Author: Riccardo

   “Ballads have strong associations with childhood: much children’s poetry comes in ballad form. […] Ballads emphasize strong rhythms, repetition of key phrases, and rhymes. […] Ballads do not have the same formal consistency as some other poetic forms, but one can look for certain characteristics that identify a ballad, including [a] simple language, […] stor[y-like poetry], […] ballad stanzas – consisting of four lines, rhymed ABCB (or sometimes ABAB–the key is that the second and fourth lines rhyme), repetition, […] and third-person objective narration.“

   It is the third-person narration that makes John Keats’ poem “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (1819) peculiar as a ballad. The poem opens with two descriptive third-person “objective” narration stanzas in which the poet sets the environment. We are in an idyllic dark location where a “knight-at-arms” (line 1) ails “alone and palely loitering”, being also “haggard and so woe-begone” (line 6).

   The poem suddenly changes towards a more subjective narration, the audience can’t easily understand who “I” is who is telling the story until the very last stanza where the narrator is indeed the knight-at-arms that “sojourn[s t]here, alone and palely loitering” (lines 45-46).

   The question here is who is this Belle Dame? Weirdly described as “a faery’s child” (line 14), with “wild” (line 16) eyes, this woman can easily make our narrator fall in love with her and vice versa, because she tells him “I love thee true” (line 28) even if she spoke “in language strange” (line 27). Everything happening between the two is so fast that once we read “there I dreamed – Ah! Woe betide! – the latest dream I ever dreamt” (lines 34-35), we feel relieved because we realize that she is a demon-like figure that kills men by seducing, abducting, deceiving, and eventually using them for her own pleasure. She is, after all, what the other fate-like “kings and prince” (line 37) tell him, she is “La Belle Dame sans Merci [that] thee hath in thrall!” (lines 39-30).

   I would argue that she does not represent what many critics say she represents: the femme fatale that puts a man to disgrace. Back when he was writing this poem, John Keats had recently found out about his disease that would have surely brought him to death. Because of this, one can tell that he focused his lyrical attention on death. In this poem, the elfin-fairy woman is perhaps death itself. He cannot say no to her, she appears out of nowhere, she killed brave “warriors” (line 38) before him, and eventually “lulled [him] asleep” (line 33). There’s nothing that, metaphorically speaking, can’t refer to death, particularly if the first thing he sees is the flower of death:

“I see a lily” (line 9).

It might be hard for us to remember, but all the technologies used in Dracula – the phonograph, the telegrams, the trains, the blood transfusions, the typewriter – were absolutely something new in 1897. But at the same time, there’s something that these new technologies cannot explain and/or be helpful for, Dracula himself. So, this creates a contrast between the science Van Helsing and his crew have on their side with the tradition and superstition governing Dracula’s world – which is actually what they use to defeat him because the formers do not apply to him.

“This concern with the disjuncture between late-Victorian technology and medieval methods suggests the discomfort with which many Victorians saw the resurgence of old-world superstition destabilizing scientific and technological progress.“

This doesn’t mean though that the good guys aren’t able to use technology to their advantage, they eventually do use it in many cases but it has its limits: for example, the blood transfusions don’t save Lucy’s life, and the telegraph system keeps Seward from getting Van Helsing’s message in time to rush to Lucy. Technology and science seems not to have all the answers.

After a while, Seward and the others actually have to give up their faith in science, logic, and modern science in order to defeat the Count. First of all, they have to accept that vampires exist, and then they have to reconsider Van Helsing’s approach, learning about ancient traditions and superstitions, in order to figure out the way to defeat this creature. Dracula is, after all, ancient, centuries old. He cannot be treated with the Modern World mentality, he only responds to old and forgotten rules, manners, and weapons.

This is not a secret to the reader, Bram Stoker is actually hinting these theories from the very beginning -the further Harker gets from Great Britain, “the center of modern civilization” (in his opinion), the less reliable the trains are and the less reliable his knowledge of how things work is. So, Count Dracula could be seen as the past, and Great Britain (aka the British) as the present – Dracula’s “invasion” of Britain might be a reminder of the way history has on influencing or haunting the present. We should never forget about the past. Dracula, himself, knows that to conquer a new land he must learn everything about it, you cannot be unprepared to what may comes: “Unable to rely on his supernatural powers alone, Dracula prepares himself for his assault on England by mastering reference books that catalog the country’s vital statistic”. He combines the old and then new, a lesson that eventually the British side will learn.

