It’s the ninety-fifth episode of Required Reading With Tom and Stella! This podcast, which is hosted by Tom Panarese (Pop Culture Affidavit, In Country) and Stella (Batgirl to Oracle: A Barbara Gordon Podcast, The Batman Universe) is two teachers talking about literature. Each episode, we will be taking a look at a single work, analyzing it, criticizing it and deciding if it’s required reading.
This time around, we are looking at Dracula by Bram Stoker.
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Required Reading With Tom and Stella 
Captain Entropy here. Stella, if that doesn’t ring a bell, we ate pizza together once as part of a HeroesCon crowd. Tom, I hope to meet you someday as well. I really enjoyed this discussion of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and I have comments.
Pacing — I first read the novel on a Barnes & Noble e-reader (Nook). It was a classics edition B&N had put together with every old-timey reference or place name linked to a glossary at the back. I loved it. It was like reading the “annotated for the 21st century” version. It informed my reading without slowing me down. I was going through some interminable pre-deployment training run by the U.S. Army. I spent three times as much time waiting on my instructors to get their stuff together as I did actually training. So, by comparison to how slow my life was at that point, the novel was paced just fine.
Technology — One of the notes they made in this classic edition was that (as Tom pointed out in his comparison to 90s computer movies) Stoker was packing the novel with as many modern references as he could. Even the typewriter Mina used was only thirty years old at the time of publication. According to the commentary, Stoker’s readers considered themselves denizens of a scientific age beyond mysticism and hoo-doo. Stoker was telling the readers they were fooling themselves. The old ways and the darkness still had power, even in the modern age.
I think the Romany segments are part of Stoker’s repudiation of arrogant, uninformed modernity. The “primitive, superstitious” people of Transylvania are, with the exception of the open-minded Van Helsing, the only ones with the knowledge to even slow this monster down. Van Helsing is really the only one equipped to navigate both worlds. But the whole novel is designed to induce fear, to tell the readers that the science they place their faith in won’t save them.
I think the sexual aspects are similarly manipulative and commercial. I don’t mean that in a bad way; we pay novelists to manipulate our emotions. But Stoker’s equivocal stance on sex is his way of eating his cake and having it, too. He tittilates his audience with vampire-induced wantonness, but he avoids condemnation by saying it wasn’t their fault. The devil, or one of his chief minions, made them do it. He also makes sure the symbols and sacraments of Christianity have real power over the darkness. That might be consistent with his actual worldview, but it also prevents people from railing against his novel. It’s like how, in the original Ocean’s Eleven (spoiler alert), they weren’t allowed to get away with the money. The moviemakers could show crime as fun, but they couldn’t let it pay.
I think the two of you were spot on regarding where this novel fits in literature — not required reading for academic reasons, just for cultural significance. I enjoyed it, though.
Thanks again for the great discussion!
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Hullo, Tom & Stella. Got the link from Cap’n Entr’py.
Dracula caught my eye, and check out the backlist of episodes to see that some of these are among the books I’m trying to get my teenaged son to read (and some that I have read already myself).
Will be posting again soon on this and other episodes once I’m caught up.
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