atundratoadstool:

atundratoadstool:

I caught up again, and I’m thinking a lot about Lucy today, and how I don’t think I’ll ever be 100% certain how I feel about her vampiric self. I’ll be the first to admit that the vampiric Lucy speaks to the fact that Bram Stoker really seems to enjoy creating monstrous women and assigning hyper-violent deaths to them, and this no doubt reflects his rather misogynist views regarding acceptable gendered behavior. At the same time, I also think a lot about how Lucy became a vampire in a world that didn’t necessarily see a continuity between a person before they were a vampire and a person after they were a vampire. I think there’s a tendency nowadays to view vampires as essentially human beings, albeit ones with a radically different biology and an unfortunate diet, and I’m not sure if 19th century readers would come naturally to that assessment.

A lot of my interest in the novel revolves around how it might have been received at a time when philosophical materialism seemed like a scary and threatening thing, and how that impacts the book’s ideas about the brain and the soul. While I don’t agree entirely with Anne Stiles absolutely marvelous essay on the topic, I find something very compelling about her insinuation that Lucy as a vampire is the natural end of Ferrier’s brain science: an entity that acts, however complexly, according to the stimuli provided by an infernal vivisector. I do believe that Lucy as a vampire retains some part of the human Lucy, given her reaction to Arthur, but I’m very unconvinced by attempts to wholly explain her vampiric self as an emerging part of her human subconscious. Besides the fact that a lot of these arguments hinge on really awful victim-blaming insinuations about how Lucy somehow desires her own assaults, I think that Dracula’s role as a mesmerist/hypnotist is often overlooked in the equation. I mentioned earlier Wells’ assertion in The Island of Dr. Moreau that hypnotism is the mental equivalent to the physical self-altering vivisection Moreau perpetuates, and I think that there’s a precedent with Trilby that would indicate that the mesmeric process (at least in fiction) can create a sub-personality that’s something between the mesmerist and the mesmerizer, a second self intermixed with that of one’s violator that may operate on its own even out of its originator’s influence.

This read-through I thought a lot about the actual emergence of the vampiric self, and how Lucy, even not knowing what it was seemed driven to resist it. The back and forth with the garlic and her final plea to Van Helsing are seriously absolutely terrifying to me in the context of the vampiric Lucy as the sort of construct described. I’m not certain how aware Stoker was of all the implications of this sort of thing (He had one source that mentioned both double personalities and mesmeric control but we can’t prove he read it), but I think that for the period it would be possible to see the vampiric Lucy as being in some way an extension of the Count, a parasitic personality that’s a mixture of the human Lucy’s memories and Dracula’s mesmeric will. I still enjoy a lot of the literature, fic, and analyses that maintain human Lucy and vampiric Lucy are functionally one and the same, but that thought of the emerging vampire as something inflicted by an outsider is something that resonates with me deeply, and it’s one of the few ideas from the novel that genuinely causes me to have trouble sleeping at night.

It’s three years since I wrote this, and I realize that I successfully defended a thesis in which this text post was teased out into a full chapter.