In Chapter XVII, Van Helsing actually teaches and warns Seward that “to rid the earth of this terrible monster we must have all the knowledge and all the help which we can get,” (Dracula, 237) he literally means all the knowledge. Beliefs on the new technology must not be a blind trust. “It is the fault of our science,” he says, “that it wants to explain all; and if it explains not, then it says there is nothing to explain.” (Dracula, 204). Here, Van Helsing states the consequences of subscribing only to contemporary currents of thought. Van Helsing is hence the bridge for both the old and the new world – we should also never forget that he is not British. He later points out that “in this enlightened age, when men believe not even what they see, the doubting of wise men would be [Dracula’s] greatest strength” (339), for it would prevent them from acting against him. Like other late Victorian critics of science, Van Helsing argues that it is really scientists who lack an open mind, since they believe that what they can see and prove constitutes the whole of reality. He dismisses the facts of materialist science as “little bits of truth” that can “check the rush of a big truth, like a small rock does a railway truck” (202). Knowledge, he counsels Seward, must be kept in its place- in the head and the heart- until it can bear fruit (126).

As we all know, Dracula by Bram Stoker is one of those books that have influenced and will always influence the horror genre and many others. In particular, what I found fascinating the first time I read this novel was the way people think about Dracula’s quotes as Stoker’s original thoughts while what most people don’t know is that Stoker was such a brilliant writer with such a wide knowledge and culture that used many references in his book. As a consequence, nowadays watching a movie, a TV-series, or reading a book, we point at those sentences as quotes from one of the many characters in the Victorian Horror Masterpiece.

There are many examples of what I stated above, but the one that stuck in my mind most is when in Chapter XI Dr Seward is writing in his diary about Renfield’s aggression that instantly stopped right after he cut the Doctor’s arm because << he was easily secured, and to my surprise, went with the attendants quite placidly, simply repeating over and over again, “The blood is the life! The blood is the life!” >> (Dracula, 152).

It is not a surprise that Bram Stoker himself explains later on the text what he was referring to through Renfield’s words: << The doctor here will bear me out that on one occasion I tried to kill him for the purpose of strengthening my vital powers by the assimilation with my own body of his life through the medium of his blood, relying of course, upon the Scriptural phrase, “For the blood is the life.” >> (Dracula, 249)

The Scriptural phrase he is talking about comes directly from the Bible, Leviticus 17:10-14: << And any man from the house of Israel, or from the aliens who sojourn among them, who eats any blood, I will set My face against that person who eats blood and will cut him off from among his people. “For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood by reason of the life that makes atonement.” Therefore, I said to the sons of Israel, “No person among you may eat blood, nor may any alien who sojourns among you eat blood” >>. According to this passage nobody must eat blood, but somebody does: Dracula, the one that disobeys the orders of Christ making him the one who is closer to the Anti-Christ than anybody else.

That simply explains why still nowadays blood and vampires are always link, only one person so far could turn this “Stokerian” theory upside down: Joss Whedon. The director of Buffy the Vampire Slayer cleverly used the connection between vampires and blood to come in handy when Buffy is again the only one who can safe the world, as a sort of Goddess herself, ennobling the function of blood once for all. Blood is not only something that is helpful for the “undead” but also something that could save the world. After all, Spike sums it up pretty well so that Buffy can actually understand the real meaning of this mystic substance:

“Blood is life, lack-brain. Why do you think we [vampires] eat it? It’s what keeps you going. Makes you warm. Makes you hard. Makes you other than dead.”

