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The Literary Life Podcast
Episode 297: Best of Series - Bram Stoker's "Dracula" Ch. 3-7
01:14:11
On The Literary Life Podcast this week, our hosts continue with part 2 of their series on Bram Stoker's . After sharing their commonplace quotes, Angelina, Cindy and Thomas begin discussing how to properly read Dracula and other books written in this...
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A
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.
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B
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. Hello. Welcome back to the Literary Life Podcast. This is episode two of our series on Bram Stoker's Dracula. And with me, I'm trying to figure out what chill I call him. Shall we. Shall we call Mr. Banks Quincy Morris? Can you do a Texas accent?
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A
Yes, but I think people from Texas would prefer I did not.
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B
I mean, your brother's a Texas adventurer. Maybe that counts. Sort of.
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A
Actually, I was amusing myself by reading the Quincy Morris dialogue in my brother James's voice.
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B
How amusing.
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C
How easily amused you are.
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B
That's right. So the mysterious Mr. Morris and. And. And Cindy. Cindy, Lucy Westerner. Welcome. Welcome, gang.
- [02:16]
C
What? I don't want to be Lucy. You don't want to be.
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A
No one wants to be Lucy.
- [02:20]
C
I kind of Lucy. That's pretty bad. But thank you, Angelina, for that.
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B
Just imagine that you were the pretty girl that everybody fell for.
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C
Yeah. Yeah.
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B
I'm gonna admit it. I've seen your high school pictures, Farrah Fawcett, that you were totally that girl. I don't. I was.
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C
I actually wasn't. But yeah, okay.
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B
I was definitely not that girl. I was definitely Mina, who's like, can I take notes?
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C
I would have been that girl. If I'd have been an extrovert, maybe, But I was an introvert, so that kept me out of a lot of trouble. Going to a party did not sound fun to me.
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B
So, all right, neither of us is Lucy, then. Well, both together will be Mina. So it is. I can't believe it's November and I am loving Dracula right now. I'm loving reading everybody's Response. The. The Discord forum for our Patreon group, our private forum there is just absolutely bursting with this group writing, reading Dracula. Guys, shout out to all of y', all. You are doing such a great job reading. I'm just loving reading your comments. And they're. They're doing really a fabulous with this novel. Cindy, are you enjoying it?
- [03:32]
C
Oh, I love it. I read it, you know, this year earlier, but it just goes to show I already plot points I've forgotten about, so I have the big picture, but a lot of these side trails I'd forgotten.
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B
How about you, Mr. Banks?
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A
I really like it a lot. I. Yeah, I think I said last time. It's been a very, very many years since I've read this, but some. Some of the little sections which might seem like throwaway sections, even like the. The part on the ship, I think is really, really good suspense writing. And yeah, I. I'm glad we picked this one.
- [04:04]
B
Oh, me too. I've been thinking about how. So. It's been a long, long time since I've read this. 20 years, more than 20 years since I've read it last because I. Because I. I taught it two years in a row, very early in my teaching career. So it's probably more like, gosh, yes, my oldest child. Yeah, it's. It's getting. It's getting close to 30 years probably since I've read this book. And I really fell in love with this book the first time I read it. And then I took a class on vampires in literature, and it was pretty much the whole semester devoted to this novel as well as, you know. You know, we read Polidori, and we read, you know, Carmilla, we read Coleridge's Christabel, you know, all of the vampire stories. And what strikes me about why I. Why I loved that class so much and why I loved the book so much is that I think, you know, so I was an undergraduate. This was early in my career, but it was the first time that I found myself very deliberately reading an entire book metaphorically. And this book really lent itself to that easily, I thought, back then. And. And so I just. I loved it. I loved it. And I had read other things partially allegorically and metaphorically. And then, of course, when I. Not John Bunyan. Allegory. Sorry, guys. Medieval allegory. And then when I wrote. Ended up writing my. My thesis on Jane Eyre, that was a. That was a deeply metaphorical reading that I gave of that. But Dracula was the first one that I was able to do that with and revisiting it now, 30 years later, when I have really immersed myself in learning so much more about metaphor and form and images and the medieval imagination and how all this stuff works. I. It's taking on yet another level. I'm kind of chuckling to myself about what I thought these things meant the first time. I mean, my instincts were good. I definitely had the good basics of the book, but it is just lending itself to so many more layers now. And I'm. I'm just absolutely delighting in it. And I'm excited to talk about this book with all of y'.
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C
All.
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B
And now, commonplace Quotes. Time. I almost forgot again. Who wants to go first for commonplace quotes?
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A
I think one of you should. Mine is kind of long.
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B
All right, what you got?
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C
Okay. That helps me a lot because I'm going to use the one I stole from Mr. Banks earlier this year. I've been waiting. Been kind of shy about using it.
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B
But I just thought, don't be shy. Steal. He always steals mine.
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C
Yeah, he did. I've heard him steal a couple times. So this is from the playwright, poet and writer Samuel Johnson. And he said, this is on listening and learning. I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.
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A
Oh, yeah.
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B
Biting my tongue not to shout out names of modern.
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A
Yeah. And so many public figures, too.
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C
Yeah.
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A
Politicians who write their memoirs and things like that. Like, you know that Congressman X is basically illiterate, but he wrote a memoir. That's. I know.
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C
There's a whole industry called ghostwriters.
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A
I know, I know.
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B
Yeah, that's right. If you ever find yourself asking, like, how can somebody put out this much content? The answer is they're not.
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A
What's his. James. James Patterson. Is that the guy who writes all this?
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C
Oh, yeah, Bless his heart. He's written everything.
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B
I mean, Thomas Kincaid of novels.
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A
He's got, like, a whole team.
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B
He's got a team doing it for him.
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A
Yeah, I know. He covered one with Bill Clinton, I guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, did Thomas Kincaid invite Bill to, like, do a.
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B
Put the squiggly marks.
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A
Happy little tree, Former presidents running thrillers with. Yeah, yeah.
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C
There's a lot to think about there.
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B
That.
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C
Just that one example.
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A
Right. Angelina, do you want to.
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B
Go into, I think, the larger discussion of Dracula? So you.
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C
I'll.
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B
I'll wait. Why don't you go.
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A
So mine. This is. This is like a parody paragraph. Paragraph. Long quotation from the English historian James Anthony Froude from his History of England, where he is talking about the end of the Middle Ages and the transition to the world of, you know, early modernity. It's just a kind of a beautiful passage quote. For indeed, a change was coming upon the world, the meaning and direction of which even still is hidden from us. A change from era to era. The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up. Old things were passing away, and the faith and the life of 10 centuries were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry was dying. The abbey and the castle were about to crumble together into ruins. And all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the old world were passing away, never to return. A new continent had risen up beyond the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space. And the firm earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom. In the awful vastness of the universe, in the fabric of habit in which they had so laboriously built for themselves, mankind were to remain no longer. And now it is all gone, like an unsubstantial pageant, faded. And between us and the Old English, there lies a gulf of mystery which the prose of the historian will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, and our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among the long aisles of the cathedral, only as we gaze upon their silent figures sleeping on their tombs, some faint conceptions float before us of what these men were when they were alive. And perhaps in the sound of church bells, that peculiar creation of the medieval age which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world.
- [10:12]
B
Oh, that is very appropriate to the book we're reading.
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C
Yeah. Even the images of Whitby almost. What was that from?
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A
That was a James Anthony Froud from his History of England in the. In the Tudor era.
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C
It almost sounded like Elizabeth Goosh. It was so good.
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B
Yeah, that was spot on.
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A
He was a novelist as well as a historian, and, yeah, he's kind of. Kind of a novelist's eye that he brought to his task.
