#my eternal cry: why is tumblr not actually a humanities grad program.

[aeide-thea]

(i’m only doing dracula secondhand rn, although i have read it ever, and i’m delighted that everyone’s having fun but i gotta say, the inevitable way in which the usual tumblr discourse is starting to creep in around the edges as people belatedly discover that the text is, gasp, Problematic is—a lil exhausting 2 me? like. of course the text is Problematic. maybe tumblr book club can do wilkie collins next and really have fits. like. what kinds of things did you expect a victorian-era brit* to position as scary??

and like. not fair of me, probably. people don’t know shit and it’s good they’re learning and it’s always good to contemplate and analyze things! but at the same time it just feels a little like—are you going anywhere with these announcements of Orientalist Spectres Haunting Europe, etc? or are you just having fits abt having made contact with something Impure, and trying to expiate yr sins by squawking about it?

like. idk. i love analysis! but some of the posts i’ve seen starting to float around just feel like. halfway between Baby’s First High School English Essay (That Doesn’t Really Have a Thesis, Just Descriptions of What’s Happening in the Text) and, like, scrupulosity? like. tell me something about all the fucked-up fears stoker is leveraging here! make an argument! just announcing that these things exist in the text feels like. no shit. so glad we could crowdsource a second sparknotes (now with more guilt!) right here on tumblr dot edu, so we don’t have to look anything up.

idk, i’m having trouble articulating exactly what’s alienating me about this, and i do realize i’m probably being excessively irritable! really i think it’s just like, i desperately want a mode of reaction to media—to the world, really—that’s more complex than either ‘shhh, i’m averting my eyes from anything troubling abt this bc Capitalism Has Worn Me Down and now i’m too depressed and exhausted to engage with anything in a way that isn’t purely escapist,’ or else ‘i’m going to enumerate all the -isms that Taint this narrative, in a way that strongly suggests i’d prefer some kind of ahistorically, implausibly sanitized version of it so i was spared the necessity of confronting anything real or difficult, and could revert back to the aforementioned eyes-averted escapist mode without being Tainted by Associating With Problematic Narratives I Failed to Denounce As Is Proper…’

that’s a lot of words and not a lot of clarity, but basically: there has to be a more generative mode of engagement somewhere, somehow, that isn’t just this facile binary in which we either spit something out immediately, like reactive children, or else swallow it whole! i want to chew on stuff, and build muscle.)

⸻ * it has been pointed out in the comments, and i agree, that this is an oversimplifying elision—stoker was, yes, british, but more specifically irish (which i did know, but didn’t say), and while really this phrasing was an attempt to gesture at the way in which brit-ish orientalist anxieties are activated in the text, not compress stoker into an uncomplicatedly imperialist boogeyman, it’s still a reductive description! like. ‘colonized artist leans into colonizer anxieties, aligns self as sympathetic narrator with Correct Worldview at expense of more-othered Foreigners’ is still not an especially innovative analysis, but it does at least immediately bump the complexity of our model from binary to trinary—a complication devoutly to be wished, under the circs!