Quote:
“Having answered the Count’s salutation, I turned to the glass again to see how I had been mistaken. This time there could be no error, for the man was close to me, and I could see him over my shoulder. But there was no reflection of him in the mirror! The whole room behind me was displayed; but there was no sign of a man in it, except myself. This was startling, and, coming on the top of so many strange things, was beginning to increase that vague feeling of uneasiness which I always have when the Count is near; but at the instant I saw that the cut had bled a little, and the blood was trickling over my chin. I laid down the razor, turning as I did so half round to look for some sticking plaster, (53).”
Comment:
Most people have some sort of understanding or knowledge about Dracula or vampires in general because of their abundance in pop culture today. Even if someone has never read Dracula, it is likely that they have encountered it in some other form, being either direct adaptations of the novel or other media containing vampires that follows the same rules as established in Dracula. It is because of this that when a person goes to actually read the novel for the first time, it is extremely likely that they know that Dracula is the monster, and what kind of monster he is (this is before even picking up the novel). So instead of spending the first section of the novel trying to figure out the strange happenings that Johnathan experiences, the reader is already in the know. This I find interesting because it changes the reader’s experience when reading the novel. But this does not affect just some readers, this change affects a whole generation of readers, and it changes the experience from what Bram Stoker intended and how the readers who read Dracula when it was published would have experienced. They likely wouldn’t have known from the start that Dracula is the bad guy and that he is a vampire. This can be seen in the ways that Johnathan reacts to the supernatural events in the novel. Though he thinks it’s strange that he can’t see Dracula’s reflection and that he has never seen him eat, he does not immediately connect it to vampirism, which readers from this generation likely would.
Question:
How does pop culture change how a novel is read, and does it change the way that the author originally intended for it to be read?
