When you have SparkNotes calling a classic work of fiction “Christian propaganda” you know it’s worth checking out! The ultimate gothic literary masterpiece of the 19th century is also a profoundly pious piece of work, and Jacob is here to spread the word!
Resources
- Voyage Blog Entry – Dracula Doesn’t Suck! – part 1
- Voyage Blog Entry – Dracula Doesn’t Suck! – part 2
- Read the latest entry of the Voyage Blog!
Listen to the latest Voyage Podcast
Related Episodes
- How a Salty British Dude ruined Christian vampire lore, and other fun facts!
- Save the Whole World and Losing Your Soul – the Last of Us season finale
- Be Willing to Wait a “Long Long Time” – the Last of Us
Transcript
mike (00:01.304)
button.
Jacob (00:01.318)
Don’t rush me bro. This is like the biggest day of the year for me. I’ve been looking forward to this podcast, this episode, like since the day I started doing this.
mike (00:06.397)
So, so.
mike (00:14.006)
This is how you get to talk about that old axe to grind, that Dracula is just a huge sex machine, right? Or just a big sex symbol? That’s what all it is? That’s all Dracula is.
Jacob (00:20.849)
Yeah, that’s totally what I believe. Time to discuss. I don’t know if you’ve heard this before, Mike, but Dracula is actually just symbolism for sex. Have you heard that before? Vampires are just, you know, just a vehicle to be salacious. You know, I know that’s like cutting edge stuff. I know that’s the hot take.
mike (00:34.952)
What isn’t?
mike (00:39.03)
What isn’t?
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
mike (00:47.382)
cutting edge stuff. It’s biting. It’s biting commentary. Biting social commentary is what that is.
Jacob (00:50.769)
I don’t mean to, I don’t mean, yeah, it’s a biting commentary. I don’t, I don’t mean to, uh, poke your sensibilities too hard, but, uh,
mike (00:59.978)
You’re driving me baddie and everyone else. Yeah, didn’t think I was going in that direction. Welcome everybody to, welcome everybody to this episode, Jacob’s favorite episode of the Voyage Podcast. And you’ll find out why, where we finally get to have a redemption of Dracula. See, I had to keep him around for almost nine months. We started back in January. So now I guess it’d be 10 months, right? Cause we’re at the end of October.
Jacob (01:06.22)
I’m getting a little misty from all these puns.
Jacob (01:15.238)
The only reason I signed up to do this.
mike (01:28.906)
with our Monster Month, our Halloween episode, and the monster of monsters, right? Dracula.
Jacob (01:34.021)
I had to wait 10 months. I’d bided my time for 10 months. Like an old Eastern European count, waiting for the right time. Yes. Oh man, I love this book. I love Dracula. You know, of all the, there’s really only a handful. I can count on two hands probably. How many books I’ve like reread, right? Most of the time I, you know, read a book, move on, read a book, move on.
mike (01:39.186)
It probably felt, I was going to say, it probably felt like an eternity.
Jacob (02:03.709)
Dracula is probably the one that I’ve reread the most, actually. Now, you, did you finish it? I know that you were reading it at one point. Did you like…
mike (02:13.822)
Alas, I did not. No, I did. I started it and, you know, I don’t know. I can’t remember what the percentage was. It was the ebook. Got, you know.
Jacob (02:15.999)
Uh.
Jacob (02:23.543)
Common opinion is that it drags in the middle. Pretty much everyone says that it drags in the second half. And so you probably didn’t make it through. You probably couldn’t persevere, which I would expect nothing less, but you know.
mike (02:26.612)
Okay.
mike (02:35.942)
I was, yeah, yeah. It wasn’t the perseverance of the saints on this one. So it was actually at the Van Helsing when he is, I think is it Lucy that they’re tending to, Dr. Seward. He and.
Jacob (02:53.646)
You didn’t get to the death of Lucy?
mike (02:56.502)
I don’t think so, no.
Jacob (02:58.065)
Oh, you suck. That’s right. Pun intended. Dude, that’s one of the best scenes. That’s one of the best scenes. That whole the Lucy, all the Lucy stuff, some of the best. Honestly, dude, you probably made it like you might have been halfway. Shame on you. Did you watch any Hammer Horror movies? Did you watch any Dracula movies? I told you to watch Hammer Dracula. Yes. You know.
mike (03:00.626)
Yeah, yeah. Nice.
mike (03:15.916)
Yeah, yeah.
mike (03:21.534)
No, I didn’t watch any Dracula movies either. How does it feel to have a partner, how does it feel to have a partner who doesn’t prepare?
Jacob (03:25.333)
This is a podcast where we pride ourselves on being, we pride ourselves. You know, in this podcast, we take preparation seriously, you know. I’m really disappointed in you not holding yourself up to our high standards.
mike (03:36.917)
Mm-hmm.
You know, 50% of the time, yeah, one of us does. So, I didn’t say which one, cause again, sometimes it’s one or the other.
Jacob (03:44.942)
I’m out.
Yeah, I guess so. I guess, yeah, it’s one of these days we’ll both be properly prepared, but today is not that day, I guess. Well.
mike (03:55.99)
You know, I acquiesced to a lot of monster stuff this month. So let’s, you know, I feel like this is enough banter, Jacob. Let’s get into the Dracula. Yeah.
Jacob (04:03.358)
Okay, you want to get into? Dude, by all means, man. You don’t have to ask me twice. Okay, so here’s the thing. This is something. This is an axe for me to grind. This is a stake for me to shave, if you will. Because, yeah, right? Evidently, like, I think that no one has actually read this book.
mike (04:20.152)
Uh huh, there we go.
Jacob (04:28.453)
I think that obviously a lot of people have, like academic types have read this book, but they have just completely maligned what the actual experience of reading this book is truly like. And I think that what people think the experience of the book Dracula is, is insanely far removed away from what the actual Dracula experience is, which is to say, Christian propaganda. And I mean that I’m not using those words.
those are the words that like for funsies I went and like started looking up like spark notes, Wikipedia, all these different, you know, like just to see like what the status quo commentary on this book is according to the interwebs circa 2023. And in a number of those, you’ll see like specifically I was reading the spark notes, it’s the one I read the most of and you know they’ll
mike (05:02.678)
And not a pejorative either, yeah.
mike (05:14.424)
Mm.
Jacob (05:25.757)
then again, the paragraphs of them. And like, they repeatedly talk about how much Dracula is Christian propaganda. So parents, if you want to introduce your children to a novel that modern academics refer to as Christian propaganda, I have got the book for you. Because it is a classic. It’s an honestly, it was super popular when it came out. Like there was this kind of don’t let anyone say that the book floundered, right? It didn’t. It was really, really well received.
mike (05:37.299)
I mean…
mike (05:42.591)
A classic.
Mm-hmm.
Jacob (05:55.433)
And it was so popular that it got turned into like stage performances and things like that. It became an international hits. So you have it being translated into different languages or whatever. And, you know, it was written in 1897. So it’s right at the turn of the century. And it was, uh, you know, a really, really popular phenomenon for a while. And that’s why within 20 or 30 years, you have movies being made out of it, you know, which film was a brand new art form at the time.
mike (06:21.557)
Mm.
Jacob (06:25.117)
So it’s very interesting that some of the earliest films we have for mass audiences are actually adaptations of Dracula, right? It really kind of goes to show.
mike (06:30.059)
Mm.
mike (06:35.842)
Well, and the thing is too, if you’re going to invest, if it’s such a new technology, it’s going to be more expensive. You’re going to invest all this money and you want to make sure you get a return. And so what stories did they choose to invest? It’s going to be on something they think is the most popular.
