My Expectations

Before I begin Dracula by Bram Stoker and taking you along with me in my thoughts and reflections as I read, I'd like to foreground with some of what I know and what I expect on the subject of Dracula and out of this book.

My understanding of vampires is very elementary as of now. I have the inevitable pop culture experience that is oh-so popular today; picture perfect model-types play the part of the vampire, and I have the Halloween version; the ones you see on bags of candy and dressed up for the kids saying, "I vant to drink your blood!" They are afraid of garlic, crucifixes, mirrors, etc. I regret to inform you that, yes, I have read all of the Twilight books and seen all the movies to date. I will tell you though, that I do not buy the whole 'vampires sparkling in the sun' ordeal. Since I was little, the commonly held belief was that vampires could not see the sun or they would cringe and die. That's the image I'm going to stick with; it just seems more classic. When I think of Dracula, I think of something along the lines of a human version of this,

despite what pop culture has been suggesting, which is this.

Stoker's version is also quite popular, but in a different way. You can see what makes Dracula so popular in this article by David Glover: http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v043/43.4br_glover.html .

Now, seeing as Bram Stoker's version is widely conceived as 'the original' Dracula, I expect the characters NOT to remind of Twilight's the Cullen family or the characters from True Blood. I'm picturing this Dracula looking something like Bela Lugosi with large fangs. I'm interested to see how true to the common image/story the actual book turns out to be, and I'm excited to see how much of what Dracula is conceived of today is warped from what it started out as.

To see reasons why Bram Stoker's Dracula withstood the test of time, see the article called "Dracula, Tradition, Modernism" by Rosemary Jann, which can be found at this website.