Draculas Lineage Speech

Dracula’s Lineage Speech

If anyone for any reason would appreciate a blow by blow breakdown of everything that is going on in the Count’s lineage speech, matching all of Dracula’s dialogue to Stoker’s research sources and describing the historical events being alluded to, I made one of those many many years ago and I’ve copy/pasted it under the cut:

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going back through the prompt list too while i have some time. hope that's ok!

@inception30daychallenge

Day 01: Your favourite scene.

I absolutely love the scenes where they really go heavily into the idea of 'we are in fact dreaming, we can do anything.' The scenes where Ariadne is playing with the bridges and the city, the one where Cobb and Mal knock over the brick of sand and we see it duplicated behind them, their city being built in a similar way... that kind of unreality stuff makes me so happy. I just want to look at it forever.

What age are the characters (Dracula aside)? I think I remember one of your old posts talking about this, maybe.

[Spoilers: The linked post contains a whole rundown of major characters and is rife with spoilers. The rundown below has allusions to later events/context but is friendlier to people who only want to know the particulars of the characters Dracula Daily readers have already encountered.]

The post where I addressed the whole cast is here. To address just the people we've met thus far, here’s my read on them (keep in mind, these are headcanons informed by some geeky research; only a few characters have established canon ages):

Jonathan Harker: Jonathan’s age isn’t given, but in the 1890s, he would have had to apprentice to a trained solicitor for five years in order to qualify for the exam he just passed. Given some information we learn about his circumstances later on, I find it reasonable to believe he started training reasonably early, and I place him around 21.

Mina Murray: We’ll eventually get an exact age for Lucy, and there is a very recurring theory among critics, adapters, and writers that Mina is a little older than her and that she stayed on at the school they attended together as a teacher. I have wholeheartedly adopted this headcanon, and I like the idea that she’s a little older than Jonathan. I place her around 21-23.

Dracula: If you think he’s Vlad III, he’s a silver fox in his 460s. If you don’t think he’s Vlad III (and I don’t; check out this Notes & Queries article), he’s a little bit younger. I like to imagine he’s a descendant of Vlad III from somewhere in the 1500s, placing him in the middle of his third century.

Broke: Mina shares so many of Jonathan's intense academic interests (law, journaling, timetables, etc.) because she's the dutiful love interest who sets her own passions aside to accommodate him.

Woke: Jonathan and Mina are both huge nerds and that's how they fell madly in love in the first place.

we've all spent all this time learning that jonathan harker is a stupidly devoted wifeguy and i'm so pleased that now you guys can learn that mina is exactly the same way about him

It’s worth noting that while Stoker definitely drew upon sources purporting to describe vampire folklore in establishing rules for his own vampires, some of the vampire “lore” you see in play in Dracula is original to him. The mirror thing doesn’t seem to have been around before Stoker. While there are regional superstitions one can track down about needing to cover mirrors in the home of the recently dead to prevent their corpse from turning vampiric, the idea that vampires cast no reflection appears to really have had its start with this novel. What’s more, it was only part of what was planned in Stoker’s notes on vampiric irreproducibility. While it never made it into the final text, Stoker wrote down vampires also wouldn’t show up in photographs (which is might be related to Jonathan conveniently mentioning his kodak camera) and that even attempting to paint a vampire would fail. Apparently painting a vampire was just supposed to end up looking like somebody else. Photographs would either come out black or show a skeleton or corpse.