Jacob (06:49.257)
people are going to come check out. Yeah. And they did. Obviously, you know, Universal’s Dracula starring Bela Lugosi. That really set the template for the popular culture consensus of like what Dracula is for sure. And, but it was, it was huge. Yeah, it was a phenomenon, right? So this is a good book. It’s definitely an older book, right? So it might not be for everyone, Mike, but it’s
what you can’t take away from it is how much it just like drips with Christian iconography and Christian sentiment. But it’s far more nuanced and interesting. And it’s not just, it’s not like a cheesy Christian sentimentalism. It’s way more than that. And that’s what I’m going to talk about today.
mike (07:23.01)
Mm.
mike (07:37.078)
Well, and what’s funny too is you’re touching upon an interesting idea that it’s so iconographic, that it’s so sacramental in its presentation. And yet, Bram Stoker was not a Catholic or an Orthodox, was a Church of Ireland. So basically it’s like Irish Anglican sort of flavor. So a Protestant, like Church of Ireland slash Church of England, Anglican, you know, that sort of, around that sort of area.
Jacob (07:53.109)
That’s true.
mike (08:07.218)
And yet, not only do we have positive Catholic character in von Helsing, but the whole kind of sacramental worldview is presented in a very, it’s assumed almost. It’s not even like you have to justify it. It’s not like you have to
Jacob (08:20.061)
Oh, it is assumed. That’s going to be, yeah, that’s going to be a really, really important element of the real, like the text of this story. You know, I do think, so Bram Stoker was really famously reclusive, right? He was like a shy man. And he didn’t really leave a lot of commentary. We do have, like, his notes when he was making Dracula. And I haven’t actually read those. It’s one of those things I need to get around to doing sometime.
But they don’t, evidently from what I can tell secondhand, is they don’t really give people a whole lot of like real meaty, I guess, like, into the headspace of Bram Stoker, even though we have these notes, right? I guess they’re fairly pragmatic notes, I suppose. I haven’t read them myself. But so people, there’s so much, one of the reasons why there’s so much interpretation of Dracula academically.
mike (09:06.03)
Hmm.
Jacob (09:17.653)
is because Bram Stoker didn’t provide much commentary on it, right? And so you’re stuck with just the text in a lot of ways. I think the text speaks for itself, though, for what it’s worth. But what I want to say about Bram Stoker is that he, his wife, converted to Catholicism. And I’m not sure when she did in the context of Dracula. I’m not sure if it was before, after, during, I don’t know.
mike (09:40.935)
Okay.
Yeah.
Jacob (09:43.621)
But I do know that he was married to a Catholic, right? And he was married to a woman who was at least inquiring for a while. I don’t think that he was unsympathetic to the Catholic Church. We know that he never converted to the Catholic Church. But his book, the hero of his book, is a Catholic who uses Catholic means to fight evil. Just saying, right? So even if he didn’t convert, his wife did. And, you know, he probably just…
wouldn’t surprise me if he just had a certain loyalty to like his Irish Protestant roots, because we’re talking about an era of time in which it was really politicized and like really culturally, you know, kind of important to pick a side, you know? No.
mike (10:22.903)
Mm-hmm.
mike (10:27.114)
Well, and we’re not going to go down that rabbit trail, but basically after the West Vallea Treaty, where it’s like every, it all became political. And that’s where, you know, that’s one of the reasons, like you said, it became so difficult for people who maybe recognized this more ancient Christianity to not necessarily go that, you know, yeah, that explicit route of actually converting.
Jacob (10:37.517)
Oh yeah.
Jacob (10:48.917)
do it in public, you know.
Yeah, so we don’t know much, but it’s pretty easy for me to believe that Bram Stoker was really, really sympathetic. His book is, Dracula certainly is as a novel. So, what I think I want to do is, A, just do a brief refresher on the vampire lore, because we did a whole episode on this last week.
mike (11:01.858)
Hmm.
Jacob (11:18.973)
Because it’s important to have that context for when we start to just discuss Dracula, right? So in like Yeah, 30 in 30 seconds 30 seconds to a minute
mike (11:23.722)
Yeah, review of vampires in general.
Or should we say, go back and listen to the vampire episode? Yeah, pump those numbers up, right? Yeah, exactly. No, no, sure. 30 seconds.
Jacob (11:30.609)
Or go back and listen. Yeah, absolutely. That’s right. Listen to it like five times. Vampires are parasites. They hunt their loved ones, i.e. their family members specifically. They are werewolves. Werewolves who die become vampires. And vampires turn into wolves because they could do it in real life, like when they were still alive, so they can still do it when they’re
mike (11:44.13)
They’re not enemies of werewolves, they’re friends with werewolves because they are performing the same, yep, they’re performing the same function, so.
Jacob (12:00.725)
They’re the same creature people. And it’s all witchcraft. It’s all packed with Satan stuff. Vampire lore is specifically Christian lore.
mike (12:08.514)
Mm-hmm.
mike (12:12.758)
It goes back to our, it goes back to actually before we were talking about vampires, we were talking about zombies, we were talking about monsters, how it’s sort of the, and it’s connected to zombies as it’s death that follows you around. It’s death that you can’t escape from. And in this way, and like you said, it’s living death or undead, right? That’s what zombies are. That’s what, you know, vampires are. So it’s sort of continuing that same logic or that same principle.
Jacob (12:37.917)
Well, and specifically within the lore tradition, it’s an excommunicated death. So within the context of Eastern European folklore, if you’re, there was this belief that emerged where if you are dead, died, excommunicated, or by other means of excommunicating yourself, your body cannot die the way God intended it to die. And because it cannot die the way intended to, it’s undead.
mike (13:01.047)
Mm.
Jacob (13:04.913)
So you’re not alive anymore, but you’re not dead according to like the laws of God. And so you come back as a pestilence, as a plague upon your community.
mike (13:13.878)
it’s ironic that it’s a corruption of the tradition of incorruptibility, which you’ll find in the church where, you know, a saint’s body or a part of a saint’s body will not corrupt, it will not decay, you know, without any sort of, you know, not by any natural means. And so this is sort of, like I said, the corruption of that in that it’s an unnatural way or an anti-god, anti-faith sort of way of going about.
Jacob (13:41.253)
Absolutely. No, it is and everything about because vampire lore is specifically Christian lore and I keep emphasizing that because a lot of people have watered down the idea of vampirism to be any type of blood sucking creature because those types of phenomenon like folklore exists all over the world. Because ancient people understood that the blood is the life right as it’s said in the Old Testament. So it’s not surprising that every culture on the planet has blood sucking as a motif.
mike (14:02.113)
Mm.
Jacob (14:08.937)
Vampires are not just another bloodsucker though. Vampires are excommunicated Europeans who are kicked out of the church and come back to assault Christians with satanic powers.
mike (14:22.254)
See, but you can’t threaten people nowadays by saying that if you’re ex-communicated, you’re a vampire because that will actually make it sound cooler. Like, now it actually would be more… Yeah, it’s like you can’t even say that because now it makes it sound… Now ex-communication sounds appealing if you say, hey, you’re going to be a vampire. So…
Jacob (14:29.132)
So my skin will sparkle?
Jacob (14:35.157)
Oh, hey, are sparkly vampires an inversion of Christian theosis, Mike? Hmm, who knows? Um, as much as I poke fun at that, yeah, as much as, as much as I poke fun at those, uh, stories, we’ve barely touched those and we’re not going to, not in this episode.
mike (14:42.461)
Uhhhhhh
mike (14:47.542)
Yes, oh sorry.
mike (14:54.986)
We’ve actually not even touched theosis as much as I thought we would, you know, explicitly. Like, I thought it’d be…
Jacob (14:58.701)
Oh, as a pod. Oh, just within the… Well, we’ll get there. Actually, that’ll probably play up in this episode a little bit. You know, I’ve been so busy lately that I never got to finish the outline for this. And there’s already still like five pages. But like, there’s so much that I can talk. Yeah, it’ll cover an episode. But anyway, everything about Satanic… No, we’re done. We’re done. Oh, I’ll draw the line. You need to… Christmas is a…
mike (15:10.57)
I was going to say, it’s going to make up, it’s going to, it’s going to cover an episode. Don’t worry. Yeah.
mike (15:19.558)
Monster month does not go into November. It does. I’m drawing the line. Yeah
Jacob (15:28.193)
Christmas, like December holiday. Halloween is an October holiday. And you know, they had the stuff out in August for Halloween this year. Shame on you, pop culture, America slash Walmart. No, capitalism, for sure I will, I will. I will say that, like, hey, stop it.
mike (15:37.246)
Mm-hmm. As soon as you take the back-to-school stuff out, put that away. Yeah.
mike (15:47.77)
Oh, you’re not going to go after capitalism? That’s good. All right, keep going. Yeah.
mike (15:55.433)
unbridled.
