{"id":283,"date":"2016-03-12T06:16:23","date_gmt":"2016-03-12T06:16:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/?p=283"},"modified":"2018-09-02T22:05:24","modified_gmt":"2018-09-02T22:05:24","slug":"a-comfortable-distance-narrative-in-dracula-and-the-moonstone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/2016\/03\/12\/a-comfortable-distance-narrative-in-dracula-and-the-moonstone\/","title":{"rendered":"A Comfortable Distance – Narrative in Dracula and The Moonstone"},"content":{"rendered":"

The narrative style of Dracula<\/em> is generally a pleasant surprise to modern-day readers who may be expecting another fervent Victorian melodrama. Dracula\u2019<\/em>s narrative skips back and forth between several narrators, in the form of diary entries, medical notes, newspaper articles, telegrams, letters, and so on, enabling the author to depict events happening at the same time in different places, and the reader to see the characters and actions from different points of view. The epistolary novel was a common form of the period, but the extraordinary nature of the events in Dracula<\/em> gives the collected narrative the air of an official case study (consciously heightened by the preface informing readers that the documents have been placed in order). When considering this case-study aspect of the book, it is interesting to compare Dracula <\/em>to another groundbreaking Victorian novel: The Moonstone. <\/em>Published some thirty years before Dracula<\/em>, The Moonstone <\/em>is generally considered the first detective novel in the English language; like Dracula, <\/em>it deals with violent aberrations in the settled life of ordinary English people; and like Dracula, <\/em>it is told in a collection of narratives, from the rich Verinders\u2019 lifelong servant, to their insufferable cousin, to the opium-addicted doctor who solves the mystery. Like Dracula, The Moonstone <\/em>uses its changing narrative to establish an \u201cofficial\u201d narrative and, by jumping from narrator to narrator, effectively keeps the reader from becoming too wedded to any one version of events, or too attached to any single character.<\/p>\n

Why is the case study technique so important in these particular books? I suggested earlier that the extraordinary story of Dracula <\/em>gives the narrative an official power; in fact, both Dracula <\/em>and The Moonstone<\/em> use the distancing technique of multiple narrators to keep horrible events at arm\u2019s length, suggesting that the way Victorian authors \u2013 and readers \u2013 could best deal with occurrences so far beyond the pale of ordinary life was to experience them through the prism of a reassuringly orderly study. The documents in both novels were written after the fact by the characters; therefore we know that they survived whatever horrible experience they are describing, because they are able to write about it. Both novels deal with threats to England \u2013 Dracula<\/em>\u2019s in the person of the Transylvanian count, The Moonstone<\/em>\u2019s in the titular jewel, which is Indian, and the \u201cexotic\u201d opium that is revealed to have been a vital element of the crime \u2013 but we know that England survived, because some reassuringly English hand has ordered the narratives for us.<\/p>\n

The similarities in narrative between Dracula <\/em>and The Moonstone<\/em> \u2013 both unusual at publication, both regarded as seminal genre works today \u2013 are striking. I am too cautious (and too ignorant) to expand this argument into one about Victorian society as a whole, but I will leave it as an open question: what does this distancing of reader from story, in this particular genre of shocking stories, tell us about the Victorian psyche? Why did potentially disruptive stories like Dracula <\/em>and The Moonstone <\/em>need to be \u201cofficialized\u201d for an audience? And finally, what kinds of stories do we in the 21st<\/sup> century treat in this way, and what does it say about us?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The narrative style of Dracula is generally a pleasant surprise to modern-day readers who may be expecting another fervent Victorian melodrama. Dracula\u2019s narrative skips back and forth between several narrators, in the form of diary entries, medical notes, newspaper articles, telegrams, letters, and so on, enabling the author to depict events happening at the same … Continue reading A Comfortable Distance – Narrative in Dracula and The Moonstone<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1581,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[123782,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2016-blog-post","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1581"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}