The Woman In Black (play) by Stephen Malatratt

Just to be clear, this post is about the 1987 stage play by Stephen Malatratt, not the original 1983 book by Susan Hill, the 1989 television movie with the screenplay by Nigel Kneale, or the 2012 film starring Daniel Radcliffe. I believe the book is the source for all three, and the films are not based on the play.

The Woman In Black has been playing continuously in London since 1989, making it the second longest running play there - second only to The Mousetrap, which has been running since 1952 (!) By the way, I have seen The Mousetrap in London (back in 1999). Yes it is good. No I won’t reveal the ending.

The stage version of The Woman In Black is interesting in that it is intentionally minimalist. There are only two credited actors - more on that later. The setting is a theater, and while some props are used, most of the props are expected to be imagined by the audience, from the existence of a dog on down. There is no real “set.” Sound effects fill in the gaps. Even the way the parts are played is kind of unusual.

Let me see if I can coherently explain the framing device. Arthur Kipps is a solicitor (one of the British kinds of lawyers, for those not familiar with that system) who is trying to recover from a traumatic experience that happened to him when he was young. He seeks out the assistance of an actor (who remains unnamed) to help him “perform” the story for his friends and family, so they can understand what has happened - and so that Kipps can, he hopes, finally put his trauma to rest. The actor insists that the best way to do this is to have himself (the actor) perform the part of Kipps, while Kipps plays all the other parts in the drama. Yes, this is a bit confusing at first, but it actually works, and makes for an interesting interplay between the two.

Because of this framing device, the actor playing Kipps has to be an actor playing a non-actor acting multiple parts. Which isn’t easy. Kipps also has to develop from a rank amateur who is a terrible actor into someone who convincingly plays a whole range of characters, all while watching the other person play his own character.

At its core, however, The Woman In Black is fairly standard Gothic Horror - it uses all the proper tropes from the foggy and remote location in northeast England to the dead child to the lurid backstory. It isn’t exactly groundbreaking on plot or atmosphere, but done well, it makes for an effective play.  

Here is the basic setup: Kipps is sent by his boss to sort through the papers of a recently deceased client, the reclusive and mysterious Mrs. Alice Drablow. At the funeral, Kipps sees a mysterious woman in black - one that everyone else denies seeing. Later, while at the house out on the marsh, he sees and experiences more supernatural manifestations, which eventually lead him to the truth of the past - and a deadly threat. I won’t reveal more than that.

I saw this play in large part because my second daughter loves scary and suspenseful stuff and really wanted to see this one. I also took my eldest daughter and eldest son, as they were old enough to enjoy a scary thrill. All three loved it.

I have mentioned The Empty Space in many prior posts. It is, shall we say, a gem of our local community, and one of my favorite places to see live drama. Small size, modest budgets, but high artistic values and devoted actors and staff make for consistently excellent and imaginative productions. In this case, the acting was strong, and the staging made for great suspense and atmosphere.

The part of Mr. Kipps the person was played by Paul Sosa, who we previously saw at Cal State Bakersfield’s production of Pippin. In this play, he had a lot to do. The opening scene, where he is (very awkwardly) reading the introduction to his own drama is fantastic. You honestly could believe that Sosa cannot read a line to save his life. Of course, we know better, but he was entirely convincing at the beginning. Later, he has to cover a plethora of parts. This he does hesitantly at first, but gradually grows more and more comfortable with acting. This to me was the most impressive part of the play. To portray the development of skill and enthusiasm like that took superb control and focus throughout. Sosa has professional experience in Los Angeles, but is now teaching English at a local middle school. 

 Daniel Korth in character as Mr. Kipps, and Paul Sosa as Mr. Kipps playing "Keckwick," a local villager.

