Up-to-date with a Vengeance (Dracula, Part 2)

In Part 2 of our discussion on Dracula, editor Rachel Feder discusses the inspiration for the cover of her Norton Library edition, her favorite line in the novel, how the novel relates to the popular cultural understanding of vampires, and notions of the sublime in  Gothic literature.

Rachel Feder is an associate professor of English and literary arts at the University of Denver, where her courses often bring literary history into conversation with contemporary culture. She is the author of Harvester of Hearts: Motherhood under the sign of Frankenstein and the poetry collection Birth Chart.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of  Dracula, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/Dracula.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Listen to our Spotify playlist inspired by Dracula: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5KJEv5xKOtQt6aFUPcgMWg?si=ef328110a1014367.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter @TNL_WWN.

Episode transcript at: https://seagull.wwnorton.com/dracula/part2/transcript.

Transcript

[Music:] 

[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library podcast where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W. W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Cirino with Michael Von Cannon producing, and today we present the second of our two episodes devoted to Bram Stoker's classic novel Dracula. We are once again joined by its editor Rachel Feder to learn more about this work. In the first episode we discussed Bram Stoker's life, the Gothic, and some of Dracula's infamous characters. In this second episode Rachel shares her Dracula playlist; she shares her favorite line in the novel, and so much more. Rachel Feder is an Associate Professor of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver. She is the author of Harvester of Hearts: Motherhood Under the Sign of Frankenstein and the nonfiction title The Darcy Myth: Jane Austen, Literary Heartthrobs, and the Monsters They Taught Us to Love. Rachel is also the author of a poetry collection, Birth Chart and co-author of AstroLit: A Bibliophile’s Guide to the Stars. Rachel Feder, welcome back to the Norton Library podcast.  

[Rachel:] Thanks for having me back. 

[Mark:] Oh, it's good to see you again, and we're looking forward to hearing your experience with Bram Stoker's Dracula. The first question I wanted to ask you is why is the cover of your Norton Library edition designed the way it is, with these colors? It was incredibly important to me that my edition would be yellow, and it is. It is a lovely mustardy yellow, the yellow of the Victorian decadence movement, the magazine called The Yellow Book, the pulpy novels that were wrapped in yellow, and the color of paper, and hyper- and inter-textuality, and also the yellow of the very first edition of Dracula, which was yellow with just some red detailing. And then in homage to that we have the title, Dracula, in red. The eggplant is just a lovely Norton Library design touch, because we need a third color, and the first edition is just yellow and red. So many editions of Dracula are black and red, kind of emphasizing the blood and the darkness and the horror and the influence of Dracula on the horror genre, but it was so important to me to have the book kind of wrapped in that original color, which has such different connotations and which also feels much more hopeful.  

[Mark:] It's a beautiful cover. Rachel, how did you first encounter Dracula? Do you remember? 

[Rachel:] I don't remember, but I did teach my first vampire literature course back in my grad student days. And so, I remember that I first taught the novel in, I believe it was, 2010, and it was an entry-level writing and literature course that, you know, the type of course that's assigned to graduate students. And I assigned Twilight, and so everyone took it for Twilight. It was 2010, everyone came for Twilight, they stayed for Dracula, and I never forget this moment, walking in after my students had read Dracula and they were just enraged. They were enraged about Twilight and this idea that, to them, they had been rooting for Bella, which is like rooting for Lucy instead of Mina. That was how they put it. They sort of saw to ask: why is there this stronger, more active woman in Dracula, which is from the Victorian era, than in Twilight? And so that was a pivotal moment for me just in terms of – not that I 100% agree with that take – but, you know, I'm not saying that Dracula is some feminist masterwork, but in terms of falling in love with teaching Dracula and the types of reactions that it could provoke. 

[Mark:] So you didn't read this novel as a kid? 

[Rachel:] You know, I probably read it at some point in high school or college, but I don't have an original memory of reading it. 

[Mark:] Is this a novel that young readers typically read, or is this something that is sophisticated enough that this is really on the college or high school level, let’s say? 

[Rachel:] This is something that I have been discussing with my own child right, and I told him that he could read it at twelve, which I kind of made up. I do think, you know, it's very dark. But I think that a lot of the more disturbing thematics are abstracted enough that one could encounter it in high school, or even before, and then read it again later and discover new layers and levels. And that is how the novel itself is structured, because we have so many narrators, so many interlocutors, that you could read it young and identify with Jonathan Harker, and you could read it much later and pay attention to Van Helsing and what does it mean to put a life's work in service of one great project. So, I think it really does have something for everyone. 

[Mark:] You mentioned in our first episode that you teach this novel frequently. What are the challenges that you find students have when reading Dracula? 