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B
If you're listening at home or driving right now and saying, do I need to pull over my car? Rewind this and write this down. No, no, you do not. We have a wonderful producer who has done that for you. Kiel manages our website and all of the commonplace quotes for every episode are on there, as well as links to every book we reference. So you can go to theliterary Life and. And just click on the episode you're looking for and you can find all that information there. She. She does a great job for us. All right, so I want to. I want to pick up on what I was talking about last week about how do we know what books mean. And again, my classes, the House of Humane Letters, we are devoted to this, the literary tradition, and how do you know what books mean? And it's hard to talk about this in the podcast because we can only just talk about it in little bits and pieces where in my classes I'm very systematically teaching this stuff. But I did want to go ahead and kind of piggyback on some things that we talked about last week. And we still have this, you know, faulty notion right now that books basically can mean whatever we say they mean. And this book in particular bears. Bears the. The marks. I was gonna say the fruit. It bears the marks, the wounds, the scars of that attitude because there are some just ridiculous readings of this book and especially Freudian readings of this book. We were talking about this last night in our all fellows eve meeting with our Patreon. Don't Google about Dracula. Just don't. You will not be able to unsee that stuff. It's going to be so Freudian. And if you listen to the episode we did just a few weeks ago with Jason Baxter where we're talking about C.S. lewis and the medieval mind of C.S. lewis, and I was talking about Sigmund Freud and he said, you know, Freud was a bet noir for Lewis. And that is absolutely true. I've been reading a ton of stuff and Lewis responds to Freud and Freudian psychology and Freudian readings of literature in a number of places. And one of the points that Lewis makes is that Freud has set up an alternative, rival universal language of images based on his own mind, that he has decided these are what the images mean. And, you know, and it's Freud. So he thinks all of the images are about sex. And Louis Lewis's, you know, issue with him is that we already have a universal language of images and it extends all the way back. That's what we were talking about last week. And that's what Lewis is getting at when he says, don't ask me where the witch came from. Every child's born knowing the witch. These forms are deeply embedded in reality and they come up again and again in stories and art because they are connected to nature and the transcendent realm and they're just deep in reality. And, and Freud, Freud just made up a whole new way. And in many ways, his new made up rival symbolic language has eclipsed the old way. And this has caused a lot of problems for people in a number of ways, and it is a real stumbling block for Dracula. So we're gonna. I'm gonna try. I mentioned this last night on the. On the all fellows eve events. I'm not you. This is the way a Freudian would read this book, because I know a lot of people listen to this podcast with their kids, so don't worry, I won't. I won't go down the crazy. But I am going to try to make the case that this book means something in particular and it's not what Freud would think, and that there's a way we can know what these things mean, so. Oh, go ahead.
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A
I was going to say it's kind of an irony that Freud dies as a refugee living at Lewis's university right at the beginning of World War II.
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B
Right. One of the things Lewis says in one of his essays is like, I have no idea. Freud's right about his theories of what dreams mean. However, when he starts applying that and his followers start applying that to literature now, I can say, you're wrong. That's not what these images mean in stories. In fact, in the Weight of Glory, there's an essay there called transposition. And C.S. lewis wrote that in response to Freud. So he's having this ongoing conversation like, nope, nope, that's how Freud, you're wrong. That's not what these images mean. And he points us back to nature, et cetera, et cetera, for knowing how they mean. Yes. You want to say something? Yeah.
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A
His objections to some of T.S. eliot's poetry are founded on kind of the same basis because, I mean, you know, the famous beginning of the Wasteland. Let us go then, you and I, while the evening is spread out like a patient etherized on a table. Lewis takes that as an example that no one who looks at the sky in the history of the world, since people could raise their heads, has ever seen that. So, I mean, images, I mean, yes, poets have to recraft them, make them their own, by all means, but at the same time, there's a body of imagery which we inherit rather than manufacture out of whole cloth. And when you, when you do this, when you invite us to look at the heaven as a patient splayed out on the table, you're. You're changing the way we see. Not necessarily for better. It's not simply. It's not simply private creativity at work here. There's. There are dangers, I suppose.
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B
Absolutely. Absolutely. That's one of the things that Lewis and Tolkien both fought against, is the idea that poetry is made up of a private symbolic language of the poet. They both fought against that. In fact, I was just reading a Tolkien quote this morning about how what a good poet does. And again, they're using poet to mean storyteller, because that is what that word historically has meant. The Greek poets are Homer. I mean, you know, the story writers. But he was talking about, like, what. What the great poet does is he takes these old stories and he combines it with his fresh imagination and he sort of makes the images larger for a new generation. But, yeah, it's all these. It's all these old images. In fact, Lewis and Tolkien absolutely had a hill to die on when they were at Oxford against psychoanalytic readings of literature. That was one of the things they really, really fought against at Oxford because it was the super popular thing at Cambridge and American universities to. To have these Freudian readings. And they were just like, nope, nope, nope. So I've got a quote here from George MacDonald, who of course is a huge influence on Lewis and Tolkien. And it's more about this idea like, where do these forms come from? And you'll hear me use the word form and metaphor and image sort of interchangeably. We're all talking about the same thing. This universal symbolic language. He says, and this. This speaks to what you just said, Mr. Banks. A man no more creates the forms by which he would reveal his thoughts than he creates thoughts themselves. For what are the forms by means of which a man may reveal his thoughts? Are they not those of nature? What springs there is the perception that this or that form is already an expression of this or that phase of thought or a feeling for the world around him is an outward figuration of the condition of his mind, an inexhaustible storehouse of forms from which he may choose exponents. The meanings are in these forms already, else they could be no garment of unveiling.
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A
I like garment of unveiling a lot.
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B
I thought you might like that. That is a dish of orts, that collection of wonderful McDonald essays. And again, I know that this can be difficult for some of our newer listeners. You know, that, that to find out that so many of the assumptions we have about language and meaning and metaphor and stories is. Is incorrect. We. We the creating new metaphors. And he. We see this in film all the time. It's one of the reasons why films are so terrible right now is that filmmakers think they can just create symbolism. Oh, well, you know, this pin represents my, you know, my. My thwarted ambition. No, it doesn't, actually. We already have things that represent thwarted ambition. The poets have been using them since beginning of time. That's the form. And then. So we're not surprised when we're seeing that meaning is just falling apart. One of the things that I have really come to conclude, the more that I am studying this stuff with Lewis and Tolkien and, you know, they absolutely believe that reading, well, is connected to your understanding of meaning. That what we're really talking about, when we're talking about how do you read, is we're talking about how do you know what things mean? And we live in a time in which we don't think anything means anything. And it's because we started on a very slippery slope of moving away from this medieval understanding, what Lewis called transposition.
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C
Here's what Lewis says in Studies in Words, he said, if we read an old poem with insufficient regard for change in the overtones and even the dictionary meanings of words since its date, if in fact we are content with whatever effect the words accidentally produce in our modern minds, then of course we do not read the poem the old writer intended.
