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For Wednesday: Stoker, Dracula, Chs.6-9 (pp.61-110)


 
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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