Essay On Dracula In The Lacanian Mirror

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The Monster (Missing) in the Mirror –
Positioning the Reader/Viewer of Dracula in the Lacanian Mirror.

The representation of monsters in mirrors has a venerable history, stretching back into antiquity with the legend of Medusa. In this myth, the hero, Perseus, uses the goddess Athena’s bronze shield to perceive the Gorgon as a reflection, allowing him to decapitate her and avoid being petrified by her unmediated gaze. The fable enacts the desire to gaze on the spectacle of the monstrous other even as it destroys that very spectacle in its climax. A vampire narrative such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula resurrects this fascination with monstrous revelation through reflection, but troubles this relationship by emphasising the monster’s absence in the mirror. This absence raises questions about the nature and location of monstrousness which can best be answered by a recourse to Psychoanalytic criticism. Lacan’s “Mirror Stage” applied to the ‘shaving scene’, both in the original novel and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film adaption, reveals the vampire not as a monstrous other, but as a spectral self, repressed by the meconnaisance that identification with the ideal-ego produces. The theory, applied to the novel, reveals an inherent doubling of Dracula and Jonathan as oppressor/oppressed – a doubling which the violent end of the book completes. This doubling also extends to the reader/viewer of Dracula, who stands an invisible spectator in front of the mirror. Where the reader of the novel must be content to analogously inhabit Jonathan’s position, the viewer of Coppola’s film uncomfortably takes a position of Dracula, the repressed self who lurks behind/within Johnathan. Ultimately, both texts reveal the unseen presence who haunts the Goth...

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... much he himself resembles the monster that he despises, Dracula does encourage readers to see ourselves in the novel, to recognise our connectedness with the Other.” Readers continually return to Dracula because they recognise in the novel desires that, as Jonathan remarks in the film “[we] dare not confess to [our] own soul[s]”

The monster in the mirror of Greek Antiquity, expressed in the myth of Medusa, shows the long trajectory of the desire to gaze on what is forbidden; to dwell on the spectacle that is the ‘monster’. Lacan’s theory of the Mirror Stage, however, makes us keenly aware that the mirror with which we see the ‘other’ is only - in fact - distorting our own image to reveal the monstrous self within. Both Stoker’s novel and Coppola’s film, in this sense, are mirrors which expose the missing monster in the mirror to be no one “except [our]selves.”

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