[Rachel:] Something we discussed in the first episode is the novel's resistance to interpretation. And on the one hand that can be pedagogically so interesting because every time I teach Dracula, and I teach Dracula all the time, it feels like a new novel. It's really shaped by the perspectives and questions and applications of that particular group of students and they're always able to open it in new ways. But I think that that can also be a challenge, especially for me. I have texts that I teach all the time, Frankenstein, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, where I feel like I really have my understanding; I have my take, and my goal is never to lead students to my particular take. I always want the classroom to be a space that's open to multiple interpretations, and yet it's comforting to have my own personal take that I can share, that I can change and modify as students open my eyes to new details. And with Dracula it really always feels different, even to me, because it is so hypertextual and it is so dynamic but it also is just so slippery in certain ways. 

[Mark:] Do you have a favorite line in this novel? 

[Rachel:] I have a favorite line in this novel from very early on in the novel, from chapter three when Jonathan Harker is trapped in the Count's castle and he is writing in his diary in shorthand and he refers to his diary in shorthand as “nineteenth century up to date with a vengeance,” and then goes on to say “and yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.” And to me that's just so fundamental to Dracula: this idea that no matter how modern the world gets, no matter how advanced our technologies, our strategies of communication, come to be, we are always haunted by the sins of the past.  

[Mark:] And he's using the word vengeance and kill, so it seems like there's that kind of conflict of generations being brought to the surface. Does the novel have a lot of meditations along these lines, about society as these characters see it? 

[Rachel:] Not really, but I think that the hypertextuality does a lot of that work. So, sometimes it's a phonograph, sometimes you're in a newspaper clipping, sometimes you're in a letter, sometimes you're in a diary, sometimes you're in a telegram that has been missed with disastrous consequences. So, the world of Dracula is really a text-based world, and in that way it's – even though it's fiction and it's supernatural fiction – it's also, formally, a mirror of the world that it claims to represent. 

[Mark:] Are gothic novels or novels of this time frequently hypertextual, or is Dracula unusual in that respect? 

[Rachel:] If we want to go all the way back to the eighteenth century, then we see that there is this long history of novels in English playing with epistolary and quotidian forms, and we definitely see that, over the course of the history of the gothic novel, get kind of sent up and played with. So, one way, for example, to think about Mary Shelly's Frankenstein is that much like Frankenstein's creature is stitched together from parts of different bodies, the novel is stitched together of these different genres and textual forms, and so there's definitely a tradition of that. What I think Stoker does that's unusual is that the textual forms don't give this sense of a historical documentation, that this has been received from the past. They're a way of making a monster who's so ancient and a story that's so dated feel really contemporary. 

[Mark:] Rachel, you were mentioning one of the challenges of reading this novel, which is sort of that it's a little bit slippery and chaotic. What are your strategies as a professor to make this a more comprehensible book for your students? What do you find works? 

[Rachel:] I definitely avoid the impulse to make it simpler, to make it cohere. I think what's happening fundamentally in the novel is a sort of refusal to cohere. One thing that I love to do is send students on historical deep dives. So let them find – I love that word chaotic. It really is chaotic. And so, let them find in that sort of shrapnel of text a piece that speaks to them, a moment that speaks to them, and ask them to employ all of their research skills to take as deep a dive as possible. How does that relate to the Victorian period? How does that relate to Stoker’s life? How does that relate to his textual sources? And so, this is just something that has been so fascinating. We get into somnambulism and its long nineteenth-century connection to the history of the vampire novel, things of that nature. So, a historical deep dive is one favorite. I also like to ask students to analyze – there are so many adaptations – so to analyze sort of ever evolving adaptations. 

[Mark:] So, of those adaptations are there manifestations of this novel in other forms that you would either recommend or that you want to remark upon as being notable. 

[Rachel:] You know, I'm not a huge film buff, and I'm not a huge horror buff, you know, horror, Gothic buff. I'm kind of a wimp. So, I'm not the person to provide that holistic overview. I will say one film that I saw recently that my wonderful agent, who I'll shout out on here, Becky Legion, got in touch and said “have you seen the invitation?” So, it's this 2022 film, and she said, “you have to watch it! We have to talk about it. It's a take on Dracula.” And I'm not really recommending it, because it – it's incredible – but it is a true horror film, and I definitely lost an entire night's sleep, which is so humiliating. It was very scary but I thought that that was such an interesting take in that it really digs into that question of who are those three women in Dracula's castle and why are they there and how might we see the classic seductive Byronic vampire figure, who Dracula really isn't but that's kind of nineteenth-century vampires was leading up to Dracula, how might we read that into Dracula if we take the perspective of questioning the presence of those women in the castle. So, I thought it was a really interesting take and it had to do with intergenerational trauma and cycle breaking in really interesting ways but also was really scary. So, watch at your own discretion.  

