Dracula x Carmilla

Matt, Katherine Bergevin ( PhD candidate at Columbia University's Department of English and Comparative Literature), and Jehan Senai Worthy (Attorney at the Hudson Valley Justice Center) discuss two of the most influential vampire texts of all time: Bram Stoker's Dracula and Sheridan LeFanu's Carmilla. 

Transcript

Matt Park
The fearful count was coming to London. If it should be, and he came to London with his teeming millions, there may be a solemn duty, and if it come we must not shrink from it. I shall be prepared. I shall get my typewriter this very hour and begin transcribing. Welcome to the Bard Sequence Seminar Podcast. Today it's Dracula and Carmilla. 

And I'm Matt Park, Director of the Bard Sequence. Today I'll be your friendly moderator and panelist, and I'm joined by Katherine Bergevin and Jehan Worthy. Katherine, would you mind by briefly introducing yourself?

Katherine Bergevin
Sure. If you're listening, you might recognize my voice by now. My name is Katherine, as Matt said. I'm a PhD candidate at Columbia, specializing in 18th century literature, but I'm also well read in the Victorian era from which Dracula and Carmilla originate. So I'm really looking forward to this chat.

Matt
And Jehan.

Jehan Senai Worthy
Hi everyone, my name is Jahan and I am an attorney at the Hudson Valley Justice Center and an educator. I've previously taught at Bard High School Early College and a number of Bard Early College programs, far too many to count.

Matt 
Thank you both. And Catherine, yes, you are the number one contributor right now to the Bard Sequence Seminar podcast, so welcome back. Jehan, first time for you. Jehan, have you podcasted before? Have you podded? Is this your first pod?

Jehan 
I feel like it's my first real podcast. Like I did do like a podcast interview before, but it was very different than this. So I'd say this is my first.

Matt
Excellent. I really like that you called this a real podcast. That makes me feel good. 

Jehan
It is real, okay?

Matt (02:07)
It's on the internet, you can Google it, therefore it's real. I'm going to take that as a huge victory for the pod. 

All right. Thank you both for introducing yourselves. So before we get started, a full disclaimer. We are not here as experts who are going to tell you what these texts are quote really about, nor are we here to have the final say in these texts. Instead, we're going to talk about what they are to us and why we value them. We are going to ground our readings in evidence from the text. But if we do a decent job, you should be walking away from this with more questions than answers. 

We are also not here to summarize the text for you because whether it's a podcast or an essay, you should not spend your precious time giving your audience a literal summary of something that they need to read themselves. If you're listening to this, go and read the thing. 

And with that, we're going to get into it. We're going to do five or fewer minutes of context. And for that, we have to go to the expert. So, Katherine, you know a lot more about the background of these texts than we do, certainly. And so I'm going to throw it over to you.

Katherine 
I'm going to begin with a short reading of a speech of Van Helsing's from Dracula that I think is going to ground us in how to think about the position of the vampire in English literature. And Matt and Jehan, feel free to cut me off if I am going on for way too long.

And I'm going to make a note that I'm not going to attempt to emulate Van Helsing's accent. My grandmother had a Dutch accent and I don't think I'm up to trying to reproduce that right now. So if I don't match the text word for word because I'm speaking in a more grammatical manner, please don't call me out for it.

"There are such beings as vampires. Some of us have evidence that they exist. Even had we not the proof of our own unhappy experience, the teachings and the records of the past give proof enough for sane peoples. I admit that at the first I was skeptical. Were it not that through long years I have trained myself to keep an open mind, I could not have believed in such time as that fact thundered on my ear.

See, see, I prove, I prove, alas, had I known at the first what now I know. Nay, had I even guessed at him, one so precious life had been spared to many of us who did love her. But that is gone, and we must so work that other poor souls perish not whilst we can save. The Nosferatu does not die like the bee when he stings once. He is only stronger and being stronger have yet more power to work evil.

All we have to go upon are traditions and superstitions. These do not at the first appear much, when the matter is one of life and death. They are more than either life or death. Yet must we be satisfied, in the first place because we have to be. No other means is out of control. And secondly, because after all these things, tradition and superstition are everything. Does not the belief in vampires rest for others? but not, alas for us, on them? A year ago, which of us would have received such a possibility in the midst of our scientific, matter-of-fact 19th century? We even scouted a belief that we just saw justified under our very eyes. Take it, then, that the vampire and the belief in his limitations and his cure rest for the moment on the same base. 

For let me tell you, he is known everywhere that men have been. In old Greece, in old Rome, he flourished in Germany all over, in France, in India, even in the Chersones, and in China. So far from us in all ways, there even is he, and the people fear him at this day. He has followed the wake of the berserker Icelander, the devil-begotten Hun, the Slav, the Saxon, the Magyar. So far then, we have all we may act upon. And let me tell you that very much of the beliefs are justified by what we have seen in our own so unhappy experience."

So Van Helsing makes a very interesting claim here, which is a familiar one to probably most people who have ever enjoyed a vampire story in their time. And that's the idea that the vampire is an ancient form of evil, which has always stalked humans going back to the beginning of time. In particular, this text associates vampires with the ancient worlds of what to the Victorians would have been considered the Orient. So Eastern Europe. He also invokes India and China, ancient Greece and Rome. These were considered lands of mystery where the supernatural might, you know, in the imagination have greater force compared with the modern Northern European landscape as the characters in our novel and the people who were reading it in say London would have seen themselves.

The interesting thing is that we don't actually see vampires as such appear in English literature until the 19th century. And in fact, a lot of these ancient myths that are invoked as the originary forms of the vampire don't seem to have much resembled a character like Dracula. They were sort of various forms of the undead that might manifest like a ghoul. They might come back to feed on the living, but they didn't have this sentience, this debonair character, this association with aristocracy in the way that we now think of vampires and that we see reflected in texts like Carmilla and Dracula. And, you know, if you look at the 20th century, 21st century books by Anne Rice or even the Twilight series, we have a very particular image of the vampire as someone who is almost indistinguishable from a human being, except for the fact that they're more powerful and more seductive in some way. This is very different from the idea of a zombie-like corpse emerging from the graveyard to unconsciously feed on his still existing friends and relatives. 

So there's another important association with the vampire that comes through in Dracula, and that is science. It's almost as though the vampire has to emerge as an ancient threat for modern science to confront and outwit. So by conjuring Dracula as this evil going back to the time of say the middle ages or the early modern wars, it's a way for Bram Stoker and his readers to reassure themselves in our modern world, medicine, studies of electricity, and our ability to travel really quickly. These are all tools that'll give us the ability to outwit even the most ancient threats.

So I'm sorry, because I'm sure I went on for more than five minutes. But I think that's a really important dichotomy that can ground our discussion between this belief in the vampire as an ancient evil and the way that he actually emerges in a very recognizably modern context where we have like trains, even electricity by the time we get to Dracula. 

Matt 
 In preparation for this, I did do a bit of research. I did do a bit more reading outside of the text.  One thing that you mentioned that certainly went along with what I'd found is, again, this idea of Dracula as the aristocrat that does seem to be very much a literary invention and different from a lot of the folk tales, which, again, are the vampire is more of a ghoul, more of a zombie. There is this idea that you become a vampire through something like a suicide or some other kind of wrong action in life which leads you to be cursed. Right? So the idea is, you know, if you've committed suicide you've tried to prematurely end your own life and you are therefore cursed with this immortal life that you cannot get rid of and you're cursed to therefore go on feeding on the living and doing things that are, you know reprehensible and you know damnable and in the eyes of God and things like that. 

Whereas again when we think of How you become a vampire it's well, of course you got bit by a vampire, right? It's more similar to what we think of when we think of werewolves Which is right the the vampire bites you and drains your blood and that is how you become a vampire or you drink of the vampire's blood or something like that It's more of a contagion effect as opposed to a kind of moral judgment, which I think goes along more with with the kind of folktales and the idea of anyone can become a vampire in the right circumstances and then you know you round up the townsfolk and you go dig up the corpses and start staking corpses and burning them and beheading them and things like that which was more of the folk practice. So I do agree that these texts are particularly modern and they are the result of quite a few authors reading each other's works and continuing to incorporate this idea of the aristocratic vampire into literature in a way that again differs from kind of the folk models.

Katherine 
I actually would love to pick up on what you mentioned about contagion as the framework for the vampire. I mean, this is sort of just building on what you were saying. I'm sure in reading the novel, students will have noticed that there is a lot of experimental medicine taking place, including in the realm of the asylum, in the realm of blood transfusions, which you definitely should not perform at home. They didn't know about blood types back then. So these things were all very preliminary. But the idea of disease would very much have been on people's minds because in the 19th century as cities are getting bigger and bigger there's anxiety about illnesses like cholera, even like the plague comes back in certain parts of the world. So the idea of being incredibly proximate to large numbers of people, more so than ever before in human history, and moreover, that a lot of these people could have come from around the world, actually meant that contagion was very much on everyone's mind. Tuberculosis was a very frightening illness in this time. And actually some of the symptoms we see described in Dracula, when say Lucy and Mina are kind of wasting away and becoming really pale, were ones that we would associate with the patient who had the illness tuberculosis, which was also known as consumption. And we can see that reflected in like operas from the time period that were not supernatural in character. So this is another really important strain of culture that we see coming through in the text.

