Comparing Themes in Bram Stoker's Dracula

A detailed Summary of Comparing Themes in Bram Stoker's Dracula

Perhaps the most entertaining thing about entertainment is deconstruction. To uncover a unifying theme or premise in a story is to understand, to realize the author's vision. In the case of such a classic as Bram Stoker's Dracula, it seems strange to find such difference between text and film. This paper will analyze the unifying theme of both the book and the movie and try to understand, from the creator's viewpoint, the factors that lead to the construction of two very different and equally strong ideas.

Bram Stoker's original classic novel takes the reader through a cultural and political time-warp to a highly-educated aristocratic English folk at the end of the 19th century. From the first chapter on it is quite clear that the world has changed since this novel was written. The journal-style narrative gives the reader insight into the minds of characters that are completely different then any modern fiction paperback. It is very easy to see that these characters have a certain cultural pedigree which leaves them with a love of morality, spirituality, community, friendship, and a general faith in the goodness of humanity. These ideas are the real foundation for the story's theme. The obvious good vs. evil storyline is ground

ed in an epic God vs. Satan struggle for which the heroes fight on the side of the glory of God.

Francis Ford Coppola's rendition of Dracula had obvious storyline and character augmentation occuring frequently in a film supposedly most faithfully based in the novel. The single biggest change however was not the sexualization of the female characters or the romanticizing of Dracula, it was the complete change in the theme. Without speculating on any hidden agenda, it is very obvious that the construction of the film's theme was based on factors of typical hollywood formula. Evidence of this is the sexual behavior of Lucy, the intro scenes explaining Dracula's origins, and the out-of-nowhere romantic encounters between Dracula and Mina. The film's theme replaces the central God vs. Satan struggle with a "Mina Harker & Count Dracula Have An Undying, Supernatural Love Extending Beyond The Grave." Instead of relying on Stoker's classic theme, Coppola chose to create a theme of his own by inserting a heroic backstory to the Dracula character, giving him a way to focus the film on some kind of supernatural love-story.

In any form of storytelling you have a very clear difference between core themes and content. For a book that is hailed as the centerpiece of early goth literature, it lacks a core theme that identifies clearly as gothic or even negative. It seems that the preoccupation with the details of vampires is simply the content of the novel and not the core. A

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Approximate Word count = 992
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Novels