Dracula Daily: Seward
May. 26th, 2022 09:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
writerkitSo today's actual letter was just the equivalent of Arthur sending a thumbs-up emoji agreeing to the proposed "let's go out drinking" plan, but I want to address something I'm seeing a lot of in discussions of the book.
This book is from the nineteenth century. There's a lot of casual racism and misogyny and not just in Seward's entry. It's been there the whole time.
There is also a lot that would have had very different valence at the time: Mina planning to actively assist her husband with his soliciting and learning shorthand and typing actually makes her fairly up-to-date and modern for the time, for example.
So why are people suddenly fixated on Seward as the root of all evil? He... asked his patient about his delusions rather more than is good for the patient and immediately realizes it and goes "I shouldn't have done that." And for the time, his method was actually super progressive, since he's running an asylum where you deal with the patients by talking to them and they're fed regularly and kept clean. (Remember this book was published just ten years after Nellie Bly's Ten Days in a Madhouse and they hadn't made a ton of progress in that time.) Yeah, it's not great that this is what was considered progressive at the time, but all the characters are of the time they were written in, and it makes zero sense to be like "Yeah, Quincey P Morris!" when being rich in Texas at the time probably meant someone did a lot of terrible things to your workers to get that way while going "Seward is EVIL! EVIL I TELL YOU!"
Yes, I've seen a few people who are just like "All of these characters are terrible people" at which point I'm like "Well no one's forcing you to read along" and those people are at least consistent in their worldviews, but it is ridiculous to be singling Seward out when you're going on about how xenophobic Jonathan Harker is adorable and wonderful or probably-a-robber-baron Quincey P. Morris is amazing and funny.
It is a novel that was written in the 1800s. Literary analysis of the times is one thing, but if you're just going to apply modern standards to a century-old book and go on about how terrible the characters are, why are you reading it at all?
(Oh, right, the same reason all the purity-culture warriors do this; someone might be having Insufficiently Woke Fun and that MUST BE STOPPED.)
This book is from the nineteenth century. There's a lot of casual racism and misogyny and not just in Seward's entry. It's been there the whole time.
There is also a lot that would have had very different valence at the time: Mina planning to actively assist her husband with his soliciting and learning shorthand and typing actually makes her fairly up-to-date and modern for the time, for example.
So why are people suddenly fixated on Seward as the root of all evil? He... asked his patient about his delusions rather more than is good for the patient and immediately realizes it and goes "I shouldn't have done that." And for the time, his method was actually super progressive, since he's running an asylum where you deal with the patients by talking to them and they're fed regularly and kept clean. (Remember this book was published just ten years after Nellie Bly's Ten Days in a Madhouse and they hadn't made a ton of progress in that time.) Yeah, it's not great that this is what was considered progressive at the time, but all the characters are of the time they were written in, and it makes zero sense to be like "Yeah, Quincey P Morris!" when being rich in Texas at the time probably meant someone did a lot of terrible things to your workers to get that way while going "Seward is EVIL! EVIL I TELL YOU!"
Yes, I've seen a few people who are just like "All of these characters are terrible people" at which point I'm like "Well no one's forcing you to read along" and those people are at least consistent in their worldviews, but it is ridiculous to be singling Seward out when you're going on about how xenophobic Jonathan Harker is adorable and wonderful or probably-a-robber-baron Quincey P. Morris is amazing and funny.
It is a novel that was written in the 1800s. Literary analysis of the times is one thing, but if you're just going to apply modern standards to a century-old book and go on about how terrible the characters are, why are you reading it at all?
(Oh, right, the same reason all the purity-culture warriors do this; someone might be having Insufficiently Woke Fun and that MUST BE STOPPED.)