The other part was played by Daniel Korth, who I do not believe I have seen before. This was his Empty Space debut, and I do not recall seeing him anywhere else locally. Korth was apparently one of the founders of Pop Up Theater LA, so he too is a professional veteran. He also gave a compelling performance. His job required that he sell the horror and suspense despite the lack of spooky music or special effects. His voice, his body, and especially his face had to convey all that. And this while he was playing an actor playing the part of Mr. Kipps. So he switched in and out of character, so to speak. The rehearsals of the “play within the play” often went wrong when the “real” Mr. Kipps forgot lines, or fell out of character, so Korth had to go from portraying the terror of the moment right back into the actor trying to coach the non-actor. My kids commented that it must have been difficult to keep a straight face while doing all that. I agree. This is one reason I love live theater - particularly in a small venue where you can see every detail. There is something visceral about seeing good acting up close. 

 Daniel Korth and Paul Sosa

There is one other part in the play, but it is not credited. There is an actual “Woman In Black” in the play. She appears where her character should, but does not speak until the climactic scene. However, she is not “officially” a part of the play. She is not supposed to actually exist, and the fact that we, the audience have seen her is a portent of disaster for us. In the Empty Space version, they do not even credit the actor as “Vision” as she is credited in the London production. And honestly, between the makeup and the black veil, I am not sure who the actor was. Furthermore, she does not appear in the photo gallery at all, let alone with a tag. Her existence is a mystery, I suppose. Whoever she is, whether she exists or not except in our collective imagination, she played her part well.

The Woman In Black runs this Friday and Saturday, and then it is gone. If you live here in Bakersfield and need an idea for a creepy date, go see it.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Source of book: Borrowed from the library. I haven’t found a good used hardback yet…

This book is the October selection for the Reading to Know Book Club, hosted by my friend Carrie at readingtoknow.com. This will be my final book club review for this year. Next month is Little Women, which I have read, but didn’t find all that interesting, so I’m skipping reading it again. December is A Tale of Two Cities, which I read just a few years back. I liked it, but decided to skip reading it again both because I did recently read it and because December is my most insane music month, so I seriously doubt I would have time to tackle a Dickens novel. I will note in advance that A Tale of Two Cities is only novel for which I can quote the beginning and the ending. No other novel has such memorable lines at both ends. So, if you haven’t already read it, this might be a good chance.

This book also fits into the category of “Books I Should Have Read in High School.”

Photograph by Napoleon Sarony, 1882

I should point out at the outset that I love Oscar Wilde. The Importance of Being Earnest is, hands down, one of the wittiest and most quotable plays of all time. Any time one needs a pithy - or poisonous - quote, Wilde is always a good bet. So I rather expected to find some good lines in this book, and I was not disappointed.

The central idea of The Picture of Dorian Gray is so well known that it isn’t much of a spoiler to disclose it. Dorian Gray remains young and unspotted by his vice while a portrait of him suffers the consequences of his debauchery.

The plot is also a variation on the age-old story of Faust. The German legend is best known through the plays by Christopher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In the earliest versions, Faust sells his soul to the devil for early knowledge (contrasted with heavenly wisdom). In Marlowe’s version, Faust seeks power as much - perhaps more than - knowledge. Goethe makes Faust’s bargain to be the result of his quest for something that transcends the limits of human knowledge and experience - almost the flip side of the original. (I am currently reading part two of Goethe’s Faust, so I will have more thoughts on this soon.)

Wilde makes Dorian Gray rather more shallow than Faust. Where Faust seeks knowledge, power, or transcendence, Dorian wishes to look pretty. He is horrified initially at the thought that he will age and become ugly. At one point, he cannot decided which is worse: to show the signs of cruelty and debauchery, or to simply look old.

He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul. He would examine with minute care, and sometimes with a monstrous and terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, wondering sometimes which were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age.

This vanity, combined with the new-found temptation of the experiences of hedonism, leads him to wish that the portrait would age, rather than himself.

The part of Mephistopheles is played by Sir Henry, who resembles Algernon Moncrief (in The Importance of Being Earnest), except more jaded and worldly-wise. He tempts Dorian (and everyone who will listen) with a delightfully witty never-ending stream of paradoxes and repartees that contain a mixture of truth and poison. He is a living representation of the hedonistic philosophy. Pleasure is everything. Aesthetics is everything.

