and there's all these English books and counter Dracula is. And he's old and he's got the white mustache and he's very interested in Jonathan Harker teaching him the right way to speak English and how to get along in the English customs.

[Thomas Banks]

He's a man of information. And the books he has on England, I mean it's. He has works of literature, etc, but he also has just like very matter of fact type of books like railway guides and it says parliamentary blue books and stuff like that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly, exactly. He's trying to, he's trying, you know, school himself here. So here he. I think this is an important passage here in chapter two. So he says, I, I wanna, I wanna really get my English right. And Jonathan Hart is like, well, you basically have. He's like, no, I want it perfect because here I am a noble, the common people know me and I am master. But a stranger in a strange land he is no one. Men know him not. And to know not is to care not far. And so you said earlier, well, not everything from the Middle Ages is as good. Correct. Because he's associated with the ancient. But here's what I think that's going on in this old superstitious world. They still know that the devil is real and they revere and fear him. And so he says, I'm A master here. But England, with its scientific, enlightenment, rationalist, deistic self, does not really believe in Satan. And he, so he, he's. He's coming to the place where he is not known. And we'll just leave that there and see. So, so perhaps there's a. In, in this perfect heaven on earth, England with science and technology. Perhaps there are threats that are.

[Thomas Banks]

One never knows who is wandering the earth.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. Very, very old threats. Perhaps the oldest threat still cannot be remedied by science and technology. Then of course, he says you can go anywhere you wish in the castle, except step where the doors are locked, which of course is a reference to the Bluebeard, a fairy tale. So there's this very fairy tale esque stuff going on. We are in Transylvania. Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways. Right. And then there, there's a couple of times when Jonathan is frustrated because he asks the question. It happens one with the innkeeper and again with Dracula. And they pretend to not understand. Just notice this and see what's going to happen later. If there's this idea that people are deliberately withholding information and we'll see what Bram Stoker is going to do with.

[Thomas Banks]

That, or trying not to put themselves in a situation where they have to say his name.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, but that wouldn't be the case with Dracula.

[Thomas Banks]

Right? I'm sorry, I'm referring to the scared peasants. The innkeeper. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. So we find out he's boss bought an estate in England and it's a medieval castle. And he's very happy because he says, I want something old and I like to be in the shadows. And of course, the house is near a body of water, it's near a chapel, it's near a crossroads. So he's literally on a cross.

[Thomas Banks]

When he said, I wanted to be in the shadows, I mean, I was thinking like, this is England. Do you think you're really going to die from a surfeit of sunlight? I mean, come now, it's.

[Angelina Stanford]

Don't be all rational, Jonathan Harker. You just gotta go with it. So they stay up. So this. So of course, one of the things Jonathan notices, this guy's never here when the sun's here. So they stay up all night talking. He hears the cock crow, he jumps up and runs out. Right. So something about the sun. And this guy is super weird and old. Now the last day he. On May 8, which is the last day of chapter two do, it starts to hit him. Something's wrong here. It takes him a lot longer Than we're taking me. But I'm Harriet Vane. Right. I'd been like, dude. He's like, I fear I'm the only living soul within this place, which. Okay, obviously we know. That is correct. You are the only living soul there. That's my Halloween Dracula voice. But he's worried that his imagination is running away with him again. So you see this? Like, you know, don't get carried away. This is the modern world. There are no such things as monsters. There are no such things as ghosts. Right, right. Let's, you know, be reasonable. But weird stuff is happening. Dracula doesn't have a reflection in the mirror. Of course, that's part of the lore. But that also goes to the idea that something is satanic here. So, you know, he's not alive. There's no soul there. Mirrors and cameras, of course, you know, they can. They can steal your soul.

[Thomas Banks]

He himself is a distortion of nature.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. So he can't reflect. And then there's also the idea that evil is not a positive force, it's only a negative force. So. So evil doesn't exist. It's just the absence of goodness kind of thing. And that's why he doesn't have a presence enough to be reflected in the mirror. Again, you're nodding your head, but no one.

[Thomas Banks]

No, no, no. I was. I was saying that was very, very Augustinian of you.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, well, thank you. Thank you. And then, of course, we have that creepy thing with the blood. And instantly the Count freaks out when he sees the blood and grabs Jonathan's neck, only to touch the crucifix. Freak out instantly change. And then says, take care of how you cut yourself. It's more dangerous than you think in this country.

[Thomas Banks]

And he smashes the mirror.

[Angelina Stanford]

And he smashes the mirror, which is not weird at all. And then he's like, it's really strange. I've never seen this guy eat. Maybe it's on the carnivore diet. He's fasting. Yeah. So he's gone during the day. No, no, I don't want to laugh too much. This book is so good. There's going to be. See, y' all gonna see. Y' all are gonna. See. What he's gonna do with this is gonna be so good. And it's gonna be so the antidote to all the bad, bad monster stories out there. I know.

[Thomas Banks]

It's like, I think, like, we. We associate this book with a certain amount of camp and cheesiness, but, like, a lot of that is foisted onto It. By the films, many of the films by the Count from. I admit, whenever Dracula speaks, I hear the Count from Sesame Street. You have to kind of get over that, I guess.

[Angelina Stanford]

One mirror.

[Thomas Banks]

I actually knew someone from Romania, a friend of mine when I lived in Montana, and he mentioned it with great annoyance that his most famous countryman is a fictional monster invented by an Irishman. And like, when he's like, he said, yeah, and Americans, that's like the only Romanian they can name. And then he rattled off a list of other, other.

[Angelina Stanford]

Vlad the Impaler. That's in Romanian.

