Disease in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

As science continues to illuminate the down(p)ened corners of our world, another legendic talethe drinking of split by the ubiquitous Draculamay have a basis in fact harmonise to Wayne Tikkanen, a professor of chemistry at California State University, Los Angeles. I am a expert scientist. I dont believe in vampires and werewolves, Tikkanen told Anthony Breznican for an AP release on Halloween, 1998.Tikkanen speculates that some European monster myths were the product of a short letter disease known as porphyria that causes the unclothe to weaken and be negatively affected by ultraviolet rays that change heme, a comp singlent of blood that carries oxygen to the brain, into a toxin. As the disease progresses, the unclothe blackens and ruptures in the sun, followed by hair growing in the scars. Lips are burned, causing them to peel back, thus devising the teeth more prominent.In some cases the nose erodes and the fingers disintegrate, making the hands resemble paws. The diseas e affects one in 100,000 people and is treatable with medication. Tikkanen thinks it is possible that those afflicted with the disease centuries ago may have drunk animal blood to relieve their pain as a folk remedy, and that they would have preferred to go out at night in parliamentary law to avoid the sun, and that perhaps this behavior was co-opted into myths.You may do this all the time, exactly people will only see you when the night is at its brightestor in other words, a full moon, Tikkanen said. Unfortunately, the result of such myth-making was that as humannessy as 600 victims of this disease were considered to be monsters by the 16th-century European judge H. Bouget, who subsequently had them burned at the stake. Just think youre horribly disfigured but youre short lucid, Tikkanen said. You dont know whats happening to you, and the doctor doesnt want to treat you even if he knew how.Your priest wants you to confess your sins or the judge will burn you at the stake. But you dont know what youve done wrong. Other elements of the Dracula myth often include garlic, which Tikkanen says causes victims of porphyria to suffer violent illness because of the creation of toxins in their blood. Fear of the cross similarly makes sense in this theory, because the cross represents the Church and thus the Inquisition, which would have instituted the torture and murder of the sufferers of porphyria.In the same vein, the superstitious Romanian society projected its fear of disease and deviancy onto Dracula, thus rising the well-liked folklore hypothesis that a man or woman who has led a predominantly wicked existence will almost for sure become a vampire it is his curse for the wicked deeds committed during the usual term of his lifetime, as well as an entrance that a influential sin can not easily be put to rest (Douglas, 39). This resembles the idea propagated by the religious right that AIDS is a visitation of celestial punishment for versed deviancy, i. e. , homo informality.David Prindle in his book tempestuous Business of all the diseases, the ones that are sexually contagious seem to carry the heaviest burden of symbolic weight. Such diseases seem to bring our peoples anxieties about spiritual and somatogenic pollution, their dread of being exposed as hypocritical sinners, their yearning to condemn those less righteous than themselves (Prindle, 73). In Coppolas Dracula, Lucy, who is teasing, inquisitive, and immoral is punished for her evil behavior, her sexuality, by being enticed into the warren of Dracula and thus flattering a vampire herself.Once a vampire, Lucy takes a four-year-old electric shaver as her injured party, intimidating the guiltless child much in the same way that infants with AIDS often are fatalities of their mothers performance. Susan Sontag notes that these allegorys are hardly in contradiction. Such is the extraordinary potency and efficacy of the plague metaphor it allows a disease to be regarded twain as something incurred by susceptible others and as potentially everyones disease (Sontag, 152). Bela Lugosi first gave Dracula filmic complexity in the 1931 Dracula. His moves were smooth and contemporary, steeped in gender and glamour.His affluent inflection gave the count the religion that awoke the sexuality of female audience members. Christopher Lee (1958) followed in Lugosis steps and moved Dracula from sexual innuendoes to blatant sexuality. At one top dog in The Horror of Dracula, he bites a youthful womans throat-not simply feasting, but apparently experiencing orgasm. Dracula had thus developed into a seduction fantasy, vitally disturbed with the circumstances and penalty of premarital or illicit luxury in forbidden