And he does have some pleasing lines.

I make a great difference between people. I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool.

Or this one, which has more than a grain of truth in it:

Each class would have preached the importance of those virtues, for whose exercise there was no necessity in their own lives. The rich would have spoken of the value of thrift, and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour.

It’s hard to believe this wasn’t written yesterday. (Do a web search for McDonalds and how to live on minimum wage.) And there are many, many more. In most cases, there is a grain of truth, mixed with an utterly selfish and self absorbed view of life. At its core, however, it is an empty philosophy, as Wilde makes utterly clear by the end of the book. Henry, and eventually his acolyte Dorian, are incapable of love. Infatuation, yes. (Dorian’s passion for and eventual destruction of, Sybil parallels Faust’s relationship with Margaret.) True love in the sense of believing others exist beyond their capacity for giving one gratification, no. Sir Henry has disdain for his wife (who eventually leaves him for another man) and indeed women in general. One of many examples:

My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.

This inability to love results in one of the most disconcerting scenes in the book. Dorian tells Henry that he is reforming, and that he did a good deed. Henry (and the portrait) reveal that Dorian has merely done good out of vanity and a quest for sensation. Exactly the same reason he engaged in his life of pleasure and debauchery. Although he feels that true repentance would give him freedom, Dorian resists to the end, and eventually destroys himself as a result.

The Picture of Dorian Gray caused a huge scandal when it was published. Before it even made it there, it was revised in part to get past the censors. The revisions seem rather minor to us in retrospect. They were primarily the modification of certain homoerotic elements which might lead to the idea that the painter Basil and Dorian were sexually involved. Nothing even remotely explicit. Perhaps the strongest line was Basil’s remark, “It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend.” Actually, this isn’t any stronger than the words King David and his friend Jonathan say to each other in the Bible, but the interpretation of the words was undoubtedly colored by Wilde’s own homosexuality. Wilde was pretty widely suspected of homosexual relationships when he wrote Dorian Gray, but the real scandal came later. As a result of a public accusation (in a manner that would have led to a duel a few decades earlier), Wilde sued a man who accused him of sodomy. In the course of the trial, some of Wilde’s letters came to light, and he was eventually convicted and sent to prison for a couple of years. So yes, the censors seem to have overreacted a bit to some fairly mild elements.

While the reaction to the homoerotic undercurrent was understandable, the work was also condemned by many who felt it condoned hedonism.

One wonders if these critics actually read the book.

If anything, Dorian Gray is a compelling argument against hedonism. It is hard to think of a better vision of just how empty selfish pleasure really is. Sir Henry sounds great. One can see how the naive and vain Dorian would become attracted to his ideas. But the point isn’t that Dorian is punished by a cruel society that doesn’t understand him. Because society loves him, for the most part. He gets his way, and does what he wants. He even seems to escape conscience itself until he crosses over his own line and commits a murder.

And yet he becomes increasingly empty and unhappy. He escapes the physical consequences of his sin, but continues to pay the price in his soul - and indeed in his very essence. That which he believed would lead to happiness destroys him inside long before it leads to his final destruction. “"Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, borrowing from Samuel Johnson’s Latin aphorism.) It is difficult to imagine a more unhappy man than Dorian. And this encourages debauchery?

Perhaps one like Miss Prism (also in Earnest) might interpret it that way. (Such people as my wife knew from her teen years - see the note at the bottom of this review - definitely fell in this category.) If one cannot abide the idea that anyone would ever do anything wrong, even in literature, then this book would be dangerous indeed. (And heaven forbid anyone of this opinion would actually read the Bible. Good lord, there is a lot of sex and violence in there!) But, if one looks beyond the presence of genuine evil in this book, one might note that Wilde’s point is the vanity of, well, vanity and hedonism. As Wilde himself puts it, "The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”

