My Reading Room: Guest Post: Karen Essex on Dracula in Love with Anne Fortier, author of Juliet

Thursday, August 4, 2011

Guest Post: Karen Essex on Dracula in Love with Anne Fortier, author of Juliet

Today I have a wonderful guest post with Anne Fortier, author of Juliet, interviewing Karen Essex, author of Dracula in Love which I reviewed here. Enjoy the interview.

Anne Fortier: With Dracula in Love you take us back to the very dawn of vampire
literature, namely Bram Stoker’s groundbreaking novel Dracula from 1897. What
inspired you to revisit this old classic and recreate the horrible events of 1890?

Karen Essex: I’d date the dawn of vampire literature to John Polidori’s short story, “The
Vampyre,” written on that fateful weekend in 1816 when Mary Shelley began
Frankenstein. But you’re right, it was Stoker’s Dracula that gave birth to the vampire
novel and spawned hundreds, if not thousands of incarnations and variations.

I have loved all-things-vampire since childhood, when I first saw “Dark Shadows” on
television and fell for Barnabas and Quentin. All my novels are loaded with mythology,
and all my novels present a different side of, or tell a new story about iconic women.
Plus I was raised by very spooky old ladies who conjured spirits and dabbled in the
occult. Given all of those factors, when the idea of writing the Dracula tale from Mina
Harker’s perspective descended on me—and that’s literally how it happened—I found it
irresistible.

I don’t think a literary writer has taken on Dracula since Elizabeth Kostova’s enthralling
book, The Historian. There’s a lot of hastily written vampire fiction out there (I don’t
mean the Twilight series, which for my taste is imaginative, page-turning YA material),
which will never appeal to more demanding readers, self included. I love genre-crossing,
and I love the fusion of high and low art. I wrote something I wanted to experience;
something I would want to read.

AF: In Bram Stoker’s novel, Mina Murray was a secondary character, but you have
made her the heroine. What is it about her that makes your Mina so much more
interesting than Bram Stoker’s Mina?

KE: I revere Bram Stoker, so I am reluctant to say that I have given the reader a “better”
Mina. But from the first time I read Dracula as a teenager, I knew that Mina was not
satisfied with her role as the quintessential Victorian virgin. I wanted to give her more
breadth and dimension and place her firmly in the reality of women’s lives in the 1890s.
Bringing the late Victorian period to life, with all its paradoxes, constraints, and massive
societal shifts was one of the great joys of writing this book.

Another motive for re-imagining Stoker’s novel from the female perspective was the
hyper-misogyny of the original. Today, the book is often read as a cautionary tale against
the unbridling of female sexuality at the end of the 19th century. In Dracula in Love, I
wanted to turn the original story inside out and expose its underbelly or its “subconscious

mind.” I wanted to deconstruct the good girl versus bad girl paradigm that Stoker’s
females, Mina and Lucy Westenra, embodied—a construct I would personally like to
smash to bits before I die. Frankly, I would like to become a vampire so that I could
devote an eternity to eradicating it. Women will never, ever be happy and fulfilled if we
have to live this dichotomy.

As inexplicable as this sounds, from the moment that the idea descended on me, Mina
started revealing her secrets. Believe me, when this kind of provocative material is
whispered in your ear, you naturally want to reveal it to your readers.

AF: One of the fascinating things about Dracula in Love is that the line between monster
and man is blurry. In fact, some of the most monstrous scenes of the book take place at a
mental asylum. Can you tell us a bit about the research you’ve done, and why the asylum
in your book has become such a terrifying place?

KE: Mina says in the prologue that we must fear monsters less and be warier of our own
kind. My literary conceit for the book was that women in the late Victorian era had a lot
more to fear from their own society than from vampires.

In Stoker’s novel, we meet only one inmate at Dr. Seward’s asylum, the insect-
eating Renfield. I wanted to portray these asylums as they were—filled with women
incarcerated for exhibiting what we today would consider normal sexual desires.
Victorian asylums for the insane were convenient dumping grounds for women
whose husbands wanted to be rid of them, or children who wanted to control their
mother’s fortunes. I read many books of psychiatry written in the period, and I also
went into the archives of these asylums where I discovered case after shocking case.
The thinking about women’s bodies and women’s sexuality, and the “treatment” for
female “hysterical” maladies are as shocking as anything I have ever read—much more
horrific than anything I have researched or studied in any other period of history.

AF: What is it about unbridled female sexuality that is so appalling to men?

KE: Appalling and intoxicating, of course, which is a difficult combination to bear. I
think it’s important to separate “men” from “society.” We cannot blame “men” for the
power arrangements that have evolved through history. We must factor in biology,
geography, psychology, warfare, survival, technology, agriculture, and a host of other
elements that have led us to where we are today.

Societies seek to control female sexuality because it’s the easiest way to keep hierarchal
structures intact and to control the culture at large. Nobody wants to give up power,
and let’s face it, on top of that, women are scary creatures! We literally think with our
feelings, which is unfathomable to that other sex that values logic and fact. Sexually,
we mystify men in ways that they are drawn to and are also repulsed by. Men feel quite
vulnerable to women’s sexual power, and as the “stronger” sex, they do not like being
defenseless. Who can blame them? I’m not so fond of it myself.

AF: In your book it takes Mina a while to understand her own psychic powers, and quite
often, the spirit world looks suspiciously like her own subconscious mind. How difficult
was it to enter that grey-zone and describe her erotic encounters with her shape-shifting
lover?

KE: Honestly, nothing is easier and more natural for me. I spend a good amount of time
exploring the spirit world as well as my own subconscious landscape, so I can slip into
that dreamy space at will, although describing it on the page can leave me quite spent,
as it were. I also have no problem writing about sex. Though I am a fairly understated
person, and can also be quite old-fashioned sometimes in my thinking about gender
arrangements, I am not at all mortified to write about erotic sexual encounters of all
kinds. I just reread one such scene in my first novel, Kleopatra, and I thought, wow, how
did I have the nerve to put that in there? I’ve just written a piece for Publisher’s Weekly
about the absence of visceral, transporting descriptions of sex in literary fiction, which
I specifically wanted to challenge in Dracula in Love. I don’t know why we still feel
the need to heap shame and self-loathing upon female characters (and our actual female
persons) for their sexual experimentation, but we do. I think that as writers, as readers,
and as a culture, we need to examine these things.

AF: Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published more than a century ago, and yet readers
never seem to tire of the vampire theme. What is it about the vampire that makes it such a
compelling monster?

KE: The role of the vampire has shifted dramatically in recent years. Vampires used
to reflect our fears but now they reflect our fantasies. My theory is that while every
generation has longed for a fountain of youth, today we have many youth-extending
tools that enable us to reject the very idea of aging. It seems to me that humans today
downright abhor the idea of mortality. We live in a youth-seeking, youth-worshipping
society—on steroids. We have stem cell treatments, hormone therapies, cosmetic surgery
both invasive and noninvasive, and loads of medicines that can keep us alive past our
expiration date. We are very close to being vampires already. I sometimes run into people
who look younger than they looked twenty years ago!

The pop-culture vampires of today are not the monsters who corrupt and destroy but
magical creatures possessing what we lust for—eternal youth and immortality. The
vampires of the Twilight series are glamorous “vegetarians,” only eating wild beasts and
devoting themselves to protecting human life. They are de-fanged, so to speak, and far
from losing their immortal souls, have highly evolved consciences. We are vampirizing
ourselves and at the same time, humanizing the monsters. Fascinating, no?

For more on Dracula in Love check out these links: