Rainy Days and Mondays and Vampires

Don't they always get you down? I think that they make it much harder to be awake, because my hibernation mode kicks in and I say, "The animals probably aren't walking around, why should I?" But alas, workers have to be awake. There's my tangent.

In my Victorian Lit class, we are reading Dracula. This book I have read a few times before, but never the way in which my professor is having us read. Instead of just a classic gothic novel, we have taken the approach of Britain being invaded by alien races, those that plan to break down the British ideal of civility. In this light, I have been thinking that this is much more interesting. When Dracula is a man who sneaks into London by cover of mist, and slowly drains the blood of people, that is the exact symbol of the threat of 19th century imperialism. Plus, there's really disturbing facts about Dracula that movies and modern interpretations overlook: hair on the palms of his hands?!!! I really don't want to think about that.

It's interesting as well that Dracula is old when the book begins and grows younger with fresh blood. This was portrayed well in the 90s movie version, and I liked that he was able to move around in London society even during the day (I don't know how, but he did.) When Van Helsing kills one of the women in the novel after she becomes one of Dracula's vampires, he cuts off her head. Wow, that's really placing the Victorian gavel on the man's side. The many sides of feminine ideas come from this book, to the disturbing "New Woman" and the gentle souls who help their men any way they can. What was wrong with the New Woman? The fact that they were "loud". Wow, need I say more.

The end is equally interesting because instead of seeing the action from the villain's side, it's always a second-person account of the action, which kept me interested because it's a story told from journal entries and letters. It seems boring, but makes the story that much more exciting because it's all of these different characters adding their own unique characteristics to the plot. Dracula is actually a group narrative, and it works.

Now, we think of vampires as mythic monsters who hide in the dark, when in actuality Dracula was out in broad daylight taking over everything with a copy, with the simulation of modern society, and it made him harder to catch because everybody thought he was normal. I think that this makes him more evil, because it makes the fact that you can't see him for what he is that much more menacing.

I have read this book in more ways than one, and this reading was especially great on a rainy day. Now, who likes Twilight when they got the original?