Jacob (15:57.509)
Stop it. Anyway, yeah, so yeah, we’re done. We’re done after this episode. And it’s time to move on, because that’s what makes it special. If every month is Halloween month, Mike, then no month is Halloween, Mike, month, Mike. Mm hmm. Yeah, so yeah, so everything about vampire folklore is an inversion of Christian sacramentality, just explicitly so. Born in the context of that.
mike (16:07.637)
Mm.
mike (16:14.44)
Well put.
Jacob (16:27.545)
So, what we also pointed out last episode is by the time you get to the 19th century, you know what I didn’t cover the last episode is there was something called the vampire craze and we forgot we just never got to it. But you know how there was like the witch craze. Everyone knows about the witch craze because like Salem and the witch trials and Puritans and all that stuff right. There was a vampire craze, Mike. The 17th century or the 18th century was chock full.
mike (16:36.992)
Okay.
mike (16:42.206)
Yeah, sure.
mike (16:48.055)
Yeah.
Jacob (16:56.697)
of vampire sightings.
mike (16:58.558)
Now, was that fueled by misogyny, xenophobia, or was it anti-Catholicism? Because that’s ultimately all the witch craze was is misogyny. So if, since vampires can be boys, that can’t be misogyny, it must be xenophobia. Is that what you’re gonna get at or?
Jacob (17:02.465)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Jacob (17:13.541)
You know, honestly, no, it was it was rooted in like, you know, fear of all the stuff that we talk about, right? Because what is like you have all these all these examples of people being like, oh, vampires coming back, whatever. So official government agencies like the Austrian government, or like the Holy Roman Empire, were sending out doctors to like, exhume bodies and investigate it. Yeah.
mike (17:20.545)
Yeah.
mike (17:39.042)
a drive a stake through? Oh. Just to make sure.
Jacob (17:40.973)
Literally, literally, because what in what really happens, yeah, all of these all of these doctors come back and they’re like, Yeah, it looks like vampires are real. And so like, so look it up, folks. It’s fascinating. It was a thing. It was a real thing. And you have like theologians commenting on it making like writing out big treatises on like, you know, if vampirism is real or not. It was quite the touchstone for European culture.
But I don’t know, for whatever reason, we don’t like historically remember that the way we remember like the witch stuff. Maybe because of feminism. I don’t know. But so anyway, in the 19th century, you know, a hundred years ago, these vampire things become this pop culture phenomenon across Europe. So they start writing about it in the 19th century. So that’s why you get like a handful of like stories about vampires popping up. And Bram Stoker, that’s why he, you know, I think.
mike (18:34.592)
Mm-hmm.
Jacob (18:37.877)
That’s why Bram Stoker does it is because he’s hopping on the bandwagon of vampire fiction. And so that’s why. But what’s fascinating about Stoker’s novel is that it is probably the best example of embracing the Christian tradition in response to this vampire stuff, because every other story that had been written, they all, you know, the best ones contain like the Christian elements in them. But Stoker.
mike (18:39.242)
He’s just hopping on that gravy train, right? Yeah.
Jacob (19:07.429)
it’s just super textual in his work. And I guess what we can do is get into some context for the world of Bram Stoker, right? Because that’s what makes Dracula such a fascinating book. Bram Stoker, he’s writing in the late 19th century, published in 1897. This is the birth of, this is a very specific time in British history and European history.
mike (19:18.057)
Okay.
Jacob (19:37.601)
This is Darwin has happened, right? The origin of species has come out. Technological industrialization has occurred. Globalization is occurring at a rate that it just couldn’t have done before these like kind of modern industrialized means of transportation like steamships or trains.
mike (19:41.452)
Mm.
mike (19:57.002)
Well, and you know, one of the things that the setting of Dracula provides is it’s got this sort of like accessible but still very foreign feel to it. And that’s sort of where, you know, like you said, travel is becoming possible, but it’s not necessarily something where it’s like everybody is traveling all over the world. And so you can still have these areas where it’s like, I mean, I say a cult in the true sense of the word as hidden, where it’s like
You’ve got these places where it’s like, oh yeah, I’m this traveler who came back from this place. I’m gonna tell you about all the mysteries, all the wonders from this part of the world.
Jacob (20:29.865)
Well, that becomes a hobby unto itself. Really, there’s a lot of parallels with modern 21st century, like TikTok or Instagram, things like that. This idea of social media has basically turned everyone’s life into, like, look what I’m doing, look what I’m doing, look what I’m doing. When the frontiers were opened in the 19th century, you really had this…
mike (20:48.555)
Mm.
Jacob (20:57.713)
new zeitgeist of like exploring the unknown and like going and traveling places. And so Europeans were zigzagging in ways that they just hadn’t done before. And travel fiction, travel literature, travel guides were a super popular form of entertainment. People would go and just read books about other cultures, because it was all new. It was it was like, oh, that’s fascinating. You don’t mean that they wear that?
mike (21:03.459)
Mm-hmm.
mike (21:11.947)
Mm.
Jacob (21:26.277)
over there or they eat that kind of food over there. That’s all brand new in the zeitgeist of Bram Stoker.
mike (21:30.626)
So what I’m hearing is Bram Stoker just wanted to be a travel influencer. He’s just a proto travel influencer.
Jacob (21:34.453)
He was that was another that was another fad that he was popularizing on with Dracula because Dracula is very much about the world shrinking and being opened up the frontiers being opened up and the anxiety that comes with the unknown, right. And these, you know, strange new cultures and things like that, right. Very much a theme in Dracula. But um,
mike (21:53.283)
Mm.
Jacob (22:04.033)
He is also, so we’ve talked about how he’s right in the context of like travel, the travel craze and things like that and new frontiers. He’s writing in the aftermath of industrialization. And I touched on Darwin, but like that scientific revolution. So it’s post industrial revolution. It’s post scientific revolution. And so in Bram Stoker was a fan for sure. Bram Stoker was one of those. He was a techie.
That’s who Bram Stoker was. He loved the latest gadgets. And it was, you could tell it was like a hobby of his. So like his book, his book, it’s hard to get into the head space if you don’t like, if you don’t know to, but his book reads like, if I was gonna write a novel, the way that Bram Stoker writes a novel, it’s like, and then I got into my Tesla and I checked my iPhone watch. And then I was like, oh, and the data was being down. It’s almost like a Michael Crichton novel. Like.
mike (23:01.225)
Okay.
Jacob (23:02.109)
He bakes into the story, a lot of like the cool hip new technologies. So for example, one of the things that we haven’t mentioned yet is if you read this book, it’s a pistol Atari. It’s is a book that is delivered the story is delivered through people’s diary entries, letters, newspaper clippings, or pertinent to this context of the conversation, the phonograph of Dr. Seward.
mike (23:23.004)
Mm.
mike (23:29.252)
Mmm.
Jacob (23:30.365)
So Dr. Stewart is one of the main characters. Everything that you read in his chunks of the book, he’s delivering that to an audio file. And so the book is conveying that this is the transcript of an audio file that has been recorded, which in 1897, that’s like super new. It’s like you’ve recorded sound, you know, like.
mike (23:46.017)
Mm.
mike (23:50.494)
Yeah. Well, it’s kind of like, do you kind of remember in the early 2000s when it was such a popular thing in especially the like, teen, like high school-ish setting movies where they would give you exposition by people texting each other? It’s kind of that same idea where it’s like, it’s to show how cool the writers are. Yeah.