Matt 
Okay, let's move on from the historical context to our context. So how did you meet these texts? Does that matter in terms of how you read them and receive them? And just generally speaking, did you enjoy them? Do you like them? 

I'll go ahead and start. So I definitely read Dracula many years ago. I can't, I couldn't tell you when. I don't have a particular memory of when. I believe I probably read in abridged version for younger readers in which a lot of the detail that makes the text very rich was probably excised to make it easier to read.  I do think the ending of Dracula drags quite a bit and could use a bit of tidying up. But otherwise, generally speaking, I really did enjoy rereading it and reading the full version. And I think a lot of those details that I probably missed when I was a young reader make it more interesting and deep and give the text a lot more to say about the society in which it was placed in.

Carmilla, on the other hand, Katherine, you recommended that to me when we were talking about some potential texts to do and immediately it struck my interest. I really, really enjoy Carmilla. Reading it for the first time for this podcast and then it's a short text and I've gone back and reread it a few times.  Not only in preparation, but also because I really enjoyed it and wanted to catch more of the quotes that were going on in there.

I'll talk a lot about Carmilla today, but I really enjoyed it. I found it to be moving very, very different from Dracula, lacking some of the wider context that Stoker puts into Dracula. It's a much more tight and focused drama, focusing around a few people and really just kind of one location as opposed to a globetrotting narrative, but I can enjoy both of those sorts of texts. 

And then just generally, I will also say, you know, that certain aspects of both of these texts I found to be somewhat problematic. There are more things, I think, in Dracula that I found to be quite problematic. There's a lot of really dicey gender stuff going on in there. However, you know, as a reader, I can read and appreciate a text and enjoy parts of it and then also read parts of it and be like, oh, this is just, don't, this is bad, right? Like I'm not enjoying this particular discourse on gender here, right? Other than to say, this is what it was like back then. This is what people wrote and talked about when they were talking about gender from this particular perspective. but again, generally, you know, I did enjoy both texts for, you know, both of their kind of uniqueness.

Katherine 
So on the topic of gender, it might surprise readers and it might surprise you guys to learn that a lot of critics suspect that Bram Stoker may have based Dracula on the character of a man who was his boss for decades and who people think he might have been in love with. Bram Stoker also competed for his wife's affections with Oscar Wilde. Bram Stoker ended up winning out. So, those are just a couple hints that there might be, I know the fact that Mina is constantly swooning over how amazing it is that there are brave men in the world, blah, blah, and how grateful she is to the man who invented the typewriter. Like that gets tedious really fast. But there are are also other dimensions to the gender dynamics in the book that with a little bit more authorial context and awareness of some of the developments happening in the time period might come to the surface and be fun to talk about.

Matt 
Jehan, what was your experience?

Jehan
Oh, so I'd never read Dracula before. And so, you know, when I began reading it, I liked it for, you know, I was immediately drawn to its style and not necessarily its content. You know, it begins with in Harker's journal documenting his travels to Transylvania. He's talking about the food he's enjoying, notes to remember. He says on page seven, "we left in pretty good time and came after nightfall to Claussenburg. Here I stopped for the night at the Hotel Royale. I had for dinner or rather supper a chicken done up some way with red pepper, which was very good but thirsty. Ma'am, get recipe for Mina. I asked the waiter and he said it was called Paprika hendl and that it was a national dish. I should be able to get it anywhere along the Carpathians." And so I just immediately wanted to think about my travels. So it was, I wanted to go back in time. Where have I been the last few years? Go through my Instagram stories, is where I document everything and just kind of put in a box, you know, my favorite foods and my memories and the people I've met and the clothes they're wearing, you know, so I was drawn in, right? 

And of course the idea that Mina has compiled all of the notes and the memos and newspaper clippings and telegraphs and all of those things to kind of tell the story of Dracula toward the end and you know for them to understand it and for other people to understand it You know, I really really was drawn into that. So I I loved it. Of course, you know the gender stuff definitely annoying. It was you know, but you know, definitely a lot of things that I valued from Dracula.

And then Carmilla, just as everyone seems to be in love with Carmilla in the text, I too was, you know, in love with the story. The words were just like luscious and poetic and romantic. And I just really, really, really enjoyed it. You know, there's just something about the protagonist and her father appearing at the scene of an accident, a lady described with a commanding air, a lifeless young woman in the carriage. You know, get this, sense that this might be planned, right? Like, is this really a coincidence? And she says, the mother says, I must leave her. And you're like, what? What do you mean you must leave your daughter, your almost lifeless daughter here? Right? And you just get Laura's father, she asks to take Madame and trust her child to the care of my daughter and good governance. Madame Peridot, permit her to stay as our guest to which she responds, cannot do that, sir. It would be to task your kindness and chivalry too cruelly, like just setting them up. You know she's playing them. You know something's gonna go down. You're not quite sure how it is. But you know, I'm pulled in, just drawn to it. 

The way they gush over each other when they discuss the visions they have of each other as children. Carmilla emphasizes her lips even when she screams. Carmilla is aroused by her scream even though she is frightened by it. Your looks won me, she says. Carmilla's eyes follow her fondly and with melancholy. And it's almost so disturbing how then Carmilla's beauty and interest and love and lust and fondness, right, that she can feel begins to change that nightmare that she's had. That nightmare or the real experience that she's had into something very different. Something that know, it's just, you you just, you want to read it. You love it. It was marvelous. I'm just, very happy and like glad that I was asked to be here so I could take part and read these texts because I never would have picked them up on my own.

Matt 
Thanks, Jehan. Yeah, I discovered Carmilla like Harker discovered paprika. It was like, my God, what is this spice? It's crazy. They've got this thing over here. It's called paprika. You're have to bring this back. Which again, is I think a very 19th century British thing, right? Which is like, there's not too many spices necessarily yet over here in England. And so I went to the East and tasted this new dish and my God, paprika, wow.

Katherine 
I can't really remember a time when I didn't know Dracula. I knew Matt would ask me about this for the podcast, so I was trying to do some excavation of my own, you know, memories. And I did realize my first copy of Dracula I ever owned came from a Scholastic book fair, which must have been maybe in grade six or seven. And that book is pretty well-thumbed, so I think I might have at least tried to read it in middle school. And then I know I watched a few movie versions like the Francis Ford Coppola film looms very large in memory. It has a lot of very striking and weird visuals. You know, I have the image of Nosferatu, which everyone knows from the meme of a guy saying goodbye chat and then falling back into his tomb, even if they haven't seen the original.

But I really came to know Dracula predictably enough in a 19th century literature course that I took during my undergraduate studies. And one of the things we really talked about in relation to Dracula was the topic of gender and the ways in which, I kind of alluded to before, in the Victorian era, which we stereotype as being incredibly buttoned up and conservative, and there was this idea that romance and sex were things you could never talk about. We actually see in this novel that there were forms of connection, like between men, potentially as both friends and with some kind of like romantic frisson, potentially between women and that between men and women as both friends of potential lovers, like even though there's a lot of lip service paid to conventional gender roles in this text. 

Mina does kind of construct her narrative a bit as a rebuttal to this idea of the new woman. So that might have been the suffragette or like the blue stocking, the woman who wore bloomers instead of a skirt and rode a bicycle. you know, Mina aspires to be similar to a lady journalist, as she calls them. And we kind of see she's a bit more of a professional even than Jonathan, who is ostensibly the breadwinner for the family, because she knows all the train schedules that he has to catch to meet with clients. She's doing all this organizational labor. The fact that typing was considered a very professionalized field. If you've seen Mad Men or something, it was a skill that in particular women had. Same with writing in shorthand, that men often didn't possess. And we kind of see that displayed in the text where she teases, I think, Van Helsing at one point by giving him the shorthand. So there's a very frustrating sort of knee-jerk conservatism about gender that comes out in this novel. But then we also see these moments where she is thinking, Lucy's so beautiful when she sleeps. If only you could, you know, be allowed to see your beloved sleep before getting married. You know, what would, how would that change the world? There are moments again, where we see men watching each other sleep and there's a lot of expression of affection that is kind of surprising and seems like very intense and is really nice in a way. Like this novel is about a group of friends who really think the world of each other and are constantly going on about how brave and magnificent. They all are. So it does have a bit of a modern feel in that sense. It almost brings to mind ideas of like chosen family.

And in terms of Carmilla, the way I found out about it was that I had a professor who told me, well, if you liked Dracula, did you know there's a lesbian version of Dracula? And I was like, what? And in fact, I had actually read a poem which this novel is largely inspired by, which is called Christabel and it's by S.T. Coleridge, who was one of the romantic poets. And in there, he kind of lays out, you know, this was from the late 1700s, so way before Sheridan Le Fanu sat down and wrote Carmilla. But it was this unfinished poem about a girl who wanders out of her father's castle and comes upon a beautiful woman who she brings home and kind of falls in love with, but that turns out to be, you know, a seduction by, you know, energy or blood drinking monster.