At his best, Wilde is perceptive in his criticisms of the hypocrisy of society, not because he comes out and says “society is bad and hypocritical” but because he strips away the pretty veneer. Sir Henry isn’t really saying things that we don’t all think. He just says them outright rather than coating them in a shell of respectability. Dorian isn’t doing anything we don’t do. He just does them to the extreme. We are all Dorian Gray - and Faust, which is why the legend endures. All of us have our moments of compromise when we think we will not be caught. If we are honest with ourselves, we would undoubtedly discover that Dorian’s bargain would be hard to resist. If our selfishness were truly hidden, and we would never pay the consequences, what would we do? The answer lies in the everyday actions we take to reduce others to means of our fulfilment. (This one thing alone keeps divorce lawyers in business.) And then we justify our selfish actions in ways that seem to leave our own souls unspotted. But what if someone could look at that magical portrait of our souls. What would they see? Would we really want anyone to know what we really look like? Do we really want all our motives laid bare? If one can answer “yes” to that question, one must be a thorough hypocrite indeed.

Note on the ennui of debauchery:

Another quote that I couldn’t figure out how to fit into the main body of my review:

There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them; strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses.

Wilde is on to something here. Dante, for example, distinguished between the sins of passion and the sins of deliberate planning. Francesca da Rimini and her lover Paolo are in the outer circles because their adultery was a sensual affair, while the worst punishment (being stuck in Satan’s mouth) was reserved for infamous traitors such as Judas Iscariot. Somehow, the line between sins of a lack of self control and sins purely to gratify the ego are different in our minds. (Perhaps they are different in an absolute sense too.) This is a powerful description. The acts no longer bring pleasure to the senses, but they feed the pride. An interesting idea to ponder.

Note on the most famous quote from this book:

I had heard this numerous times before, but did not realise it came from Dorian Gray - and was one of Sir Henry’s fun lines:

When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.

Now, confirmation bias is a legitimate problem here. Still, my own practice indicates that Wilde (and Sir Henry) were speaking at least a partial truth. In my experience, one facet in particular does appear to be nearly universally true: A man who has had a long and happy marriage either dies soon after she does, or remarries quickly - and often unwisely.

The other parts of this are less universal. I do see a general tendency after the breakup of a bad marriage. Women tend to think that they just picked badly and will do better next time. And then, they seem to pick, as we lawyers say, “The same person, with a different face.” And men, while they may enter a new relationship after a bad breakup, are more resistant to marrying and having children with a new woman. Once bitten, twice shy. Finally, I do think that one finds more women who remain widows after the end of a good marriage. Although, this may also be due to the fact that men generally tend to die earlier - so there may not be much to choose from after a certain age.

Note on Wilde’s view of his own book:

I am hesitant to take anything Wilde said entirely at face value, because his tongue was pretty much grafted into his cheek. That said, this is Wilde’s statement about Dorian Gray, in a letter to an admirer of the book:

I am so glad that you like that strange coloured book of mine: it contains much of me in it. Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry is what the world thinks of me: Dorian what I would like to be - in other ages, perhaps.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Source of book: I own this.
Date originally published on Facebook: June 12, 2011

Before I started blogging, I wrote reviews for the entertainment of my family and friends, and posted them as notes on Facebook. Later, I became dissatisfied with the lousy format and limited options of that medium, and started this blog. I am systematically re-posting my old reviews to the blog. My friend Carrie recently reviewed this book, so I figured I would join the conversation.

Mary Shelley came from an interesting background. She was the daughter of William Godwin, a somewhat radical author and intellectual (he is considered the first modern proponent of anarchism); and Mary Wollstonecraft, a pioneering feminist. Godwin’s two major books were Enquiry concerning Political Justice, a work on political science; and Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, a satirical novel believed to be the first mystery thriller. Wollstonecraft is known for her influential work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The stories of the lives of these two would make a fascinating essay to write.

The story of Mary Shelley, however, comes at the end of Wollstonecraft’s life. She contracted childbed fever and died when her daughter was 10 days old.  Godwin remarried a couple of years later, as much to have help raising Mary as for love. Unfortunately, this did not work out as well as planned. Mary and her stepmother clashed, to say the least. In any event, Mary ran away with the still married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley at age 16, becoming pregnant soon thereafter. To a degree, life with Percy and his friends and fans was like a soap opera, with some questions even today about who was sleeping with whom. Eventually, Percy’s wife committed suicide, leaving him free to marry Mary.