Jacob (24:06.069)
Oh yeah, it is. Yes, yeah, absolutely. Uh-huh. Yep, yep. And the book itself, so what’s, what is really cool about what Bram Stoker’s done with this novel for a modern audience like us is he is intentionally trying to address the juxtaposition of the old and new because up until this time, you have a medieval world.
and he’s writing in the revolutionary aftermath of the Enlightenment. And what this book is trying to do is trying to embrace both. I think that Bram Stoker, I suspect that this was him trying to come to terms with the newness of reality and the as it transitions, you know, he’s, he is
mike (24:51.978)
It was a brave new world. It was a brave new world he was experiencing.
Jacob (24:57.965)
in that lineage of commentary on modernity, commentary on the transition from medieval into the modern.
mike (25:01.655)
Hmm?
mike (25:05.002)
and he actually would have been a contemporary of Aldous Huxley’s dad, who was a scientist too.
Jacob (25:10.829)
Mm hmm. Well, he was also writing in the time of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne and all these other. So this is the techno file and a constant reference to like science and education, learning and all that stuff that you find in Dracula. It’s in the context of, again, a zeitgeist that’s really embracing like these new ways of learning.
mike (25:15.466)
Mm.
Jacob (25:36.937)
these new ways of exploring scientific achievements and things like that. Um, all of that stuff, that’s all wrapped up and that’s cool. So what makes Dracula cool is that you have a book that’s like saturated with Christianity, but it’s also super optimistic about technology. It’s super optimistic about the kind of like new way of doing things and whatnot. Um, and so he gives us an example of a story that
These don’t have to be enemies. You know, science and faith, reason and faith are not bad guys. They’re not opposites to each other. His biggest character, most iconic character, Van Helsing, as far as the good guys go, he is a scientist. He is a scientific doctor, but he’s also someone who is extremely well-versed in all forms of knowledge, including theology.
mike (26:20.759)
Yeah.
mike (26:30.838)
Well, he takes his faith seriously. Yeah. So he takes his scientific and he takes the supernatural evil seriously. Right. And obviously it’s because of that faith that, you know, we see that too.
Jacob (26:34.405)
Yeah, and he’s a super faithful Catholic.
Jacob (26:41.652)
He does.
Jacob (26:46.117)
And he doesn’t do it naively. Like he, you know, he basically says in the text that like, I wouldn’t have believed this either, but I have an open mind. And so because I have an open mind, I just kept exploring it and I let, I just followed the evidence and the evidence is this. And so I accepted. So he’s not, he’s not presented as just like a naive, superstitious fellow. He’s just more open-minded than everyone else is.
mike (26:53.559)
Mm.
mike (27:05.452)
Now Jacob.
You said towards the beginning of this episode that you suspect nobody’s read Dracula. And I unfortunately helped confirm that suspicion a little bit by only getting about, I’m going to say generously about halfway through. So I think what we should do is maybe take us through, like I said, the cliff notes, the spark notes version of the plot, or if you want to just spend a little bit more time on some of the parts or as you go through, we’ll kind of talk about some of the important themes and stuff.
Jacob (27:17.044)
Ah!
Jacob (27:33.561)
No, good point. Yeah. That’s that’s a really good suggestion. Okay. Dracula, one of my favorite books. Dracula opens with Jonathan Harker. He is traveling to Transylvania, Eastern Europe, on behalf of his law firm to do some real estate stuff with this ancient Count Dracula guy. And while he’s traveling there, all the peasancies encountering are all like, oh, you’re in trouble, don’t go there. This is like, well, Purgis knocks.
This is the night of the devil. Don’t do that. And the entire time he’s all like, I’m a modern British citizen. I don’t believe in all this silly superstition. Um, you know, I’m a Protestant. I’m not Catholic like you weirdos. Uh, and they force them to take a crucifix and he’s like, well, I’ve been trained not to like, you know, care about these baubles, but, uh, just to make you feel good, I guess I’ll take it. Right. Um, so there’s a lot of kind of like religious commentary going on. Um, he gets to the castle, uh, in the first.
mike (28:09.911)
Yeah.
mike (28:27.278)
Mm.
Jacob (28:31.249)
40 pages of this book, this whole initial intro to Jonathan Harker like encountering Dracula first time, this is some of the best gothic fiction like hands down. The first 40 pages of this book are awesome storytelling, really creepy good kind of spooky storytelling. When he gets to the castle he quickly realizes that he’s trapped there, that this Dracula guy is really strangely nefarious and he’s not gonna let him leave and you know there’s
weird ladies in the castle that tried that they put their seductive wiles on him. But then I know there it is there I’ll give it to you. That’s one point for the opposition. We’ll come back to it. But then Dracula shows up with a baby. He’s like, hey, eat this baby instead because you know Dracula he’s such a he’s such a charming fellow. Right. Certainly the icon of masculinity that we all know and love.
mike (29:07.446)
See?
mike (29:12.832)
Ha.
mike (29:26.014)
Mm-hmm.
Jacob (29:31.105)
And so, yeah, they turn their attention away from Jonathan, they go eat the baby instead. And then when the mother shows up later, he sticks a bunch of wolves on the mother and she gets eaten by wolves. So you know, Dracula, quite the anti-hero, am I right? But he’s just dark and gritty, bro. You just don’t understand. He’s actually a sympathetic character. Yeah, right? But so he gets trapped in the castle.
mike (29:46.218)
Ha!
mike (29:51.806)
Yeah, misunderstood. Misunderstood.
Jacob (30:00.977)
He manages to basically escape by jumping into the river afterwards. Meanwhile, Dracula has taken all the accommodations that Jonathan has made for him. He’s traveled back to London and there he encounters the people in Jonathan’s life that were left in England. So you have Lucy. Lucy Westerra is his fiance’s best friend.
And then you have the three suitors for Lucy. You have Quincy Morris, who is this American cowboy type, because it’s the frontier. It’s the new world. Right. And so Bram Stoker wants one of his characters to be this crazy American cowboy guy, because like, yeah, because people in England are like fascinated by the Wild West. You know, it’s like, oh, let’s have a cowboy. You know, this is a very like Avengers assemble type cast of characters. He definitely he has all these like
mike (30:43.854)
Like archetype, yeah, almost.
Jacob (30:57.889)
Oh, let’s get a cat. Let’s put a cowboy in there. That’d be cool. You know, kind of thing. And so Quincy Morris is the cowboy archetype. He’s one of my favorite characters. He hardly does anything in the movie, but I love his character. And then you have Arthur Holmwood, who is the nobility. He’s the aristocratic upper cruster of the group. And within the context of Britain, people, it’s still very much a class system. Right. And so.
mike (31:18.603)
Hmm.
mike (31:23.914)
He’s the stand-in for the audience, right?
Jacob (31:25.621)
he is well not the audience. He’s a stand in for the aristocracy. And the aristocracy within England is still a very idealized, you know, they’re, you know, high blood, right, literally, right? Yeah, well, and the whole society still admires, you know, this, you know, kind of upper crust genteel honor culture, right. So that’s all for Homelands purpose. And then you have Dr. Seward.
mike (31:29.78)
Okay.
mike (31:38.774)
devoted to honor, devoted to, yeah.
