Yeah, OK, I know; Santa isn’t real (oops; spoiler alert?) but as Picasso ostensibly said, everything you can imagine is real. That is, Santa Claus might not be a real being, but the persona and the associated actions are. And Santa, as an emotional abuser, has some very real repercussions.
To be clear, emotional abuse doesn’t rely on Santa Claus alone. Parents have six ways to Sunday to emotionally abuse their children, threatening with repercussions, bribing them, gaslighting them, manipulating them. But Santa, besides a very efficient weapon of emotional abuse, is also a remarkably apt personification of the phenomenon itself.
Before I say another word, here’s a disclaimer. Yes, the subtitle is somewhat misleading, albeit catchy. Bram Stoker’s Dracula didn’t quite foretell the Great War, that is WW1, in the sense it didn’t intend to. What happens in Dracula – and the reason this post exists – is that Stoker, reflecting the cultural milieu of the late 19th century, subconsciously included in his magnum opus the reasons why modernity fails. These reasons partly overlap with the reasons behind the Great War.
Perhaps what is more important in all this is that the reasons don’t seem to be all that different today. More than a hundred years later, modernity fails us again. Crucially, modernity fails us for the same reasons. We’re dealing with somewhat altered dynamics, of course, yet the basic ingredients are the same.
We’ll begin by taking a brief look at the historical context of Dracula – the cultural milieu I referred to. Then we’ll see how Stoker’s novel explains why modernity fails, and how that relates to the Great War.
Like every self-respecting Gothic work, Dracula hides a complex nexus of meaning. Blood-sucking vampires only form the skin layer, but the heart – no pun intended – of the novel contains a multitude of allegories, many of which are not the result of conscious authorial work.
I imagine Mina Harker to look like that; calm and welcoming on the surface, but deep down ambiguous and fascinatingly unreliable. She’s also the embodiment of why modernity fails in Dracula.(more…)
Note: the following article on the modernity of Dracula is a modified excerpt (pp. 66-67, 145-147) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which is available for free from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, presentations, etc. feel free to visit the relevant page on the main Home for Fiction website.
Perhaps one of the most interesting utterances in Dracula is Jonathan Harker’s “old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill” (D 43). However, what Jonathan fails to realize is that the joke is on him:
Dracula awes because he is old, but within the vampire tradition, his very antiquity makes him new, detaching him from the progressive characters who track him… Jonathan Harker looks in his shaving mirror and sees no one beside him. In Jonathan’s mirror, the vampire has no more face than does Dickens’s Spirit of Christmas Future. In his blankness, his impersonality, his emphasis on sweeping new orders rather than insinuating intimacy, Dracula is the twentieth century he still haunts … [He is] less of a specter of an undead past than a harbinger of a world to come, a world that is our own. (Auerbach 1995, 63; emphasis in the original)
And so, several scholars connect Count Dracula with modernity, through the concept of the eternal now. Dracula, like other Gothic texts, presents a temporal model in which “[c]hronological time is … exploded, with time past, present and future losing their historical sequence and tending towards a suspension, an eternal present” (Jackson 1981, 47).
The modernity of Dracula often passes unnoticed, precisely because of his very antiquity(more…)
