ENGL20031 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Jonathan Harker, Orientalizing Period, Cinematograph
11 May 2018
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Adaptions and Transgression
Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Adaptation
- All vampire cinema adapts previous vampire cinema/characters/novels/etc. Adapting the
vampire genre.
- Jonathan Harker’s journey east, to Transylvania…to trade (in real estate, property).
- An imaginary journey, orientalising the east as mysterious, unpredictable, ungovernable,
unreliable and threatening.
- Stoker depended on Victorian travelogues and ethnographic of the region because he had
never been there (e.g. Emily Gerard’s The Land Beyond the Forest, 1888). Nothing is
authenticated in the novel, everything is borrowed, copied, plagarised.
- Dracula charts two epic journeys: Jonathan Harker goes east and Dracula going west. The
novel is an example of what Patrick Brantlinger calls ‘imperial Gothic’, a novel of ‘reverse
colonialisation’: the other comes to you.
- Why is Dracula able to migrate so easily? His lineage is mixed, not pure: “in our veins
flows the blood of many brave races’. HE speaks excellent German and English and his
library is full of books about English life and customs.
- He is the opposite of Jonathan Harker who is keen to hold onto his English identity, this is
different for Dracula — he wants to blend in as an Englishman in London. He disapproves
of the idea of ‘a stranger in a strange land’.
- How to adapt to some other place or predicament? How to translate? How to ‘master’ other
languages and cultures?
- The stranger is someone who arrives and stays.
- Think about the ‘pre-history’ of cinema: a spectatorial and spectral technology. Cinema is
not a matter of accurately representing reality, what is; instead, cinema brings things (back)
to life. It (re)animates to produce the ‘real’ as a (special) effect.
- Spirits, electric impulses, technologies, optical illusions, fakes that seem real.
- So is Dracula a cinematic creature?
- Is seduction/rape a civic duty? Framed by the discourse of the master/the Symbolic Other.
This structures Mina’s economy to require her sacrifice.
- The vampire (Dracula) as a residue, as something that remains (in cinema), insubstantial, a
‘mere phantom’… but it needs woman’s desire (her reading: a woman’s media) to re-
animate it.
- Cosmic vampire?
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