corporal relations, in this occurrence with the opposite sex.Gary Oldman takes Lees erotic Dracula one step hither in Coppolas Brain Stokers Dracula. When Oldman attempts to nibble the neck of the inoffensive myna bird at the Nickelodeon, the camera comes in on a taut attempt of his face as his eyeball change color, his fangs are exposed and his corpse tremors with expectation. The transformation of Dracula to his present- day classification makes him the most sexual of all the creatures of the night.Draculas sexual insinuation and blatant hunger for human blood make him the wonderful mythological vehicle to express American societys fear of the modern day plague of AIDS, since the HIV virus is communicable through blood and semen. Coppolas Dracula visits his victims in the dead of night or in a dark milieu. He takes Lucy from her bed to connect her with both intercourse and feeding. These visits from the attractive creature who first boot outs the sleeper with igneous embraces and then withdraws her blood symbolically parallels the night-time emissions that convoy erotic dreams.Frank Jones points out in his book On the incubus of Bloodsucking In the unconscious mind blood is commonly an equivalent for semen (Gottsman, 5 9). However, the sentence for these sexual interludes with the leech is the permanent alteration into vampirism an illness that separates the afflicted from the rest of the society, one that insists on sucking the life out of other people. In this admiration the vampire enters the victims blood stream, as does the HIV virus, to eventually exhaust the host of his/her life.Coppola cinematically reflects this correlation throughout the course of the film. Initially, Dracula renounces the church, and in doing so plunges his sword into the cross at the alter. Blood then flows from the cross, and Coppola cuts from a stone angel icon releasing tears of blood to a elasticity of Dracula satisfying a cup and consumption the blood. In this pre- recognition succession, the back visible light creates a striking similarity between Christ and Dracula (the shoulder length hair, smooth skin and ethereal glow).On his return home from war, Dracula learns of the death of his wife. His stabbing of the cross is a phallic metaphor for intercourse with a virgin, whose loss of virginity is often marked by a loss of blood. The cathedral, infected and attack by war, denies the interment of Draculas suicided bride. Dracula renounces the church by drinking the blood out of the chalice, declaring that Blood is the life and the life is mine. Here he metaphorically takes on the position of the bug, gratifying the judge of life and death.David Prindle reinforces the vampire as a metaphor for the virus As a deadly threat, the disease was made to order for melodrama as a potential sexual assassin, the HIV carrier could easily be portrayed as a demon. (76). Coppola establishes a departure from pureness to evil by using peacock feathers, representative of innocence and vanity, as a transition between the enlightened world and the dark road to Transylvania as the young Jonathan Harker is sent to Transylvania to work for Dracula.Both virtue and pride are lost when Jonathan encounters a group of female vampires who seduce him throughout his first night in the castle. Coppola reinforces the anonymity of the participants by showing incorporeal footsteps appearing by the bed while the women appear from within his sheets and start to embrace and murmur to Jonathan. He does not hold up and follows through in what could be termed a one night stand. The camera shows a head shot of one of the vamps whose hair is made out of snakes, referring to Medusa or the serpent From Genesis that caused the eviction of disco biscuit and Eve from the Garden of Eden.References Babuscio, Jack. Camp and the Gay Sensibility. Gays and Film. Ed. Richard Dyer. New York Zoetrope, Inc. , 1984. Broeske, Pat. Hollywood Goes Batty for Vampires, New York Times, April 26, 1993. Canby, Vincent, Coppolas Dizzying Vision on Dracula, New York Times, Nov 13, 1993. Douglas, Drake. Horrors The awful truth about monsters vampires, werewolves, zombies, phantoms. mummies and ghouls of literature and how tiny went Hollywood. New York The Overlook Press, 1989.Gottesman, Ronald. Focus on the Horror Film. Trenton, New Jersey Prentice Hall, 1972. Hogan, David. Dark Romance-Sexuality in the Horror Film. Chapel Hill, North Carolina McFarland & Company, Inc. , 1986. Prindle. David. Risky Business. the Political Economy of HollywoodBoulder Westview Press, 1993. Russo, Vito. The celluloid Closet Homosexuality in the Movies. New York Harper arid wrangling Publishers, 1990. Sontag, Susan. Illness as a Metaphor/AIDS and its Metaphors. New York Doubleday, 1989.