Jacob (31:55.621)
he is the middle class scientist, right? So that’s his archetype. Because the middle class at post industrial revolution, post commerce, post trade, post capitalism, right? Suddenly you have a lot of people gaining wealth and gaining access and upward mobility. That’s all new in Bram Stoker’s time. So to have a doctor not born to the aristocracy, just born to some lower class parents,
gained his respectability by pursuit. He Yeah, he has mobilized up the ranks. And now he’s hobnobbing with the aristocrat, right? And Quincy, yeah, he is he he’s Yeah, he is the person where it’s like, oh, I could be that, you know, kind of thing. And he’s also a scientist. So he is representing this new breed of like, rationalism, science, industry, all that stuff, right. So that’s his archetype in the book.
mike (32:27.138)
hold himself up by his bootstraps. Yeah, that old myth, basically.
mike (32:36.131)
He’s an aspirational hero, sort of, yeah, for sure.
mike (32:43.05)
Mm.
Jacob (32:55.525)
So these three suitors are interested in Lucy. Lucy is interested in them. So she’s kind of coquettish. Not as much as like, people want you to believe, but there’s simply something to that. But she’s so however, unfortunately, when Dracula shows up, he immediately latches on to her, no pun intended, and starts to drain her life away, right?
mike (33:08.65)
Nobody calls her a tease, I don’t remember that line.
mike (33:23.713)
Mm.
Jacob (33:24.621)
So Mina is preoccupied worrying about wherever her fiance Jonathan went. Eventually, because he escapes, he makes his way to a convent, a nunnery, where they save him. So that’s some of your earliest signs of like the Catholic Church, or in this case, it’s probably an Orthodox church, frankly, you know, being a refuge from like the evil darkness and things like that. She travels there. While she travels to go meet her husband, Lucy dies at the hand of Dracula.
mike (33:34.248)
Mm.
mike (33:45.888)
Mm-hmm.
Jacob (33:54.961)
They try to save her through blood transfusion. This is another example of Bram Stoker being like, science, you know, like how cool is this? Right? Like it did. Well, it’s also funny because it was so it was such a new technology that like it’s we know better now. And so they’re all like, she just needs blood. But like, we know about blood types now. Right. And so at the time he didn’t. And so it’s like just pumper full of blood. And it’s like that only works if it’s like the right blood type.
mike (33:58.187)
Yeah.
mike (34:03.957)
I mean, it didn’t work, but yeah.
mike (34:16.848)
Mm.
Jacob (34:24.009)
But we’re just going to assume they were all positive folks. And so, you know, they all whatever. And that doesn’t work, unfortunately, tries to put the garlic up, but the garlic keeps getting brought down. That doesn’t work. Go back to our last episode to learn about garlic. And so she dies. This is where Mike got to, folks. Boo. And so she starts coming back. She starts coming back to life.
mike (34:40.439)
Mm-hmm.
mike (34:47.638)
Yeah, yeah, all right, come on.
Jacob (34:53.361)
And then there’s all these newspaper clippings of like the blue for lady, which is just like, um, like cockney for beautiful. That’s what blue for means. So it’s the beautiful lady and the beautiful lady is roaming around Ghidaraf yards, hunting children and, um, you know, killing children basically. Uh, and so Van Helsing gets brought in from Dr. Seward Van Helsing was Dr. Seward’s Dutch teacher.
mike (35:14.316)
Yeah.
Jacob (35:22.197)
And he is the hero of the story. He’s the one that has the open mind. He’s the devout Christian and the noble scientist all rolled into one. And he’s like, you guys got a vampire in your hands. And he convinces them to go and, you know, dispatch Lucy in the correct way so that her soul is released from her vampiric prison, so to speak. At this time, Mina and Jonathan show
mike (35:32.065)
Mm-hmm.
Jacob (35:51.313)
attacks Mina, she gets partially turned. And the rest of the novel, they have to go, one of the parts of the folklore is that vampires have to sleep in their native soil. So Dracula has brought over a bunch of boxes of soil. So the second half Dracula, the book turns into like a video game where they have to hunt around London trying to like find all of his different soil boxes and destroying them. So…
mike (35:53.198)
Mm.
mike (36:16.814)
Those are the side quests. Yeah.
Jacob (36:18.157)
Yeah, it’s and you know, so hey, video game makers, you should make a super cool like Assassin’s Creed style story based upon Dracula. And yeah, and you grow around and you’re breaking up dirt boxes that would but in the meantime, you get all kinds of dude, this would be such a good video game. Make this into an awesome video game somebody. But and then so Dracula’s on his
mike (36:28.054)
where you’re just like dumping dirt out into the…
Jacob (36:47.637)
Transylvania, but they pursue him via train. Meanwhile, Mina has kind of like a psychic connection to Dracula because like of her like encounter with him. She gets burned with the Eucharist, the host on her forehead. So she’s got like a Eucharist host imprint on her forehead because she’s unclean. And they get, they capture him in time and they kill him. Poor Quincy Morris dies.
mike (37:09.218)
Sure, yeah.
Jacob (37:17.565)
defeating Dracula. But then Mina and Jonathan name their kid after Quincy. So all’s well that ends well. The vampire vixens at the castle get killed by Van Helsing. So they get rid of the bad guy. And that’s the nutshell abbreviated form of the story Dracula. But as I was telling all that, you can see all these different themes that I was kind of poking out.
mike (37:17.931)
Uh…
mike (37:32.97)
Okay.
Jacob (37:46.589)
as I was given the descriptions, right? You know, when they are discussing Dracula, he’s anti-Christ. He is someone who is trying to spread his disease, his plague. He’s trying to parasite society, and he’s trying to turn people into Satanists, right? He’s, you know,
mike (37:46.806)
Yeah.
mike (37:59.373)
Hmm.
mike (38:13.826)
Mm-hmm.
Jacob (38:15.325)
Van Helsing, he gives us history of the Dracula count. He was like, he was an alchemist. He was a super intelligent dude who wanted to learn. He was like a Faustian character. Literally, he was Faust. And so yeah, he dove too deeply into the occults. And that’s what led to him turning into a vampire. So Bram Stoker, everything, the foundation of Bram Stoker’s characters, his vampiric knowledge, it’s rooted.
mike (38:29.271)
Yeah.
Jacob (38:44.177)
in that deeper European lore of like this is like the powers of darkness. This is Satan. This is if you play with the occult, you turn into a vampire when you die. All that stuff.
mike (38:54.154)
Well, and it is interesting that you include that because the whole like, it’s almost like the plane with fire. Like you mentioned, Bram Stoker, one of his big themes is integrating all of this new technology that the Industrial Revolution brought about. And what was medieval alchemy but a sort of like proto technology? I mean, it was techne. It was trying to, you know, now
Jacob (39:17.021)
Yeah. Oh, it was. Yeah.
mike (39:19.07)
it was closer to, but again, because that’s all magic was, right? Magic is just trying to manipulate the… And so, isn’t it interesting though that Van Helsing describes?
Jacob (39:23.505)
It’s just technology. Magic is just technology.
And technology is magic, folks. That works both ways. I literally believe that. Go on.
mike (39:34.058)
Van Helsing describes or he talks about the history of Dracula as that was sort of like what got him down this path was the alchemy or the, you know, dapling with this sort of occult knowledge or hidden knowledge or, you know, it’s almost like you can kind of see the like, go back to that’s one of the big themes and he brings it in, Bram Stoker brings it in as like, this is just part of the setting now. But I wonder if it’s a sort of almost like a warning.
right, where here’s all the different ways that it’s becoming a part of our world, but here’s where we’ve seen it taken to its logical conclusion after however many hundreds of years, right? Because that’s, Dracula had been around for hundreds of years at this point, at the point in the story. Does that kind of make sense?
Jacob (40:18.461)
Mm hmm. That’s yeah, I do think that’s true. So given the details of the story, having given you some context for the world that Stoker was operating in, and maybe I’ll just one more time express as you read this story, Christ is constantly invoked. And this is it’s very much portrayed as the armies of darkness arrayed against the forces of Christianity.
And so that’s very on the forefront of, you know, contextualizing these characters, saving their souls, right? This is all about, you know, getting people to heaven and all that stuff and embracing, you know, faith as the means of waging war against the enemy and things like that. So what I want to do is go look into some of the
mike (40:56.706)
Mm.