[Mark:] Well, you mentioned in the first episode that Dracula began being adapted almost immediately after it was published, so there are probably countless adaptations in all different forms, and would you say that any vampire narrative in the last hundred-plus years has some debt to Dracula? That you see aspects of this novel in all the various narratives? 

[Rachel:] No, I don't think I would say that. But for me the text that I would say that about – and making a very clear caveat that there's a long history of vampire narratives and vampire adjacent narratives from many, many different cultures, and I'm speaking very specifically about the British tradition and the influence of literature in England on the US literary and pop cultural tradition. So, within that very narrow scope, not going globally, I would say interestingly while Dracula is the most famous vampire, I think Polidori’s The Vampyre is the most influential vampire, because that's where we get – Polidori, he's annoyed at Byron, and so he turns him into a vampire. And that's where we got the prototype for the vampire as this seductive, debauched aristocrat who will suck you in and then suck your blood. That comes from Byron; it comes from an earlier moment in British Romanticism. And because The Vampyre was falsely attributed to Byron, so a lot of people haven't heard of Polidori, but part of what made it so influential was that kind of false attribution to Byron, which I don't truly believe was a mistake on the part of the publishers. But so, I think that it's The Vampyre, the one we've never heard of as a more influential text perhaps, and, you know, Stoker conducted so much painstaking research on vampire lore and on folklore to write Dracula, that he was influenced by a prior British tradition, and specifically an Irish tradition, and Le Fanu’s Carmilla, etc., but he was also doing something a little bit different. And I think when we look at vampires in pop culture, we get the Byronic vampire more than we get Dracula. And going back to our last discussion, where I said Dracula has no backstory, part of that is because the Byronic vampire is attractive, sympathetic, you're drawn in, whereas there's something about Dracula that is harder to – it's been adapted as many times as anything, but there's a point where it's a little harder to connect. 

[Mark:] No, that's excellent. So, Rachel, we do ask our Norton Library editors to introduce a hot take on their title. So is there something controversial you have to say about Dracula. 

[Rachel:] I feel like I accidentally said my hot take the last time we chatted. But I'll say it again because it really bears repeating, which is that Bram Stoker's Dracula is proof that if you just write enough things, you will eventually write something good. And I truly believe that, and I believe it of Bram stoker and I believe it of you, anyone listening to this. I believe it in myself, as well. That's the lesson of Bram Stoker's writing career – persistence. 

[Mark:] What about a Dracula playlist? What kind of music does this novel evoke? 

[Rachel:] You know, I have to take this moment to shout out Olivia Rodrigo’s “vampire,” even though that's a Byronic vampire and not really Dracula, but I think that would be the first track on my playlist. 

[Mark:] Are there others?  

[Rachel:] I thought I had more; do you want to brainstorm with me? 

[Mark:] “Bat Out of Hell?”  

[Rachel:] I'll stick with Olivia Rodrigo; I'll give the shout out 

[Mark:] That's perfect; it'll be a single. The playlist will be a single. 

[Mark:] Well Rachel, I wanted to turn to the endnotes of your edition of Bram Stoker's Dracula. And there are a couple that really struck me, and maybe I could ask you to talk a little bit more about them. One is a note to page twelve where you talk about sublime vistas, and it strikes me that given our conversation in episode one about the Gothic that there's an element of the Gothic sublime as a concept. What does that mean and how does that come into play in terms of this novel? 

[Rachel:] Absolutely, well, you know, how long do we have? Because I could definitely talk about the sublime for two more episodes. But I won't; I'll just say that the sublime is an aesthetic category coming out of long eighteenth-century thought. There is no one sublime. There are many different versions and variations of what this aesthetic category means, what it's thought to be able to do. The word sublime comes from a sort of weird translation of Longinus. So, it comes from a classic rhetorical text, but it's sort of reconstrued as a way to think about powerful aesthetic experiences that are not quite beauty. So, when we're at this moment at the turn of the nineteenth century when we have industry and teaming cities and the death of the commons in rural life, and people going on tours and looking at the ruins of antiquity, and all of these big experiences that are different than beauty, we start to see meditations on this concept of the sublime. And in the Gothic, or let's just say – because I don't want to oversimplify, but in particular in the moment where I have this note in Dracula, it's very early in the novel, and Jonathan Harker is traveling and just comes across this beautiful view and this grand mountain. And so, we can think of that as a moment of one version of the sublime called the mathematical sublime, which is very influential to Romanticism, which has to do with seeing something so overwhelming, so large so infinite, or a concept or a mountain anything in that category, that it overwhelms us and we recognize that we can't fully conceptualize it. And that moment of feeling our limit, feeling that we can't fully conceptualize it, is satisfying. 

