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#talia schaffer
faintingheroine · 1 year
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From Talia Schaffer’s Romance’s Rival
@cor-ardens Interesting that Behlül is both types of suitor for Nihal
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atundratoadstool · 2 years
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I have seen some writing about how Dracula was partly written as a reaction to Oscar Wilde’s trial and was wondering about your thoughts on this?
So... we know now that Stoker had begun to take notes for Dracula (including the rudimentary outlines of one of the novel's iconic homoerotic scenes) as early as 1890s, five years before Wilde's trial. We have the dates in his notes. The idea that Dracula was written solely in reaction to the Wilde trial was popularized by Talia Schaffer in her 1994 essay "A Wilde Desire Overtook Me: The Homoerotic History of Dracula," in which she made a good hypothesis as to what might have been a generative historical moment for Dracula before scholars had ready access to his personal papers. I think because of the impact of her (very thorough) research, the influence of Wilde on Stoker sometimes gets overplayed... a little.
Overall though, at this point, I think it would be foolhardy to deny that Wilde influenced Dracula at all. Stoker was a frequent guest at the house of Wilde's family during the 1870s before he left for London to work with Henry Irving. He made allusions to Wilde's father in his first published novel (The Snake's Pass) and there has been some speculation by Paul Murray that Lady Wilde's folkloric research might have helped to inspire elements of his supernatural fiction in general. Stoker also stole Oscar Wilde's girlfriend in 1878, swooping in to marry renowned Dublin beauty Florence Balcombe who had been seeing Wilde romantically for two years. This happened quickly enough that Florence still needed to return tokens and letters to Oscar following her marriage, including the gift of a golden crucifix that he had given to her the prior Christmas. So yeah. Bram and Oscar were close acquaintances who had a not insignificant amount of personal drama between them in which a key object was a crucifix. I don't think you can fail to see how there might be something there.
And while we do not have anything 100% concrete as regards Stoker's sexuality and we don't know what his personal emotions about Wilde's trial were (he was remarkably silent about the event at the time, despite his friends and associates being among Wilde's staunch supporters), I think it is very hard in the year 2022 to assert that Bram Stoker was unquestionably heterosexual. Stoker famously wrote to Walt Whitman and discussed his wishes for a man to be "father, and brother and wife to his soul." He recounted rapturously falling into hysterics and becoming "unmanned" when Henry Irving read poetry at him, and however you read his relationship to the actor it was definitely the one that dominated his life. He wrote of himself in the one extant personal journal of his we have that he felt he had "a woman's heart." His non-Dracula work includes a non-fiction book about "Imposters" that seems to include disproportionate amount of historical figures that would register to modern readers as trans. While none of these stand as conclusive evidence, the fact of the matter is that when you are looking to queer history in the 1890s, you will not always find conclusive evidence.
My take is that while the Wilde trial was not the inspiration for Dracula, I do not think you can look to Stoker's biography and the contents of Dracula without seeing the influence of Bram's probable queerness. As a queer person existing in the 1890s, he would have been influenced by the Wilde trial. Full stop. I will say that I think it is a little short-sighted to frame Dracula as being just about the Wilde trial or even predominantly about the Wilde trial when there are so very many other aspects of Bram's life and the historical moment that have clearly left their impression on the text, but at this point, I am willing to say that the Wilde trial is a part of the fabric that makes up Dracula.
[As always, I confess to being a little bit behind the cutting edge of Stoker scholarship these days, and if somebody more plugged in to works regarding this since 2016ish has cause to correct me, please do so. I understand that David J. Skal's biography takes the stance that Wilde and Dracula are very much interrelated, but I have yet to read it. I also confess to being an academic who knows through Wilde mostly through Stoker, so people whose primary expertise is with Wilde may have insights that I am missing.]
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astarion-dekarios · 1 year
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I’m not one of those who suggest that Dracula is wholly based on Oscar Wilde, but Mina’s particular phrasing in today’s chapter is one where I’m able to locate him, or at least the grotesque, “monstrous” version of him that was disseminated during and after his trial.
She writes: “I suppose one ought to pity any thing so hunted as is the Count. That is just it: this Thing is not human - not even beast.”