Jacob (41:17.501)
themes, the academic themes that have been foisted upon this book. And then we’ll touch upon, we’ll touch upon Death of the Arthur stuff because I think that, you know, people would be like, well, what about that? But let’s go through the themes first. And then that’ll… Well, no, it’ll be interesting. This is going to be almost game-like. And so you have access to the outline, right?
mike (41:25.205)
Oh boy.
mike (41:33.846)
Okay, what is not what Dracula isn’t? Is that what you’re going to title this chapter?
mike (41:46.634)
Yeah, I’m looking at it.
Jacob (41:48.05)
I want you to just give us the rundown. Starting just the way I have them written is fine. You know? Yeah. Alright, so what does Wikipedia say the themes of Dracula are, Mike?
mike (41:54.326)
Wikipedia ones? Yeah, okay.
mike (42:01.514)
Well, the first one is gender and sexuality.
Jacob (42:04.901)
Okay, how about the second one? Mmm, and the third one?
mike (42:07.254)
Race.
disease.
Jacob (42:12.709)
Okay. We’re gonna go through all of them and then I’m gonna rant and then I’m going to shake my fist at this guy. How about the next one? The next one is… Spark Notes. Famous. I don’t even know Spark Notes. What does Spark Notes say the themes are?
mike (42:13.963)
Mm-hmm.
mike (42:19.026)
Oh, all right. The next one is Spark Notes. Yeah. The first one is Christian Salvation.
Jacob (42:32.229)
Hey, I like that.
mike (42:34.91)
madness. Oh, I get no, which I was gonna say I forgot to mention. So of the Dracula movies I watched, I watched the new Renfield with Nicolas Cage. That’s the only one I know. I thought it’d be a funny, I thought it’d be a funny contrast. But I get points for this next one. Xenophobia.
Jacob (42:36.597)
Sure. We never even talked about Renfield. Renfield’s a big character in this. We’ll get to him.
Jacob (42:46.061)
Oh, jeez.
Jacob (42:54.825)
Xenophobia. Okay. All right, keep going.
mike (42:58.804)
Money.
Jacob (43:00.369)
Money. Okay, go.
mike (43:03.522)
The threat of female sexuality.
Jacob (43:06.017)
Ah, yes, female sexuality, very threatening to a Victorian mind.
mike (43:10.262)
This is, you know what I was gonna say, this is right around the time of Freud as well. So you gotta be understanding. But anyway, and modernity.
Jacob (43:14.201)
Absolutely, this is all part of that zeitgeist.
Jacob (43:20.029)
Modernity. All right. So better that’s legitimately better than Wikipedia, right? Here’s a really good example why people say don’t trust Wikipedia kids. But all right, so what’s the next one?
mike (43:22.294)
The next, oh, go ahead.
mike (43:26.614)
Sure.
mike (43:32.362)
Next one is from LitCharts, major themes.
Jacob (43:34.213)
And these do, I will say these do they actually I went from worst to best, maybe I should have gone from best to worst. But like, whatever, we’re already here. So keep going.
mike (43:39.052)
Okay.
mike (43:42.338)
No, this is good. Next one is writing, journaling, and messaging. Pretty self-evident, right? Christianity, science, and the occult. We’ve already covered that one a little bit. Life, death, and the undead. Yes, of course.
Jacob (43:47.29)
Interesting, yeah, go on.
Jacob (43:51.997)
That’s fair. All right, keep going. Yep.
And, yup, it is Dracula.
mike (43:59.378)
Illness, madness, and confinement.
Jacob (44:03.125)
Keep going.
mike (44:04.21)
And lastly, for lit charts at least, romantic love, seduction, and sexual purity.
Jacob (44:11.337)
That’s a pretty good list of themes right there. We have one more though, give the final one.
mike (44:17.03)
Last one is from Literary Devices. I don’t know if you’re gonna like these ones. Some of them are redundant, to be fair, but this one, it’s like good and evil. I mean, okay. Superstition. Revival of religious faith. Madness. Fear of outsiders, also known as xenophobia.
Jacob (44:19.498)
Mm-hmm.
Jacob (44:27.478)
I actually think that’s pretty fair.
Mm-hmm.
Jacob (44:35.201)
through going. Yep. All right.
Jacob (44:41.653)
Yeah, okay. At least they don’t call it xenophobia. I respect them for not calling it xenophobia.
mike (44:46.769)
It’s like when you copy somebody’s homework and you have to use different words so you don’t get caught. Money. Sex.
Jacob (44:50.573)
Yes!
Jacob (44:54.977)
Yeah, that came back. It’s got a weird one as far as I’m concerned. Oh, sex. Okay. All right. Any others? Limits of knowledge, yeah.
mike (45:01.475)
limits of knowledge. I can get behind this one, at least a critique of it anyway. British idealism. And finally, science versus the supernatural.
Jacob (45:08.997)
Yep. Yeah, absolutely.
Jacob (45:14.073)
Okay. Remind us what Wikipedia said Dracula was about.
mike (45:20.041)
Um, gender and sexuality.
Jacob (45:23.101)
gender and sexuality, racism, and xenophobia, or no, disease, at least they have disease in there.
mike (45:26.442)
race and disease. Race and disease. Which to be fair, they’re almost like big overarching categories that could fit. So obviously if it’s about race, then it includes xenophobia. A little bit, right? It’s a-
Jacob (45:35.173)
I love how Wikipedia does even like talk about Jesus. It’s like, if you go and get your knowledge of what Dracula is about from Wikipedia, you have no idea what Dracula is actually about. Wikipedia, this was a garbage article, Wikipedia. You keep asking me for like three bucks and I am not gonna give you $3 because your Dracula Wikipedia article is terrible.
mike (45:47.907)
Hmm.
mike (45:57.16)
the
Jacob (46:01.277)
But as you continue to go down those themes, they do start to get branched out and they do start to incorporate some of the other stuff that I think is truly present in the book. Now, what I think is ironic about this list of themes from these four different sites, though, is that you can kind of tell the ideological background of the authors of these articles based upon a what themes they mention and what language they use, right? Yeah, what lens are you looking at here?
mike (46:09.951)
Mm.
mike (46:22.322)
Oh for sure. What lens are you gonna look at it from? Right? I mean, you’re gonna have blind spots. You’re gonna have blind spots for sure.
Jacob (46:30.729)
Well, and so one of the things that I do want to point out, though, is the consistency of themes across those articles. If you have Wikipedia and lit charts of green on these themes, then you can kind of assume that there must be something to that, right? The problem is, A, how the language is, and then also kind of what the emphasis is, because here is where I will lay down the facts here, folks.
mike (46:45.251)
Mm.
Jacob (47:00.509)
within the novel Dracula. Now you might not believe me even based upon the context of this conversation because we’ve already given a few examples, right? I mean, Jonathan Harker seduced by vampires in the castle and Lucy, she’s all like coquettish and things like that and she has all these like dudes trying to marry her and stuff. But those are the only examples. Now we’re going to talk about some things in addition to this, but those are the two biggest, most obvious examples.
in a four or five hundred page novel that is every other page talking about how Jesus is Lord and vampires are satanic and science is awesome.
mike (47:34.164)
Mm-hmm.
mike (47:41.419)
Mm.
Which actually for the late 1800s is pretty, I mean, to have those juxtaposed is pretty profound, too.
Jacob (47:50.817)
I just want to point out that if you read this novel and your takeaway is that this is a book about sexuality, you’re crazy. You are bringing, yeah, you are bringing an awful lot of what you want to think about to this book.
mike (47:59.614)
It says more about you than it does the book.
mike (48:06.566)
Like I said, this was right around the time of Freud and stuff, so I mean that kind of makes sense. Sometimes a pair of fangs is just a pair of fangs.
