Dracula

Damn - October's just a week old, and already I'm posting my third "horror" story. Will I have any left once the Halloween season kicks into high gear? (Granted, the first was just a book in which people lived forever, and weren't necessarily zombies or even monsters. But, still, the cover had the Grim Reaper on it. Good enough, right?) I tried to read Dracula two years ago, in college, but within the first ten pages or so it became evident that this was yet another Victorian England novel with stuffy prose and too many words in general. I decided to set it aside for a later time. However, having now read through this surprisingly sexually-charged vampire classic, I really need to give some overdue credit ...to Twilight and True Blood. Those and other modern day vampire franchises may be campy and way over the top, but they've taken some of the same "vampires and sex" parallels made by Stoker back in 1897 and made them palatable for a modern day audience. Silly me. I always figured the "sexy vampire" was a new trope in pop culture, an overly fetishized goth fantasy that used bloodlust as a metaphor for regular lust. How wrong I was! Turns out even old Bram Stoker was doing this a hundred years ago. Just, you know, in the most vanilla and carefully-worded way possible. (Furthermore, turns out other authors were doing it before Stoker, too. But don't blame me for forgetting about Carmilla, because that book was terrible.) I guess vampires and sex just go together, and always have. Makes sense. Fangs penetrate. Body fluids are exchanged. Something about a virgin's skin breaking and blood being drawn? Too much? I dunno, but I guess vampires are just sexy monsters by definition. But again, like I said, it's tough to buy into vampirism as a sexual theme when the characters in the story are from Victorian England. Dapper and noble gentlemen. Pure, innocent virgin women - and weakly-written women, at that. I know Stoker wrote this book back in a certain place and time, when a woman's role was simply to be weak, helpless, attractive, and motherly, but the female characters in Dracula are just so one-dimensional and flat. This would be fine if they existed mainly on the story's periphery, but two of them are very prominent characters who even get to narrate certain sections of the epistolary book. One is clearly meant to be the more promiscuous of the two, but only because she's got a few suitors and lets it slip - once - that she enjoys being the target of men's affections. I guess Dracula was an interesting book to read and I can see why it's a classic. There are a lot of themes and metaphors and such that must make it a high school English teacher's dream. Also, like Shelley's Frankenstein, Dracula left its timeless mark on pop culture in the form of a memorable monster villain. It's been made into something like fifty different movies through the ages. Clearly, there's lasting appeal here. Either way, I'm glad I'm starting to run out of 19th century literature on my backlog.