Disease in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

As science continues to illuminate the nefariousnessened corners of our world, some other romanceic talethe drinking of beginning by the ubiquitous genus genus Draculamay have a basis in fact match to Wayne Tikkanen, a professor of chemistry at California State University, Los Angeles. I am a trained scientist. I dont believe in vampires and werewolves, Tikkanen told Anthony Breznican for an AP justify on H each(prenominal)oween, 1998.Tikkanen speculates that some European monster myths were the product of a personal line of credit disease known as porphyria that causes the come up to weaken and be negatively affected by ultraviolet rays that change heme, a component of filiation that carries oxygen to the brain, into a toxin. As the disease progresses, the skin blackens and ruptures in the sun, followed by hair growing in the scars. Lips are radiateed, cau wickednessg them to peel back, thereof making the teeth more prominent.In some cases the nose erodes and the fingers disintegrate, making the give resemble paws. The disease affects one in 100,000 peck and is treatable with medication. Tikkanen thinks it is possible that those untune with the disease centuries ago may have drunk animal inventory to relieve their pain as a folk remedy, and that they would have pet to go bulge at night in order to negate the sun, and that perhaps this behavior was co-opted into myths.You may do this in all the time, only 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 numerous as 600 victims of this disease were considered to be monsters by the 16th-century European judge H. Bouget, who after had them burned at the stake. Just think youre horribly disfigured but youre perfectly lucid, Tikkanen said. You dont know whats happening to you, and the doctor doesnt want to treat you in time 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 oftentimes include garlic, which Tikkanen says causes victims of porphyria to suffer violent complaint because of the creation of toxins in their bloodline. Fear of the crossover also turn overs sense in this theory, because the cross represents the church service 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 certainly become a vampire it is his curse for the wicked deeds committed during the usual confines of his life, as well as an entrance that a influential sin can not easily be put to rest (Douglas, 39). This resembles the judgement propagated by the religious r ight that acquired immune deficiency syndrome is a visitation of ethereal punishment for sexual deviancy, i. e. , homosexuality.David Prindle in his book Risky Business of all the diseases, the ones that are sexually transmitted seem to carry the heaviest burden of emblematic weight. Such diseases seem to bring our peoples anxieties ab come on spiritual and physical pollution, their pinch of beingness exposed as hypocritical sinners, their yearning to condemn those slight 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 seduced into the warren of Dracula and thus flattering a vampire herself.Once a vampire, Lucy takes a young child as her injured party, intimidating the spotless child much in the same way that infants with AIDS often are fatalities of their mothers performance. Susan Sontag notes that these metaphors are hardly in contradiction. Such is the ex traordinary military capability and efficacy of the plague metaphor it allows a disease to be regarded both as something incurred by susceptible others and as potentially everyones disease (Sontag, 152). Bela Lugosi prototypic gave Dracula filmic complexity in the 1931 Dracula. His moves were smooth and contemporary, steeped in gender and glamour.His overflowing 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 point in The Horror of Dracula, he bites a up last 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 extramarital luxury in forbidden corporal relations, in this position with the opposite sex.Gary Oldman takes Lees erotic Dracula one step hither in Coppolas Brain Stoke rs Dracula. When Oldman proves to nibble the neck of the inoffensive myna at the Nickelodeon, the camera comes in on a taut attempt of his face as his eyes change color, his fangs are exposed and his clay 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 mythic vehicle to express American societys fear of the modern day plague of AIDS, since the human immunodeficiency virus virus is transmitted 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 exhausts the sleeper with fervent embraces and so withdraws her blood symbolically parallels the night-time emissions that convoy erotic dreams.Frank Jones points out in his bo ok On the incubus of Bloodsucking In the unconscious mind blood is commonly an equivalent for semen (Gottsman, 59). 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 end-to-end 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 shot of Dracula satisfying a cup and consumption the blood. In this pre- recognition succession, the back illumination creates a striking analogy between Christ and Dracula (the shoulder length hair, smooth skin an d 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 raped 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 do to order for melodrama as a potential sexual assassin, the HIV bearer could easily be portrayed as a demon. (76). Coppola establishes a going away 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 s ent to Transylvania to work for Dracula.Both virtue and superbia 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 bodiless footsteps appearing by the bed while the women appear from within his sheets and start to embrace and murmur to Jonathan. He does not resist and follows through in what could be termed a one night stand. The camera shows a query 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 Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.References Babuscio, Jack. campsite and the Gay Sensibility. Gays and Film. Ed. Richard Dyer. sore 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 abo ut 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 learner Hall, 1972. Hogan, David. Dark Romance-Sexuality in the Horror Film. Chapel Hill, North Carolina McFarland & Company, Inc. , 1986. Prindle. David. Risky Business. the semipolitical Economy of HollywoodBoulder Westview Press, 1993. Russo, Vito. The celluloid Closet Homosexuality in the Movies. New York harpist arid Row Publishers, 1990. Sontag, Susan. Illness as a Metaphor/AIDS and its Metaphors. New York Doubleday, 1989.