- [19:59]
B
Yes, yes, that was a big, big thing for Lewis. And that, of course, is absolutely true. When you read old books and you don't understand the way meaning was put together in these old books, you're going to read them, you know, completely wrong. So that is, of course, what is happening with Freud. And we also have. Basically, the shift we're describing is that what McDonnell is talking about, what Lewis and Tolkien are talking about, is that meaning exists outside, outside of us. And we're constantly trying to discover that meaning. We discover that meaning in nature, we discover it in, you know, divine revelation, we discover it in stories, but it exists already in the modern world. We think that truth and meaning is to be determined. And that is a very significant difference. That truth and meaning exists inside of us, and we are determining what it is. It's not an out. It's not an entity that exists on its own. We just decide amongst ourselves, this is what true is true. This is what this means. And we impose that meaning on there. And because it's a lie, it falls apart and it collapses. And that's where we are right now with the current language wars. So, anyway, all of that is just to sort of continue this conversation we have about how do I know what things mean? Because Dracula is a storehouse of fantastic images and forms and metaphors. And in fact, I'm going to argue as we go through this book that one of the things Bram Stoker is trying to do is to reintroduce those realities in the modern world. So let's jump in to these chapters. We have basically, like you were saying Cindy a minute ago, we have like three different sections here happening. We got left on quite the cliffhanger with Jonathan Harker. And I thought one of the things I wanted to really make sure we're oriented in as we go through this book is I think we have a tendency to think of the Victorians as like the quaint old fashioned days when really they thought of themselves as modern. In fact, Bram Stoker has Jonathan Harker using the word modernity. And everything here is up to date 19th century. So what Bram Stuker is doing is bringing back the reality of evil and the supernatural into this very modern, materialistic, enlightened world. In fact, I made a little list while I was reading of all the references to technology. We have like you should be paying attention as you read the. Each individual letter. Like there's, there's a note that goes with each one saying how they recorded it. And this is, this is part of the whole modern world and what's happening. So we have Jonathan Harker using shorthand. So that would be something modern. We have Mina using a typewriter that's cutting edge. Cutting. Cutting edge technology.
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A
Typewriters could only have been about a decade or two old probably.
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B
Well, yeah, and they started to have correspondent secretarial schools and she's like, she's taking one of those classes. So we've got that, we've got Dr. Seward using a phonograph. Again, cutting edge. So this is.
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C
Yeah, I thought that was super interesting. I'm like, what a phonograph? How do you.
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B
It's like a Dictaphone. So he's, he's recording his profession.
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A
I mean he's the, he's the ward of a mental assignment. I mean, is this the first time we meet a psychiatrist in literature?
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B
It might very well be.
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A
I was trying to jog my memory. I cannot think of an. Or the alienist. Be the more common term then.
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B
Brilliant that he's got a psychiatrist here. So this is before Freud, but this is the birth of modern psychiatry. What will become modern psychiatry? So he's running an asylum and he is scientifically trying to figure out what's wrong with their brains. And, and we're going to look at that. But yeah, that. So that's fascinating to me that he's going to be. Well, I don't want to say. Let's just see what happens with our modern psychiatrist and what he's going to be.
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A
Freud would have been a practicing. A practicing psychiatrist. Not. He's not a celebrity, though. You're right.
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B
Right. Freud is alive and practicing. Yeah, I would say. Well, I guess what I meant was Freudian psychoanalysis not taken over globally at that point, but. Yes, yes, yes. It's definitely cutting edge. Even the coast guard and the searchlight. Like, just so many references to modern stuff. This is the modern world.
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A
I forgot that he also uses the narration device of a newspaper article.
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B
Same thing.
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A
The arrival. The strange arrival of the ship.
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B
It's like Orson. Yeah, it's like the newsreel into Citizen Kane. That same kind of shit.
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A
He's a really good storyteller because, I mean, he's using a lot of devices which. Which under normal circumstances might sort of detract from the scariness of the book. Yeah, it's like, you know, he could sort of make it too prosaic, but he doesn't.
- [24:56]
C
Kind of like Ulysses before, each chapter being a different form.
- [25:02]
A
Right? Yeah, but, yeah, like the fright, the terror, I think, kind of kind of burns through the sort of prosaic medium which he uses to convey it.
- [25:12]
C
Yeah, he really brings us to. At the end of that third chapter, we're just shaking in our boots, and then he moves over to something else.
- [25:21]
A
Yes, he really.
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B
He is a good storyteller. And he. He. The pacing here is fantastic. He. He keeps the suspense going. And I think the leaving Jonathan on that cliffhanger. And then fast forwarding. Actually doesn't fast forward. He backs up.
- [25:36]
A
He jumps around the time frame. Jumps.
- [25:38]
B
He brings us up so we know what Mina has been up to. And then he brings us up to the present moment.
- [25:44]
C
Well, it just makes the darkness so much darker when you. Then you have this normalcy or what seems to be normality, you know, oh, we're back in this girl. Young girls writing each other letters. How. How quaint. Do with anything, you know, Completely oblivious.
- [26:00]
B
To evil in the world. Exactly. All right, well, let's jump into chapter three. He uses a lot of language here about how he's a prisoner and he's imprisoned. And a lot of our Patreon supporters noticed that this was all definitely a descent to Haiti. This is a. This is a hell. Like Castle. We. He's calling him a demon, a fiend, a monster. He refers numerous times to the fact that he's in hell. He's in a pit of hell. So he's. He's trapped in hell here.
- [26:30]
A
It's the worst working vacation ever.
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C
He's Very loyal to this Mr. Peter Hawkins.
- [26:38]
A
Yeah. I think hopefully he gets like a race after he gets back to England.
- [26:43]
C
Oh, it's a job. Somebody's got to do it.
- [26:46]
B
He's so British, right? I mean, he reminds me of Mr. Banks from Mary Poppins. You know, the bank. Yeah, exactly. I mean, he's, he's over there like, I think this guy might be a demon. Here's the paperwork for you to sign, sir. Let me answer your questions about a solicitor. But, but the, the point for that is just how English he is and how business minded he is. And, and, and how, how is he responding in the face of this, this, you know, almost irrationality. Right. That's how a materialist would look at it. He keeps saying, I've got to write down the facts. I don't need to go crazy. I don't need to, you know, jump to conclusions here. What are the facts? These are the facts. He's trying so hard to stay read it rooted in reason.
- [27:31]
A
It's almost like he expects himself to wake up from a bad dream and there's going to be some, some kind of rational explanation. And it's relative. It seems again, relatively late that he realizes that no, this really, this is the reality.
- [27:42]
B
Now again, I want to remind our listeners because, you know, when you, Dorothy Sayers makes the point about Wilkie Collins, you know who, who a little bit before Bram Stoker here, how she makes the point that when you read Wilkie Collins, the Woman in White or the Moonstone, that as a modern reader you're tempted to read and be like, oh, how tropey is this? And she says, but you have to remember is he's the guy that invented this stuff. So you have to read it thinking, this is the first time someone used these. And the same thing is happening with here with Bram Stoker. Like, I keep thinking about how often we see this set up in a horror movie. Like it's always some really rational scientific person who's faced with the supernatural and it's like, nope, nope. There's got to be a logical explanation for this. And we might roll our eyes seeing it here, but this is the first time this happens. He's, he's the inventor of, of what becomes all these tropes. So what about the fact here at the beginning of book three, chapter three, that he's now happy for the crucifix? In fact, he says to himself, when I have a moment, I need to think about the implications of the fact that I, I'm finding a lot of Comfort in something that I think is idolatrous.
- [28:50]
A
Oh, yeah. I mean, it shows that he's definitely undergone a change. I mean, there's something that he had dismissed at first as a kind of superstitious bauble is now a genuine means of defense.
- [29:02]
B
That's right. He goes from saying, I think it makes me feel comforted, to, I'm gonna hang this over my. To keep the evil away. He has that long conversation with Dracula in which. And this was so cleverly done, that Jonathan Harker is saying to himself. It almost sounds like he's using the constant present tense as he gives me the whole history of the world. Has he been here for all of these things? Yeah.
- [29:28]
A
It's almost like Dracula, when he speaks of himself and his ancestors, it's. It's almost like they're all one person who is. Yes. Been. Been occupying this particular part of the world for centuries on end.
- [29:41]
B
So there's that.
- [29:42]
A
Attila the Hun was here yesterday, and I was fighting alongside him. It's almost this kind of. Kind of feeling.