[Mark:] Can this be something wonderful, or frightening, evil, good, or all of these things? Or does it skew one way? 

[Rachel:] So, I would say it is wonderful and frightening, although, for Kant especially, it's important that you don't feel yourself to be in actual danger, so that you're in the right headspace to experience the sublime. But in the Gothic, we often see someone experience the sublime, and it just gives us a little clue that they're the good guy. So this idea that someone can sort of pause and look out at a vista and see the beauty of a mountain and they have access to that experience of the world, especially in Radcliffe we see this, but I think it's a moment – here it's kind of a trope early on, with Jonathan Harker and then the person next to him interpolates the view in religious terms – that just the ability to do that, the ability to see that you're small and you're limited and that the character has a sense that their own comprehension and knowledge is not infinite, is a sort of moral quality in the Gothic, as opposed to someone like Dracula who is just a totality. He is going to come to London and create a London of vampires. 

[Mark:] I'm going to ask about another note, if I could. And this might be a related question. This is towards the end of the book where, in chapter twenty-five, you talk about the term transcendentalism, which is not a term that I would immediately associate with Dracula, but how does it come into play in terms of this work. 

[Rachel:] The word transcendentalism has different literary and philosophical meanings in different contexts, and I think it is connected and it's not connected to this question of the sublime. So, the way that we think about transcendentalism in the American literary context might not be exactly what's happening in Stoker's novel here. Although, that might be a beautiful reading, and I would definitely invite someone to make that reading to me. I think it's referring to a general sense of spirituality and hope here. So, this idea that things go a little bit awry and then Jack Seward writes, “I suppose that nature works on such a hopeful basis that we believe against ourselves that things will be as they ought to be, not as we should know that they will be. Transcendentalism is a beacon to the angels, even if it be a will-o'-the-wisp to man.” And so, this is a way of saying, our hope, our spiritual connection – it's a deeply, weirdly spiritual and religious novel in ways that I am always trying to untangle and always relying on my students to help me untangle. But this idea that our hope is a beacon to the angels, even if it doesn't do anything, even if it's not useful, just having that hope is a way to connect to the spiritual realm, to connect to our higher self.  

[Mark:] So, what's being transcended is our everyday life, our humanity? 

[Rachel:] That transcendentalism is itself, in this context, taking a moment to transcend one's own situation, one's own frustrations by allowing oneself to experience hope, even if you know that hope is not really going to help you in any pragmatic way. 

[Mark:] Rachel, one of the things that we talk about a lot on the Norton Library podcast is the contemporary relevance of some of these older texts, and I'm thinking about just the situation of readership in the twenty-first century. How would we read this text in a way that might be different from the way people read it in the late nineteenth century? 

[Rachel:] Jeffrey Jerome Cohen once wrote that fear of the monster is really a kind of desire and that monsters, to paraphrase now, are symptomatic of the cultures that bear them. And I've said in our discussion today – I've maybe critiqued Stoker's monster a little bit for being almost too open to interpretation, for not grounding us in any particular interpretation of why he exists or where he comes from, but I also think that that's part of what has made Dracula immortal. That in every generation fears and desires can be projected onto the vampire narrative, and in part because Dracula is so open to our interpretation, we can always read him against our current moment. 

[Mark:] So, Rachel if there are plenty of ways to interpret this monster, what's one articulation of this in our time?  

[Rachel:] One question that I might encourage students next time I teach this – my next question to think about has to do with what we actually see when we read Dracula. Because what we actually see is text, and we see all of these different textual forms, and do we trust them all? And who is writing what? And then who is editing or transcribing other people? What are the perspectives? How are they all combining? What does it mean to tell the story? And what does it mean to have the story cohere in a way that, because it has so many authors, quote unquote “authors,” so many narrators, that it is in some sense anonymous, that it's this document or this body of evidence and our students live in a world where what it means to share and produce text is constantly changing, both in terms of social media's continual evolution, which I cannot keep up with, I have given up, and in terms of AI, which is just suddenly this huge topic and issue for discussion in Humanities departments, and I would really encourage students to think critically about those issues. What does it mean to receive a text that claims to have been written by people at a moment? How might Dracula encourage us to question notions of authority and authorship and textuality and evidence and history and its hauntings? 

[Mark:] Rachel Feder thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library podcast to discuss your edition of Bram Stoker's Dracula. 

[Rachel:] Thanks again for having me and for the intellectual engagement. 

[Mark:] The Norton Library edition of Dracula by Bram Stoker, with an introduction by Rachel Feder, is available now in paperback and eBook. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles. 

[Music]