I strange optical illusion happens at Whitby. I've been visiting Whitby since a teenager but this June is the first time I witnessed it. The sun seems to sink and rise in almost the same place over the sea.This seems against the natural order of events so no wonder Bram Stoker set part of Dracula there!
Sunset and sunrise seems very close together instead of opposed in the West and East.I watched this happen from the windows of the house where Bram Stoker stayed, and was amazed.
So it seems only right that a place of apparently unnatural occurrences should be the place where the unnatural events of a horror story unfurl.
Dracula is really about Mina, the woman at the heart of it all, and the battle for her soul.Perhaps that battle for Mina's soul is also a battle for the soul of the nation at a time of great change and uncertainty.Stoker tapped into the zeitgeist of its time. Mina is alternately infected by two foreigners;Van Helsing who is the Dutch Doctor, a man of science and the future, and East European Count Dracula who is a man of mystery and superstition, an aristocrat from the past.These two opposing forces are similar in Nature (Both have authority, hypnotic powers and prodigious memories for instance).
Ha! Does the baddie always have to be in the inscrutable East,like Putin or Sherlock's east wind!?
"Leaving the West and entering the East, Harker fears to go into the unknown....with neither eyes or ears for the outer world...sweeping into the darkness of an unknown night journey..."
In this psychomachy, Mina is pulled in both directions, as in society culture was being pulled in both directions, backwards and forwards.Science won but also lost because its Dracula we remember ,not Van Helsing.
However it's Mina who is the centre of this horror story as the men vie to control (they would say "save"!) her soul.I dont know any horror production that has recognised this, but its obvious if you read the story with any critical awareness.
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oh p.s : The answer to this optical illusion is in the compass! Whitby is on the east coast of yorkshire and appears to face east so the sun should rise over the sea and set over the land in the west. However in fact, England slants to the west and Whitby faces north so the sun rises and sets over the sea almost in the same place!
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Quotes:
about Mina,"it's really wonderful how much resilience there is in human nature"..."there are darknesses in Life and there are lights; you are one of the lights."
about Dracula, "All through there are signs of his advance....the father or furtherer of a new order of beings".
