#but then... I don't know Dracula nearly as well as I do Tolkien

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

re: the text's sort of feints towards darkness, i was thinking about this in the context of the burning question, Why Do No Dracula Adaptations Bear Any Meaningful Resemblance To The 1897 Novel Dracula By Bram Stoker, actually - how part of why it feels so incredibly like a time capsule of an extremely specific historical moment is that it kind of straddles two literary landscapes, both of which were in the air at the time of its publication, but one of which was sort of on its way out. the horror of dracula feels very modern (and the gore of it seems to have been particularly so at the time - in this selection of contemporary reviews, both admirers and detractors note that the book is maybe the grossest thing they've ever read), and of course the text is itself enamored of modernity, but the characters are, like, incredibly old-fashioned: if the plot is the nineteenth century up-to-date, the cast is the nineteenth century with a vengeance. i don't just mean their beliefs or behaviors, although, like, yeah - i mean that there's a kind of thoroughly sweet wholesomeness to them at their core that i don't think ever really stopped being written but that does nearly completely drop out of, like, The Anglophone Literary Canon not long after dracula was published (and that "nearly" is covering both for the fact that i would not consider myself particularly well read, and for the fact that some might consider tolkien canonical).

which, i mean, some (a lot) of this is just about the development of mass market paperbacks and the emergence over time of genre writing as Genre Writing, etc. and some of the dracula adaptation thing is definitely just that one guy made a movie a particular way that people thought slapped and subsequent adaptations have to a large degree been adaptations of that more than of the novel itself. but i do keep thinking about nathaniel hawthorne's midcentury complaint that america was given over to "a damned mob of scribbling women," about what a college professor of mine called the "masculinization" of the novel in the early twentieth century, which the short ta-nehisi coates post i found to remind of me the exact hawthorne phrase also reminds me is about the novel as a form moving out of the realm of trash and into respectability, and thinking, you know - through a certain lens, the lens of What Is Gender, Like, Culturally... for a book about 700 guys doing science and adventures, dracula is kind of a girly novel! it's florid, it's sentimental, it's a story about a battle with evil but somehow curiously a very domestic novel, too - so much of it is just people in houses talking! it is quite literally a tale of women's work, in that the in-text explanation for the existence of the text itself is the work done by a scribbling woman. and so i do kind of wonder if that's a factor in why, despite the book's ongoing popularity and the character's incredible fame, people seem not inclined to pick up what stoker was putting down when creating their own dracula tales: they want to make something that is kind of dudelier than dracula, despite being so much a book about so many dudes doing dude stuff, actually is.

#it's homophobia is what it is. j/k. but am i? i am. but am i? i am. but am [blogger is taken off stage by a hook] #i have sort of galaxy brained myself into believing that patriarchy is what's keeping us from a good dracula adaptation #which i think is a symptom of how this book has made me insane #but. just updating you that that's where ii'm at. #blood pressure warning on the coates piece for wanting to murder vs naipaul with your bare hands btw #dracula daily