Author: baz

The conversation in class today made me think about the Victorian celebrity. Someone made a remark about how The Picture of Dorian Gray served as a warning against idolization, because Basil’s worship of Dorian and Dorian’s worship of himself caused Dorian to believe he could get away with anything (and he did get away with quite a lot). In the Longman Anthology of British Literature reading, it talks about how authors during the Victorian era became sort of celebrities. The circulating libraries and three volume novels allowed “…readers who wanted to see more of one character, less of another, or prevent the demise of a third,” to “badger” authors like Dickens, creating a new sort of relationship between author and audience (Longman Anthology 1067). At the end of the Age of Reading section, it is stated that “hero worship was yet another Victorian invention,” and idea which I think can offer some insight on The Picture of Dorian Gray (Longman Anthology 1068). 

Given this practice, I think it’s interesting that the novel focuses on art. Before this new relationship between authors and their audiences, authors (and publishers) had full control over the literary art people consumed, but once the three volume novels became a trend, the audience started to have more of a say over what they read, and the authors lost some of the control they had over their art. I think that kind of mirrors what happens in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Basil creates the portrait of Dorian which he claims to have put too much of himself into, which I think drives home the idea that the the art still belongs to Basil, and he still has control over his own creation, which would reflect the situation of authors before the Victorian era developments (Wilde 8). 

I think, looking at the novel in this lens, Dorian is the art. Even though he was a person before Basil painted his portrait, he was not a very interesting person, and almost immediately after Basil finished the portrait, it comes to reflect Dorian’s soul and Dorian comes to reflect Basil’s art. So in the same vein, I think that Lord Henry can be viewed as the audience or readership. Aside from Dorian, he is the only other person who ever sees the portrait. Like Dickens’ readers, Lord Henry also had a lot of influence over the “art” (ie Dorian) and takes full responsibility for it, thinking “to a large extent the lad was his own creation,” (Wilde 51). 

I also found the parallel between the novel and the idea from the Longman Anthology that “…readers experienced literature as an ongoing part of their lives,” (1067). Still reading Lord Henry as the audience to Basil’s art, this could explain why Lord Henry had a constant relationship with Dorian throughout the book while Basil kind of faded away and only returned to be murdered. Even the way Lord Henry viewed Dorian, as a specimen/psychological study, points to Dorian being less of a human and more of an object/text up for interpretation. 

https://blogs.dickinson.edu/britishlit/files/2023/08/Longman-Anthology-The-Victorian-Age.pdf  

Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia” didn’t seem particularly gothic on the surface to me, but looking at it more closely, it seems to check a lot of the gothic motif boxes (from the British Library’s website). One of the most noticeable was, like in Dracula, the entrance of an interesting-looking man from eastern Europe into England. Because of this similarity, I was surprised where Holmes’ story went. In Dracula, the Harkers, Seward, Quincey, Van Helsing, and Arthur seek to dispel the foreigner and save England, so when I read that the Bohemian king wanted to steal a photograph from a woman living in England, it surprised me that he was seen as the good guy or victim. But maybe that should not have surprised me given Holmes’ apathetic misogyny toward women, described by Watson in the beginning of the story (1), and the assumptions Holmes makes throughout the story; that “women are naturally secretive ” (14); “a married woman grabs for her baby [and] an unmarried one reached for her jewel-box” (16); and that he immediately takes the side of the king and assumes all the blame falls on Irene. Irene was the young woman, and the king was the sexual transgressor who engaged in a relationship with an inappropriate power imbalance (another gothic motif).  

Holmes taking the side of the king made me think of Moretti’s “Capital Dracula” and his argument about Quincey being a vampire (435-436). Irene is also an American, and she ends up not in England by the end of the story, which effectively happens to Quincey as well, with his death. Moretti mentions the vampiric/American desire to take over the “Old world” (437), which I can see being a message in “A Scandal in Bohemia” as well. Irene’s potential blackmail “‘may have an influence upon European history’” as the king says (5). This seems like an interesting subversion to the idea from “Gothic Motifs” that the past comes back to haunt the present (Clashing time periods), since England is portrayed as the past, being connected to the “history of Europe” and the U.S. as the present/future, being the place where Irene goes off to start a new life. So, in this Sherlock Holmes story, it’s the future that comes to threaten the past instead of the other way around. 

Reading the story with this in mind gave a reason for why Holmes was on the king’s side from the start (why else would he mention that she was born in New Jersey? It doesn’t seem like it should have any importance to the plot). It also seems to sort of excuse Holmes’ failure to solve this mystery, since Irene doesn’t really belong to the society Holmes is used to. She’s a New Woman and an American, and Holmes seems to be stuck in the past regarding his ideas about women. 

 

https://blogs.dickinson.edu/britishlit/files/2023/09/Dracula-Critical-Articles.pdf 

https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/gothic-motifs  

To set the scene, at the end of his essay “’Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” Christopher Crest makes the claim that Little Quincey, Jonathan and Mina’s baby born on exactly the one-year anniversary of big Quincey’s death could represent “the restoration of ‘natural’ order” but a sub-reading could be that his is the “son of an illicit and nearly invisible homosexual union” (Crest 458-459). He cites the line: “His [Little Quincey’s] bundle of names links all out little band of men together” (Stoker 402) to form his idea that “Little Quincey was luridly conceived in the veins of Lucy…and then deftly relocated to the purer body of Mina…” (Crest 459). Crest also spends much of his essay building on the idea that “Van Helsing stands as the protector of the patriarchal institutions” (449).  