And then suddenly all the men around her are like infatuated with this woman she's brought into the castle and she doesn't know what to do. And then it ends because he never finished it, unfortunately. But Carmilla was this interesting discovery and I think it's getting more traction now with new editions coming out because I think people are kind of realizing like, wait, the Victorian era wasn't just, you know, this very superficial, like heteronormative society, you know, like, there are texts like Carmilla, are explicitly, you know, like queer in their outlook and which have interesting female characters. And then through reading that, we can look at Dracula in new ways too, and other books, of course.

Matt 
Thanks, Catherine. Yeah, I was aware of Stoker's, you know, again, I don't want to say anything about his sexuality that would be out of time or out of inappropriate to his context, but I was aware of some of those things in terms of doing research on and seeing his kind of relationships with other men like Oscar Wilde and so on. And so there certainly is a reading of Dracula or readings of Dracula, which can certainly highlight that.

I think when you're talking about the connection between the male characters here, I think that's partly driven by what the vampire is, right? Which is the vampire is, to a group of people who consider themselves the top of the food chain, who consider themselves to be the most refined, civilized people on the planet. The vampire appears and is more powerful than them.

Katherine 
Apex Predator.

Matt 
Yes, absolutely. He is. He's the apex predator, right? And these guys are hunters and they walk around with their bowie knives, right, from the wilds of America and from the, what was it, the Gurkha knife from India? 

Katherine
The Kukri knife? For some reason, Jonathan, the lawyer, knows how to use a Kukri knife.

Matt 
Yes, yes, that's right. It's the Kukri knife from India, right.  And these guys are hunters and they consider themselves to be apex predators, not only in terms of their diet and what they actually eat, but also they're part of the great British civilization, Soon to be the great British empire spanning across the globe and all that. And the vampire appears and is more powerful than them.

And in order to face the vampire, they need to band together. And so there is this kind of narrative that we see in lots of other novels and in quite a lot of films in which the overpowering thing, the monster, the challenge arises and people need to band together in brotherhood and sisterhood to take on this thing. Right. And so, I mean, that certainly is one way the narrative could go. The other way is that people just kind of fall apart in the face of the monster, right, and they disintegrate and society collapses. And so, you know, Dracula, therefore, is an optimistic novel in which the great evil which appears can be overcome through bonds of brotherhood and sisterhood and friendship.

Jehan
But did we say that, Dracula was based off of Stoker's, may have been based off of Stoker's, like, boss whom he had a crush on?

Katherine 
That's what people have speculated. 

Jehan
Right, but we don't get so much about Dracula though. Like, I would think if this was based off of someone that you're in love with, we'd get more of like a Carmilla feel, because, you know, I didn't leave this thinking, yeah, I'm just as in love with Dracula as, you know, our author may have been. He spends far more, much time discussing women's lips and their teeth and their, you know, voluptuousness. And I'm like, not once did he describe Dracula's lips as voluptuous, so I'm, I kind of want to know more because if that's, I see more love for each other and like the guys than I do for any sort of admiration for Dracula.

Katherine 
Yeah, for sure. mean, this is one of the reasons why I personally sometimes find that reading a bit interesting because I I could see maybe basing Dracula on a boss with whom you had a contentious relationship. So Bram Stoker worked in the theater and you can kind of tell that from a lot of the set pieces in the novel are kind of set up as you might set up a stage. you if you reread some of them that'll without a mind, it'll come through really strongly and I believe it was the theater director was this like really strong personality who clashed with everyone. so Bram Stoker kind of had this like "my best fiend" kind of push and pull with him. And in general, there's been speculation that Bram Stoker may have had romantic interests in men. And I think because he had this intense relationship with this professional partner, people have kind of speculated maybe Dracula was inspired, you know, by his, you know, sublimated feelings of desire for this man. 

But I think one place where we can actually see a little bit of, this isn't really speaking to Bram Stoker's feelings about it because that's historical information that kind of died with him, right? But I think it's very interesting in the early part of the novel when Jonathan encounters the three brides and he kind of overhears them mocking Dracula for his interest in Jonathan. They kind of say, you never love. And he says, yes, I do. You know, all three of you, I loved at one time. That's why I created You as Vampires is the subtext of their conversation. And you're kind of left wondering, okay, so does he love Jonathan? Is that what they're implying? He does seem to really enjoy talking to him and have this fascination with him. And there's just like a little hint of maybe Jonathan could have kind of become one of these pets he keeps in the castle too. So it's not something that's overt or 100% fixed in the text, but I think there is a little bit of this dynamic between Jonathan, who also compares himself to kind of like a blushing maiden of past ages as he's sitting in the castle. He imagines himself as a princess from another time and this like bluebeard type captor.

Jehan 
Right? And I think he does say like something along the lines of he's mine for right now. Later, you can have him. 

Matt 
Yeah, think that, I mean, the early chapters with Harker are the best characterizations that we get of Dracula for sure. And later on in the novel, when Van Helsing and his compatriots are talking about Dracula, they essentially describe him in 19th century criminological terms, which is they talk about him as having the intellect of a child. And that's why he is doing these things. That's why he is the way he is. And that's the way that they used to explain why there were criminals in society in the 19th century. This way of seeing the world was also highly racist and applied to colonized peoples as well. And so in my own research into the history of colonial Africa, I found lots of, the way that Dracula is described here, I found lots of these kinds of descriptions being used to describe people in the Gambia where I was doing my research and this idea that they have a kind of childlike intelligence and that is why they are anti-social and commit crimes and do these other sorts of things and that's basically how Dracula is described by you know, the other men in the text, right? That's not a real characterization. He's not really given the opportunity to speak very much for himself. And when he does later in the text, it's when he's kind of emasculating Harker and, you know, blood is spurting and all that kind of stuff. So that's not a whole lot of opportunity to get inside his head really and what's going on there.

So I'm going to move us on to our take. So what is your unique reading of these texts and why do they speak to you? Does one of these texts speak to you more than the other? Does one of these texts speak to you more than the other? 

Jehan
I feel like I said most of what I wanted to say in my context.

Matt 
I have a bit more so I'll go ahead. 

I was really struck that both of these novels were written kind of in the epistolary form, though Dracula is far more diverse in its use of various literary devices, so letters, journal entries, news clippings, and so on to tell the story. I do think that is also part of why we don't get much characterization of Dracula and his interiority. We do know that he writes. We know that he can write from the early chapters. However, we are not presented with anything written by Dracula himself, no recordings of him. The only way that we see him are through these other letters and clippings and hints and things like that. I mean this is really effective in building dread, especially early in the novel because you you read a news clipping and you know that something is deeply wrong here right but the characters don't know it yet so there's this effective kind of building of dread here and then in Carmilla as well right the story is presented as Laura having written the story down and then eventually passed those letters on and then being published. So in both of these we have the idea that this is some kind of, you know, based on correspondences. 

And I think that speaks to the context of it into the 19th century, in which we do have this kind of proliferation of writing, travel correspondences, colonial narratives, and so on that were popularized by the print capitalism of the day and were circulating around 19th century England, which again was growing into a colonial power. You also have increasing rates of literacy in society in which these travel accounts are kind of being gobbled up as profitable. I mean essentially they were largely fiction because of the way that they were exaggerated. 

In Carmilla, we have a transplanted English family, which is the focus of the story. And at the beginning of Dracula, we have a lot of allusions to this idea that Britain is becoming an imperial power. Right. So we have allusions to clock time, international time, the British Museum, polyglot travel dictionaries, ordinance survey maps versus local maps, the borders of the West versus the East, the Hotel Royale, anthropological accounts of Transylvania's population, train schedules, barbarians, cowboy hats, oriental brigands, and compiling recipes. Again, the paprika/

Right. And so why, right. What does Jonathan Harker say? He says "there was business to be done and I can allow nothing to interfere with it." Right. And that's really what's going on here where we have this kind of development of a particular kind of colonial capitalism that is the background of Dracula and this idea that there is this kind of onset of modernity here that the world is becoming somehow modern and the figure of the vampire is sticking out like a sore thumb against this modernity. It's a really interesting kind of context for it, right? 

And of course, Carmilla, right, is set in a swamp, but it is set in a swamp with these English transplants who live in a polyglot household where they're speaking English, French, and German. Laura, at the end of the novel, leaves for an international tour, right? So even in Carmilla, which is, again, a much more tight and focused narrative on a particular place, there is still very the idea that it's centered around this kind of modern family and this kind of modern arrangements. And even the kind of figure of Carmilla herself is fairly modern. She kind of talks as a natural philosopher. She sounds like an atheist. She talks about, you know, when Laura's talking about a creator, you know, Carmilla says, "all things proceed from nature, don't they? All things in heaven and under the earth act as nature ordains." And so there's a lot of discourse around this kind of ongoing onset of modernity here, of colonization, and that major, major changes are happening in the world. And here's this figure of the archaic vampire. That's my take.