I’ve always found this language striking-- the instinct to feel sympathy with the “monster”, and then the rationalization of his treatment by leaning fully into that monstrosity. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that the cognitive dissonance here probably mirrors Stoker’s own feelings about Wilde’s persecution-- feeling sympathy for him, as a friend and someone who recognizes himself as of the same ‘kind’-- but then rejecting those feelings of sympathy and leaning into the image of him as a monster. Hence his later writings that homosexual authors should be imprisoned.
The “not human, but not beast” language also calls to mind other ways that gay men were seen as not fully inhabiting humanity, or gender. Stoker himself in a letter to Whitman writes: “We do not allow to the human what we overlook in other animals.”
And, as Talia Schaffer points out in her article “The Homoerotic History of Dracula”: Turn-of-the-century 'inversion' theory considered homosexuals neither male nor female, but, in Edward Carpenter's phrase, the "intermediate sex," inhabiting a no-man's land like the Undead who were neither dead nor alive.
She also connects the language of “purification” that is used when staking Lucy, and particularly the idea of restoring her body and soul, to the language that was used to describe Wilde’s imprisonment. Oscar’s brother Willie wrote to Bram stoker in a letter appealing to his sympathy: “ He is taking his punishment [...] 'with manly fortitude', & from my heart I believe this thing will help to purify him body & soul.”
Just food for thought.
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count-skribula · 1 month
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i saw that you were welcoming infodumps that relate to dracula! i have a not so fun fact about bram stoker and oscar wilde to share :)
so. we know for a fact that wilde was invited to a bunch of dinners at the lyceum theatre. we know stoker wrote those invitations, and it's overwhelmingly probable that he was also responsible for making the guest list. we have tons of evidence showing that stoker was pretty close friends with wilde's parents. basically, we may not know the specifics of their relationship-- we have no solid evidence that justifies saying they were close-- but we do know they knew each other. they hung out in the same circles, their families were friends, stoker presumably chose to invite wilde to all his cool club dinners, and wilde certainly kept in touch with florence.
wilde also adored both henry irving and ellen terry, the leading players of the lyceum, so he found a lot of excuses to visit the theatre. he and stoker shared a passion for walt whitman's poetry. they went to the same university, where stoker recruited wilde to the philosophical & historical society-- though wilde was never a particularly active member. all this to say that wilde was definitely, inarguably, someone who had a presence in stoker's life.
in stoker's only work that can be even remotely considered autobiograpical, which is actually a biography of his boss + allegedly close friend henry irving (titled personal reminiscences of henry irving; wouldn't recommend it, it's not exciting reading), he never mentions wilde. not once. not even when he just straight up lists all the famous people who visited the lyceum theatre.
the book was published after wilde's conviction for gross indecency. there's no record of stoker voicing any opinion about the trials or the conviction-- no public outrage, no public mourning. nothing. wilde's brother wrote to him about the whole ordeal, but there's no evidence stoker ever replied. ellen terry was vocally supportive of wilde. author hall caine, to whom Dracula is dedicated (under the petname hommy-beg), expressed shock and grief and moral outrage. but as far as we can tell, stoker said nothing.
to me, that's one of the loudest silences in history. the only indication of an opinion we ever get is that some years later, he published some articles arguing for the moral benefits of censorship of plays and novels.
florence kept the letters wilde had written her till her dying day, though. apparently her family was convinced she could have prevented the tragedy if she had just married wilde instead of stoker, which is..... certainly some kind of take lmao
(most of this info is taken from Barbara Belford's biography on Stoker plus Talia Schaffer's article on the influence Wilde had on Dracula. they both end up... idk, sort of trying to psychoanalyze a guy who's been dead for a century in a pretty invasive way that kinda skeeved me out? but all the claims i'm repeating here are pretty well substantiated by historical sources, which both authors were very good at tracking down. i know i probably don't need to cite my fucking sources in a tumblr ask or explain why i'm choosing to rely on flawed sources but it's the grad school brainworms i can't help myself)
Don’t apologize for citing sources I love you for it ❤️
Also that’s SUPER interesting, there just seems like a lot of uncovered bts drama happening with stoker and wilde’s relationship but like you said so much of it is just speculation and it’s easy to slip into territory of disrespecting dead people by theorizing too much about their personal life. But it is a really fascinating subject to learn about
And I’m realizing asking for info dumps is an amazing way to get through the off season so YESSSS THANK YOU!!!