Frankenstein had its birth in a discussion about recent experiments involving “galvanism,” known to us as electricity. The famous experiment in which the legs of a frog were caused to move by a properly applied electrical current had been a revelation to the scientific community, and there were even rumors that Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles, and a poet and scientist himself) had reanimated dead matter. On a rainy evening gather around the fire, Mary Shelley and Percy, Lord Byron, and John Polidori read German ghost stories to each other, and discussed the recent scientific discoveries. Byron suggested that they each write their own ghost story inspired by the evening’s conversation.

Byron himself managed only to make a start on a poem about the Balkan vampire legends. Polidori did better by writing The Vampyre, a short story that birthed the entire romantic vampire tradition of writing. Percy did nothing.

Mary, the sole woman, wrote Frankenstein. This novel is rightly considered to be the first science fiction work, although the genre didn’t become established until Jules Verne popularized it a few years later. However, few books have had such an influence on popular culture as this one. Unfortunately, much of what has entered the culture completely misses the point of the book.

First, Frankenstein is the scientist, not the monster. The poor monster never even gets a name. He is described in the book as being hideous, primarily because of his yellowish, watery eyes. Shelley does not waste much time in description here – she allows the imagination to paint the picture. This may be a reason why the novel itself didn’t sell well at first, but an artistically questionable theater production based on the book did. The monster was much more effective with a good visual. Had the theater company done a better job in understanding and presenting the story, rather than indulging in cheap scare tactics, Frankenstein may have been an effective tragedy. Instead, the public was ever after left with the vague idea of a green monster terrorizing the population.

What is Frankenstein really about? On one level, it is about the danger of science without ethics. Victor Frankenstein becomes enamored of himself and obsessed with alchemy. He sees himself as being able to use modern science to do what alchemy wished it could do: create. Heedlessly neglecting everything else, Victor assembles his creature from body parts. Only the best will do, as he intends to make an Übermensch that will surpass in strength and quality any known human. Through the use of electricity, the creature is given life. Victor refuses to explain the process lest anyone attempt to duplicate it. When the creature looks at Victor the first time, terror results, and Victor flees. So far, the theme is scientific hubris. In the popular imagination, the story would then continue with the monster going on a killing spree before eventually being stopped with (fill in magical or technological device here).

Shelley takes the story much deeper by asking two fascinating questions. First, what is the creator’s responsibility to the created? Second, can a creature remain good in the face of abuse and unkindness?

As to the first question, Shelley references Paradise Lost throughout the book, even giving the monster access to a copy as he learns to read. The monster comes to believe that Victor owes him a mate. Since no human can look on him without horror, Victor should create a female monster.

As to the second, this question strikes at the heart of the nature versus nurture debate. How much of what we are is due to our innate nature, how much to our own choices, and how much to the experiences we have had? Could any of us survive loneliness and rejection without damage? The creature, as is well known, becomes the monster. However, his rage isn’t directed at humankind as a whole. His war is with his creator. What collateral damage the monster causes is calculated to hurt Frankenstein.

Thus, in this book, the monster becomes the sympathetic character, not the nameless horror he appears to those around him. This is both more subtle and far more interesting than the popular conception of the soulless monster to be killed that inhabits the horror genre today.

A few notes on the writing itself. Shelley wrote this book at the age of 20. She was obviously well read and had an intelligent and imaginative mind. As a general rule, she keeps her narrative tight and focused, wasting little space on the page in trying to sound “literary”. She is, however, subject to several of the affectations of her times. With such a thrilling story to write, she would have been better served by the use of simpler language and more direct, active narrative. Later, of course, writers such as Verne and Wilke Collins would master the art of suspense, using the language itself to propel the story forward rapidly, even breathlessly. This fault, although hardly hers alone, makes the story feel overly deliberate at times.

