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Stoker's Dracula and some Halberstam - Coggle Diagram
Stoker's
Dracula
and some Halberstam
the novel and reproduction: who is making babies? Being "fathers"?
Halberstam: "Gothic, I argue, marks a peculiarly modern preoccupation with boundaries and their collapse. Gothic monsters, furthermore, differ from the monsters that come before the nineteenth century in that the monsters of modernity are characterized by their proximity to humans" (23).
How might the novel support certain binaries?
gendered norms and expectations: "Oh thank god for brave men" --Mina making herself helpless; feels hindering
Mina's sentimental outpouring reinforces femininity; uses sympathy and pity to reproduce "good" woman
she is being "useful" for her husband? "train fiend" lol
sobbing Jonathan? cry baby or murder man?
even if vampirism temporarily shocks us out of "normative fmeiniity," the novel seems invested in bringing us back to gendered roles, good femininity, and gender difference
"Unclean! Unclean!" -- Mina internalizing this because of Dracula's spread of "undesirable" through sex; physical marking of sin/undesirable; use of visual marks to outcast folks
How might the novel put pressure on certain binaries/boundaries?
Mina as hypnosis sleeper agent
ok, but like where are our sympathies/sentiments? like people who are sick kinda need understanding?
little salty about the end?
the use of a coda to flash forward us to 7 years. RIP
truth is subjective, authenticity isn't "real"
RIP Quincey; sorry you shoot bats and carry Winchesters
Jonathan and Mina's boy is born on Quincey's death; we call him Quincey; he has all their names? "our little band of men"?? It mirrors Lucy's multiple blood transfusion marriages? And this
Lucy's body as a vessel for blood; this baby boy reinforces patrilineal blood
The pairings in the end: Van helsing and paternalism
Van helsing vs the Dracula wives/sisters: "voluptuous beauty so that I shudder"; "his heart fail him, then his nerve" -- other men were too horny to stake the Dracula babes
the use of "child brain" (chp 24) to pathologize Dracula; a deep anxiety about assimilation and immigration
The novel might not have "objectivity"--Van helsing's observations (esp colored by sexuality) reveal subjectivity; same with the Lucy crisis