Spike, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 5 Episode 22

“How difficult it is to believe sometimes that a man doesn’t like such and such a favorite dish!” (Volume III, Chapter II, “The Bearer of the Tidings”, by the end of the 22^nd paragraph)

 

In this all paragraph, Robert masculinity is at stake throughout the narrator’s metaphor of food. This is not the first time that in the novel, we might think at Robert as a misogynist, for example as Schorsch described in her post “Robert and his Contradictions”, Robert “describes women as a kind of tsunamic force behind men, driving them to conform to the image the wife has construed and forced upon them. Man is naked clay in the hands of manipulative, cunning, thoroughly unpitying women, who are above else never lazy, and never quiet. They force a man into the worst of possible circumstances against his will or inclinations, relentless in the pursuit of their own feminine ambitions.” However, she keeps going stating that Robert’s attitude is pretty contradictory: “his proclivity to have somewhat strong emotions almost immediately upon meeting two of the women in this story, would indicate an impulsive personality that does anything but hate women.” Thus far, we might be confused by reading about and understating his personality and the most common idea we come up with is that he is still a child when it comes to women, he’s not ready yet.

Then, we read this paragraph and everything changes. We start doubting Robert’s sexual desires thanks to the narrator’s point of view and Sir Michael Audley’s words. It might be weird, but what if this passage suggests that Robert is homosexual? In a very subtle way, the author, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, uses the metaphor of the food to explain such a complicated matter: a “respectable” man that doesn’t like women. It’s fascinating that the words used are so peculiarly placed so that the reader at first doesn’t even realize the connection between food and sexual differences. But because food is on everybody’s collective memory as keyword for sex (let’s think about the very first example: Adam and Eve in the Bible), we are not surprised when we actually realize what she is trying to imply through such an articulated but fluid word choice.

She concludes her metaphor by saying that “there are people who dislike salmon, and whitebait, and spring ducklings, and all manner of old-established delicacies, and there are other people who affect eccentric and despicable dishes generally stigmatized as nasty”. In this last sentence, it is so poetic the way she states that of course there can be men that don’t like some women because of their different beauties, and others that on the contrary like something which is not generally accepted as the norm. It’s peculiar that during those days there would be somebody writing about these delicate matters through a novel and we all must admit that the author Mary Elizabeth Braddon has an “avant-gardistic” point of view on that. She doesn’t condemn anybody, she is not saying that this behavior is to punish, instead she just says that of course it is “eccentric and despicable” but it is “generally stigmatized as nasty” which means that the society in which she lives knows about this “issue”.

To conclude, I have to admit that it shocks me to read about such things written more than 100 years ago because things didn’t change that much and actually in some countries it just got worse. Victorian Age has always been the time of sexual awakening both for women and for those who had “despicable” tastes and since then the “old-established delicacies” didn’t go through a process of modernization: they are still the same.

“The young man was a great favorite with his uncle, and by no means despised by his pretty, gipsy-faced, light-hearted, hoydenish cousin, Miss Alicia Audley. ” (Chapter IV, 5th paragraph)

In this sentence, I noticed two couples of oppositions: “young man” and “pretty, gipsy-faced, light-hearted, hoydenish cousin” connected to the other couple “favorite”/”despised”. I might say that this is because the two cousins are not that different after all. And also, that he is better than Miss Audley because he is described by just positive adjectives, in opposition to her that thanks to the chiasmus “pretty, gipsy-faced, light-hearted, hoydenish”, she is at the same time pretty but still boyish and both cunning as a gipsy – I consider it not physically but as a trait of her personality – and light-hearted.

This simple, descriptive, and superficial language might give us the idea that there’s a bond, a connection between the two cousins. Even if he is their uncle’s favorite, she doesn’t hate him at all. The passage might also mean that she is more interested in men company than that of women but not in a sexual way, she simply doesn’t belong or fit with women’s society.

After all, this short passage may suggest two things: the first is that even if they are blood-related (cousins), there might be a sort of love affair between the two. The second thing it suggests is that they’ll become “partners in crime” for a common goal – or maybe for Miss Audley’s: she is the “gipsy-faced” after all.

To sum up, I believe that what this passage is really about is Lady Audley’s personality that differs from the others’, because even if the language is simple, at the same time it’s effective and mostly focuses on her introduction through her cousin which creates a sort of distorted image of her.