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mariacallous · 1 month
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In Communities of Care, Talia Schaffer explores Victorian fictional representations of care communities, small voluntary groups that coalesce around someone in need. Drawing lessons from Victorian sociality, Schaffer proposes a theory of communal care and a mode of critical reading centered on an ethics of care.
In the Victorian era, medical science offered little hope for cure of illness or disability, and chronic invalidism and lengthy convalescences were common. Small communities might gather around afflicted individuals to minister to their needs and palliate their suffering. Communities of Care examines these groups in the novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, and Charlotte Yonge, and studies the relationships that they exemplify. How do carers become part of the community? How do they negotiate status? How do caring emotions develop? And what does it mean to think of care as an activity rather than a feeling? Contrasting the Victorian emphasis on community and social structure with modern individualism and interiority, Schaffer’s sympathetic readings draw us closer to the worldview from which these novels emerged. Schaffer also considers the ways in which these models of carework could inform and improve practice in criticism, in teaching, and in our daily lives.
Through the lens of care, Schaffer discovers a vital form of communal relationship in the Victorian novel. Communities of Care also demonstrates that literary criticism done well is the best care that scholars can give to texts.
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magdaclaire · 2 years
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you ever wanna cry about historical homosexuality
[ID: two lines from the wikipedia article on Dracula from beneath the section on major themes: gender and sexuality. it says, beginning in a sentence fragment: “to sex and sexuality. Bram Stoker himself was possibly homosexual; Talia Schaffer points to intensely homoerotic letters sent by him to the American poet Walt Whitman. Stoker began writing the novel one month following the imprisonment of his friend Oscar Wilde for homosexuality.”]
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crocnotes · 3 years
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"Harker sees himself as a woman writing a love-letter, and as a desperate conspirator penning secret shorthand epistles (D, 36). But the physical aspect of his epistolary desires seems nonexistent. Dracula holds the shorthand letter and envelope in the flame "till they were consumed" and steals "every scrap of paper" that Harker possessed (D, 42, 43). Throughout the novel, characters find enjoyment in writing, only to find the material on which they inscribe-their waxen phonographic cylinders, diary books, and telegrams-burned, mislaid, or misdirected, as if Stoker needs to salvage the pleasure of writing by destroying the sensuous experience of the document itself."
- "A Wilde Desire Took Me": The Homoerotic History of Dracula by Talia Schaffer
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jackknife-roach · 2 years
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reading about bram stoker
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[Talia] Schaffer’s discussion of paranoid versus reparative reading revitalizes the latter category, showing how it can be an incisive methodology, despite being often caricatured as uncritical appreciation. Likening paranoid reading to “the diagnostic medical gaze” that flattens individuality, reparative reading becomes a form of caregiving that cares for the text without necessarily caring about it. Repair, she writes, creates a bridge to the past by inhabiting older modes while also noting their breakdowns and divergences. “If we want to do reparative reading, then,” she writes, “we need to embrace a carefully attuned relation with each particular text in which we can value what is broken, be patient with the past, and repair it to survive for future others to enjoy.”
