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A Fiend in Human Form
Feb. 29th, 2012 10:29 pmAug 2011
Dracula - Bram Stoker - Penguin Classics,1993
* * *
This is an interestingly dialectical book with which Freudians have doubtless had a field day. On the one hand, the descriptions of the Count and his powers have a dream-like quality, full of strange little details such as the little blue flames that Jonathan Harker sees in the darkness on his way to the count's castle, which hint in a very Lovecraftian manner at horrors beyond the ken of man. On the other, there is the Victorian everyday world of phonographs, timetables, hypnosis, blood transfusions (if hilariously unaware of immunological cross reactions), manly fellowship and women as maidens in need of protection and patronisation whenever they have an original idea. It is to the detriment of the book that the latter soon overwhelms the former, ultimately sucking the life out of the story in much the same way as the Count does his victims.
( Read more... )
Dracula - Bram Stoker - Penguin Classics,1993
* * *
This is an interestingly dialectical book with which Freudians have doubtless had a field day. On the one hand, the descriptions of the Count and his powers have a dream-like quality, full of strange little details such as the little blue flames that Jonathan Harker sees in the darkness on his way to the count's castle, which hint in a very Lovecraftian manner at horrors beyond the ken of man. On the other, there is the Victorian everyday world of phonographs, timetables, hypnosis, blood transfusions (if hilariously unaware of immunological cross reactions), manly fellowship and women as maidens in need of protection and patronisation whenever they have an original idea. It is to the detriment of the book that the latter soon overwhelms the former, ultimately sucking the life out of the story in much the same way as the Count does his victims.
( Read more... )