- [29:47]
B
And so there's a lot of things. Yes. That is how the aristocracy think of themselves. But it's also true that he's a vampire, so we don't know how old he is. But also, if he's. If he's Satan, then Satan has been in the midst. I mean, that's straight out of Paradise Lost. Everywhere there's a war, there's Satan marching around the middle like Aries.
- [30:06]
C
Oh, that's a good idea. I never even got that far in my thinking. I was just thinking he'd lived a long time.
- [30:13]
B
Well, in the way he keeps saying. And in the midst was a Dracula, and in the midst was a Dracula. Now, those of you who were in the Patreon last night heard this funny story, but I will now tell it to our other listeners here, that there was something I was saving to say, and Mr. Banks blurted it out and the episode last week, because he didn't know that I was saving it. So we edited it out, but I'm gonna let him say. Good.
- [30:39]
A
I couldn't resist.
- [30:40]
B
I know, I know. And I didn't tell you I was saving it. And so, because he's bursting, why don't you tell us about the etymology of the word Dracula?
- [30:49]
A
Oh, well, since you asked me to, Ms. Stanford. So Dracul in Romanian would be son of the devil, and it's etymologically related to dragon as well.
- [31:01]
B
So my notes from vampire class say son of the dragon.
- [31:04]
A
Son of the dragon.
- [31:05]
B
Son of the dragon. So not only is Dracula related to Satan because his name means demon or evil in Romanian, but also because Dracula, the word is connected to the word dragon. So we're talking about the dragon of Revelation, the deep. The deep dragon.
- [31:24]
C
What kind of language is Romanian? Is it.
- [31:27]
A
It's a romance. It's actually.
- [31:29]
C
It is a romance language. Okay.
- [31:31]
A
Yeah. If you hear it speaking, spoken. It actually sounds like. Imagine like Italian if you had a bunch of Slavic loan words introduced.
- [31:39]
C
Ah, that makes sense. Okay.
- [31:41]
A
But you'd recognize, like, anyone who studied Spanish or Italian would recognize a lot of. A lot of common words.
- [31:47]
B
So it ends in an A. I recognize that.
- [31:49]
A
Exactly.
- [31:51]
B
So if you think about it that way, he's saying if you go all the way back to the Vikings, the dragon was there. And when the witches were being born, the dragons were there. And during this war, the dragons were there. And Attila behind the dragon. Boy, you just read it like that. My little symbolic brain was exploding. Yes, yes. This is. This is the oldest enemy, and he is getting ready to attack the modern world that even denies his existence now. This is brilliant. This is brilliant.
- [32:25]
C
Oh, it's even more scary than I thought.
- [32:27]
A
Yeah. I was just thinking that that would be such a. For an American, if you were present, that would be such a. That speech would be so hard to respond to. I mean, what would you say? Oh, yes, I think I might have had an ancestor who came over on the Mayflower or something like that. We'd go back a long way, too, to, you know, 300 whole years. But anyway.
- [32:50]
B
I know.
- [32:50]
C
Well, I love.
- [32:51]
B
There's an American in here. We'll get to that in a minute. But, yeah, I always.
- [32:54]
A
Oh, we have not just everything.
- [32:58]
B
Texan. Yeah.
- [32:59]
C
So.
- [33:00]
B
All right, so next thing that happens, of course, in chapter three is we get the. The classic fairy tale setup. The warning, the admonition, the don't do this. You can go anywhere you want in the castle. Just don't fall asleep anywhere.
- [33:13]
C
Clearly, he has never heard a fairy tale before.
- [33:16]
B
That's right. My fairy tale read the wrong books.
- [33:18]
A
He's read the wrong books.
- [33:20]
B
Somebody suggested if maybe he wasn't a little bit like Eustace and he hasn't read the right books. But anybody who's taking my fairy tale class knows. But once you get that one admonition, that one command, then they are going to break it. And that is exactly what he does. He also sees the snake climbing down, and he describes him the snake. I'm sorry, the Count. The Count climbing down. I read My note instead of the text. The count is coming down and, and it's like a lizard. So reptilian again, reptilian snake. Like there's gonna be. I'm. I'm trying really hard not to just blow everything about this book when I open my mouth. So I will be continuing to drop little pearls as we go. But wait till you see how he's going to bring this all together. It's very, very well done. But yes, a lizard, a snake and then lizards because of Darwin and some, some experiments there and some, some natural history stuff being happening. Lizards were kind of a, a new thing. So he's using that. So he finds the door that's locked but unlocked, pushes it open. He's. He's walking around. He's having really this crisis in his mind because he is seeing unexplainable things. Like a man crawling down the side of a mountain. Like a lizard but in an otherwise up to date home. And he says it is 19th century. Up to date with a vengeance. And yet unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had and have powers of their own which mere modernity cannot kill. Oh, that is so good.
- [35:07]
A
It is.
- [35:07]
B
That is so good. So no matter how modern and up to date we get, the, the oldest enemy is still there. It's still lurking right under the surface like a dragon. So he disobeys the fairy tale warning and he ends up getting almost attacked by the three women. Guys, thoughts about that scene?
- [35:30]
C
Well, I think that's the highlight. I mean the peak of the uncomfortable scenes in the book really. If someone's wearing this is how you know it's going to go.
- [35:42]
B
Oh yes. Yeah, this is, yeah, this is the only scene like this in this whole book.
- [35:47]
A
My copy, honestly, my copy had some really, I guess questionable notes. Oh I'm sure he was like. Yeah, obviously Harker wants to be bitten here and other, other observations of that kind. And anyway I am.
- [36:02]
C
But it's, it is true that you know that it's a moral battle and he's not. Yeah, he's winning it really.
- [36:11]
A
Perhaps. But like he wants to be turned into a vampire. I'm not quite, quite sure of that.
- [36:16]
B
Really, really does a good job with here is showing that temptation often looks like a seduction.
- [36:26]
A
The glamour of evil and all that.
- [36:27]
B
Yeah. How it, how it, it lures you over and you want to sin, you want to give in to the temptations and, and you know, they are the minions of Satan here and, and it's very similar to. I'm Going to be talking about paradise lost a lot as we go. So that, that more about that'll be coming. But I mean, even the proverbs, you know, don't fall into the. To the mouth.
- [36:53]
C
Yeah.
- [36:53]
B
Of the woman. She will devour you. You know, stay on the path. So. So the scriptures have a long history of describing sin and temptation as a woman trying to lure you away. Right. And, and I. So that, that's what all this is a picture of. It's like you said last night, Cindy, it's low hanging fruit to go for the obvious sexual stuff. What, what's really happening here is he, he is face to face with a spiritual temptation here. You know, he's. He's this rational, modern, reasonable guy and he's, he's face to face with this old enemy and he's got no defense, does he?
- [37:34]
C
Right?
- [37:36]
B
I mean, he's.
- [37:37]
A
Except his crucifix.
- [37:38]
B
Well, but he doesn't have it on right now.
- [37:39]
A
Oh, that's right, he doesn't have it on.
- [37:41]
B
So, so Dracula himself comes in and says, not now. But, but I mean this is a masterful scene. This. I'm horrified, I'm afraid. But also I want it. That is, that is our spiritual battle. When we choose, we want to sin.
- [37:57]
C
Yeah.
- [37:59]
B
So that's, that's, that's just a beautiful thing. And so anyway, we have all this stuff. The wrath and fury of demons of the pit, the flames of hell fire blaze. Calls them fiends and monsters. All of that. All right, Chapter four. Now he is really trying to figure out how do I get out of here?
- [38:14]
C
Now he's like ready. He's, he's, he's got, he can't win this battle.
- [38:20]
B
And plus he knows that the Count is planning to kill him because he hasn't write those letters to fate which. Yeah.
- [38:26]
A
Make it sound like it would intimate that he's right.
