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| Odilon Redon, Angel in Chains (1875) |
Answer TWO of the following:
Q1: How do the passages from Dr. Seward’s Diary play into
discussions begun by Frankenstein and
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Who is more
of a specimen for study—Renfield or Seward himself? You might consider the
passage, “Am I to take it that I have anything in common with him, so that we
are, as it were, to stand together; or has he to gain from me some good so
stupendous that my well-being is needful to him?” (102).
Q2: Which of the “outside” stories (the log from the Varna, etc.) adds the most to the
overall narrative? Why do you think Mina decided to add this into her journal?
What ‘story’ is it helping her tell to her readers? (and how might we read this
differently when we remember that she is
the one arranging it)?
Q3: If you remember Coleridge’s Cristabel, how might the story of Lucy resemble that poem in its
story, characters, and imagery? Consider a line such as “”there, on our
favourite seat, the silver light of the moon struck a half reclining figure,
snowy white” (86).
Q4: At the beginning of Chapter 8, Mina writes of the “New
Woman” which she gently mocks in this chapter. However, according to the Notes,
the New Woman was a “middle-class woman…sometimes celebrated as a pioneer in
work, marriage, intellectual, and sexual life, but more often as a source of
scorn in the conservative press. She was represented incoherently, either as
mannish or frigid, or as a dangerously unstable and over-sexualized figure”
(377). How might Mina and Lucy represent many qualities of this New Woman, and
do you feel that Stoker is either supporting or celebrating the idea of “New
Women” in society?
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