Because a few of my friends and family wanted to see what I presented at this year's PCA/ACA Conference, I've decided to post the paper I read. This is what us English nerds like to do! Or at least, this is what this English nerd likes to do.
Dracula and the Feminine Unconscious: Coppola's Dracula and the Demeter/Persephone Myth
Winona Ryder was the first person to bring James V. Hart’s script to Francis Ford Coppola’s attention, which is fitting considering the film is a much more woman-centric film than the novel it adapts. Coppola’s film versions of Mina Murray (later Harker), Lucy Westerna, and Count Dracula provide the central dynamics of the film, while the surrounding male characters (with the exception of Dracula, of course) take more of a supporting role. Indeed, their dominance over the women of this film is less apparent than in the novel. I address this idea because there is an aspect of the film and novel that has yet to be fully articulated: the appearance of Demeter, Greek goddess of agriculture and the mother of Persephone, Queen of the Underworld. Sure, the original novel may have meant the reference to Demeter as an ironic joke (the ship named after the goddess of fertile lands and abundant crops carries aboard it death and destruction), but the film seems to build on the tensions presented in the story of her daughter’s abduction and subsequent marriage.
As opposed to the traditional analysis of Dracula, where Stoker presents the evil that can befall a fallen woman, Coppola reforms the story and transforms it into a tale of young women coming of age, fearing marriage, and fearing motherhood. In other words, Dracula, or vampirism, is a symbol for the unconscious fears of women terrified of the world outside their parents’ home, a world where they are powerless and considered nothing more than property. Coppola’s shift in focus to the women of the story and his constant juxtaposition of sex and violence—where sex is treated as a strange curiosity rather than a moral dilemma—shifts the terror of Dracula from a fear of sexual impropriety to a fear of sexual conquest, a fear of what happens after the wedding.
The shift in focus is immediately apparent with Coppola's prologue, a framing device that informs the viewer of his more romantic interpretation. Stoker's novel is all about the dangers of blurring the lines between socially acceptable binaries: east/west, masculinity/femininity, marital sex/premarital sex; Coppola's interpretation underscores the terrors associated with burgeoning feminine sexuality, and yet his narrative is framed by love, an undying, romantic love, hence the film's promotional tagline, "Love Never Dies" (Coppola). From the opening sequence to the final shot, Coppola's film is dominated and driven by feminine desire. The male characters are relegated to supporting character status, with the sole exception being Keanu Reeves' Jonathon Harker, a performance many consider to be a weak point in the film. This shift in perspective highlights the feminine aspects of the novel, creating central characters from the outlines provided by Stoker's novel. Indeed, Lucy Westerna (played by Sadie Frost) and Mina Murray (played by Winona Ryder) provide the dramatic nexus of the film.
Coppola cements the bond between the two women through an early scene of the film. While Jonathon is away on business with the Count, Mina stays with her wealthy friend, Lucy Westerna, a vivacious and free-speaking woman, unafraid to speak candidly about sex, which shocks and intrigues Mina; "Her free way of speaking shocks me sometimes" (Coppola, my emphasis), Mina says after Lucy catches her reading Arabian Nights. The book had been knocked off the table revealing an image of sexual intercourse. Despite her reluctance, at first, to demonstrate a curiosity of sex, Mina allows the short conversation to take place, something their counterparts in Stoker's novel never do, at least not in any of the letters Mina is supposed to have collected. This scene establishes a dynamic of the film that was only vaguely addressed through metaphor in the novel: feminine sexual desire. Coppola is, in a way, harking back to an even older characterization of Gothicism, as defined by David Punter in his muli-volume examination of Gothicism and its evolution, The Literature of Terror: "[Early Gothic novels] strove above all, albeit with variable success, to eschew the contemporary world" (Punter 9). Lucy and Mina use this quiet exchange to demonstrate their natural curiosity concerning sexual intercourse, which appropriately enough for the time would have only occurred in a private, secluded setting, if at all. Despite their shared curiosity, Mina is by far the more reserved of the two young women. In their essay, "Postmodern Iconography and Perspective in Bram Stoker's Dracula," Carol Corbin and Robert A. Campbell write, "Coppola plays with the coming-of-age of these English women as they encounter the secrets of primal emotion... the women are flirting with danger when they fantasize about sexual pleasures, thus establishing their complicity in the seduction by Count Dracula" (43-4). However, this reading does not take into account another aspect of this exchange: Mina is engaged to Jonathon and Lucy is (at least at this point in the film) lamenting her lack of marriage proposals. Marriage dominates their exchanges, and after Mina is introduced to Lucy’s three suitors Dracula begins to exert his power over these virginal English women, which is demonstrated as Dracula’s shadow slowly consumes all light from the scene, thus establishing the juxtaposition of fear and marriage, much like the Greek myth, "The Rape of Persephone."