- [38:30]
C
What is the cat waiting on? Is it, you know, is he just waiting? He's, he's not hungry yet because he's been.
- [38:36]
A
I mean, the Count's been feeding. I mean, there's the little.
- [38:39]
C
Oh, I know there was that terrible.
- [38:41]
A
I had forgotten that again.
- [38:42]
B
I was like, well, that was a bad scene. A child. Because in fairy tales witches are often feeding on children, you know, hansel and Gretel, etc. That's, that's a pretty standard image. I mean, Jadis in Narnia is, you know, she's going after Edmund and there's a lot of reasons for that. It has to do with the Lilith Myth and the image of the false woman. But in a nutshell, the true woman figure, the true mother figure in literature is always going to be wanting the life of a child, giving life with her own body, feeding the child with her own body. And so images of death are going to be the opposite of that. So you have.
- [39:26]
C
That makes sense.
- [39:27]
B
Want to take life with their own body, and instead of feeding the child with their body, they're eating them. So. So. So you have a lot of that stuff going on there.
- [39:37]
A
And the ancestral hatred, the mutual hatred between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman from Genesis.
- [39:43]
C
Oh, yeah, that's a good.
- [39:45]
B
Precisely, precisely. It also taps into a lot of child sacrifices in pagan religions. So. So that's. You. You see the attack of children associated with demonic evil in. In stories very, very consistently. Like, that's.
- [40:01]
C
If this makes you uncomfortable, it's really. You can't go back to the Old Testament and say, this is what these. These ancient tribes were doing. Really, they were. They were doing these terrible things.
- [40:15]
B
That's right.
- [40:15]
C
Picture of what evil does, where evil goes. We can't imagine it. We don't think we're there, but this is where it will take you.
- [40:24]
B
That's right. And it is horrific. I mean, it's horrific both in the literal level, but also on the metaphorical level. This is the. This is the ongoing battle between good and evil, and children are absolutely attacked. I mean, even if you want to think about the story of Abraham and Isaac, I mean, that story is because one of the things that's happening there is that all of the pagan religions require child sacrifice. So when God asks Abraham to kill Isaac, it's like, see, you know, of course you do this. This. Everybody does this. And Abraham's puzzlement is, but I thought you were different then. Of course, he takes him out there and he says, okay, if this is what you require, I'll do it. And then God says no and gives the substitution. And. And in that moment, he's setting this precedent that Christianity is different. All of these other religions will take your children. Want to kill your children? No, I'm going to give my child as the sacrifice. I'm not going to take your child as the sacrifice. All right, so he's figured out he's gonna die, and he starts trying to escape. So he crawls out, he goes exploring. He's trying to figure out, could I maybe kill him again? We're getting images of. He's got a smile like Judas. All. All this stuff. He crawls down there to find the monster. Now, this is very much the image of the dragon's lair. This is Bilbo in the Hobbit. He has. He has crawled down into the cave and he has found the dragon sleeping in his lair. I mean, all of this, his. His eyes turn so. So Dracula's asleep because it's daytime, and. But his head turns and his eyes have a blaze of basilic. So a basilic is a serpent, but it's a serpent that can hypnotize you. And you're going to see through the book. That is a consistent power that vampires have. They can hypnotize you. But that's also a power a serpent has. That's also a power a dragon has. Tolkien makes that point in the Hobbit. Bilbo can't get started talking because the dragon will hypnotize you. So you'll see that the vampire, the serpent and the dragon are going to be consistently equated in the images.
- [42:38]
A
A basilisk and a cockatrice are the. Essentially the same mythical creature. Is that right?
- [42:44]
B
Yep. Okay.
- [42:44]
A
That's what my book said.
- [42:45]
B
Just that. Yep. And then, of course, he. He hits him on the forehead and leaves a big mark. Hello, Mark of Cain. You know, Stoker's going right forward. Just like Beowulf says Grendel comes from Kane. We have this. This creature here with the mark of Cain on him. I just don't know how he could make it more plain that this is. This is Satan. This is the. This is evil. This is the devil. This is. It's.
- [43:09]
A
It wasn't a Harry Potter reference. No, that was a misreading.
- [43:13]
B
No, but if you're reading this book and thinking J.K. rowling, oh, yes, there's gonna be a lot of Harry Potter stuff in here. A lot of Harry Potter stuff. So he. He's talking about. He's here in this hell. He's in the pit with the devil, and he's talking about Mina and he thinks about Mina.
- [43:33]
C
Yeah, I love that.
- [43:35]
B
Tell me what you thought about that. Go ahead. And then I'll tell you what I thought.
- [43:37]
C
Well, I just think it brings it around to love.
- [43:40]
B
He.
- [43:41]
C
I mean, I'm not saying love will save the world, but it's a. It's. It's where the opposite of evil is love, and that's where his mind goes when evil is encroaching on him.
- [43:54]
B
That's absolutely true. And there's a few other things going on, like even in Proverbs. Right. So in Proverbs, the. The Harlot, the prostitute is symbolically what lures you off of the path. So you're on the path of righteousness. And. And these, you know, whose mouth is an open pit. Whose mouth is an open pit. Just like these vampire women, they're trying to pull you up. They want you to fall into the pit of hell. But if you keep going on that path in Proverbs, you end up with Lady Wisdom. So it's the true woman and the false woman. And. And. And you see that over and over in stories that struggle between those two. Those two poles, you know, so you have Odysseus trying to get to Penelope, and there's all these false women. There's Calypso and Cersei and, you know, the witches and the enchantresses and the seductresses who are trying to pull him away from that woman. It's the same image. Then on top of that, you have this idea, which we're going to really get into in the next chapter here, one page over. We've talked about this on this podcast before, the idea of the angel of the house. So there's a. There's a sense in which he's saying, these devil women are trying to get me, but I want to get home to my angel.
- [45:01]
C
I love that he said, at its foot, a man may sleep as a man. Goodbye, all, all. Mina. So he's having this conversation about women, but then he wants, you know, that there's the. The concept of manliness, also that these women are actually trying to steal from him.
- [45:21]
A
Something strange. I. I can't decide whether I have a. Like, in some ways, mine is a very good annotated copy when it comes to dealing with, like, Eastern European customs and folklore. But whenever the commentator, whenever the editor makes some kind of observation about any of the characters, like, a kind of snideness comes through. So, like, really doesn't. Like Mina. It almost sounds, whenever he says something about Mina, like, you know, Mr. Darcy describing Elizabeth in the first few chapters.
- [45:48]
B
Of Pride and Typewriting is tolerant.
- [45:51]
A
He says that she. He says that she is a quote, quote, useful but rather servile. No, A useful but rather subservient woman.
- [45:59]
B
Okay, then that is completely misunderstanding because let's just.
- [46:02]
A
She's supposed to be, like, kind of the modern girl.
- [46:05]
B
Well, it's going to be in chapter eight that she's going to identify herself with the new woman, capital N, capital W. So that is a serious misreading. But we'll get to that. I'm angry now. We'll get to that. All right, so he's like, I've got to get out of here, away from this cursed spot and this cursed land where the devil and his children still walk with earthly feet. That is so good, right, that there are places in the world where real evil is still walking around. And then we leave him there on that cliffhanger and we switch to England and we're back in time and we're meeting the two main female characters, Mina, his fiance, and her best friend Lucy.
- [46:43]
A
Who are kind of oil and water.
- [46:46]
B
Tell me about what you think all that.
- [46:47]
A
Well, I mean, so, I mean, Mina we've already said, I mean, she has kind of a hard headed common sense about her. She's, I mean, you know, she has professional skills which will serve her in good stead. Lucy is, I think it's not unfair to say kind of a flake.
- [47:04]
B
Yeah.
- [47:04]
C
Very air headed.
