“And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.” Jonathan Harker writes this in his journal in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as he tries to make sense of Count Dracula’s castle in which he is realizing he is being held hostage. In his journal, and through the letters he writes to his beloved Mina back in London, he is able to commit to paper the strange occurrences to which he has bore witness. It is thanks to Mina, however, that his journals, written using the technology of shorthand, are transcribed and made accessible to the team of men hoping to slay the Count. Mina Harker, through her transcription, is the one to bring the Count’s doom. It is her role as a bringer and utilizer of new media, of new technologies, that Kittler argues signified and foreshadowed a form of women’s liberation, one in which the word becomes immortal. In Kittler’s “Dracula’s Legacy,” it is a recurring motif that “speech has become, as it were, immortal.”
By Shelby Shukaliak