The second fault is the lack of personality in the secondary characters. Some of this is surely due to the fact that she envisioned the book originally as a short story. It grew, but not enough to flesh out the characters. The two main actors, Frankenstein and his creature, are well drawn, and psychologically interesting. The other characters become necessary to further the plot, but are ultimately forgettable. Particularly disappointing in this matter is the lack of a female character with more than a cardboard outline. This is perhaps particularly puzzling coming from a female author. However, it is possible that Shelley never identified with womankind. Her mother, after all, was scandalously radical herself; and Shelley never really knew her in person – merely from her writing and her father’s memory. Her conflicts with her stepmother and stepsister are well known. She may have felt more comfortable writing about men. Alternately, she also may have decided that her tale simply fit with male, rather than female characters.

This is a book to read with careful contemplation. It does not work as a thriller in the traditional sense; to read it this way would fail to appreciate its depth of thought and analysis. Rather, this book should cause us all to look within ourselves. Hubris, prejudice, and our relationship to our maker. These are all bound up together in the classical tragedy. This fantastical tragedy gives us the opportunity to find these tragic seeds in our own hearts.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Source of book: I read this during my waiting times in court, on my tablet.

The legend of the vampire stretches back before any human memory, with legends of blood-sucking spirits appearing in the earliest written literature. The vampire as the undead, however, appears to have originated in southeastern Europe, where it also received its present name. Our modern conception of the vampire, so ingrained in our culture as to be well known to nearly everyone, owes its existence primarily to this particular book, written by Bram Stoker in 1897. While it was a reasonable success when it was published, and was hailed by critics and other writers as a masterpiece, it did not become the universal sensation that it has since become until it was adapted for a film starring Bela Lugosi in the 1930s. (There have been many adaptations, serious and otherwise, since then. I was first introduced to the trope by Count von Count in Sesame Street - who was more of a sinister character at first than he is today.)

Stoker’s portrayal is notable for the full development of the legend as we know it today. Dracula’s appearance, powers, weaknesses - all are here in full form, and few additions or changes have been made since.

Stoker turned out to be a one-hit wonder. Nothing else he wrote is familiar today, although his original career as a theater manager continued to support him.

The book drew on a number of sources. The basic concept of the vampire as a nobleman preying on young women was drawn from The Vampyre, a short novel by John Polidori as the result of the discussion with Byron and Mary and Percy Shelley that also led to Mary writing Frankenstein. Stoker settled on the name of Dracula after discovering the real life Vlad III, “The Impaler,” a Fifteenth Century Romanian prince, who was also called “Dracula,” the son of Dracul, that is, the Dragon (Vlad’s father’s nickname). Stoker used some of the real life details of Vlad III in the backstory for his villain. (Peculiar side note: Vlad III’s son was known as Wihnea “the Bad,” which belongs with Ethelred “the Unready” and Ivan “the Terrible” in the pantheon of derogatory royal epithets.)

This is another book I really should have read in high school, but somehow missed. I won’t spoil the plot for those who have not read it, but the basic outline is presumably familiar to most of us anyway. The book is told through a series of diary entries by the major characters, none of whom initially know what the others know. The use of multiple perspectives helps to add to the drama, as the reader knows things that most of the characters do not. The reader gets to see them stumble around the truth until they finally all are able to each contribute a piece to the overall puzzle.

In fact, I would say that this is the best part of the book - the tight plotting and pacing. As a good horror book should, it draws the reader in more with suspense than with gore and death. The pace starts slowly, but gradually builds to a frantic chase at the end. It is easy to see why this book was the basis of so many successful films. It already has all the elements of drama in place without modification.