- [47:05]
B
Pretty. And she likes having.
- [47:08]
C
You wanted to call me Lucy. I'm just so offended.
- [47:12]
A
There's a certain, there's a certain kinship, I think, with Lydia Bennett.
- [47:16]
C
Yes, yes, there you go. Lucy and Lydia. I like her name though. Lucy. I have a little granddaughter named Lucy. So of course CS Lewis has a Lucy. Lucy does mean light.
- [47:28]
A
It does, it does.
- [47:29]
B
From what species? And so her name here, Lucy Westenra, means Light of the West.
- [47:37]
C
So she's not hopeless, but she just. Her attitude towards these suitors is, is silly. Kind of silly, but.
- [47:47]
B
Let'S see how he develops that.
- [47:49]
A
I was going to say her name. I mean Light of the west is. She's a beacon that attracts.
- [47:54]
B
Yes.
- [47:55]
A
People from all quarters, I guess.
- [47:58]
B
All quarters, yes, yes. Okay, so you have two different female characters. They're obviously very different. We're going to have to see what Stoker's gonna do there. But Mina is associated with technology and up to dateness, modernity, efficiency, practicality. And Lucy is the opposite of that. She's frivolous, she's, she's beautiful, she's a flirt. But her name is Light of the west. And like you said, she's going. This light is going to attract all kinds of things.
- [48:26]
A
Customers. Yeah. I was thinking, it occurred to me, Mina, you don't meet that name.
- [48:30]
B
Well, that's Will, it's Wilhelm.
- [48:32]
A
Yeah. Probably World War I had something to do with that. Names drop in popularity.
- [48:38]
B
So a few different things. Okay, so the sim. There's a few different symbols in Victorian England, you know, of the way that they thought of themselves and women, women were, were not just like the heart of the nation, but they were also represented the stability of the nation. So, you know, a woman at home creates a stability in the home, which then gives a stability to the. To the country. So if England is going to come under threat, it makes sense then that this. The symbols of stability, would be targeted. So we'll have to see that. So she's the light of the west, and she's got these three suitors who desperately want to be the one who cares for her and protects her. And I'm gonna really bite my tongue, and you're just gonna have to wait to see where we go. But let's talk about the three suitors. Let's take them one at a time. Dr. Seward, what do y' all think about. Oh.
- [49:34]
C
Oh.
- [49:34]
B
But first she gets three proposals, which is a parallel to the three letters Jonathan sends. Okay, go ahead.
- [49:44]
A
So Seward is a scientist. Scientist. He is a man who is deeply involved in his work and has maybe almost kind of a morbid fascination with certain of the. Certain of the disturbed people under his care. The. The. The one inmate, Renfield, with his food chain that he has created to amuse himself. It's almost like he sees Renfield the same way that Renfield sees the spiders and the flies, especially when he reaches again. That's not to say that Seward's like, you know, consciously evil or something like that, but he's. Yeah, he's maybe a materialist.
- [50:27]
B
I was marking here. I mean, he's not Mr. Collins, by any means, but his proposal is described as very straightforward. So he's.
- [50:35]
A
He's the least glamorous.
- [50:35]
B
Right? So he's this, like, very rational, straightforward. Look, here's what I want. I want to marry you. Please tell me, are there obstacles to that? Do you want somebody else? Just. Just lays it out.
- [50:45]
A
Universally acknowledged that a doctor in charge of a mad house must be in search of a wife.
- [50:52]
B
Cindy, your thoughts about Dr. Seward?
- [50:55]
C
Just the same. He's just, you know, he's. He's a steady kind of guy, but he works. He works hard, but he looks at everything through the lens of maybe science and not exactly what a girl like Lucy would be looking for.
- [51:08]
B
Yeah, he's not terribly romantic, but the next guy is kind of romantic.
- [51:14]
C
Yeah, he's quite the guy. I kind of like.
- [51:17]
B
All right, Cindy, you tell us what you thought about old Quincy Morris.
- [51:20]
C
Yeah, he's just a Western guy that is just very American. And. But he. He seems like he has honor. And he. I love when it said that he said, thank you for your sweet, honest to Me honesty to me and goodbye. He run my hand and taking up his hat, went straight out of the room without looking back, without a tear or a quiver or a pause. And I am crying like a baby. And I think that's a sign that she is. She's going to be making a mistake here. This guy is a pretty special guy and in the. And he is full of honor. Now of course I'm not going to go on any further than that with, with that. Not that she's making a mistake, but that he, he is a very suitable fellow.
- [52:14]
B
We're gonna, we're gonna learn more about him. And I, I love that he's from Texas, so he's a cowboy and he's had adventures. This will, this will be significant later on. Yeah. I love his, his accent and his straightforwardness and he tells her a lot of stories about adventure. So he's very exciting. In a lot of ways he's like the opposite of Seward. Now we're gonna find out that all three of these suitors are old buddies. Then. They're some, some kind of old war buddies.
- [52:43]
A
Yeah, they've traveled abroad. Korea. Yeah. Which would have been a war zone during this time.
- [52:50]
B
What would have been a. Well, my notes say at that time it was just like a really poverty stricken area, not like it is now.
- [52:57]
A
And the Chinese both were fighting over it for a lot of the 19th. Later 19th century.
- [53:02]
B
Then why on earth would some Victorian guys be fighting in Korea? Was England involved in that? Are they like mercenaries, adventurers? What?
- [53:09]
A
Yeah, I don't know if they're supposed to have been. It doesn't say they're supposed to have been soldiers specifically, just that they had been. They had sat around campfires in some distant parts of the world. And travel, of course, is a big part of this book. It seems that like much of much of this book book, there's a lot of it that takes place in carriages and railways and things like that.
- [53:30]
C
Yeah, he really covers the whole world pretty much. He's got Texas and Korea. Yeah.
- [53:36]
A
What if Dracula had come to Texas instead? That's, that's the basis. You can make a good, a good bad movie out of that. Exactly.
- [53:43]
B
The sequel for them. And then the third guy. We're not told that much here. We'll find out more about him. So he is a member of the nobility. He's got a title and she's quite in. In love with him.
- [53:58]
C
And he's elusive. We don't really get a very good picture of him at all, do we?
- [54:03]
B
Don't know about him. And I kind of am just gonna bite my tongue about this. And we'll see more about what I think is going on with these three guys. But we're just observe right now that these three guys are drawn to the light of the west and we'll see what happens there. All right, so we get Dr. Seward's diary next. And it's a Dictaphone.
- [54:22]
C
I think my book has a note about Korea. Let me read that real quick. It says the country where United States and Europe tried and failed to curb the burgeoning. Is that how you say that? Commercial control of Japan near the turn of the 19th century.
- [54:37]
B
So we were similar to what they were doing in China with the Boxer Rebellion.
- [54:41]
C
Yeah, they were just using it as a place to, you know, like the Philippines is often to control.
- [54:48]
A
It was a commercial market that.
- [54:49]
B
Okay, so it makes sense that Victorian guys would have been there. Sure, in some capacity. But it's also an exotic location. So there's something adventurous about these. These three. So, yes, we're going to find out a lot more about Renfield. We're just having things just. Just introduced and so be patient, be patient with Bram Stoker. Let him. Let him get there. Let. You're going to see what he's going to do. All right, now, Mina and Lucy then go to Whitby, which we know is where Dracula is planning to go is where his rented a house. So they're there and there is an old church.
- [55:30]
C
There are ruins there. I think they're Roman ruins. But there's. There are other kinds of ruins in Whitby. It's a very ancient. It has kind of an ancient feel to it.