Rachael Scarborough King, Caring Versus Caregiving: On Talia Schaffer’s “Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction”
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gellavonhamster · 3 years
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“Though Stoker had planned Dracula for a long time, it was in August of 1895 that he began writing it into notebooks. In particular, Jonathan Harker's experiences at Castle Dracula "were written ... in the first vivid flow of inspiration." These first five chapters read as a nightmarish meeting between Harker and Dracula, who are fictionalized projections of Stoker and Wilde. Like Stoker, whose name his echoes, Harker is a married man, a solicitor who has not practiced law, and a younger man loyally working for a beloved older man. Dracula, however, does not produce such a straightforward identification. He represents not so much Oscar Wilde as the complex of fears, desires, secrecies, repressions, and punishments that Wilde's name evoked in 1895. Dracula is Wilde-as-threat, a complex cultural construction not to be confused with the historical individual Oscar Wilde. Dracula represents the ghoulishly inflated version of Wilde produced by Wilde's prosecutors; the corrupting, evil, secretive, manipulative, magnetic devourer of innocent boys. Furthermore, Dracula also carries the weight of Stoker’s imaginative identification with Wilde. For Stoker writes Dracula’s plot to allow his surrogate Harker to experience imprisonment, just as Wilde languished in gaol. Thus Stoker manages to speak both from the closet and from the open; he simultaneously explores Wilde-as-monster, and identifies with the real Wilde’s pain. He writes as a man victimized by Wilde’s trial, and yet as a man who sympathizes with Wilde’s victimization. Within Dracula, this binary opposition supplants the cruder opposition between closeting and coming out.”
Talia Schaffer, “‘A Wilde Desire Took Me’: The Homoerotic History of Dracula”
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orangerosebush · 3 years
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I feel like I reread "A Wilde Desire Took Me": The Homoerotic History of Dracula" by Talia Schaffer like, once every few months. It's so interesting, both from a historical and a literary standpoint.
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faintingheroine · 2 years
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“Because Heathcliff adheres to the older lineage model, he sees people as static objects. He has no model of human development, in spite of the fact that this subject forms the heart of the nineteenth-century realist novel, including his own. Heathcliff assumes that Hareton will “never be able to emerge from his bathos of coarseness, and ignorance” (219). Linton he regards as “my property,” a dynastic guarantor who gives Heathcliff “the triumph of seeing my descendent fairly lord of their estates; my child hiring their children.” Linton’s own wishes are irrelevant, and his personality is positively distasteful to his father (207, 208). Heathcliff ’s tendency to regard individuals as property gets reinforced during his years away from Wuthering Heights. Whether he went into the army, as Nelly guesses, or got involved in the slave trade, as some critics surmise, he had an experience of seeing powerless bodies treated as objects, their physical suffering demanded as instruments for a ruler’s will.”
(From “Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction” by Talia Schaffer)
It is wrong to regard Heathcliff as a purely revolutionary and unconventional figure. He adopts the system’s values in a parodic way.
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atundratoadstool · 2 years
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hi!! i hope its okay to message, im a second year student currently working on a piece on queer vampirism, and as tumblr's resident drac expert i was wondering if you would be able to point me towards any articles or resources you know of? thanks so much !!!
Thanks for reaching out. I feel my expertise is--sadly--rather rusty this point now that I've spent several years researching Eliot and Thackeray instead of keeping abreast of cutting edge vampire/Dracula scholarship. However, the essay that often gets cited as one of the big starting points re: queer readings of Dracula is Christopher Craft's "'Kiss Me With Those Blood Red Lips': Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula." I would warn--of course--that it is a starting point and that one can and probably should look beyond Craft's reading in approaching the text. Another place I’d consider starting is with Talia Schaffer's "'A Wilde Desire Took Me': The Homoerotic History of Dracula." While several of the biographical claims it offers are questionable or obsolete in light of more recent archival evidence (Stoker was certainly formulating key homoerotic scenes of Dracula before the Wilde trial), she's still a significant voice in the criticism that looks to situating Dracula in relation to questions regarding Stoker's own sexuality.
Those are two very basic and oft-cited pieces of secondary criticism, and I am not in full agreement with either. If you want some starting points for primary sources from Stoker's corpus, I can probably be a lot more useful. It might very much be worth your while to look at Stoker's novel The Man, which is not a very good novel but is deeply concerned with bending gender roles before reasserting them in ruthlessly essentialist ways (It also--coincidentally or not--has a lot in common with The Well of Loneliness). His Famous Imposters (or Bram Stoker's Big Book of Cross Dressing He Does or Does Not Approve Of) is also worth a gander. Lastly, if you haven't read it already, please look up Bram Stoker's heartfelt fanmail to Walt Whitman. You will not regret it.
