(no subject)
guys i apologise deeply for being so dull...i wrote the Essay of Glory today on Frankenstein and Dracula. Because I am a geek, here are my favourite phrases. If you steal them, I swear to God, I will hunt you down and take you apart bone by bone, pausing to sprinkle pop rocks in the wounds. My revenge as eighties.
Stoker’s writing careens through the text, bringing different voices, moments, and accounts. There are moments of incredible savagery, though the image that remains with readers is often that of the staking of Lucy. Maurice Hindle quotes Elaine Showalter’s description of Lucy’s staking as being gang rape. Lucy has been alluring, sensuous, and powerful. She has failed to devote herself to one man, and so her power is taken away from her judiciously by repeated and violent penetration. Stoker allows Mina to have a voice in the text by justifying her intelligence - Van Helsing says she has a man’s brain. She is a dedicated wife, and a meek, observant woman, and so her intellect is generously overlooked.
Certainly the sadovoyeuristic way in which Lucy’s staking is recorded in every detail is astonishingly similar to the way films maintain their audience’ interest, by having the beautiful women die slowly and after a thrilling chase. In horror films the girl is often scantily dressed - Stoker’s Victorian equivalent is no less sexualised:
‘…she lay there; the pointed teeth, the bloodstained, voluptuous mouth - which it made one shudder to see - the whole carnal and unspiritual experience’ (Stoker 228). Two pages before Lucy is staked, and her appearance is already voluptuous. She is the sexy vampire, the thrilling, attractive face of evil. Perhaps Stoker never intended for her character to become so depraved - certainly by two pages later he has killed her brutally. Even as Lucy dies her lips are smeared with crimson, a mark of the sexualised woman.
The Gothic is often suspected of being a genre of thrills and entertainment. This, one suspects, may not be art, because art improves us. Here, though, in the heart of Shelley’s delectably wrought polemic, is precisely what art does. Here is the truth of what we can achieve, and the destruction we can inflict. Here is honesty, described by a young woman, living in sin, relentlessly pregnant, always too close to death. Mary Shelley, the brilliant daughter of two brilliant parents, describes at twenty the anxieties of the modern age. The masses left uncared for, the child whose absent parents haunt it, the science whose reach, ultimately, is beyond its capacity for compassion. This science would go on to develop first penicillin and the iron lung, and then gas chambers and the atom bomb. Were Shelley alive now, she would see ultrasound machines and antibiotics, reliable contraception and balanced nutrition. She would also see machine guns, cluster bombs, and land mines. Stoker’s text, the echoes of venereal disease, cries out to the modern reader of human immunovirus, as bloody and deadly as any vampirism.
Stoker’s writing careens through the text, bringing different voices, moments, and accounts. There are moments of incredible savagery, though the image that remains with readers is often that of the staking of Lucy. Maurice Hindle quotes Elaine Showalter’s description of Lucy’s staking as being gang rape. Lucy has been alluring, sensuous, and powerful. She has failed to devote herself to one man, and so her power is taken away from her judiciously by repeated and violent penetration. Stoker allows Mina to have a voice in the text by justifying her intelligence - Van Helsing says she has a man’s brain. She is a dedicated wife, and a meek, observant woman, and so her intellect is generously overlooked.
Certainly the sadovoyeuristic way in which Lucy’s staking is recorded in every detail is astonishingly similar to the way films maintain their audience’ interest, by having the beautiful women die slowly and after a thrilling chase. In horror films the girl is often scantily dressed - Stoker’s Victorian equivalent is no less sexualised:
‘…she lay there; the pointed teeth, the bloodstained, voluptuous mouth - which it made one shudder to see - the whole carnal and unspiritual experience’ (Stoker 228). Two pages before Lucy is staked, and her appearance is already voluptuous. She is the sexy vampire, the thrilling, attractive face of evil. Perhaps Stoker never intended for her character to become so depraved - certainly by two pages later he has killed her brutally. Even as Lucy dies her lips are smeared with crimson, a mark of the sexualised woman.
The Gothic is often suspected of being a genre of thrills and entertainment. This, one suspects, may not be art, because art improves us. Here, though, in the heart of Shelley’s delectably wrought polemic, is precisely what art does. Here is the truth of what we can achieve, and the destruction we can inflict. Here is honesty, described by a young woman, living in sin, relentlessly pregnant, always too close to death. Mary Shelley, the brilliant daughter of two brilliant parents, describes at twenty the anxieties of the modern age. The masses left uncared for, the child whose absent parents haunt it, the science whose reach, ultimately, is beyond its capacity for compassion. This science would go on to develop first penicillin and the iron lung, and then gas chambers and the atom bomb. Were Shelley alive now, she would see ultrasound machines and antibiotics, reliable contraception and balanced nutrition. She would also see machine guns, cluster bombs, and land mines. Stoker’s text, the echoes of venereal disease, cries out to the modern reader of human immunovirus, as bloody and deadly as any vampirism.