#Both Bluebeard wife and knight in a shiny armor

[noveeleven]

HE MEANS "IT HAS TO BE ELEVATED TO THE RANK OF A FAIRYTALE".RIGHT?? RIGHT?!?

Fairytales are the supreme genre. I don't make the rules, sorry mr. Skal, you have to kindly sort out your priorities.

Stoker's book was ending up quite unlike the lurid sensation novel he had first envisioned. In making his final revisions, he fell back instinctively, if perhaps unconsciously, on the sturdy substructure of the litary form that had sustained him since childhood: the fairy tale. The plot took on an archetypal simplicity, drawing on the folktale motif of abused and abandoned children. An orphan (Jonathan Harker, bereft of parentage like most of the main characters) ventures into the woods and is confronted with a terrifying demon king, who chases him home, but the young hero must return to the dreaded place to destroy the monster and restore moral order. Among the many calssic tales evoked are "Bluebeard" (the castle with locked rooms and bloody secrets), "Jack the Giant Killer" (the ogre who chases the protagonist to his homeland and is slain), and "Little Red Riding Hood" (explicitly cited in Stoker's text and mimicked when a wolf crashes through a bedroom window to menace Lucy and her mother). In short, for Dracula to be saved as a publishable tale, it had to be shrunken, collapsed, and dwindled down into a bedtime story of childhood abandonment and rescue.

david j. skal, something in the blood: the untold story of bram stoker, the man who wrote dracula