Katherine
So it's really interesting. I want to pick up on what Jehan was saying earlier on about travel and the use of Instagram and social media. Those were technologies that were really on my mind, specifically as I was rereading Dracula. It's almost, I was actually complaining to a friend that, you know, Dracula is so clogged up with technicalities about how things have been recorded, like what trains people are taking, like, and to me reading this in 2025, I'm like, it's fine. You don't have to justify the fact that this is all written down and that there was a telegram and all of this. But in the moment when it was written, it seemed like a big part of the drama for the author seems to have been the process of recording and communicating these stories. And it does have that feel. You guys have helped me sort of figure out what to make of this quality of the text that had been actually getting on my nerves a bit. 

These are also characters who are learning to navigate the modern world and the forms of communication, I guess, that it makes possible and that it also demands. And we see that they're able to outpace Dracula and his use of those. But the really, this kind of ties in, the really big theme I was actually thinking about as I read Dracula. This might sound a bit sideways, I guess, of our conversations thus far was like landlordism.

And in a way, it's like a book expressing, it's obviously like couched very xenophobic terms, like there's this fear of the other and who's racialized and characterized as a criminal using these like stereotyping methods where they look at, you know, the shape of his eyebrows and all of this stuff. But if you look at present day London, there is actually huge anxiety about the idea specifically of people from Eastern Europe coming in and buying up all the property and pushing people out of the city. It's something we see in big cities happening all over the world. The cost of living getting more and more expensive as property is sort of gathered into the hands of a small group of very wealthy people. And so I was amazed at how relevant some of the just mechanisms by which Dracula was planning to infiltrate London society or English society and how relevant they felt to me, and how instinctually I was like, yeah, who is this guy? He's bringing a bag full of money from a castle in another country and he's buying up all these houses in London, where we know there are street urchins, like we're thinking of Oliver Twist or whoever. 

At the same time, so there is something very modern about it in that way too, in terms of the class narrative that's going on. And it's interesting, we see that characters like Lord Godelming is sort of there almost only to pay for stuff. They often say, it's great we have a lord who's really wealthy as our friend, because people will kind of just cater to him and do stuff for him and he can just pay for everything. There are a couple throwaway lines like that. Whereas Jonathan and Mina are for more humble means, they consider themselves very fortunate to have inherited a business from Jonathan's boss who kind of saw him as a surrogate son. So there's this class element that still feels very present.

And in that respect, Carmilla actually feels a bit more distant to me. It feels a bit more grounded in the 19th century world or even the 18th century, like the 1700s, which I study because they are in a much more analog world. They are still kind of an upper class family who are embedded. Like they're the people living in the castle. And we aren't really in this world of like telegrams and people bopping back and forth from Amsterdam to London overnight constantly. It feels much more settled. And so it's almost like the lurking evil the vampire represents in Carmilla is one that's looking towards the ancient past, whereas Count Dracula seems very much to be looking towards the future as well. He's like, real estate speculation and all of this.

Matt 
Yeah, he's bigly into real estate, right? And I mean, Carmilla is set in a swamp, right? And so when I was reading this, I was thinking quite a lot of Monty Python's The Holy Grail, Swamp Castle. Right? Which is like, they told us we were crazy to build a castle in the swamp, but we did it anyway. It sank into the swamp, so we built another one. That one sank into the swamp, so we built a third castle and that one stayed up. Anyway, I took my kids to see Monty Python's Holy Grail recently.  It was back out in theaters, so that was fun. 

But anyway, yes, it's set in a swamp and it's isolated. Right? And while the family is to a certain degree modern and living a modern kind of isolated life outside of their home country. So there are aspects of the text that do have to do with a particular experience of modernity. The setting certainly is not... the Karnstein's, right? The family is local and that is all local history and local lore and very much embedded in the kind of local traditional system. So that aspect definitely I think is more remote.

And you know for me I kind of glossed over a lot of that. Yes. Yes dark and stormy night. Yes. Yes swamp got it right setting ⁓ Loneliness, right? But you know for me what was interesting about Carmilla was the emotional relationship between Laura and Carmilla right and not so much again as I said, right some of the other texts that make Dracula a more rich text that is pointing to a number of different things, certainly real estate being included in there

Jehan 
I didn't pay too much attention to it being in a swamp. I was really just in love with them describing each other. I was like, they could have been anywhere.

Katherine 
Jehan, said you were training to become an attorney, right?

Jehan
I am an attorney.

Katherine 
You're an attorney. I'm sorry. We just met for people listening.

Jehan 
No, no, no, it's okay. No, no, no, I didn't mean it to- I'm sorry if it sounded combative, if that's not how I meant it.

Katherine
No, it wasn't at all, but I was curious, how did you feel about Jonathan as a lawyer, you know, represented as a literary figure? Did you think that it sounded sound, like all the deals they were making with Dracula?

Jehan
Yeah. I mean, I tried to skip over that stuff to be honest. I didn't want to think of, you know, property or wills. I was just trying to like, not think about work here.

Katherine 
Do you have a Kukri knife that you bring to work with you?

Jehan
No, I do not. I almost said that when you mentioned it the first time. was like, wait, attorneys can be, you know, multi-talented. We can do many things.

Matt 
No Kukri knives in the workplace. I mean, I guess you could maybe just mount it up on the wall and just, you know, put up a little sign there like for bad lawyers only or something. I don't know, you break out the Kukri. All right. So I'm going to move us on to our close reading. So pick a passage, word or phrase from the text that you think is worth reading closely. Why does it matter? And anything about the way that it is written or translated that especially matters to you.

Matt 
I'll go ahead with this one. So I'm doing Carmilla specifically for this one. And I've got two quotes "Here in this lonely and primitive place where everything is so marvelous marvelous it okay Here in this lonely and primitive place where everything is so marvelously cheap I really don't see how much more money would at all materially add to our comforts or even luxuries and in truth I know not why I am sad. It wearies me. You say it wearies you."

And so in the quote here, they really are talking about the isolation of the setting in the swamp and particularly of the loneliness that Laura feels as a young girl who is growing up and she talks in a number of places in the text about being incredibly lonely, about not having much opportunities to interact with other kids her own age. And, you know, there's the swamp, there's the loneliness, there's ruins and graveyards, and a lot of this is kind of staples, I think, of Gothic literature. And that certainly is true. 

But I do think it is interesting to think about and to think about the relationship between Laura and Carmilla and the idea that loneliness predisposes people to certain kinds of vampirism, right? Which is, Laura throughout the text and especially as it goes on, know, she really seems to know that something is pretty wrong and at a certain level that Carmilla is bad for her. So her dream prepares her by warning her about Carmilla. And as soon as Carmilla shows up, she says, you know, I know that face. That's the face from my dream. And in the dream, it was quite frightening, right? And she felt, you know, the vampire pierce her chest. She felt the kind of crushing asphyxiation that comes along with that.

And so she has this kind of warning, this premonition or this warning in the form of a dream. And yet Carmilla shows up and she's beautiful and alluring and Laura is really kind of sucked in, even though she's had this kind of warning, which she kind of, you know, brushes aside. 

And again, I think that is probably because of the loneliness. And so when someone, when we're particularly lonely and someone shows up in our life waving red flags around, you know, there is a part of us, I think, which says, well, you know, the loneliness is worse. And this person with all of these red flags is at least a person to share her life with. And so you kind of, you kind of let them in. You let the vampire in because the loneliness is more painful than whatever it is that the vampire is doing to you. 

So Le Fanu says, from Laura, "for some nights I slept profoundly, but still every morning I felt the same lassitude and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl, a strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle and somehow not unwelcome possession over me. It was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet. Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced to it." Right? So Laura feels herself slipping into death and she's like, yeah, okay. This is a death that I could slip into. I would prefer to slip into this form of death than I would to remain lonely. Even with these thoughts of death encroaching, Laura chooses to be vampirized rather than to be lonely. 

And I think the other form of loneliness too is that when we do find that person, red flags and all, and they alleviate that loneliness that we then also become kind of a vampire to them, which is, you know, if you've ever been someone who's extremely clingy, if you've ever been with someone, I'm seeing a face there, maybe, maybe not. But if you've ever been someone who is like the entire world to you and they're clingy and they won't let go and it feels suffocating to be around them, kind of like the vampire suffocates its victims, you kind of know what it's like to be with someone who you are their cure for loneliness and therefore they have kind of wrapped themselves so tightly around you to alleviate that loneliness that they become in a sense a kind of vampire sucking the life out of that person. So I just found this whole relationship between Laura and Carmilla to be really sophisticated and very true to life and particularly very true to people who have really experienced extreme forms of loneliness and isolation. And it just strikes me as true and actually I can see how Laura would have accepted the vampire into her life and would have accepted that kind of slow slide into a beautiful death as opposed to going back to the loneliness that was far more difficult to deal with. So that's my particular close reading.

Katherine 
It's so interesting, Matt, because the way you describe it, makes me think that Carmilla is almost more the novel which is the parent of present-day vampire texts than Dracula, in the sense that it's this emotional dynamic that is at the core of... What I'm thinking of is the interview with the vampire book, for instance. It's really about this dyad of two people who kind of like are in love, but can't stand each other. I haven't actually read Twilight, but I know obviously that's a forbidden romance kind of story. If you watch True Blood, there's also, it's all about that sort of romantic dynamic and about co-dependence and toxic relationships. Whereas in Dracula, it feels much more impersonal, like the bond between Dracula and his subjects. As you were saying, we don't get this deep psychological insight into his character in the way we do like Louis and Lestat or you know other vampires we might be familiar with now.

