Daily Dracula - Tumblr Posts
I am cycling so fast through my interests from the start of the pandemic.
 unbeknownst to my poor dear parents, I will once again not shut the fuck up about a 200 year old book.
look im loving dracula daily as much as the next person but i am absolutely LOOSING MY SHIT over how the castle is described in the book, especially the may 5th update.
If you didn’t know, Dracula’s castle is/based on the real place Bran’s Castle in Romania.
Guys this castle is on a fucking cliff.
Johnathan described his arrival at castle drac as having a courtyard “of considerable size”, and right as he exited the carriage, being right next to the entrance.
You want to know what the ACTUAL entrance of Bran’s castle looks like???
FUCKING. THIS.
ITS A STEAP ASS STAIRCASE
NO COURTYARD IN SITE
Honestly there’s probably an issue regarding his super fancy octagonal room next to a dining hall but I don’t care enough to analyze blueprints and photos of the castle’s interior to find out.
Man just read the May 16th update and BOOKED IT to tumblr gotta talk to my girlies about our bestie johnathan harker and the fat crush Dracula has on him
i stumbled across your post about bran castle and it got me thinking maybe the entrance has changed over the years?
Hi there! Thank you so much for bringing this to my attention :)
Renovations and the layout changing completely skipped my mind when i made the original post, so I did some digging for you to find out if anything has changed with Bran Castle’s entrence over the year.
For starters I look into the history of the castle itself, and found a lot of information about it going through many renovations in order to repair the castle, due to it once being used as a military stronghold.
So for the most part nothing crazy, and we know that Bram Stoker never actually visited the castle either before or during the writing of Dracula.
Moving on I decided to look less at the history of the castle itself, and more specifically at any drastic changes to the castle itself.
The main source I could find on the entrence moving was Adventure Transylvania, and yes! The entrance did move!
The only issue is that because Bran Castle was used for fighting purposes, from what we know about the old bridge, it was absolutely not suitable for say, a carriage holding fan favorite British real estate agent Johnathan Harker.
Moving on, on the post itself you mentioned that Bran Castle has a courtyard, and while this is true surprise surprise there’s an Issue™️.
This is the quote in the book where Johnathan first describes the courtyard.
“In the gloom the courtyard looked of considerable size, and as several dark ways led from it under great round arches, it perhaps seemed bigger than it really is.”
Let’s start with the accurate parts about this:
1. There’s a courtyard. Good job
2. There are arches in the courtyard
And that’s it.
The courtyard itself isn’t that big, and due to something we’ll get to later, in no way could have a carriage drive around in it.
Since there’s no records of the dimensions of Bran Castle (and trust me I’ve LOOKED), I’ve used the magic of the google earth ruler to measure the courtyard. By itself that seems large but when the average courtyard is approximately 3,000ft^2, it’s 100% on the small size.
As for the other reason…
There’s a massive step/divide in the courtyard and a well
So yeah TL;DR the castle entrance did move, but it’s never been carriage accessible and neither is the courtyard :)
Sam Manson would make Danny and Tucker sign up for Dracula Daily so they could have a mini book club
[id: a picture of jonathan harker as portrayed by keanu reeves in bram stoker’s dracula (1992). he is looking up and to the left of the frame. a white badge has been edited onto his lapel that reads “tumblr’s new best friend.” end id.]
oh i do so love getting emails from my very good friend jonathan harker! i sure do hope his trip goes well!
You know, I didn't get an email from my new friend Jonathan Harker today! He's been emailing me every day of his trip so far. Do you think I should be worried? I wonder if something strange is going on in that castle...
Nah, I'm being silly, he's probably just busy with legal documents and so forth. I'm sure everything is fine.
Jonathan looking through Dracula's library, listing books he has: "and—it somehow gladdened my heart to see it—the Law List."
Jonathan, you're such a nerd. I love you.
Seward watching Renfield use his food to attract more flies because he's feeding his flies to his spiders because Seward said to get rid of the flies
I may be ascribing some of my own biases to Stoker, but it's my impression that Stoker is critical of Lucy's upbringing. He has Mina think about how pliable Lucy is due to how her life requires her to be pliable less than a week before Dracula starts preying on her. I see this as intentional. He's saying, "Look, this lovely young woman is entirely unprepared to fend of anyone else's will, and it's the fault of the way society shaped her. This other young woman, free from such expectations and pressures, will have a far better chance." If Stoker was creating this story as a way to illustrate fears of the influence of the Foreign Other, I think there are two possible ways to look at it. 1) The evil foreigners will destroy everything that is most delicate and beautiful in England. 2) We are wrong to raise nice young ladies to suppress themselves because it makes them weak in the face of such an incursion.
How Lucy is treated by all characters in this novel always just. Baffles me. And it's not just a man infantilizing a woman thing either. This conversation today happened between two women. Lucy is a full adult, albeit a young one. Maybe she is at most a year or two younger than Mina. She is about to be a wife. Why is her own mother treating Mina like an adult confidante and her own daughter like a 12 year old who she needs to find a guardian for. Why does Mina think this is normal? Why does Lucy never gets to know anything? How come Mina came away from school with a full profession and her independencewhile Lucy didn't. I would simply chalk this up to Bramathan's ideas of womanhood, except for the fact that once again, Mina is canonically an active independent adult seeming woman. I've been thinking about what he could be trying to say with these choices for months.
I'm confused. A lot of people seem to be taking the Lucy letter in stride. I see a lot who are confident she's lying. But if so, is she really in London and making almost all of it up? Others think she went back to Whitby from London and aren't fussed that she says it's been a week while five days ago she was wasting away in London. They take most of what she says as truth.
My first assumption when I read today's email is that Stoker made another timeline mistake, and this letter should have gone out before the diary entry. I've never read the book. From what one person mentioned, in the book her health seesaws, so my theory is probably wrong. But it makes more sense to me than anything else. Why would she go back to London for just a little while and then return to Whitby? She was on holiday in Whitby, right? It makes sense that the letter should come...
WAIT.
Okay no.
For a second I thought I'd figured it out. I thought maybe the letter was sent awhile before the London diary entry and we were reading it when Mina received it. But the emails are based on when a letter is dated, as we saw with Sister Agatha's. So that's not it.
Anyway, as I was saying. It makes sense that there would be a period of time after Dracula left for London, when Lucy would remain in Whitby to finish out her holiday. And of course during that time she'd feel so much better. Dracula's hold on her mind would be gone, so no sleepwalking. No bad dreams. And physically she'd recover, too.
/Then/ when she left Whitby and got to London, triggering Dracula's vampy sense and bringing him to the yard and all, things would go bad fast. /Then/ the London diary entry makes sense.
Ok so Lucy being back in Whitby was confusing, so I checked my physical copy. Here's what the annotations say:
[Image description: Annotation of 30 August that says "the correct date is probably August 20, here, and one in Chapter 13, the apparent discrepancy could be due to a printer's error or Stoker's mistake, or it could be part of the book's realistic detail, either Lucy's misdating of her letter or Mina's later mistranscribing of the document"]
This at least makes some sense out of the fact that her diary entries are from London.
And tomorrow's letter, which is from Arthur, is also from a hotel in London.
It also does fit better with the timeline of Lucy feeling much better in Whitby when the Count moves to London.
Besties I don't think Jonathan's having a morbtastic time
