Partly Cloudy, 64°
Errol Henry, Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, believes that he has finally unlocked the hidden subtext of Brian Russell's '13 final paper for ENGL0410: "Fantasy Books That Were Written Before 1900 And Are Therefore Classics."
"I believe," stated Henry, peering over his monocle, "that Mr. Russell was writing his essay not about the villain Dracula, as he appears to, but rather, about his section leader, whom he likens to a vampire."
Russell penned his ENGL0410 essay, "Dracula Is Not Dead: Vampires Who Walk Among Us" in the Fall of 2009, beginning the assignment in a frenzied sweat approximately 45 minutes before it was due. Scholars across the globe have been parsing its subtleties ever since.
"For instance," points out Professor Elmer Yates of Harvard University, who gnashed his teeth angrily when he heard that Professor Henry had successfully cracked the essay's secret before him, "Russell has chosen not to double-space his paper. Is this a metaphor for how he feels suffocated by the education system? Or was his version of Microsoft Word out of date?"
Russell's section leader was also stunned by the complexity of the student's paper. His comments praise a "fascinating connection between the vampire and the Brown University English grad student." Deep, probing questions also pepper the margins of Russell's paper. Questions such as: "Why didn't you staple this?"
In his C+ essay, Russell proposes that Dracula did not actually die at the end of the novel, and that Stoker intended Dracula's survival as a "mythological explanation" for why there are so many soul-sucking vampires roaming the earth today, including his English TA.
These are not actual bloodsucking vampires, Russell assures his reader in 12-point Times New Roman. These are metaphorical vampires who "suck out your life force until you just want to drop out of school and join the Thayer Street motorcycle gang."
Russell dropped several hints in his paper that sparked the idea in Professor Henry's mind that the whole essay employs secret code to show just how much the current sophomore loathed his section leader.
A particularly sly passage read, "One example of a modern day vampire would be my section leader, who sucks all the fun out of cool books like Dracula and doesn't even let us watch the movie during section."
"I thought, am I reading too much into this?" Henry recalled. "Would it be too much of a leap to conclude from that sentence that Russell did not like his section leader?"
Running only on adrenaline during his midnight brainstorming session, Henry rushed over to his desk and quickly pounded out a twenty-page article proposing that Russell's mysterious essay was rooted in an episode of teenage angst over his fun-sucking section leader.
After the article's publication in the Oxford Literary Journal, Russell formally stepped forward to confirm Henry's conclusions. Arthur Miller did the same in 1982 when critics finally realized that The Crucible was secretly a huge metaphor for McCarthyism; so did Disney when scholars from Harvard first noticed the parallels between Hamlet and The Lion King, which might be significant for some as-of-yet undetermined reason.