Jehan 
Similar to you, I just kind of thought about the relationship between Carmilla and Laura and kind of that emotional, the codependence and also like manipulation. I think of like the quote, "it's horrible lust for living blood supplies the vigor of its waking existence. The vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence resembling the passion of love by particular persons. In pursuit of these, it will exercise inexhaustible patience and strategy for access to a particular object, maybe obstructed in a hundred ways. It will never desist until it has satiated its passions and drained the very life of its coveted victim." And then it just reminds me of when Carmilla tells Laura, would live in you and you would die for me. I love you so. You know, so just, you know, just, You know, what is this relation, what really is this relationship between Carmilla and Laura? Is there any real love there? Is it just for blood and rejuvenation? Like what is here?

Matt 
I'm a romantic, so I think the love is real. I think that she loves her in the way that a vampire can possibly love a human. And I think beyond that, a vampire can't love a human more than that, any more than I could love an animal, which I one day knew that I would have to eat. Right. And so, I mean, she keeps Laura alive while completely draining the life out of many of the other young women in the surrounding area, right? And so she drains them totally, but from Laura, she takes little bites, little drinks, because she wants to make sure to keep her around. And that certainly is a form of abuse. I also think that it is genuine love in the way that she's able to give it. And that, again, it's extremely problematic and abusive and manipulative, but I think in Carmilla's mind, she loves Laura, despite also knowing that she's going to kill her.

Jehan
Right, yeah. I mean, it does continue. "In these cases, it seems to yearn for something like sympathy and consent. In ordinary ones, he goes direct to his object over powers with violence and strangles and exhausts often at a single feast," you know? But the... I don't know, it's just beautiful language. I just completely enthralled with it. 

Matt 
Yeah, and again, I don't want to be mistaken that I am like making excuses for manipulators and abusers and things like that, because that's not what I'm trying to come across as saying. I think, again, a lot of this is due to the way the novel is written and the lines that Carmilla is given by the author, which allow me as the reader to extend a kind of empathy for her. Even though I know she is the vampire, I know that at the end she does have to be killed, and there's a very good reason why she has to be killed, which is what she's doing to people. There is a certain, my empathy drive kicks in for her in a certain way because of the way that she's written and because of the complexity of the character.

Jehan 
Right, no, of course, but I think it's definitely a good question to like grapple with, you know, on both sides. You know, what is this? What is this relationship? What does it mean? What is it for? You know, just like we kind of grapple with the relationships that we have, you can never really fully understand the other person that you're with and their motives and their desires and their longings, right? So I think it's just, you know, something to ask of the characters of the text.

Katherine 
That's where the tortured vampire idea that we're familiar with now, I think, comes in. Because you can also see the story as being about the curse of the vampire is that they can't love anyone without destroying them. In our modern vampire stories where it's all about the heroine or hero eventually being turned into a vampire themselves, it's sort of like you can't escape that dynamic unless you then pass that curse on to the person who you turn into a vampire. So I think like the vampire is a tragic figure, you know, certainly in Carmilla and especially because she's like a young girl. She's not emotionally potentially, you know, she's still in the mindset of a teenager. Doesn't have the, even though she is very old. She is not psychologically an adult. And so she's always kind of reaching for companionship in that way that children do, which is without full control over the way they act and without full understanding of their motives.

Matt 
And I think in some of the modern vampire, you know, movies and novels that we get, you have vampires who actually try to get around this by making certain ethical choices. So, for example, I'm only going to drink the blood of animals or I'm only going to drink human blood if it has been donated and the person is not killed in the process. So you have like ethical consumption starting to come in. I think at that time that was not yet something that authors were really kind considering outside of the vampire who takes a small drink and ensures that their victim continues living. 

Katherine, what was your close reading?

Katherine 
I actually chose a passage from Dracula and again I chose a passage narrated by Van Helsing and again I'm not going to try to do a Dutch accent but please bear with me if I stumble over his syntax.

"This monster has done much harm already in the narrow scope where he finds himself. And in the short time when as yet he was only as a body groping his so small measure in darkness and not knowing. All this I have told the others. You, my dear Madame Mina, will learn it in the phonograph of my friend John or in that of your husband. I have told them how the measure of leaving his own barren land, barren of peoples, and coming to a new land where life of man teems till they are like the multitude of standing corn was the work of centuries. Were another of the undead like him to try to do what he has done, perhaps not all the centuries of the world that have been or that will be could aid him. 

With this one, all the forces of nature that are occult and deep and strong must have worked together in some wondrous way. The very place where he's been alive, undead for all these centuries, is full of strangeness of the geologic and chemical world. There are deep caverns and fissures that reach none know wither. There have been volcanoes, some of whose openings still send out waters of strange properties and gases that kill or make to vivify. Doubtless, there is something magnetic or electric in some of these combinations of occult forces, which work for physical life in a strange way. And in himself, or from the first, some great qualities. In a hard and warlike time he was celebrated, that he had more iron nerve, a more subtle brain, a more brave heart than any man. In him some vital principle has in a strange way found its utmost, and as his body keeps strong and grows and thrives, so his brain grows too. All this without that diabolic aid which is surely to him, for it has to yield to the powers that come from and are symbolic of good." 

So I found this passage really interesting because I find that within it are concentrated, I guess, some of the ideas that I brought up way back at the beginning about the meeting of conceptions of the very ancient and then the modern and the scientific. And there's a way that as Van Helsing describes the origin of Dracula here, he sees him as being a product of his environment in this really profound way, like literally of the geology and the chemistry of the land that he comes from. He's a product of the historical circumstances into which he was born and in which he became a military leader. 

And there's something like truly exceptional about Dracula kind of as an emblem of this really, really ancient history in the land of Transylvania, where we know there's been conflict, where there's been cultural hybridization taking place for centuries.  And what I find interesting about this passage is just like the idea of what we were talking about before, like culture moving into a new era, and this idea that like some ancient entities might be able to survive and persist. Like we can't necessarily leave all of them behind and we have to be very vigilant. And there's something about like Dracula's genius or exceptionality as this kind of figure that's able to transcend the centuries. That is just so like sinister and fascinating to me. 

And again, here we're incorporating forms of like scientific knowledge that really came into being in the 19th century. You know, like in the 1700s, people thought the earth was 6,000 years old. And then, you know, they began to discover dinosaurs and talk about like the layers of sediment. You know, when you did excavations and they began to understand just how old the planet was. And I think that's part of what we're getting here, like this idea, okay, maybe Dracula comes from the devil, but maybe he comes from something older, like as old as a volcano or as a bubbling pool of sulfur. Like he's a force of nature in a way. And it really feels in doubt whether this little group of friends is going to be able to challenge him.

So that passage for me just kind of embodies like what is truly scary or what flavor of horror is really scary to me personally. And it's this idea of the entity that might transcend humanity itself in some way in terms of deep time and might represent something we really can't grasp. Of course, they then are able to like dispatch with him pretty summarily. But I still think it's like a fascinating like way of thinking about the nature of evil and of like threat, you know, to humanity.

Matt 
Thanks, Catherine. Yeah, I mean, in a lot of horror films, certainly, right, there's kind of a choice where the director makes, which is does the horror come from the ancient and the rural, or does the horror come from the modern and the urban? And you kind of get one of those two particular kinds of narratives, right? Is the horror something that emanates from the past and we just can't get rid of? We can't stamp it out. It continues to arise from the past time and time again to haunt us. It is the, what does Freud call it? The return of the repressed, right? We have not been able to get rid of our kind of base primitive impulses. We have not been able to fully modernize and leave these past horrors behind, right? Or is it, you know, that you can take the opposite take, right? Or does the horror in fact emerge from something else? Does it in fact emerge from a modernity, which is in fact far more horrific than, you know, the kind of traditional mode of life which had come before, which is definitely very interesting.

So I'm going to go ahead and move us on. We can do some random questions. So there's a bit of a cat and dog thing going on in these texts. Carmilla turns herself into a cat, obviously, when feeding on Laura and others. And generally speaking, in these texts, dogs seem to be the only good animals. They seem to pretty consistently bark at the vampires. And Dracula turns into a lot of things. He commands the wolves and the bats, but the dogs still bark at him. So is this some like pro dog anti cat propaganda here we're looking at? Are you like are you all dog or cat people? I am a dog guy so I'm okay with the dog propaganda. I'm for it. I mean I have met cats that I like but generally speaking I'm a dog guy. How do you all feel about the cats and dogs?

Jehan
I'm allergic to both so, you know, I can't be friends with either.