One of the things that struck me about the book is how Stoker both reinforces and subverts certain Victorian fears and stereotypes. First of all, the sexual undertones of the vampire legend, while largely implied rather than stated in this book (unlike in earlier references, where it is more explicit) clearly line up with Victorian anxieties: the helpless, innocent, young, beautiful female who is the favorite prey of the vampire. His desire to pierce her, and mingle fluids. The fact that his vampirism is a contagious disease, like the syphilis which was at that point incurable, leading to insanity and death. The idea that the vampire had to be invited in initially, but that he could come and go freely thereafter. Back in the 1700s, this superstition led to the unearthing of corpses to kill the supposed vampires, but the Victorians had their own fears for their daughters - as do we, which perhaps explains the continued fascination with vampires. (I’ve also heard the more pernicious outgrowth of this fear wherein African-American men are stereotyped as having insatiable and dangerous sex drives and Latino men are viewed as being continually engaged in smooth seduction.) I, myself, being male and not understanding certain genres at all, have a harder time understanding the apparently widespread female desire for the ministrations of the vampire. Stoker perhaps did, though, as he writes of Mina’s simultaneous commitment to destroy Dracula, and her sympathy for him.

Mina is the character that I found most fascinating in this book. Jonathan Harker, Mina’s eventual husband, gets bonus points for being a lawyer, and for showing ingenuity, but he is a more expected character. Similarly, the central character of Van Helsing fits a common pattern found in much literature of the time: the brilliant scientific mind, familiar with the legends, and prepared for nearly everything. Also present would be Lord Godalming, who has the necessary financing, and is desperate to avenge the death of his wife, Lucy, Dracula’s first victim in England; and the American, Quincey Morris, who is clearly the “expendable crewman” of the story. He might as well be wearing a red shirt during the story.

While Lucy is the typical Victorian female: innocent, demure, pure, sweet, and of course beautiful; Mina is in a much more modern mold. She is treated as an equal partner in the quest to destroy Dracula, and she continues to show her remarkable fortitude and capabilities even as she falls under his spell. It is she who finally reads Jonathan’s journal and brings it to the attention of Van Helsing, thus allowing him to determine the identity and location of the vampire. She insists on accompanying the rest back to Transylvania, taking part in as much of the physical rigour of the chase as her weakened condition allows. She is able to calm her husband’s fears, and stiffen his spine by taking his focus off of her and on to the task at hand. She is even able to swear the others to kill her should the need arise. This amazing capacity for self sacrifice, and for fearlessness in the face of what she knows may well destroy her is an entire level above the heroism of the men, who can act from a more ordinary and straightforward source of courage. Mina is allowed to display virtues other than those typically viewed as “female,” (see Lucy above) and instead can share the traits that can and should be the aspiration of all of us, male or female: courage, intelligence, good judgment, control of emotion, focus, determination.

I also appreciated that Stoker allowed Mina to participate in the adventure without being reduced to eye candy or a love interest. If anything, by marrying her to Jonathan pursuant to an engagement pre-dating the start of the narrative, he removes the possibility of sexual tension becoming the secondary focus of the story. She thus must be interesting for her own skills, personality, and actions, rather than primarily for the “will the hero get the girl” subplot. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but one does sometimes wish that more writers and filmmakers let their female roles in mixed gender groups rise above that of “love interest.” (I think this was part of the genius of the Star Trek franchise, and a reason that it has endured despite being a bit campy and dated.)

I will admit that I have always appreciated strong women, both in books and in real life. Perhaps that is why I married one. Contrary to Mr. Bennett’s surmise, I would definitely not prefer a stupid wife.

This book is definitely worth the read. Not just another gothic horror bit of pulp, this book truly is a classic, and an example of good writing - particularly in its plotting and pacing.

Note on the castle:
 
Dracula’s castle is as much a part of the legend as the man himself, and Stoker’s spooky description of the nighttime arrival there is masterful. It is unclear exactly which castle inspired the author, although he may have drawn on books by Jules Verne and Anne Radcliffe. There are theories that he was inspired by Castle Bran in Romania or New Slains Castle in Scotland. While these castles are all right in their own way - beautiful, in fact - I imagine something more like this, from the Carpathian Mountains described in the story, although this particular location is in Slovakia rather than Romania. 

                                     Spiš Castle from the Branisko Pass (Wikipedia Commons - Photographer not identified)

Click to expand picture for a better view.