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acdhw · 4 years
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At the time of particular tension between France and England, following the French alliance with Russia in 1894... Decadence was the inverse: it was French, urban, excessive, contagious and parasitic, vampirically draining the nation’s life blood. That Bram Stoker began Dracula in 1895 is thus hardly surprising, and Stoker’s ambivalence towards Wilde and the decadent menace is evident in the text. Talia Schaffer shows how a careful reading of the dates and detail in the novel indicates a close association with Wilde’s experiences and aspects of Stoker’s own biography, particularly his intense friendships with men. An analogy between the novel and contemporary critiques of decadence and degeneracy is certainly compelling: the novel imagines a foreign invader with ambivalent desires, prowling the city for victims, existing apart from the domestic arena and potentially sapping the health of the new generation. This figure is also alluring, however, and Stoker seems sometimes to be in the thrall of the sexually transgressive undercurrent of the work. The novel uncovers the potential for sexual transgression and disorder in the city, and to an extent revels in it.
—London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885-1914, by Matt Cook
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xshayarsha · 5 years
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--- Talia Schaffer, "A Wilde Desire Took Me": The Homoerotic History of Dracula.
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cooperhewitt · 6 years
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Vesuvius in Silk
Author: Lisa VanDenBerghe
In celebration of the second annual New York Textile Month, members of the Textile Society of America will author Object of the Day for the month of September. A non-profit professional organization of scholars, educators, and artists in the field of textiles, TSA provides an international forum for the exchange and dissemination of information about textiles worldwide.
Designer Johann Friedrich Netto (German, active 1795–1809) included professionally stitched samples in his pattern book Zeichen-Mahler und Stickerbuch zur Selbstbelehrung für Damen, Zweiter Theil, published in 1798. This book, along with his first volume of embroidery patterns, published in 1795, and a later book of designs for knitting, all follow a format of presenting the designs in both color and black and white. It was an unusual feature for a needlework pattern book to include actual embroidery.
This silk and metal-thread embroidery sample matches the first stitched sample found in copies of Netto’s 1798 book, which is held by both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Winterthur Museum. [1] While it is possible that one of Netto’s readers stitched this piece using his pattern, the fact that it is nearly identical in execution and materials to the ones within the extant pattern books suggests that this one became separated from its binding. Netto’s use of mixed media and hand coloring would have made these high-end books desirable to collectors. Even so, in this case, use would have taken a toll (ie: removing the black and white pages to use for transferring the pattern to the ground fabric), resulting in loose leaves like this sampler, and explaining the rarity of the embroidery books today.
The colors of the silk threads have faded, and the silver threads and paillettes (flat sequins) have tarnished, diminishing the shading effects and details. The smoke at the peak of the volcano is painted on the ground fabric. This representation of Mount Vesuvius erupting is similar to landscape paintings of the end of the eighteenth century, such as Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson’s A View of Vesuvius from Naples, 1793-94.
The tragedy of Pompeii captured the imagination then as now, and the art of embroidery has always reflected the broader artistic tastes of the period. Traditionally considered women’s domestic craft, the popularity of realistic pictorial embroidery brought unusual public attention to the needle-artwork of Mary Linwood, an embroider active in England between 1790 to 1820. [2] Linwood was known for her reproductions of Old Master paintings, including landscapes, which she recreated in stunning detail in wool embroidery. [3]
[1] Johann Friedrich Netto, Zeichen-Mahler und Stickerbuch zur Selbstbelehrung für Damen, Zweiter Theil (Leipzig: Voss und compagnie, 1798). Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession no. 32.121.3. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/354466. Winterthur Museum, Call no. NK9205 N47z 1798 F. http://thistle-threads.blogspot.com/2014/11/help-winterthur-acquire-wonderful.html [2] Talia Schaffer, Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 39. [3] Mary Linwood (1755-1845), landscape after painting by Salvator Rosa (1615-1753), Victoria and Albert Museum, 1790-1819, Museum no. T.635-1995. No image available.
Lisa VandenBerghe is an independent researcher interested in women’s domestic craft with a focus on needlework pattern books produced between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
from Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum https://ift.tt/2DbDYYb via IFTTT
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