A reference to Persephone's mother, Demeter, is in both novel and Coppola's film, for it is the name of the ship that brings Count Dracula to England. Ovid includes Persephone's rape in Metamorphoses:
Was playing in a glade and picking flowers,
Pansies and lilies, with a child's delight,
Filling her basket and her lap to gather
More than the other girls, when, in a trice,
[Hades] saw her, loved her, and carried her away--
Love leapt in such a hurry! Terrified,
In tears, the goddess called her mother, called
Her comrades too, but offenter her mother;
And, as she'd torn the shoulder of her dress,
The folds slipped down and out the flowers fell,
And she, in innocent simplicity,
Grieved in her girlish heart for their loss too. (Ovid V. 393-405)
For Persephone, love is neither idealic nor satisfying, but a terrifying experience that offers no sense of control and allows no room for the will of a young girl. Lucy is Persephone in Coppola's film and Stoker's novel, with the exchange of blood symbolizing the consummation of marriage; as Van Helsing jokingly references in the novel, remembering the multiple blood transfusions given by all three of Lucy's suitors, "this so sweet maid is a polyandrist" (Stoker 169). The film's characterization of Van Helsing (played by Sir Anthony Hopkins) more explicitly expresses Lucy's plight: "She is a willing recruit, a breathless follower, a wanton follower... a devoted disciple. She is the Devil' concubine" (Coppola). While it's hard to imagine, as the events of the film unfold, how much Lucy willingly participated in the Count's seduction, what is clear is the terror associated with sexual union as Lucy's death, which is intercut with Mina's marriage, is the most powerful and energetic section of the film, a veritable orgy of editing and swift camera movements. By juxtaposing these two scenes together, Coppola creates a powerful, highly sexual, and graphic collage yoking together both terror and marriage. Indeed, the scene follows Mina's rejection of her "Prince" suggesting that his final attack on Lucy is driven by extreme anger and disappointment. This attack illustrates a potential dichotomy for Victorian women: An eloquent and sanguine fiancé could suddenly transform into a vicious, sexually charged monster. Marriage, thus, is both a wonderful and terrifying experience; once married, a woman no longer has control over her body, about as much control as Persephone had.
However, Hades himself had about just as much control over his actions considering Venus, the goddess of love, asked her son, Cupid, to shoot Hades with one of his arrows: "Your majesty/ Subdues the gods of heaven and even [Zeus]/ ... Why should Hell lag behind" (Ovid V. 372-6). This development in the story creates a god who is subject to the illogical and unreasonable passions of love; and just like Coppola's Dracula, the human female characters are the strongest and most complex characters in Coppola's film. Giving Coppola's "Hades" a far more complex, or rather a more sympathetic, characterization than Stoker's novel, is a technique in keeping with a much older Gothic tradition. Punter writes that early Gothic novels produced a villain that was usually the more intriguing and complex of all the surrounding characters, "awe-inspiring, endlessly resourceful in pursuit of his often opaquely evil ends, and yet possessed of a mysterious attractiveness" (Punter 9-10). This sympathizing of such a famous figure of horror caused some critics to write that Coppola's Dracula lacked the terror of previous adaptations.
However lacking the terror may be, what is interesting is what Coppola picks up from Stoker's novel: Dracula is a transition tale, a transition from pre-modern to modern, from superstition to scientific inquiry, and as English society moves into a new age, a transition to a new era. According to Corbin and Campbell, Coppola's Dracula is a reflection of the transition from modern to postmodern and away from the notions that science and technology has power over the fantastic and mystical, which is evidenced when Van Helsing "admits that there are things in the universe that even science cannot understand" (Corbin and Campbell 44). This fluid mixture of meaning and reference makes analysis of the film an intriguing process, as each time one concept is grasped that understanding falls apart. Either way, Coppola's Dracula, when seen through the lens of "The Rape of Persephone" and the concept of transition, embodies the terror of unmarried Victorian women.
Coppola's postmodern interpretation of the film blends both Victorian values with some modern feminist ideals, after which a strange and intriguing mixture unfolds, neither truly feminist nor truly heralding the scientific method. The blending of these notions, like the blending of Victorian and feminist notions of feminine sexuality, suggests that Coppola's film is in a state of transition, reflecting the changing nature of American perspectives of feminine sexuality and romantic possibilities. The final scene of the film may offer a clue in this regard. Instead of just being a lame romantic ending, the vision of Mina and the Count together in a heavenly pose may be a suggestion of the future possibilities of romantic love and feminine desire, especially since the film ends with the knowledge that she must return to her less interesting and much weaker husband. The suggestion is that such a love was not readily acceptable at the time (something that has changed with Twilight) and that what is needed is time and a change in public perceptions of love and sexuality. The time was not right for Mina to embrace her true love, but instead she must return to the unfulfilling life of being Harker's wife. After all, her final scene is not with her husband but with Dracula. Coppola's film is both an expression of how far we've come as a culture and how far we need to go as a society.
Works Cited
Coppola, Francis Ford, dir. Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Perf. Winona Ryder, Gary Oldman, Anthony Hopkins, and Keanu Reeves. Columbia Pictures, 1992. DVD.
Corbin, Carol and Robert A. Campbell. “Postmodern Iconography and Perspective in Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 27.2 (1999): 40-8. Web. Wilson Web. 25 Oct. 2010.
Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day: Volume 1: The Gothic Tradition. 2nd Ed. London: Person Education, 1996. Print.
Ovid. Metamorphosis. Trans. A. D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. Print.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. New York: Modern Library, 2001. Print.