Katherine 
I have a cat and a dog who currently live in different places, but I think I'm confident in saying like my cat could kick Dracula's ass. Like she doesn't like strangers to the point where my husband and I have sometimes said, well, if we forgot to lock the door and someone breaks in, they won't get far. But I hadn't thought about this as a aspect of the text. Like there's that really incredible and scary moment where after like in Whitby within Dracula, after the ships come into harbor and everyone, I think they're standing to watch the funeral that is held for the captain who had lashed himself into the wheel. And there's this dog that does not want to stand on the grave of the suicide where Lucy and Mina are standing. And it's owner finally gets frustrated within a pick-step and like throws it onto the grave in this instance of like animal violence that was kind of shocking to me. I don't think it would be socially acceptable to treat a dog that way in public today. But there's something about the representation of like dogs specifically fear of the supernatural that is always so affecting for me. Like even when I was a kid, I remember the movie Signs when the aliens come and you hear the dogs barking at them even though you can't see anything. I think there's this idea that they have access to obviously some kind of knowledge of good and evil or ill intent that humans kind of like willfully overlook because we're too distracted by culture. I don't know.

Matt 
Alright, and then I just have one more also connected to animals. So I can't let us go without talking about Renfield. And perhaps this is partly because of the Francis Ford Coppola film, which kind of established Renfield as, you know, one of the big on screen kind of characters, ranting and raving and eating, you know, flies, flies and all of this kind of stuff. But, you know, he starts out by eating flies and then using them to catch spiders and then eating the spiders and eating the birds and he then gets to cats and at that point they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, cut him off. We can't let them eat the cats. Is there any argument to be made that they should have just let him cook and just kind of see like after he starts eating the cats, what is the next thing?

Katherine 
You're really not a cat person, are you? Like, Jesus Christ, Matt.

Matt
Why stop him there? Why let him eat the spiders and birds and then stop him from eating the cats? You gotta let the man cook. See where this is headed, no?

Katherine
Well, because what comes after a cat? 

Matt 
That's what I want to know! I want to know what comes out of that cat.

Katherine

It's a coyote and then a human. I mean, I think it's interesting that he, when was the theory of bio-amplification established? Cause he's basically doing occult bio-amplification, which I don't know. It is really fascinating. Cause from Dracula's perspective, probably people are just like flies. And he's interested in collecting certain people who are interesting to him, who might represent the birds or the kittens, but it's all just food. And that's kind of what makes him so, you know, evil, is that he has such a mechanistic view of humanity.

Matt 
Yeah well I mean he has the view of humanity that most of humanity has about all of the other animals that they eat, right? Which is we are on top of the food chain and therefore it's not a big deal to eat you, right? You know obviously there are people, are vegetarians and vegans and all kinds of people who make different choices but for most people throughout the planet it's a, you know, this animal is food and it doesn't have the same kind of sophisticated brain that I have. It doesn't suffer like I do, it doesn't think like I do, it might not have a soul and things like that. 

That's the serious right answer, right? You know, but I mean, Renfield is just is just something. It is definitely an all time interesting character. My favorite part is I don't forget the character. I'm sorry, I don't remember the character, but they they're going to go down into kind of Renfield's cell. And he says, hold on, hold on, let me tidy up a bit first. And then he just eats all the flies and spiders and he just shoves them into his mouth. And that's like his version of tidying up, which is just wild. I just thought that was just something. 

So we've been talking a while, so I am going to keep us moving here just to keep this within a manageable time. So we're going to move on to add, delete, and rewrite. What is a moment from either novel that you would either add something to, delete, or rewrite it? 

So for my add, delete, rewrite, I did something a little bit different, which I don't normally do, which is I use chat GPT. And I...

Jehan 
Catherine's face. I was thinking that her face matched my thoughts when he said that. was like, no. No, what did you do? 

Katherine 
It's like, he's eating cats and using chat GPT, like, what? Who is this guy?

Jehan
Oh jeez. I can't wait for this. Sorry, Matt go ahead. 

Matt 
That's okay. That's okay. So for context, I hate Chat GPT. I hate the idea of it. I hate the idea that there people out there churning out whole novels with Chat GPT, lightly editing it, publishing it. And I hate that students are writing papers using Chat GPT. And I also don't like that professors are using Chat GPT to grade student papers, which is definitely a thing. You can put a rubric in and input all of your hundred whatever student papers and it will grade all of them and give feedback, right? Please don't do that.

Jehan 
Yeah, I think a teacher got in trouble because it was labeled as right as Chat GPT or AI or something and students of course, you know, reported it and we're very upset.

Matt
So the prompt that I entered into Chat GPT was write as Count Dracula I just wanted it to write as if it was Count Dracula and it I'm not gonna read the entire thing I'll give you the summary. Otherwise, it'll be way over long, but it gave me this like cartoon Count Dracula, right? It's like I am Count Dracula and I bid you welcome you have dared summon me. Yesssss, beneath the pale moonlight amidst the howling of the wolves and the whisper of shadows I rise from the crypt. You know and it goes on from there and then it ended it with bat emoji Drak.u.la.blood emoji Okay, so Chat GPT is like spitting out these emojis and then it says now what shall we discuss? Hmm? 

So I responded this doesn't feel very accurate to the Count Dracula described by Bram Stoker. To which ChatGPT then said, "You're absolutely right, thank you for pointing that out. Bram Stoker's Count Dracula, as originally portrayed in the 1897 novel, is far more refined, cunning, and aristocratic than many modern portrayals suggest. He isn't some campy melodramatic figure. He's a manipulative, ancient being with a deep command of language, a cold intelligence, and an unsettling charm.

let me offer you a more authentic version of Count Dracula, truer to Stoker's voice and tone."  And then it gave me, it did give me a much more kind of refined discourse as Count Dracula. The, you know, reference to emerging from the crypt and things like that are gone. It does say, however, you know, "you see I am old, older than you can know. I have studied many arts, many tongues and the hearts of men. And I have learned that the strength of the vampire lies not in his fang alone, but in his mind and in the invitation." So it did a less campy, less cartoony version, but still in this version it did say that basically I'm a vampire right so still not quite perfect to what Stoker said so I replied the Chat GPT I feel like Dracula would not be this obviously portentous and would not acknowledge that he was a vampire upon meeting someone Chat GPT said in response to that was "Exactly, you've hit upon one of the most important aspects of Stoker's Dracula. His menace is subtle, veiled beneath layers of civility, nobility, and old-world charm. He is not a melodramatic villain boasting of his evil. Rather, he pretends to be a gracious, even courtly host. His true nature is revealed only gradually, through the inconsistencies in behavior, uncanny moments, and the creeping dread of his guests. When Jonathan Harker first meets Dracula at castle Dracula the count is courteous welcoming and highly articulate. There is no overt mention of vampirism, only hints, strange servants who are never seen, no mirrors, his peculiar nocturnal habits, his uncanny strength and the way he seems to avoid sunlight. 

And then it gave me a really Stokery Dracula after that right and and and the lines are much much more closer and it looks like Stoker wrote it And and so I guess what I concluded from this is Chat GPT after all is the real evil and is terrifying. It really did just just from kind of moderate suggestions from me that it was a bit off here, that it was off there, that Dracula wouldn't have done this. It just spit out a better version each time until it sounded like Stoker and it only took basically three tries to get it there, which again I find to be terrifying and I think...

Katherine 
It also says he's charming, which we agreed he wasn't, so there's that.

Matt 
Hmm, that's true.

But again, I think that's more of the horror trope that the, you know, the horror is modern as opposed to the horror is ancient because chat GPT scares me more so than Dracula does actually. So that's what I concluded with this. So I use Chat GPT not to encourage others to use it, but because I don't know something popped into my brain and said, this is the place to do it, Matt. So that's what came out.

Jehan 
Like, I wish I got to know Dracula more from Dracula's perspective. And I wish I got to learn more about Carmilla from her perspective as well. Well you know what's funny, because I say that but then in Good Hang Bad Hang I say I definitely don't want to get to know Dracula but maybe it's because I don't actually feel like I get to know him. So I don't know what he would say but I think if he was there I would appreciate it but because he doesn't really feel there for me I'm like I don't want to hang out with him so that's kind of like a mixture of, of both questions. do have more to add for the next prompt though.

Katherine
My answer to the question about what we'd rewrite or change actually connects to what you just said, which is that I almost wanted like, I don't know what to call it, like a happy ending for Dracula in a weird way. Like I thought it would have been a fabulous twist if Mina had led them all to Dracula's castle so that she could turn Jonathan into a vampire and they could like finally defeat Van Helsing and sort of join Dracula's little like crew and bring it into the modern world. And then, you know, the very likable Mina and Jonathan could have kind of spearheaded, you know, his efforts to infiltrate London society. I think that the idea of an ending like that is obviously, you know, being inspired by all the modern vampire fiction I've read where the vampires are you know, the heroes. Again, I'm thinking of like Louis and Lestat. 

But I think also because the idea of Dracula as a character is really fascinating to me. Like I want to sit down with him and interview him on a podcast and be like, tell me about ancient like, Czechia and tell me about like the Huns. Like you met Attila the Hun, that's crazy. There's something, you know, fascinating about the idea of an individual that could have that much knowledge and in a weird way, maybe something like tragic and wasteful about the fact that we never get to learn the story of the three wives. You know, we never really get insight into Dracula's own motivations. 