Jacob (48:11.002)
Uh… Well, it’s-
Yeah, well, you know, my favorite phrase, which would be inappropriate for this podcast is vampire fangs are more about a tick, less about a fill in the blank. It’s a parasite. He’s a parasite. They’re those, you know, if you think ticks are sexy, if you think leeches are like great euphemisms for sex, then vampires are for you, I guess, you know.
mike (48:26.7)
Yeah, I gotcha.
mike (48:41.802)
Well, and you can even just the way that Lucy is sort of described on her on her sickbed, on her deathbed is like, if, and again, if you wanted to make that a parallel to, I guess, the destruction that lust can cause, like in a soul or in a relationship, then that’s maybe as far as it goes, you know, and that’s perfectly fine, because that’s perfectly, yeah, that’s perfectly consistent with the Christian virtue ethic to say, yep, that’s what sin will do to you.
Jacob (48:58.657)
Mm-hmm. Oh, they’re not mutually exclusive. Yeah.
Jacob (49:07.537)
Oh, I think that. And I think that’s I actually I think that is what Bram Stoker does do in this novel, because okay, so there’s two main examples that can the third thing. Alright, so I already said that, yeah, you have an example of Jonathan Harker trying to be seduced by women, three of them to Harker you dog. Three foreign women coming to him in the bedroom. But
mike (49:14.495)
Mm.
mike (49:29.42)
Mm-hmm.
Jacob (49:34.669)
Then you also have Lucy with all these marriage proposals and people like to make a big deal out of that. They like to make a big deal out of the blood transfusions. And I’ll give credit where credit’s due. There is a couple paragraphs, like some commentary on that, where after Lucy dies, she’s going to marry Arthur Homewood because of course she chooses the rich guy, right? I mean like, yeah, the cowboy and the scientist never stood a chance.
mike (49:43.732)
Mm-hmm.
mike (49:58.85)
It’s stable, secure.
Jacob (50:03.95)
It’s just the guy with the money.
mike (50:06.358)
Sounds like you’re trying to turn Dracula into a romantic comedy.
Jacob (50:10.193)
You probably… There’s Dracula dead and loving it, which is a really, really great funny comedy. The Mel Brooks one. Yeah, it’s pretty well done. Leslie Nielsen stars Dracula. But the guy from Ghostbusters 2 stars Renfield. Check it out. It’s fun. But he’s like, you know, we never got to marry in real life, but I feel like because I gave my blood to her, we’ve been married in a different way.
mike (50:13.991)
Oh, that’s the Mel Brooks.
Jacob (50:39.017)
biting their knuckles at that point because everyone gave their blood to Lucy and he doesn’t know that. And so he’s like, yeah, literally, literally in the text of the book, Van Helsing was like, I was trying really hard not to laugh at that moment. He admits that to Seward later on. And Seward is horrified. I was like, that’s not funny. And Van Helsing is like, well, you know.
mike (50:40.466)
Just a second…
mike (50:47.886)
It’s like, um…
Jacob (51:06.233)
we’re all is she’s a polygamist if that’s true kind of thing. So and so people are like, Oh, see the blood transfusion, that’s like the conjugal act, right? You know, you don’t have to take it that way. I get that’s where like your modern mind is going to go to. But you know, this is a sacramental novel. This is a novel about sacraments, right? Everything in the context of this novel is looking at things from the juxtaposition of science and sacrament.
And so what Bram Stoker is doing in this moment is talking about blood transfusion as a kind of sacraments, a kind of union between people, explicitly not a sexual union. Right. And they’re talking about marriage. They’re not now, I know that marriage and sex are very intertwined. Right. I get that.
mike (51:55.83)
Well, I was going to say, actually, this has an interesting parallel to the, to sacramental theology where a lot of times people will, because they only, they think of things primarily through the lens of sex, people will hear about the union that we receive in the Eucharist and communion and say, oh, is it like, you know, because Jesus talks about, he’s united to the church as a bride, right? A bridegroom and bride. So they say, oh, is the Eucharist like sex? And actually the more accurate
Jacob (52:15.754)
Yep.
mike (52:21.154)
Understand be that sex is like the Eucharist. It’s it’s an imitation of the Union that is experienced in In this earth on in the Eucharist, but obviously ultimately in heaven
Jacob (52:23.974)
Yes.
Jacob (52:32.089)
Exactly right. No, that’s exactly right. And so this isn’t about, yeah, the blood transfusion is not about sex. The blood transfusion is about sacrament. And what’s happening there is it’s not salacious. And in the context of the novel, it’s not presented as salacious. It’s presented as holy. It’s presented as matrimonial, right? And so, but then you have something that to this
mike (52:34.562)
So that would be kind of the closer parallel in talking about blood transfusions here.
mike (52:43.501)
Mm-hmm.
mike (52:53.183)
Mm.
Jacob (53:01.877)
People call it like the blood wedding or something like that. This is, this is what people will refer to Mina being attacked by Dracula as, because what happens is they, yeah, that’s, that’s what people are trying to do. Yep. You got it. Um, but, uh, Dracula manages to get into the asylum because they all reconvene at the asylum where Dr. Seward works.
mike (53:12.35)
It was the Red Wedding before the Red Wedding.
Check Game of Thrones off the bingo card. Go ahead.
Jacob (53:28.973)
and they’re in these upper rooms and Renfield’s a captive at the asylum. So Renfield allows Dracula in. He’s the one that invites Dracula into the building. Dracula manages to sneak up to the bedroom where Jonathan and Mina are sleeping and he goes and he knocks Harker out and then he goes and he makes Mina drink his blood, right?
and at which point Mina’s like unclean, she like has a mental breakdown, you know, I’ve been polluted, this is terrible, blah, blah. And yes, this is a satanic sacrament. This is still like satanic inversion of like sacramental union, because we’ve already had the blood transfusion stuff for like noble and holy reasons with like the people trying to save Lucy.
Now you have the exchange of blood with the vampire, but it’s all done for her destruction, right? And so it’s not portrayed as a good or sexy thing in the novel. Now, if people want to just insist upon making this a sexual thing, it’s rape, okay? Like, she’s roofied.
mike (54:33.238)
Mm-hmm.
Jacob (54:52.917)
and he is taking advantage of her against her will in the most insidious way possible. None of this should be titillating to anybody. It irks me that people want to pretend this book is all about vampires. What’s cool about vampires is their sex appeal. It’s like, man,
mike (55:04.663)
Mm-hmm.
mike (55:17.534)
Yeah. Mm.
Jacob (55:20.809)
That is so far removed from the folklore that is so far removed from the book of Dracula itself. Like you need to like read the book and then come back and talk to me about how sexy Dracula is because he is not.
mike (55:32.01)
Well, and it goes back to your main point, which is it’s trying to show the destructive nature of sin. And even if you wanted to look at it through the lens of sexual sin, it’s still showing how destructive it is and how ugly it is actually. I mean, and really that’s, if anything, that’s the, you know, guess positive sort of takeaway from it too.
Jacob (55:46.945)
Mm-hmm.
Jacob (55:51.025)
Well, and if you can’t, you know, another thing that you can contrast the seduction of Jonathan with what happens to Mina. You know, Jonathan gives his first person perspective of the seduction. He’s like, I was like, strangely drawn to them, you know, and I knew it was wrong. But like, there was something going on there kind of thing. Whereas Mina’s self profession, you know, like is none of that.
mike (56:10.704)
Mm.
mike (56:16.469)
Mm.
Jacob (56:16.541)
She is unconscious the whole time. She does, she talks about how she couldn’t resist him. So I think that people want to like read that into, want to read into that. It’s like a willful thing. But no, it’s, they’re differently described. The novel itself paints these as different experiences. And then also…
mike (56:28.619)
Mm.
Jacob (56:42.421)
The other thing everyone wants to talk about how Lucy is this like, you know, kind of like lusty woman kind of thing. And she’s not, it’s exaggerated. But like, if you’re going to tell me that the main factor of what happens to Lucy is that she becomes like a lusty woman, you know, and you’re talking about like female sexuality and
mike (56:51.924)
Mm-hmm.