[Thomas Banks]

Who was kind of the, kind of the historical basis for Dracula. Yeah. And also Vlad the Impaler, deeply respected in his homeland because he, he killed the turf and he was a great defender of Christian Romania against the Muslim invaders then. So it's, it's almost like he's the George Washington. So imagine if some Romanian wrote a book about George Washington where he is a. I don't know, a werewolf or something like that. I. I don't know. But that's, that's kind of what, I guess this.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, we do have Jane Austen in the zombies, so.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, someone's already kind of jumped on that. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

So, yes, it, it would not have been perceived as campy at the time. You're right. And really, it's not that the campiness is there, it's that we're thinking, Jonathan Harker, you idiot, which we're supposed to think. We are supposed to think that about him. And then, you know, anyway, this is just.

[Cindy Rollins]

And Dracula is not really campy at all here.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, he's not.

[Cindy Rollins]

He's much more gentlemanly, but not in the sense of not dangerous or, you know, he, he, he's got this guy here, but he's playing by some sort of rules about it.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right, right. Oh, and I missed that. When Dracula grabs him when his neck is bleeding, his eyes blaze with a sort of demoniac fury. So, you know, he, he looks like a demon and a devil and it's the crucifixion that repels him. We won't be missing that. So at the end of chapter two, here, he's freaking out because he realizes the castle is on the edge of a precipice and all of the doors are locked. Doors, doors, doors everywhere. And all locked and bolted. In no place save from the windows in this castle walls is there an available exit. The castle is a veritable prison and I am a prisoner. So we shall see if Jonathan figures out what is going on. So we have this. Know what? I'm not going to say any of that. Let's just see what Bram Stoker is going to do. And there's so much. It's so hard to keep my mouth shut, but you're going to see what he's going to do with this. And I, I think that this story puts its finger on a lot of the same things we are struggling with right now in our very rational, advance, technological and scientifically advanced world. You know, how could the supernatural make itself known in such a place? And if it did, would we have the tools with which to defeat it? Cindy, final thoughts?

[Cindy Rollins]

No, I just enjoy the book. It's. I've said this before, but to me, it read very Dickensian and a little obviously darker, but same sort of wordy, kind of enjoyable read.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, yes, I'm really enjoying it too. I forgot how good it is.

[Thomas Banks]

Me too. Yeah, I, I, I. The funny thing of it is I, I read another one of his books some years ago, the Jewel of the Seven Stars, if anyone has ever heard of that, which is sort of the original Mummy story. That was, that was another one of his.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, actually, that's for you. You.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, it's. No, he was a fun writer. He was a fun writer. I don't think he wrote like a lot, but you wish he wrote more.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, I have in my version that I have here, he has Dracula's guest and other stories at the back. So I'm really.

[Angelina Stanford]

His wife published that after his death.

[Thomas Banks]

She was a very jealous guardian of his estate, literary estate, after he died. And he was a fairly young man, I think he died. He might have been 45 or 50, but she, until her death, made sure that they did not make any films of this because she thought that, I think she suspected that films would ruin the story. Anyway.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, it's interesting. So he was the stage manager of an actor, Henry Irving, and there seems to be a pretty good indication that he intended for this, for this to be a play, because it has three decided acts, which I won't tell you what they are until we get a little further in.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, and the appearance of Dracula in the book. Some Stoker scholars think that the appearance might have been inspired by Henry Irving.

[Angelina Stanford]

Looks like him. Yeah. So maybe he was thinking that he would play the Count. Right. Which is interesting to me because, of course, Bram Stoker was correct. This is an iconic character and who has been envisioned in film so many.

[Thomas Banks]

Times, almost like the ultimate actors part.

[Angelina Stanford]

Almost never as Bram Stoker intended it. That's why we're going to do an an episode at the end of this series called Dracula at the Movies, and Atlee's going to come in and he's already, you know, he dove headfirst into this assignment. And, and so we'll be looking at the way that it's changed. And one of the things we'll talk about as we go through not, not to today, but the, the vampire as a sort of cultural marker is super fascinating, you know, in the question of what what does the vampire represent and what defeats it is, is a really good cultural marker. We'll just say that and it's an idea we'll develop as we go. I'm really looking forward to continuing this and hopefully I didn't confuse everybody with my comments earlier. It's really, really hard to speak quickly and summarize quickly things that are very, very complex and nuanced, announced, but hopefully you'll, you'll get the drift of what we're talking about. So for next week, we're going to read chapters three through seven and carry on with what Bram Stoker is going to be showing us here. So enjoy it and happy Halloween. Keep your garlic with you. Oh, oh, that's right. I forgot to say the thing about why he has bad breath, that's also part it's because the they don't, they're not alive and they don't breathe. So they were perceived as.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, that's. I figured that too. That he was just dead.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, exactly. Like he's decaying inside. Exactly. But anyway, there's lots more to come, so hang in there. Because I know that a lot of our listeners were concerned because they've read so many modern, modern monster stories. But it's not what you think and the payoff is going to be so good. So hang in there. Even if you think it's a little scary, it's just a fantastic story and it will be very satisfying. So until then, keep crafting your literary life, because stories, not vampires, will save the world. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life Podcast brought to you by our loyal Patreon support sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with [e-mail] Join the Conversation at our member only Patreon Forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Tip. Don't forget to subscribe rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks.

[Thomas Banks]

Ghosts by Elizabeth Jennings those houses haunt in which we leave something undone. It is not those great words or silence of love that spread their echoes through a place and fill the locked up, unbreathed gloom. Ghosts do not haunt with any face that we have known. They only come with arrogance to thrust at us our own omissions in a room. The words we would not speak they use, the deeds we dared not act, they flaunt our nervous silences they bruise. It is our helplessness they choose and our refusals that they haunt.