There's a really excellent novel called The Historian, which is sort of like a it's a 20th century take on Dracula where he comes back, I think, during the time of the USSR. And he's menacing the world again and the main characters have to, you know, pursue him while also, you know, crossing back and forth over borders that are policed and navigating different languages and different cultural barriers. And in that novel, the author imagines like a much more involved sort of set of motivations for Dracula as a character and for why he's interested in the modern world and the West. And I think I might want to see something similar from Carmilla. Like I'm curious about Carmilla. Like you were saying, Jehan, like I want to know her life story. Like how does she feel about all these people she's encountering? You know, like what was that castle like before it was in ruins? You know, where her tomb now lies. That's what's most intriguing to me in a way about these vampires.

Matt 
There is something about the idea of having vampire overlords that almost sounds better than certain current overlords. Because at least with the vampires and their age, you're getting a certain amount of perhaps wisdom there that I think I would rather almost be ruled by vampire overlords than certain trends happening today in society. So. Let's go ahead on to good hang, bad hang. So from the characters of Dracula and Carmilla, who would you like to hang out with and who would you very much not like to hang out with? Maybe we can just kind of go with who are our top? Like who is your best hang and who is your worst hang?

For me my best hang is Mr. Swales from Dracula. The kind of old guy with the Scottish brogue who knows like all of the local gossip and will just like tell it to you completely unprompted when you don't want it. So he's just out there just like outing everybody's like story spilling all of the tea. It's like yeah you see that headstone over there? Yeah that guy and his mom they actually hated each other and that's why he's dead. So he's just like he's just throwing just right and left haymakers to everybody and I he would just be a great drinking companion and I think he would definitely carry the conversation and you can just kind of kick back and listen to him telling telling stories and just outing everybody's business so to me good hang. 

Who do you all have for your best hang?

Jehan
I chose, I mean, I, Carmilla, Carmilla and Van Helsing. I really do. I love Carmilla. I don't know. She's mysterious and intriguing and she's, you know, definitely in love with Laura, but she gives mixed signals. She doesn't tell too much, but you kind of want to see if she'll tell you, you know? So I, I want to know. I want to hang out with her and get to know her. And then Van Helsing, he's just a, you know, a good friend. He knows everything. You know, he's super empathetic. The way his heart like sinks when Lucy's mom removes the garlic from around her neck and opens the window. It's just, you know, he's, I like him. So it's a tie for Carmilla and Van Helsing.

Katherine 
I think I'd want to hang with Dracula's wives. Just get their side of the story. They seem like fun.

Jehan 
I mean, they are cool. They do seem cool.

Katherine 
Like they'd probably tell you about the real Dracula, like all the things that are annoying about him and, you know.

Jehan 
I would read that book, The Real Dracula.

Katherine
They could give you their amazing skincare tips, which are probably just bathing in blood, but you know, that was trendy for a while actually a few years ago, I'm pretty sure. Vampire facials.

Matt 
Alright, so I'll jump in here with my worst hang. And Catherine, I'm sorry, but it is Dracula for me. I'm trying to see things your way and I'm trying to see a bit more in him, but like, at least from the text, right, he's described as having the intelligence of a child, and yet he gives these speeches about the superiority of his bloodline and the glorious past of his people. He enjoys assaulting women and emasculating men. He's big into real estate. He steals and destroys records and documents in order to hide the truth. He surrounds himself with gaunt, corpse like fiends. He hypnotizes others into his service into a very cult like following. He is very wealthy but he produces nothing of any actual value and he's described by others as a remorseless criminal whose crimes are motivated by his selfishness. 

I don't know, it's just something about those combination of things altogether, seems like the worst possible person. All of those aspects, if you combine some of the worst aspects of humanity together into one being and they were like that, I would probably say they're the worst human on the planet. 

Katherine 
Yeah, and three wives.

Matt
That's, that I didn't even, I didn't even, I missed that one. I didn't even clock the the cheating, right? Yeah, Dracula definitely is a cheater. A serial cheater, one might say.

Katherine 
But he roasts a fierce chicken, apparently. That's his one redeeming quality. He's great at the housework.

Jehan
Same, I'm not hanging out with Dracula. He's like, he's just... It's about him. Every time they talk about him, I'm like, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, just, I'm so disinterested in him. I don't know. I don't know how the titular character for me can be so... wah wah. Like, I'm just, I'm over it. Like, I like the quest. I like them speaking with one another. I like them trying to save each other's lives. I love their interactions. Dracula himself, I am just so disinterested in which is why I do kind of wish I had a story from his point of view, but because it's not really there, I'm just, I'm not, not feeling him at all.

Katherine 
So my worst possible hang would probably be Dr. Seward. I think nothing good is coming out of a Victorian sanitarium, I can tell you that much. But I actually find that I've never liked him as a character, I think because of the incredibly dehumanizing way that he talks about, like he talks about Renfield and talks about the inmates at his asylum. That is actually, in a way, the most sinister portion of the novel to me, partly because I have done research on what took place in those kinds of institutions and the abuses that it entailed. But it's also just this view of a person as an experiment and an entity that you can put in isolation and put in a straight jacket. And I know Renfield is a thrall of Dracula and is eating spiders and all of that, but I feel like the way he's being dealt with, I can't possibly be helping the situation. But there is something very creepy about Seward to me. think because of the way he sits and just regards other people, like I found myself wondering, like, why is he even interested in Lucy? Like he, she's so bubbly and like fun and gossipy and he seems so severe and I don't know what he imagined that relationship would entail.

Matt 
I agree. He definitely is that trope of the doctor who is more interested in studying a phenomenon than healing or treating a human being who is in front of him. And he looks at Renfield as, my God, look at what this guy's doing. It's completely fascinating. One day I will publish this study and I will become famous for this new theory that I'm going to derive from what this patient is doing. And he believes that by letting animals eat each other and then I eat the animal, I've devoured all of their souls, right? And so that really is what is interesting to him. It's just a purely intellectual pursuit that will possibly one day make him famous and allow him to publish this study and things like this. And no interest whatsoever in Renfield as a person or particularly the idea that perhaps this person could be made better or if not made better, at least made comfortable in certain ways, right? And again, I know I was joking earlier about Renfield and being silly about eating the cats and things, but a more serious reading of the text will certainly suggest that Renfield is a victim of the sanatorium. Again, as were real people who were actually put into these kinds of positions in the 19th century and in the 20th.

Katherine 
And it shows you how casually they think about it too. How it's like, he's 29 and I think it's his age and he's already in charge of an entire, you know, asylum. Great. Like, it's one of the elements in the text where you kind of see really how the characters are in a very different mentality than we are now, like in the way they regard quote unquote mad persons.

Matt 
At this point, there have been many adaptations of Dracula as well as non-Dracula related vampire content. What are your top recommendations? What should the folks listening to this podcast be reading, be watching? Let's give them some good vamp content.

Jehan
I did, I made a list. Some of the things on my list I haven't watched in years and I cannot remember them but I... but of course I have True Blood and then I've got Being Human, the UK version of the TV series. Shocking, but Vampire Diaries and Sinners. Of course. that I can only come up with. And then, you know, I might have to revisit Blade, so. Those are my five.

Katherine 
For True Blood are you team Bill or team Eric? 

Jehan

You know, I can't remember my thoughts. It was such a long time ago. I feel like I want to say Eric right now, but I'd have to revisit and rewatch it to fully remember why that's my instinct. 

Katherine
He had great hair.

Jehan

He does. He does.

Katherine
I have a long list of vampire recommendations. I've alluded to it if you aren't familiar with the Interview with the Vampire. The first two books in that series are good. Don't bother with the rest, to be honest. I don't even particularly like Queen of the Damned, but Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat are both very good. There's a great TV show that has come out in the past couple of years, which also updates and reimagines those texts in interesting ways, because they're set in the 18th century, like United States, and the show actually deals with the history of racism and slavery in the US in ways that I think are very well handled and interesting. In terms of other vampire texts, I already mentioned The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. If you are interested in Dracula's side of the story, so to speak. That's a text which really explores what that character's psychology and life experiences could have been.

Other vampire texts. I guess I'm gonna count the video game Baldur's Gate 3 has a great vampire related plot line. I don't know if either of you guys have played it, but I think a very iconic vampire has come out of that game. There's a book by George R. Martin called Fever Dream, which is a southern vampire story. I think based in New Orleans, kind of inspired by Anne Rice. I haven't read that one for a long time. I remember really enjoying it, but I was a teenager, it might some I don't quite remember how well it handles some of the themes that of course would be relevant in that context in the 19th century. Let me think if there any I haven't seen Twilight or Vampire Diaries or what was the last one you mentioned, Jehan?

Jehan 
I said Blade and then Being Human which had like a whole host of supernatural beings.

Katherine 
I haven't seen any of those. I haven't even seen Blade, so maybe we'll have to do an episode on Blade.

Jehan 
And I've seen Interview with the Vampire, again, and you said, I know you said you didn't like Queen of the Damned, but like, can't remember them. Like I have to, now that I've read Dracula and Carmilla, which I feel like I do need to yet one more time to fully digest it. I want to go through all the vampire content again, know, Queen of the Damned, Interview with the Vampire, watch Sinners again, go through the whole True Blood series, just do all, just do all of it.