- [55:42]
A
It's a cathedral town. I think there was a. During. I mean, in the Anglo Saxon period, there was a church synod there of some. Of some importance, if you've ever read Bede's Ecclesiastical History. But yeah, like some of the older, you know, church ruins to be found in England. I mean, you could. It. Whitby would be a good place to begin if that sort of thing interests you. So it's.
- [56:04]
C
Scarlet Mason had a conference there because the kids had all read about the. The Whitby. The ruins. So when they went to have their pneu conference, they had it in Whitby and the kids were so excited because they had read stories about these places.
- [56:21]
B
We should have a conference in Whitby.
- [56:23]
C
Oh, I'm all about Whitby right now. I've heard about it now five or six times in different places.
- [56:27]
B
Okay. Let's go.
- [56:29]
C
I think I meant to be in Whitby.
- [56:31]
B
I'm with you. Let's go. So they're so there. So there's the ruins of the church and they're. Their place to hang out and overlook things. Is a cemetery. And it's a cemetery of potential suicides. And that would have made it. My notes tell me. A potential place that would have attracted vampires. It would be unhallowed ground because you can't bury suicides in a. In a regular church.
- [56:57]
A
Right.
- [56:58]
B
So I think that this is a significant section. What do you. What stood out before? I tell you what I think is going on. What stood out to you guys in this section that you think might be playing into this overall narrative? Stoker's got. With modern world. Old world. I mean, they're in a place that's got Roman ruins. So you think they would have some old sensibilities about the modern age.
- [57:19]
A
And the relics of the past are always bumping up against one another. I guess that's just another instance of that.
- [57:25]
B
Cindy, anything strike you about that in the conversation with the old man?
- [57:29]
C
Yeah, Mr. Swales was very interesting. And he went through that whole list of people and had. He had the whole thing about, you know, where their bodies are going to be on the Day of Judgment. And this is ridiculous. They weren't even killed here, but here they are. And the mom didn't really even care about the son. But now, you know. I don't know. I really wasn't sure what to make of that, but I definitely thought it was probably significant. Well.
- [57:59]
B
So I spent some time thinking about what it could mean this morning, and I went back through and marked some passages. And he specifically, he said he's a debunker. Your favorite word, Cindy.
- [58:08]
C
Right. Right.
- [58:09]
B
Starts off saying, I don't believe in any of the legends and superstitions. Right. So ghosts and ghouls and goblins and vampire. I don't believe in any of that stuff. So that's modern England. Right. But then he also throws in religion with that. This is all ridiculous. You think that they're gonna pick up their graves in the Day of Judgment? Oh, this. This tombstone says waiting to be resurrected. That wasn't the truth. So. So it's an interesting kind of modern England scoffing at irrational religion and superstition. Kind of. If we could group that together.
- [58:44]
C
Yeah, I think so. Right.
- [58:47]
B
Almost like this faith is dead. The old ways are dead. And then there's this interesting thing later on in the next chapter when she sees him again. He's like, I'm old and I'm about to die. And that's just the way people talk who are about to face death. Death. Which I thought was a really interesting comment. Like modern man scoffs at religion and. And evil and everything, but really it's just us whistling past the grave kind of thing.
- [59:13]
C
But then he does die.
- [59:16]
B
And that's right when he says. He says, even I'm so old, I could die. Even now that wind blowing might be bringing my death. And it does.
- [59:23]
C
Yeah.
- [59:25]
A
In the circumstances of his death are, of course, strange ones, which are not fully.
- [59:29]
B
Not fully explained this.
- [59:32]
C
So again, it's starting to get weird.
- [59:36]
B
Starting to get weird. Well, unexplained phenomena is always a part of this kind of story. Right. When you're trying to press supernatural reality into the modern world. We're back to Dr. Seward's diary here. And I. I'm.
- [59:52]
C
This is. This is another section that's a little gruesome. And boys probably love this section.
- [59:58]
B
Well, this is such a good section. But. But what's interesting to me is that he's seeing this stuff through the eyes of a scientist and he. It's very clinical and. And he's going to use science to try to unravel every mystery. Like, if I could just get in there and examine his brain, I could figure out what's wrong with. This is a sort of specimen, this. That kind of thing.
- [60:17]
A
Yep.
- [60:20]
B
Why not? Advance science in its most difficult and vital aspect, the knowledge of the brain. Perhaps Stoker's saying it's less the brain and more the soul. People need to be.
- [60:29]
A
Stoker introduces a lot of stuff in this. This whole section with only partial explanations, we have no idea why Renfield is mad, even.
- [60:38]
C
Right.
- [60:39]
B
We're gonna find out more about stuff.
- [60:40]
C
But we don't know anything about Renfield at all. Right. Like, he's just where he came from, how he ended up there.
- [60:47]
B
I think that in this section of the chapter, the emphasis is much more on Dr. Seward.
- [60:52]
C
Right.
- [60:53]
B
Later, we'll find out more about Renfield.
- [60:55]
A
He's the kind of narrator who tells us a lot about himself without really talking about himself.
- [60:59]
B
Yes. Yes. And of course, we know a lot about him that he says he's heartbroken and he thinks the answer is to throw himself into work, which is a very Victorian kind of my duty.
- [61:08]
A
True. Sure. Absolutely.
- [61:09]
B
Jonathan Hargit's also trying to cope with things by throwing himself into his work, which is this. Yeah.
- [61:14]
C
Is there the sense that. Because we don't know what happened to Dracula. And we have Renfield here that maybe that he is Dracula somehow in this mental home. I mean, I know the answer, but. But is that.
- [61:28]
B
No, but there is. Good. Well, we'll see what. What he represents.
- [61:32]
C
Yeah.
- [61:34]
B
We also find out here that Lucy is starting to sleepwalk again, a habit she has had since a child. All right, now, chapter seven. This is a great, great chapter. We get this storm which is bringing in Dracula. Now, we know from the Jonathan Harker chapters that Whitby is where Dracula is going. This is it. And that this weird ship is full of nothing but boxes of dirt. So we know Dracula is on here.
- [62:05]
A
A ghost ship.
- [62:06]
B
It's a ghost ship. Which, of course, immediately made me think of the rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.
- [62:10]
C
Yes, it's definitely. Yes, definitely.
- [62:13]
B
Mr. Banks, tell us about the rhyme, the rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, because I think there's something going on here with this. This.
- [62:18]
A
So that's a. That's one of the more famous narrative poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in which this old, seemingly crazy sailor accosts a guest who is on his way to a wedding outside of a church and tells him a story about how once he was on a voyage at sea, he gratuitously murdered an albatross, which is a bird of good fortune, with his crossbow. And that. That sin against nature brought down the curse of nature on the ship. It drifted into the doldrums and the sailors on board start to die. And anyway, it's the.
- [62:58]
B
The whole ship is cursed.
- [63:00]
A
Right, Exactly.
- [63:02]
C
It also is. Reminds you. And he brings that up later, the Casabianca, the maudlin poem.
- [63:08]
A
Oh, the boy on the burning deck.
- [63:10]
C
Yeah, yeah. So, yes, yes. He stood alone on the burning deck.
- [63:13]
B
I was also reminded. I was also reminded of Odysseus tied to the mast, trying to get past the siren. He ties himself to the. To the wheel.
- [63:23]
A
Ah, very good. Yes.
- [63:24]
B
With the crucifix there. So one of the things that's going on in the rhyme of the Ancient Mariner is that an albatross is a Christ figure. And so it's a. It. The ship is cursed because if it's offense against Christ, and of course, this ship is bringing the dragon to England and it is cursed. And the brilliant contrast here. Okay, so the, The. The. Well, as often the case, the lower classes are associated with superstition and believing in things like, you know, demons and ghosts and vampires. And the. The more educated people. Just like you would have in a movie today, the more educated people think that's irrational. So you see that happening on the boat. The sailors are immediately like, nope, crossing ourselves. Something's not right here. But the. The officers are like, nope, no. There's got to be a reasonable explanation here. Eventually the captain thinks the reasonable explanation is that the first mate has been a serial killer and killed everybody and then killed himself. And then killed himself, only to discover that that was not true. The crucifix does save him, though. I mean, he dies, but he doesn't die from vampire attack.
