A Visitor's Guide to Mystic Falls - By Red Page 0,59
fallen out of favor. Then, in 1897, Bram Stoker produced his literary—and epistolary—
masterpiece and proved that there was (if you’ll pardon the pun) life in the format yet.
The Vampire Diaries seems to take a leaf out of Dracula’s book by having many different characters keep journals. In Stoker’s work of Gothic horror we have Jonathan Harker’s 1 An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings, and other documents are sometimes used.
2 Wikipedia’s entry for Fielding’s wicked satire makes me smile, especially when thinking about Elena Gilbert’s journal writing: it describes Shamela’s female narrator as regularly “wielding a pen and scribbling her diary entries under the most dramatic and unlikely of circumstances.”
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Journal, Dr. Seward’s Diary, Mina Murray’s Journal (later Mina Harker’s Journal), and Lucy Westenra’s Diary. Not to mention all the other forms of documentation (telegrams, a ship’s log, and various newspaper clippings) that appear throughout the story.
In her entry for July 26, Mina reveals her motivations for keeping a journal in the first place:
I am anxious, and it soothes me to express myself here; it is like whispering to one’s self and listening at the same time.
Not wishing to be left out, Mina’s best friend, Lucy, wants to try some journaling of her own—all the cool kids are doing it, after all:
Hillingham, 24 August—I must imitate Mina, and keep writing things down.
As Lucy spends much of the novel trying to emulate the high example of her good friend, it seems only right that this should extend to keeping a diary. Perhaps she even learns what Mina already knows: writing down your deepest hopes and fears can be good for the soul. You can take the time to figure things out and work through mysterious truths. It is—
dare I say it—therapeutic.
On TV, The Vampire Diaries had an earlier precedent where journal-writing characters are concerned in the 6882 Visitor's Guide to Mystic Falls[FIN].indd 165
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paranormal series Roswel , also based on a series of Young Adult books— Roswel High. The show ran for three seasons,3
and throughout the entire run we were treated to main character Liz Parker’s inner thoughts and angst-filled longing for hot alien boy Max in her diary entries. The voice-over worked well to introduce viewers to the residents of the small town of Roswell, New Mexico, and it helped encourage audience identification with sensitive, likeable Liz. However, whereas the Roswel TV series introduced the diary voice-over as an original element, The Vampire Diaries necessarily retains the journaling device between the books and the TV show.
I say “necessarily” because, when something is called The Vampire Diaries, there really does need to be a significant emphasis on the journal element. With Roswell, I always found myself wondering exactly why we needed to see Liz scribbling in her diary. Couldn’t her thoughts and feelings be communicated in other ways? Perhaps through her intense conversations with feisty best friend Maria, or during the many soulful heart-to-hearts with Max.
Still, diaries can be a powerful way of playing with format and enhancing a story—even in a visual format—like in The Vampire Diaries when by the start of episode two Elena and Stefan’s voice-overs intertwined to give them jointly narrated lines. This served to cement their growing connection:
3 Roswell aired on the CW’s antecedent, the WB—an interesting, if not necessarily significant, correlation.
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Elena: Dear diary, this morning is different. There’s change. I can sense it, feel it.
Stefan: I’m awake. For the first time, in a long time, I feel completely and undeniably wide awake.
Elena: For once, I don’t regret the day before it begins.
Stefan: I welcome the day.
Elena & Stefan: Because I know . . .
Stefan: I will see her again.
Elena: I will see him again. For the first time, in a long time, I feel good. (“Night of the Comet,” 1-2) Later on, at the very end of the episode, we learned that it was Elena’s mother who gave Elena her first journal and started her on the writing path. She arrived at Stefan’s house and they watched the comet