Jacob (57:10.081)
Oh, Lucy has to be dispatched because now she’s got like sexual agency and things like that. I just want to remind you all of her victims are young children, like six and seven years old. So yeah, what are you trying to say, folks? Yeah, I want I want a million academic papers on, you know, female pedophilia rooted in Dracula’s story by Monday, because that’s
mike (57:23.179)
Yeah, so what do you end up saying? Yeah, is that the cart you want to attach your horse to?
Jacob (57:39.893)
That’s silly, right? She does try to seduce her husband as an undead person, but again, that’s because vampires kill their loved ones. Vampires attack their loved ones. And yeah, that does mean husbands too.
mike (57:49.182)
And yeah, that goes back to your story from last week where the dad comes back and wants his family to let him in. Because in a sense, if the whole idea, you know, and you mentioned this last week at the root of the vampire like idea is that disease was coming and sweeping through communities, it was going to be the loved ones that were going to kill you, right? If when it’s communicable disease. And so in the same way, if it’s this sort of metaphor for death itself.
then it’s gonna be her loved one that she’s gonna have most access to or gonna be the one that she’s able to affect.
Jacob (58:24.901)
Absolutely. So I mean, you know, in a nutshell, Dracula is like the most pious book you’ll ever read. It’s it’s crazy pious. But what’s cool about it is it’s not afraid because these themes these themes of like the danger of sexuality. Yeah, there’s some of that in there for sure. So it’s not like a Puritan book. It’s not puritanical. It’s just really pious. And it’s Yeah, it’s
mike (58:45.491)
No, that’s just it.
It’s not, yeah, it’s not a moralistic tale, even though it has morals or something.
Jacob (58:53.561)
And it’s an embrace of the modern. It’s an embrace of Christian culture. But it’s also a rejection of the rejection of faith. It’s like, hey, we can be modern and still be Christian. We can be modern and still be devout. Bram Stoker is not H.G. Wells. Like, he is still, clearly, he wrote a very pious book. I don’t really know enough about his.
mike (59:06.859)
Mm.
Jacob (59:23.497)
his personal piety. But the book and you know, there’s so many examples of Dracula fiction that didn’t need that aren’t as pious. In other words, he writes an unusually Christian themed book and a sea of examples that are not.
mike (59:41.622)
Yeah. And even like you said, the original vampire books were not even necessarily the most pious either. So it’s almost like, you know, yeah, so it, you know, if you want to call it a co-opting, or you could say it’s grace building upon nature, right? If you have the nature of the vampire story, and then you have this someone, this person who, like we both said, even if he wasn’t a part of this ancient Christian sacramental tradition, I mean, Church of Ireland, Church of England.
Jacob (59:49.513)
Some of the more popular ones leading up to this. Yeah. Yeah, it’s a mix. It’s a mix.
mike (01:00:09.086)
still in many ways is very sacramental in its view. In terms of the Protestant church, that’s probably as close as you can get to Eastern Orthodox and Catholic. But either way, he was very Catholic sensitive, as we’ve already talked about. And so he’s in a good position where…
Jacob (01:00:11.869)
Yeah, they’re high church. Yeah.
Jacob (01:00:26.373)
Not according to knowledge though. He really abuses the Eucharist. You can tell that he wants because he has a quote unquote an indulgence from the pope to be like use the Eucharist as a weapon against the vampire. And so you have like tons of like embarrassing, it’s an embarrassing lack of knowledge on his part. To me it reads like a Protestant who likes the Catholic church but he doesn’t know enough about it to like write about it well. Yeah, he…
mike (01:00:30.922)
Well, okay, so…
mike (01:00:40.514)
Yeah.
mike (01:00:45.89)
But in the same way that he had a lack of knowledge, yeah.
It’s a fanboy. Yeah. But in the same way, you know, he made mistakes about blood transfusion too. And so it’s if it’s still kind of part of this like, you know, new world, not any and it does show that while he may be a observer of it, it there’s still a difference between being immersed in it. And so that’s where you can kind of and again, not that I’m trying to like justify it or anything like that. But I will say that, you know, the some of the themes that you’ve kind of been discussing has does make me want to go back and
Jacob (01:00:58.579)
Yeah.
mike (01:01:20.342)
reinvestigator or you know, at least finish the book too. So
Jacob (01:01:23.009)
There’s very, very good audio versions of this book that I think are really, really engaging. So I would highly recommend you check out some ones on Audible.
mike (01:01:31.614)
See, Jacob wants to give me such a hard time for not finishing when I actually read it and he just listens to it when he’s like, oh, how did you not finish that book? And it’s like, oh, you mean the one that you have while you’re at work and it’s on double speed and all that, Jacob. Yeah, yeah. Embrace technology, is that what you’re gonna say, Bram Stoker, you know?
Jacob (01:01:37.216)
Hahaha!
Jacob (01:01:43.283)
Hey, hey, work smarter not harder, Mike. That’s all I’m saying. Embrace the human tradition of storytelling.
Hey, there you go. See, technology can be your friends if used in the right way. Oh, hey, one last thought before we wrap up. There’s a, I just found out. I literally just read it this week. There’s an Icelandic version of Dracula that Bram Stoker like signed off on that was written in his lifetime that is completely different than his version of it. And for a hundred years.
mike (01:01:57.526)
Hmm
mike (01:02:15.207)
Save it for next October.
Jacob (01:02:17.209)
Yeah, oh yeah, we will probably. For 100 years, everyone just thought there was like an Icelandic translation of Dracula. And somehow, like, I guess, like, Icelanders didn’t read the English version. And English people didn’t read the Icelandic. And so everyone had, yeah, nobody had any idea that there was just a completely different book. And I read it this week. And it’s really interesting. And the one thing I’ll say about it, though, is it’s the book that everyone thinks Dracula is.
mike (01:02:27.174)
I was going to say nobody read that version either. Nobody read that version either.
mike (01:02:45.039)
Oh, that is interesting.
Jacob (01:02:46.333)
It really reinforces how pious Bram Stoker’s novel is because the Icelandic one, while still having tons of super interesting themes that are present in Bram Stoker’s, is way more salacious. It’s way more secular, basically. And it’s like a weird Elseworlds-like version of Dracula. It’s like, this is the one you’ve all been talking about for 100 years and you had no idea it existed.
mike (01:03:00.016)
Mm.
Jacob (01:03:14.121)
You should have just wrote all your academic papers on this guy. And then at least you’d have integrity.
mike (01:03:17.194)
Yeah, that’s an easy change though. All you gotta do is just put the, you know, Iceland in parentheses next to Dracula and then it’s, that’s a, yeah.
Jacob (01:03:25.499)
It’s called The Powers of Darkness. It’s got a pretty cool title too. Check it out.
mike (01:03:28.386)
Hmm, interesting. Well, I hope you are satisfied, Jacob, as satisfied as we are. Thank you guys for, yeah.
Jacob (01:03:35.545)
I feel like I got a lot off my chest. I feel like I got that weird vampire nightmare off my chest. Mm-hmm.
mike (01:03:41.146)
It’s about time. Yeah. Hey, you got to save that for the that’s different episode art. You’re going to use that for the other one. Thank you guys for coming to listen to this conversation on. We’re not going to call it the redemption of Dracula because we already have redemption in a different title, but in Jacob’s, I don’t know, soliloquy, we’ll say of Dracula and its critics.
Jacob (01:03:46.191)
I know. Yup.
Jacob (01:04:00.769)
Jacob rants about Dracula. Dracula is not sexy.
mike (01:04:04.727)
But don’t forget to like and subscribe to the show, leave a five star rating, positive review. And that just kind of helps our show get out to more people, more people can listen and get in on these fun conversations that we enjoy having.
Jacob (01:04:19.577)
or at least allows us to like get it off our chest.
mike (01:04:24.465)
Ah.