'Disease in Bram Stoker’s Dracula\r'

'As light continues to illuminate the no-accountened corners of our world, an separate mythical taleâ€the drinking of downslope by the ubiquitous genus genus genus genus genus Draculaâ€whitethorn perplex a basis in detail according to Wayne Tikkanen, a professor of chemical science at California State University, Los Angeles. â€Å"I am a trained scientist. I dont believe in lamias and werewolves,” Tikkanen told Anthony Breznican for an AP release on H completelyoween, 1998.Tikkanen speculates that some European monster myths were the return of a blood sickness know as porphyria that causes the skin to weaken and be negatively affected by ultraviolet light rays that change heme, a comp atomic number 53nt of blood that carries oxygen to the brain, into a toxin. As the ailment progresses, the skin blackens and ruptures in the sun, followed by pilus growing in the scars. Lips argon burned, cause them to peel bear, thusly make the dentition more prominent .In some cases the nose erodes and the fingers disintegrate, making the hands resemble paws. The disease affects i in 100,000 masses and is treatable with medication. Tikkanen thinks it is possible that those smitten with the disease centuries ago may require drunk animal blood to unloose their pain as a family unit remedy, and that they would have preferred to go expose at darkness in company to avoid the sun, and that perhaps this behavior was co-opted into myths.â€Å"You may do this all the time, alone people will only see you when the wickedness is at its brightestâ€or in other words, a full moon,” Tikkanen said. Unfortunately, the result of such myth-making was that as many as 600 victims of this disease were considered to be monsters by the 16th-century European figure H. Bouget, who subsequently had them burned at the stake. â€Å" on the dot think: youre horribly disfigured but youre perfectly lucid,” Tikkanen said. â€Å"You dont know whats ha ppening to you, and the revive doesnt want to treat you even if he knew how.Your priest wants you to confess your sins or the legal expert will burn you at the stake. nevertheless you dont know what youve done wrong. ” Other elements of the Dracula myth often include garlic, which Tikkanen says causes victims of porphyria to deport violent illness because of the creation of toxins in their blood. Fear of the comprehend also makes champion in this theory, because the cross represends the Church and thus the Inquisition, which would have instituted the torture and murder of the sufferers of porphyria.In the aforesaid(prenominal) vein, the superstitious Romanian society project its fear of disease and deviancy onto Dracula, thus emerging the soundly-liked folklore hypothesis that â€Å"a man or woman who has led a predominantly wicked existence will close to certainly become a vampire; it is his curse for the wicked deeds act during the usual term of his life, as wel l as an entrance that a potent sin can non easy be put to rest” (Douglas, 39). This resembles the persuasion propagated by the religious right that support is a visitation of heavenly punishment for sexual deviancy, i. e. , homosexuality.David Prindle in his book dotty Business â€Å"of all the diseases, the ones that are sexually transmitted seem to carry the heaviest turn on of symbolic weight. much(prenominal) diseases seem to shape our peoples anxieties about spiritual and physical pollution, their collar of being opened as hypocritical sinners, their yearning to condemn those less clean-handed than themselves” (Prindle, 73). In Coppolas Dracula, Lucy, who is teasing, inquisitive, and immoral is punished for her â€Å" detestation” behavior, her sexuality, by being seduced into the warren of Dracula and thus flattering a vampire herself.Once a vampire, Lucy takes a young child as her injured party, intimidating the irreproachable child much in t he homogeneous way that infants with AIDS often are fatalities of their mothers performance. Susan Sontag notes that these metaphors â€Å"are hardly in contradiction. Such is the extraordinary potency and efficacy of the abhorrence metaphor: it allows a disease to be regarded both as something incurred by pliable others and as possiblely everyones disease” (Sontag, 152). Bela Lugosi premiere gave Dracula filmic complexity in the 1931 Dracula. His moves were swimming and contemporary, steeped in gender and glamour.His affluent pitch contour gave the count the religion that awoke the sexuality of young-bearing(prenominal) audience members. Christopher Lee (1958) followed in Lugosis travel and moved Dracula from sexual innuendoes to blinding sexuality. At one point in The nuisance of Dracula, he bites a young womans throat-not simply feasting, but apparently experiencing orgasm. Dracula had thus developed into a seduction fantasy, vitally distur write out with the circumstances and punishment of premarital or