I can see why Craft makes this claim; as we’ve discussed in class, Dracula threatens patriarchal heterosexual society, and Van Helsing is the one who leads the hunt and has the knowledge to take Dracula down. And yes, Van Helsing does call Mina “one of God’s women” (201), which Crest sees as Van Helsing putting women into boxes (Mina’s a good, pure woman, which “determines and delimits the range of activity permitted to [her]” [Crest 450]). But I didn’t really find Van Helsing any more patriarchal or defensive of heterosexual society than any of the other characters. He and Dr. Seward both find ways to exclude Mina from the action, and Jonathan was very enthusiastic about protecting England from a vampire takeover. For me, none of the arguments Crest made about Van Helsing being a “protector of the patriarchy” didn’t seem to be unique to his character; all of the men in the novel had the same end goal and they all played a part in depriving Mina of any power. Van Helsing was just the oldest and most knowledgeable about vampires. 

I think that these ideas can shed an interesting light on the final paragraph of Dracula. In the scene Jonathan describes, Van Helsing is holding baby Quincey and says (about their whole vampire-killing adventure): “’We want no proofs; we ask none to believe us! This boy will someday know what a brave and gallant woman his mother is” (402). On the one hand, this seems like a reversal of the role Crest puts Van Helsing in—one could easily say Jonathan had been brave, escaping from the castle, wanting to protect his wife, stabbing Dracula, but Van Helsing singles out Mina instead, using words associated with knightliness, which was the expectation of an extremely patriarchal and male-oriented society. Either Van Helsing’s character changed within a page and seven years, or he wasn’t nearly as patriarchy-loving as Crest claimed, which makes more sense to me. Crest’s claim about Van Helsing’s role would make more sense at the end, I think, if one were to read Little Quincey as a restoration of “rightness”, but Crest puts down that idea in favor of the baby being the child of all the men in the novel. If this were the case, wouldn’t the final scene probably not be Van Helsing bouncing the illicit baby on his knee? 

I think this final scene does cast Van Helsing as a protective character, but not of the patriarchy, of Jonathan and Mina and their baby. He was one of the only people of the generation before Dr. Sewards who did not die. In an odd way, I think his connection to superstitions and what the Victorians would consider the past makes him less of a proponent of patriarchy than some of the other characters. Lucy’s mom was probably around the same age as Van Helsing, and she left nothing to her daughter in her will. It all went to Lord Godalming (178). I feel like if Van Helsing were of the same patriarchal state of mind, he would have dismissed the silly superstitions of the non-British and diagnosed Lucy as crazy or having a wandering uterus or something instead of taking her symptoms seriously. 

During Jonathan’s trip to Transylvania, he is fascinated by the way the locals look. In some of the towns he passed through, “[t]he women looked pretty, except when you got near them…” and of course, “[t]he strangest figures we saw were the Slovaks, who are more barbarian than the rest…” (9). He doesn’t even think of them as people. Regarding the Slovaks, he was told that they were “…very harmless and rather wanting in natural self-assertion,” which just goes to show how ignorant he is of cultures outside of England (9). While racism and xenophobia do play a role in this, I think class does too. Jonathan is very dismissive of the peasants’ superstitions and concern for him. When his landlady pleads with him to not go to the Count’s castle on St. George’s Day, he calls it “…very ridiculous…” but he does feel uneasy (11). While this could just be a shortcoming of Jonathan’s character, I think Bram Stoker means it as commentary on the ‘dignified English society’, because part of the reason Jonathan is so skeptical of the locals is that they use crucifixes and idols, which “English Churchm[e]n” look down on (11). However, he does not refuse the crucifix his landlady offers him, because it would be rude, which I think begins to hint at the role of class in the novel (11). 

After his harrowing ride with the superstitious peasants and wolves to the Count’s castle, the Count’s civilized “…courteous welcome seemed to have dissipated all [Jonathan’s] doubts and fears” (23). I think it’s funny that Jonathan can pinpoint what it is about the peasants that makes him feel uneasy: they are funny looking, superstitious, and worship idols, but he can’t with Dracula. When “the Count leaned over [him] and his hands touched [him, he] could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank…” (25). And this comes after Jonathan describes Dracula’s as having fangs, claws, and hair growing out of his palms (24-25). Because Dracula has thus far acted respectable and courteous toward Jonathan and is a count who knows a lot about England and can speak English, he sees no reason to see any of these features and doubt Dracula’s humanity like he did with the Slovaks. It made me wonder if Jonathan had ever seen a Romanian or if he thought all Romanians were as alarming looking as Dracula. This also plays into Stoker’s possible commentary on English society during the fin de siècle because Jonathan’s obviously an educated person since he passed his solicitor examination before leaving London (22). It says a lot about English society that an educated person knows so little about people outside of England, especially because with new technology like the trains Jonathan takes to get to Romania, it is not difficult to travel anymore.  

I feel like Stoker could be pointing out the irony of a person from a country that prided itself on being scientific and advanced and superior to other countries being completely out of place in another country that’s considered inferior. And he doesn’t stand out because he’s better than everyone else, he’s just ill-equipped. He doesn’t speak the language the peasants speak (he has to pull out his polyglot dictionary to figure out that the locals are talking about witches and hell [12]). He doesn’t take their superstitions seriously and ends up being kidnapped by a creature the scientifically minded British don’t believe exist, and he doesn’t understand paprika. One would think that someone who lives in a country that had colonized almost half the world would know a little bit more about people and cultures outside of their small English bubble.