Katherine
I would endorse True Blood too. First two seasons after that, I don't know.

Jehan 
Yeah, it does. It kind of drags on a little bit too long. And then you said the historian, so I'm going to check that one out.

Matt
I haven't read the interview with the vampire books. I will also say, though, that the I think it's 2022 Netflix series is really good. I like that series more than I like the movie with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. I think the series is able to go deeper and explore quite a lot of things that are really interesting. So I would definitely recommend that series. 

Mine are really all films. I haven't read that much the many other vampire texts. Preparing for this, I did read Varny the Vampire.

Katherine 
Really? How did you like it? It's so goofy.

Matt 
It is. There are moments of it that I really liked and I thought were interesting and poignant. And there is a lot of filler in there too, where I think because it was serialized, they had to keep it going for longer and that allowed them to sell more things. And so there's quite a bit of filler in there that I was just kind of slogging through and I was like, oh my God, stop. Right, like there's the old sea captain who's just telling like sea yarns and stuff. And I'm like, stop, this is not about Varney the vampire. But I like sections of it and I think if you were to kind of do an edit of the text and excise a lot of the filler it would be a much more lean and interesting thing to read. I don't know that I can recommend it. It's very long and I think most people will not enjoy it unless you're in for vampire content specifically. 

So a lot of my recommendations are films. Again, the interview with the vampire series definitely on Netflix. It's very not safe for work. There's a lot in there that's a bit intense. So that is something. I also really like the 2020 Netflix adaptation of Dracula with Claes Bang and Dolly Wells, which really is not an accurate adaptation of Dracula by any means, but it's very clever and sexy and it really subverts vampire lore in very interesting ways. You have to watch through to the end to really get the full sense of what it's doing there. I would recommend it if you like the lore being subverted. If you don't like that and you want, you you're upset when people subvert the lore, that's not for you.

In terms of films, Let the Right One In. It's really bleak and difficult to watch, but it really plunges you into this idea that loneliness and being bullied will predispose people to accept the vampire into their life and into a kind of vampirism themselves. I really enjoy, but I also really enjoy bleak films. But if you don't, this is not for you. 

Katherine 
It's fantastic. And the book is very good too. There's, I think the book might be called Let Me In rather than Let the Right One In, but I highly recommend both.

Matt 
And then like Jehan, do recommend sinners, although it's an interesting discussion if it's a vampire film exactly. There are vampires in it, but I think the film itself is interesting. I do like the Eggers remake of Nosferatu as well as the original. And Werner Herzog also, his Nosferatu the Vampyre, I think is very interesting as well in terms of again, subverting some of those ideas about the vampire as the remorseless fiend and things like that. So I think that's primarily mine. Again, a lot of films, I haven't read too many vampire texts, so that's kind of where I'm at with that one.

Katherine 
I have one more recommendation for anyone who wants vampires in space, which is a book called Blind Sight by Peter Watts. And the premise of that book is what if vampires were actually an ancient form of hominid that has become so depopulated as humans overtook the earth that we thought they were only restricted to, you know, legend. But now we figured out how to bring them back. Like people have brought back mammoths or had tried to and so on. And we sent them to space. So I make it sound silly, but it's actually a very philosophically interesting book.

Matt 
Thank you. Well, that is a lot for the listeners to chew over and that brings us to the final prompt, which is the Seminar Sequence. Bard sequence has been conceived of as a sequence of texts that help to guide students on an intellectual journey. What is your sequence with these texts and why? Let us know what you would like to pair them with and what kind of intellectual journey that would take the reader on. 

For Carmilla, I said Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, specifically again for those themes of loneliness and solitude and what that leads to. There's also a really interesting discourse in that novel on ideas of sovereignty and cannibalism and man eating that are really interesting when you put them side by side with a vampire novel. And they're also again themes of colonialism and modernity and slavery and things that I think would go paired well with the text about a vampire.

And for Dracula I said Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo and in that novel it's about a techno-capitalist and thinking back on Dracula. Originally what led me to pick this was just the rats and so in Cosmopolis there's the idea that the poor are thinking about using rats as currency and trading dead rats. How many rat is it for that? I'll give you rat for this. And that was the original connection for me and then as I thought more about it I thought about the main character of Cosmopolis, Eric Packer. Multi-billionaire tech capitalist as a kind of vampire. And so for me, think those are two off-kilter texts to pair that'll produce interesting readings when you read them side by side, as opposed to things that are just kind of obviously connected. Sometimes I want a kind of wacky off-kilter connection just because it'll bring some other things to the surface, some different ideas that might bubble up. So that's my sequence.  ?

Jehan
I honestly don't know. I feel so out of the loop just because my mind has been like in lawyer world. So I honestly didn't come up with any text that I would pair it with other than maybe some of the movies that I had chosen for the previous prompt. But I mean, I would love to pair Carmilla with I don't know, some book of poetry and love and romance, but as far as which one, I'm not sure exactly, but Dracula, no ideas yet.

Matt 
So maybe something from lawyer world. How about the Epstein files? Maybe you think Dracula is in there?

Katherine 
I was gonna say The Woman in Black, which is also about a lawyer encountering the supernatural, but okay Matt, I mean...

Matt 
Do you think they should release the files? And if they do release the files, you think that Dracula is there? Is he in the files?

Jehan 
Definitely in the files.

Matt 
Oh, he's in the files.

Katherine
I will say I think Dracula is too pure for inclusion in the Epstein files. The reflection on my view of Epstein and his circle.

Matt 
Catherine, what's your sequence?

Katherine 
I've been sitting here thinking, I think on their screens Johan and Matt have seen me staring at the floor trying to come up with my answer. One text I read, actually I'll give you my sequence of vampire-related texts, the things that I read in preparation for this chat. So I began by reading a book from the 1700s by someone named William Beckford, which is called Vathek. It's not strictly speaking a vampire novel, though there is blood drinking and cannibalism involved. It's what's called an oriental tale, so it's kind of problematic and weird from a modern perspective. There was this genre of types of story people in the 18th century in the English-speaking and French-speaking world would write that they kind of set in a mystical sort of vaguely Arabian setting, kind of like the way Disney's Aladdin, you know, is set. But this is the story about like a very corrupt and evil prince who sells his soul and then is beset by this uncontrollable hunger and thirst. So it has some of these elements that later pop up in the more explicit vampire stories later on, even though he's kind of engaging with a more nebulously characterized demon rather than a vampire per se.

But it's that idea of like the aristocrat with corrupt and evil appetites kind of endangering people around him by virtue of that inclination towards evil and the fact that he has too much power at his command. Then I read a text called The Vampire by William, I think he's also called William, Polidori, who was a friend of Lord Byron, the poet. And it's kind of funny because he also based his vampire on a friend he had a falling out with in the way that Bram Stoker may have based Dracula on a boss he had a lot of arguments with. But this text, it's very short. You could read it in like half an hour or so. It kind of lays out all the elements of the vampire stories we're gonna see moving forward. With the blood drinking, with the sort of suave aristocrat who everyone is fascinated by and turns out to be, you know, deadly. There's a text called Christabel, which is the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which kind of became the template for Carmilla for Sheridan LeFanu later on. And then of course we have Varny the Vampire, which Matt told us a bit about. And then of course Carmilla. and Dracula. 

But I'd also recommend reading Sherlock Holmes and the Moonstone because Dracula partakes of this kind of criminal investigation genre a lot more than I had remembered. And I might even pair it with the modern Criminal Minds because they do a lot of criminal profiling of Dracula too, the way we were talking about. That last one was kind of a joke that shows in very poor taste, so I don't think I should actually recommend it to high school students. But I think it's worth thinking about the way that procedural detective series kind of informed Dracula and the way maybe like are still taking from it.

Matt 
I did read the Polidori. I found it difficult to read. I found the language to be quite difficult to work through. as more of a specialist on that time period, you probably had an easier time getting through it than I did. There were elements of it I liked. I didn't particularly love it, though. Was that also your experience, or do you have more of an affinity for it?

Katherine 
His writing, his sentences are way too long and have way too many subordinate clauses. Like, I had to reread them often, so it's not the easiest read, but because it's like relatively short, it's kind of fun as an artifact of the time period when it was written. And it's fun because it was written kind of like to get back at Lord Byron, who he was pissed off at. And so if you imagine like characterizing your friend in the way he characterizes the vampire in this story, or your ex-friend, I should say, it can become sort of humorous for that reason.

Matt 
Yeah, no, I'm all for dunking on Lord Byron. That's fine. We can do that. All right. Thank you so much, Catherine, Jehan. It was wonderful talking to you. I really appreciated being able to talk about these two texts with you all. This was a lot of fun. 

Jehan 
Thank you.

Katherine 
Thanks so much. This was awesome and it's great to meet you, Jehan.

Jehan 
It's great to meet y'all. Thank you so much. think, like, again, I'm so happy to have read these. It was a nice break from, you know, being a new attorney. I do wish I got to spend more time with them, though, but I couldn't spend more time with them than I had, but I enjoyed it.