- [64:33]
A
He dies and he dies heroically the ship into harbor, even though he doesn't survive himself.
- [64:38]
B
Yeah, he dies from. From natural causes. The contrast here between that and then when they land is just fantastic, because we know the ship has a vampire on it. And all of the details to paperwork and regulations and laws. And who. Who is now the legal owner of this dirt? And then the SPCA wanting the dog was too.
- [65:02]
A
Is that like the Society for the. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals?
- [65:08]
B
Yes, the Royal Society for the Prevention of the Cruelty to animals, founded in 1824, wants to come get the dog. And the dog is Dracula.
- [65:15]
A
Is that organization that old?
- [65:17]
B
Can you believe that?
- [65:17]
A
I had no idea.
- [65:18]
C
Wow.
- [65:19]
B
I just. That made me laugh. So we're gonna find out in this book that Dracula can take many forms, and one of which is a dog. And so he. He's. He's manifesting as a dog. And so when the. The ship docks, the. The, you know, the dog comes out, and then the SPCA wants to get him. That is so brilliant that. That, I mean, this modernity, right? They're like. And this dog is. Is attacking other dogs and killing them. And the town's like, we want to.
- [65:45]
A
Oh, no, we're gonna say it's old yellow. Yeah.
- [65:49]
B
And it's. It's like Stephen King. And what's the dog with the Cujo? Yeah, it's like, oh, the SPCA is here to make sure you don't hurt C. That is such a good detail. It's so British.
- [66:01]
C
Because the British people will. Are so against cruelty to animals, unlike us, who are for it.
- [66:08]
B
Yeah, don't hurt the dragon. And of course, that people assume that there was a madness on the. On the ship and all of that, and. And the storm and the hell and the tip. And the reporter.
- [66:22]
A
The reporter is, like, very much a prosaic beat reporter who's mostly interested in, like, the property dispute questions which the arrival of the ship naturally produces. And he says, the Russian. You know, the Russian consul came to take charge of the ship and its contents today. And like, it's, like, it's kind of a fun. It's a humorously boring sort of narration in a lot of ways, because he doesn't understand what he's talking about. That's what's so great.
- [66:48]
B
This is modern, kind of a dispassionate, rational reporting of the facts contrasted with the, the, you know, the, the, the journal pages in the bottle where he's like, it's a fiend, it's a monster. Hell itself is coming upon me. Yeah.
- [67:03]
C
And the journal starts out so matter of fact also. But as it goes, it gets more and more.
- [67:11]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [67:12]
A
And then there were none, you know.
- [67:13]
B
Exactly. So we've got the storm and the fog is moving with them. So Dracula is associated with these natural disturbances and he seems to have the power to. To stir them up. We saw that earlier with Jonathan Harker here. I'm not going to tell you what this means just yet. I'm just going to observe, however, that this is an image of Dracula on a boat who starts a storm and commands the elements. That is contrasted, of course, with Jesus, who commands the sea and the wind and puts an end to a storm while on a boat. So we have a few things going on there and we will be developing this idea more later, looking at Dracula and Christ and how those two are interplaying. Just. I'll make one little more thought about that in, in ancient mythology. In Canaanite mythology, for example, in Babylonian mythology, the evil character in those myths is a chaos monster. Slash dragons. A chaos dragon. And that monster is associated with water. And so there's always the thought that the water. So, okay, so. So Genesis, God divides the water in the land and partitions it out, right? So the chaos monster is the water. And the water's always threatening to come back over the land. And, and there's some of that same imagery in the Old Testament. As, you know, Moses is writing and he's writing it, framing it in a way that the God of the Hebrews is greater than the gods of the Canaanites. Very much like what you see in the scene. Is it, is it Dagon? Is that the. Is that the gods? Yeah, where they. They bring the Ark of the Covenant in there. And, you know, it keeps knocking, knocking the idol over. That kind of image of our God can beat your God is all through the Old Testament, if you, if you understand Canaanite mythology, you. You catch that repeatedly. Really, it's just fantastic. Those are some of my favorite stories. And so One of the things. So that this is like this idea of water as the chaos monster and the chaos dragon. And in the midst, he's fighting different things. But the way that that shows up in, in Christian imagery is you see Christ in charge of water. He's turning water into wine. He's calming the storm, he's walking on water. Those are all images of him defeating the dragon, the chaos dragon of water. And so you see, Dracula here is in mysteriously, supernaturally in control of the water in this very opposite of Christ image, he is stirred up the storm while he's on the boat. So as we continue to read, we'll look to see what other kind of interesting parallels are going on there. This book is so good. It's so good. I'm so glad we decided to, to, to do this book. I'm excited to see how this is going to come together. Any final comments, gang?
- [70:13]
C
Well, also just. I was just thinking about Swales one more last time before he died. So he had, like, made. He had, by his own words, basically said he was a pagan. And he is the one who falls. Falls to the. To drag first in the land.
- [70:30]
B
Oh, he's the Jack of his first English victim. Oh, good, good, good. The guy who was saying, I don't believe in any of this.
- [70:36]
C
Yeah, but.
- [70:36]
B
And he doesn't believe in religion and.
- [70:38]
C
He doesn't have a crucifix, obviously, because he does. He thinks they're silly. But anyway, he. He's the first victim.
- [70:48]
B
Oh, that's good. Oh, that's very good. That's good. This next set of chapters is going to be really good. But if you're weirded out at all by Dracula, Cindy's right. There's not going to be anything worse than what you saw with the three. Three. The three vampire girls. That's. That's the most. That's the sexiest scene in this book. I'll just put it like that.
- [71:05]
C
It's. It's a little Monty Pythonesque.
- [71:09]
B
It's voluptuous. That's one of Bram Stoker's favorite words. It's voluptuous. It's the most voluptuous scene in the whole book. So you'll be fine. You'll be fine. But hopefully you're getting excited now seeing some of these images and, oh, there's so much more to come. Okay, well, meet us back here next week. Same China, same Bat Channel, same Bat Time. And we are going to cover chapters eight through 11. And boy, there's going to be a nice, good chunk of things happening there, some new characters introduced and we'll have to think about what they mean and, and how the interplay of all of these characters, what's going on here. So until then, stick around to the end of this podcast. Mr. Banks has got a selection from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner here. Whenever I teach the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner in my classes, my students are always so excited to be like, ghost ship. That's Pirates of the Caribbean. No comment. Banks.
- [72:03]
A
No, no, that's. That's quite funny.
- [72:05]
C
I was just trying to decide if you should have said Caribbean.
- [72:11]
B
All the stories are talking to each other, even the Disney movies. All right, gang, I will see you all back here next week. And stick around. Mr. Banks has got a poem for us. And until then, keep crafting your literary life because stories, not vampires, will save the world.
- [72:26]
A
Huzzah.
- [72:38]
B
Thank you for listening to the Literary Life Podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon 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 Cindy@morningtimeformoms.com 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. 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.
- [73:23]
A
A selection from the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Alone, alone, all, all alone, alone on a wide, wide sea, and never a saint took pity on my soul in agony. The many men, so beautiful, and they all dead did lie, and a thousand thousand slimy things lived on, and so did I. I looked upon the rotting sea and drew my eyes away. I looked upon the rotting deck and there the dead men lay. I looked to heaven and tried to pray, but or even a prayer had gushed. A wicked whisper came and made my heart as dry as dust.