extramarital high life in forbidden corporal relations, in this occurrence with the opposite sex.Gary Oldman takes Lees tingling Dracula one step hither in Coppolas Brain Stoker’s Dracula. When Oldman attempts to find fault the neck of the inoffensive Mina at the Nickelodeon, the tv camera comes in on a taut attempt of his face as his eyes change color, his fangs are exposed and his corpse tremors with expectation. The transformation of Dracula to his present- day classification makes him the most sexual of all the brutes of the night.Draculas sexual insinuation and blatant smart for human blood make him the howling(prenominal) mythic vehicle to express American societys fear of the modern day annoyance of AIDS, since the HIV virus is transmitted by dint of blood and semen. Coppolas Dracula visits his victims in the all in(p) of night or in a dark milieu. He takes Lucy from her bed to wed her with both intercourse and fee ding. These visits from the attractive creature who first exhausts the sleeper with fervent embraces and then withdraws her blood symbolically parallels the night-time emissions that convoy erotic dreams.Frank Jones points out in his book â€Å"On the Nightmare of riptide suction” : â€Å"In the unconscious(p) mind blood is commonly an resembling for semen” (Gottsman, 59). However, the sentence for these sexual interludes with the run is the permanent alteration into vampirism; an illness that separates the afflicted from the rest of the society, one that insists on sucking the life out of other people. In this admiration the vampire enters the victims blood stream, as does the HIV virus, to eventually exhaust the legions of his/her life.Coppola cinematically reflects this correlation throughout the course of the film. Initially, Dracula renounces the church, and in doing so plunges his sword into the cross at the alter. Blood then flows from the cross, and Coppo la cuts from a stone angel icon evacuant tears of blood to a blastoff of Dracula satisfying a form and consumption the blood. In this pre- recognition succession, the back illumination creates a striking similarity between Christ and Dracula (the raise length hair, smooth skin and vapourous glow).On his return home from war, Dracula learns of the demise of his wife. His stabbing of the cross is a priapic metaphor for intercourse with a virgin, whose deprivation of virginity is often marked by a loss of blood. The cathedral, infected and raped by war, denies the interment of Draculas suicided bride. Dracula renounces the church by drinking the blood out of the chalice, declaring that: â€Å"Blood is the life and the life is mine. ” Here he metaphorically takes on the position of the bug, pleasant the judge of life and death.David Prindle reinforces the vampire as a metaphor for the virus: â€Å"As a deadly threat, the disease was make to order for melodrama; as a pote ntial sexual assassin, the HIV carrier could well be portrayed as a demon. ” (76). Coppola establishes a departure from innocence to venomous by using peacock feathers, exercise of innocence and vanity, as a revolution between the â€Å"enlightened” world and the dark road to Transylvania as the young Jonathan Harker is sent to Transylvania to work for Dracula.Both virtue and pride are lost when Jonathan encounters a group of womanly vampires who seduce him throughout his first night in the castle. Coppola reinforces the anonymity of the participants by demonstrate incorporeal footsteps appearing by the bed while the women appear from within his sheets and last to embrace and murmur to Jonathan. He does not resist and follows through in what could be termed a one night stand. The camera shows a head shot of one of the â€Å"vamps” whose hair is made out of snakes, referring to medusoid or the serpent From Genesis that caused the legal ouster of Adam and E ve from the Garden of Eden.References Babuscio, Jack. â€Å" campsite and the Gay Sensibility. ” Gays and Film. Ed. Richard Dyer. unfermented York: Zoetrope, Inc. , 1984. Broeske, Pat. â€Å"Hollywood Goes yeasty for Vampires,” immature York Times, April 26, 1993. Canby, Vincent, â€Å"Coppolas Dizzying Vision on Dracula,” New York Times, Nov 13, 1993. Douglas, Drake. Horrors! The awful truth about monsters; vampires, werewolves, zombies, phantoms. mummies and ghouls of literary productions and how tiny went Hollywood. New York: The Overlook Press, 1989.Gottesman, Ronald. counseling on the Horror Film. Trenton, New jersey: Prentice Hall, 1972. Hogan, David. Dark Romance-Sexuality in the Horror Film. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc. , 1986. Prindle. David. inquisitive Business. the Political Economy of HollywoodBoulder: Westview Press, 1993. Russo, Vito. The celluloid insistency: Homosexuality in the Movies. New York: harpist ar id Row Publishers, 1990. Sontag, Susan. Illness as a Metaphor/AIDS and its Metaphors. New York: Doubleday, 1989.\r\n'