Dracula

:Alternate meaning: Dracula (orchid genus).

Analysis

The novel is narrated very effectively by multiple voices — Jonathan's journal of his trip to Transylvania, Mina's diary, and Seward's recorded journal, as well as letters and newspaper items. Although somewhat crude and certainly sensational, the novel also does have psychological power, and the sexual longings underlying the vampire attacks are manifest. The pace is relaxed and atmospheric and the characters richer than one might expect.

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Despite its important contributions to the vampire myth, several popular tropes are absent: for instance, Count Dracula is killed by knives, not a wooden stake; the destruction of the vampire Lucy is a three-part process (staking, decapitation, and garlic in the mouth) not the simple stake-only procedure often found in later vampire stories. Dracula also has the ability to travel as a mist and to scale the external walls of his castle. One thing Stoker definitely added to a vampire's qualities is the inability to be seen in mirrors, not something accounted for in traditional Eastern European folklore.

Related Topics:
Decapitation - Garlic - Folklore

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It is also notable in the novel that Dracula can walk about in the daylight, in bright sunshine, though apparently without the ability to use most of his powers, like turning into mist or a bat. He is still strong and fast enough to struggle with and escape from most of his male pursuers, in a scene in the book. Traditional vampire folklore does not usually hold that sunlight is fatal to vampires though they are nocturnal. It is only with the film Nosferatu that the daylight is depicted as deadly to vampires.

Related Topics:
Nocturnal - Nosferatu

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Modern analysts have detected in Dracula a strong sexual component. As one critic wrote:

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::What has become clearer and clearer, particularily in the fin de siecle years of the twentieth century, is that the novel's power has its source in the sexual implications of the blood exchange between the vampire and his victims...Dracula has embedded in it a very disturbing psychosexual allegory whose meaning I am not sure Stoker entirely understood: that there is a demonic force at work in the world whose intent is to eroticize women. In Dracula we see how that force transforms Lucy Westenra, a beautiful nineteen-year-old virgin, into a shameless slut. (Leonard Wolf, "Introduction" to the Signet Classic Edition, 1992).

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"Dracula" should also be viewed as a novel about the struggle between tradition and modernity at the fin de siècle. Throughout, there are various references to changing gender roles; Mina Harker is a thoroughly modern women, as she uses (then) modern technologies such as the typewriter, but she still embodies a traditional gender role as assitant school mistress.

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Stoker's novel also deals in general with the conflict between the world of the past, full of folklore, myth, legend, and religious piety and the emerging modern world of technology, logical positivism, and secularism. Dr. van Helsing epitomizes this struggle because he is doctor who used extremely (then) modern technologies like blood transfusions; but, he is not so modern as to eschew the idea that a demonic being could be causing Lucy's illness, thus he spreads garlic around the sashes and doors of her room and makes her wear a garlic necklace. After Lucy's death, he receives an indulgence from a Catholic cleric to use the Eucharist, held by the Roman Catholic church to be transubstantiated into the body and blood of Jesus Christs, in his fight against Dracula.

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Jonathan Harker's character also shows Stoker's apparent dislike of a strictly rational modern world. Visiting Count Dracula in Eastern Europe, Jonathan scoffs at the peasants who tell him to delay his visit until after Saint George's feast day. As a rational solicitor, Jonathan is concerned ?with facts-- bare meagre facts, verified by books and figures, and of which there can be no doubt? ("Dracula"). All of Jonathan?s rationality weakens him to what he witnesses at Castle Dracula. For example, the first time Jonathan witnesses the Count crawling down the castle face down, he is in complete disbelief. Not believing what he sees, he attempts to explain what he saw as a trick of the moon light.

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