The Haunting of Hill House, Dracula, and... that one awkward moment with Daphne DM

I think I mentioned that I have been listening to Tony Walker's Classic Ghost Stories Podcast. I was inclined to pick shorter stories first because I dislike having to break off my attention in mid-story, but I finally listened to:

1. The Haunting of Hill House. I have been meaning to give this a try since I saw some analytical videos about Shirley Jackson by Books 'n' Cats on Youtube and then listened to a couple of her short stories. I am an anti-horror-genre person in general, but this is mostly down to a dislike of jump scares, slashers, thrillers where someone is pursued, etc. I had heard, and I think correctly, that this novel is not very horrific in that sense, although it definitely qualifies as psychological horror. I was not as distressed by the horrible ghost manifestations and the tragedies as by ( spoilers )

BIG BONUS: Tony Walker, as mentioned in a previous post I think, is Northern, but he does a variety of accents and is quite good at them. His Scots, Irish, Cockney, etc all seem great. His American accent is... mostly good? I mean it's better than Ewan McGregor's, but it's EXTREMELY midwest with slightly too much chewy mouthing around everything and a bit of sort of New Yorky nasal tone. For some reason, he only read the professor and his wife with this accent, leaving the other residents British, and then the wife's dumb henchman is like... rustic Scots. It's very distracting.

2. Don't Look Now, a short story by Daphne DuMaurier. I have read Rebecca a few times but that was my only acquaintance with her works. This is a short story that's... um... well, the surprise twist ending is that the narrator ( cut for multiple kinds of offensiveness )

3. Dracula. I had read Dracula 23 years ago, and started to do Dracula Daily a few years ago but I didn't make it very far. So a lot of my memory of the story was worn away by time. I remembered thinking that Jonathan Harker was a moron whose thoughts were a trial to read, and this was true again even though I am older and more patient (but maybe it's harder when you're listening to an audiobook since it's so much slower than reading). I remembered thinking that Mina was the only character with two braincells to rub together. I had actually forgotten how large Van Helsing's role was and didn't remember thinking anything about him. I was surprised to see such a distinct character, who is both likeable and maddening (long-winded with weird metaphors). He is not as slow as the other three men of the party, who are required to be confused so that he can explain things, but he also makes more errors and these more repeatedly because all through Lucy's slow demise he is the only one who suspects, then knows what is going on, and continually fails to act decisively in a way that reminded me irresistably of the bungled western powers' responses to the pandemic. ( Read more... )

A brief postcript on Dracula and gender

A couple of days ago I tried to find old text posts from dracula daily's heyday on Tumblr, but I found it impossible due to the fact that people who create fanfic drabbles and fanart in the Dracula fandom use this freely as a fandom tag and I couldn't wade back through it successfully. I only kept looking for about an hour before I gave up, but I did find a post where an asker said something like,

There is no female character treated worse by adaptations than Lucy Westenra. Every single adaptation completely rewrites her to make her an evil whore basically.

And the answerer agreed and provided a bunch of examples of egregious details of this phenomenon in various film adaptations, adding that this slanderous misreading of the text is also popular in criticism.

I tried a brief websearch after that and found about five essays or blog posts doing exactly what the answerer says here before I stumbled on this fascinating paper: Rethinking the New Woman in Dracula by Jordan Kistler.

Abstract: The existing canon of scholarship on Dracula asserts that the sexually aggressive female vampires are representative of the New Woman, and thus are evidence of Stoker’s conservative reaction to changing gender roles. In contrast, this article offers a reinterpretation Dracula in the light of key writings of the New Woman movement which sought to demonize the Victorian marriage market because of its creation of a class of female parasites: idle middle-class woman entirely dependent on fathers and husbands. A close reading of key sections of the novel demonstrates that the female vampires are characterized as traditionally subordinate Victorian housewives, in contrast to the positive presentation of Mina Harker as a New Woman. This reading reveals a text that argues that work for women is the only antidote to the degeneration inherent in traditional womanhood, through which women are reduced to nothing more than their biological functions.