Why Garlic? I Asked A While Back And Today I Read This:

Why garlic? I asked a while back and today I read this:

“Straining the Limits of Interpretation: Bram Stoker's Dracula and Its Eastern European Contexts” by Ludmilla Kostova, published 2007

So...yeah. I did not see the phallic aspect at all, but now that you mention it...

In the article, Kostova argues that part of what's unsettling about Dracula is that he is both masculine and feminine. The efforts to defeat him ultimately force him into full feminization through staking (I hope that's not a spoiler at this point but I'll tag for it just in case).

Also fyi if you want to read the article, be warned, it does spoil something we haven't run into yet reading Dracula Daily.

Jonathan Harker: [Slashes at Dracula with a kukri knife]

Dracula: Haker is…alive? Harker is vengeful? Harker is after my blood? I am running away. I am shipping my little dirt box and going back to Transylvania to ask how you escaped. I can no longer thrive in this city.

I canNOT be the only one who is CONVINCED Quincey must be played by Jensen Ackles in the next adaptation, right? Just think of him delivering THAT LINE fjjgjfhehdjfjjvjjhgf

I do not, I confess, recall much of anything about Renfield in either of the adaptations of Dracula I have encountered. But I'm pretty sure he wasn't beaten to death as he attempted to defend Mina.

I am flabbergasted.

In the school play I was in, he was comic relief and survived. In Coppola's movie... I don't remember. Does anyone know what happens to him? Does he sacrifice himself for Mina??

I'm so totally floored.

I always thought he was an evil character. He wants to eat cats ffs. I did NOT see this coming.

"Alas, but that sentence is a puddle; is it not?"

Even Van Helsing can't make sense of his own speech. 🤦

I've been fiddling with a Dracula-adjacent story idea and I won't say much about that just yet bc who knows whether it'll develop. In any case I was pondering the whole "adaptations make Lucy out to be a lascivious and willing victim" thing, and puzzling over where that comes from.

And granted, the obvious answer is that Stoker describes Vamp!Lucy as voluptuous and seductive.

I'm not sure I'm going to be able to put this idea into words that make sense, so please bear with me.

I was thinking about having a character see Lucy at her window not long before the wolf incident, and I was imagining how to describe the look in Lucy's eyes. Grief and fear, but overlaid with profound weariness, much like the eyes of sex workers the character knows in the dark alleys of London, who've been dealing with predators like Jack the Ripper since forever.

This made me contemplate the ways Lucy's life is both very different from a London sex worker (she has the privilege of wealth, for one thing) but also how it is similar (she has very limited agency).

And that's when I thought of how the adaptations (Coppola is my main one) have made her out to be "the devil's whore." And I thought, "Huh, it's funny, it's like they think sex workers enjoy the sex they sell."*

(*I know some sex workers do, however my guess is that that was rarely the case among impoverished sex workers of the time. I'm pro-SW and have no intention of generalizing, however.)

And that's when the idea I had came. That's exactly it. These people are mostly male, I'm assuming, though who knows maybe not always. They think people (women for simplicity's sake since I think male and trans SWs add another dimension I'm not confident in discussing right now) who sell sex must enjoy it, bc they *need* that to be true. Coppola et al. believe Lucy is a whore (their word) who wants sex because all whores must want sex because if they don't that's just too awful to contemplate. They fantasize about these women and if the women aren't into it the fantasy doesn't work anymore.

Of course there are those who like the idea of it being bad for SWs too, but we're not dealing with them here.

I hope I'm making sense. Let me try to sum up.

I think Coppola and people like him want Lucy to be a whore because it's titillating and they believe whores must want sex (and in her case, Dracula) because otherwise their fantasy can't survive the implications. SW must be willing, eager even, for it to be hot. So they throw out pure Lucy not bc she made the shocking comment about wanting to marry three men (they can see just as well as we can that it came from a place of wanting to make everyone happy, not a place of frivolity or lust) but bc she won't fit with the fantasy.

I wonder if that was like, obvious to everyone else? To me it was a realization.