In Stoker’s novel, Mina and Lucy are portrayed as fulfilling the role of ideal Victorian women.  There are significant differences between how these women are portrayed in Stoker’s novel and Coppola’s film.  In the movie, the first time we see Mina, she is dressed in a conservative dress with her hair pinned up, she is very affectionate towards Jonathan and is initially portrayed as the ideal devoted Victorian wife, consistent with her character in the novel. At the end of the scene, when Jonathan and Mina say goodbye to each other, Mina pulls him into a courtyard and onto a bench and passionately kisses him.  This is quite a contrast to her depiction in the novel, where Mina’s sexuality is mysterious and ambiguous. She never voices sexual desires or impulses which allows her to maintain her purity, which is a central theme in the text.  In the film, Lucy is portrayed as flirtatious and dresses much less conservatively than Mina, this effectively highlights Mina’ purity and depiction as the Victoria ideal but is inconsistent with the novel.

In both the novel and the film, it is evident that the battle between good and evil hinges on female sexuality. In the novel, both Lucy and Mina are chaste, pure, innocent and devoted to the partners, which is not so much the case in the film, as discussed above.  In Stoker’s novel, Dracula threatens to turn these two women into voluptuous and sexually desiring women.  Dracula succeeds in transforming Lucy into a vampire which leads Van Helsing’s men to destroy her in order to return her to a purer and more socially acceptable state.

There are several important differences between the portrayals of  Mina and Dracula’s relationship in these two works.  In the novel, Dracula forces Mina to drink his blood and she is horrified by this, however in the film, Mina is given the choice of whether or not to drink his blood and she herself decides to drink his blood despite the fact that Dracula tells her that he loves her too much to condemn her to be a vampire.  In the film Mina slowly falls in love with Dracula, however in the novel Mina despises Dracula because of what he has done to Lucy and for terrorizing her and tries to fight him off and remain loyal to Jonathan.  Importantly, in the novel Dracula does not seem to love Mina or any other woman from his past, however a key part of the film is that he falls in love with Mina because he believes she’s a reincarnation of Elisabeta.

There are significant differences between the portrayals of the female characters in Stoker’s Dracula and Coppola’s film.  Much of this seems to be related to creating a more appealing story-line for a modern audience, which can also account for the romance between Mina and Dracula that is central to the film’s plot but absent from the book. In this way, Coppola’s film gives the female characters more independence. However, the extent to which this represents the women being given agency is questionable given that the relationship between Dracula and Mina in the film as well as the female character’s sexuality seems to fulfill male fantasies.

Mysterious Deaths, Revivals, Gold, and Vampires in Ireland?

Early last month, three brothers were found dead in their beds in Drimalegue, county Cork, Ireland.  The boys had no signs of having been attacked in their sleeps and all were previously in good health.  The morning of their deaths, a wake was held at their home.

Kate, a young woman from the village is said to have approached the boys’ father and told him that she would save the man’s sons if he agreed to give her Gort na Leachtan (a field of stone heaps) and to marry her to his oldest son.  Kate sent all of the town’s people out of the house.  When she reopened the doors to the family’s home, she sent the boys’ father inside to wake his sons.  The three brothers were found groggy, but in good health and had no memory of the previous night.

The following week, Kate married the family’s eldest son.  The couple and their families have since found huge amounts of gold buried in Gort na Leachtan.  The families believe that the money had been the Derrihy family’s.

An anonymous informant claimed that Kate had disappeared the night before the three brothers’ “deaths”.  Kate has since reported that she had been summoned by Michael Derrihy’s corpse the night that the boys were “killed” and that he had slit their throats and consumed their blood in oatmeal that night.  She reported that the corpse later told her that the boys could be saved by three bites of their blood and oatmeal, luckily although she had instructed to consume the boys’ blood with the man, she had managed to conceal the food and stash it in the boys’ home.  She claims that this is how she saved the three brothers.  The boys’ deaths and revivals remain a mystery but it seems that vampires may once again be active in Ireland.

In “The Unnatural and Accidental Women” the scenes are described to have a “black-and-white picture feel”, animated by the “bleeding-in color” as the scenes unfold, allowing the reader or viewer’s imagination to illustrate the scene. “Colours of personality and spirit, life and isolation” create the women’s realty and create a particular landscape within the women’s worlds and hotel rooms.  Aunt Shadie and Rose are at the top level from the beginning, which represents their own spaces and their own world.  The elements of Act One are “trees falling, falling of women, earth, water flowing/transforming.” The falling down of trees and women is reminiscent of Lee Maracle’s idea that the violence against the earth is directly related to violence against women.  The environment or “place” in this play is quite dark and obscure, which not only represents the women’s reality living in the Downtown Eastside and the isolation which they experience in this context, but also allows the reader to project their understandings onto the scene. In the second act, the scenes take place in Rebecca’s apartment in Kitsilano, “but reflect the symptoms of urban isolation even without being on Hastings Street.”

Though the setting of “The Kiss of the Fur Queen” is quite different to that in “The Unnatural and Accidental Women,” the themes of repression and social isolation are also central.  The residential school which the boys go to has enormous rooms in which the boys lose their identity and cultural heritage.  When Champion arrives at the school, the narrator describes  “long, white passageway(s) that smelled of metal and Javex.”  The school is described as a “sprawling orange-brick edifice” with “two enormous gravel-covered, fenced in yards.”  These descriptions of the school emphasize the oppressiveness of the residential school and for me were reminiscent of a prison.  The “space” of the residential school is very different to the “space” in which the boys grew up in Manitoba where they had many more freedoms.  Later on in the novel, the city is described as a place with lots of violence as well as a space for the brothers to become artists and independent individuals.  As the lecture notes describe, cities in the novel are described as “the last frontier” and “uninhabited lands,” I think that in a way these descriptions speak to the effects which settlement has had through the changing landscape of the boys’ hometown.  “The last frontier” evokes the sentiment that this land is something to be conquered or taken over for settlement.

In both of these pieces, the characters are in radicalized spaces which as Goldberg says is a way to regulate city spaces by preventing minorities “from polluting the body politic  or sullying civil(ized) society.”  These marginalized individuals are also excluded from or experience oppression in white, middle-class areas and are either forced or given incentive to remain in marginalized and racilized areas.  In the case of “The Unnatural and Accidental Women,”  much of the play takes place in the Downtown Eastside which is home to many Indigenous women and in Highway’s novel, the boys go to Winnipeg after leaving residential school which has had the highest urban aboriginal population in Canada.