Essay about Novel Dracula by Bram Stoker

“Dracula is an important novel told in an interesting way. It centers around the mysterious Count Dracula, who is moving to England from Transylvania, and those he comes into contact with who become his victims. It is told from the point of view of many different characters through journal entries, diaries, and newspaper clippings to tell the story. The novel begins with Jonathan Harker traveling to Transylvania to meet with Dracula to finalize the sale of a castle to Dracula in England.

While there, Harker is attacked by Dracula’s brides and he finds out the true nature of Dracula. After Harker is attacked, Dracula takes a ship to England. When Dracula arrives in England, he attacks a woman named Lucy Westenra. She is bitten, and Dr. Van Helsing tries to treat her with blood transfusions to try to stop her from becoming a vampire. She later dies and is reanimated as a vampire before being killed for good by Arthur Holmwood, Lucy’s fiancé, who stakes her. Eventually, at the end of the novel, Dracula is killed when Quincey Morris stabs Dracula in the heart.

In the novel, Dracula is seen as evil. When Jonathan Harker first arrives in Transylvania, Dracula tries to be a good host and tries to make Harker feel welcomed, but the nature of the vampire takes over and Dracula becomes more of an evil character. Van Helsing, Arthur Holmwood, and the others that fight against Dracula are seen as brave heroes, going against an immortal creature to defeat the evil.

The novel is modern in many ways. The horror of what happens to those who become victims of Dracula play off of fears that many people have today. People are always worried when there are reports of robberies and murders in the community around them, somewhere they’re supposed to feel safe, and the characters in the novel were worried about the attacks that happened once Lucy was turned into a vampire and Mina was bitten by Dracula. The fact that a vampire is created when a mortal is bitten by a vampire, and the vampire feeds on their blood, could be seen in modern times as the fear of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. The novel also deals with the fear out “outsiders” in society, people who are seen as different and how they are not as trusted as those who are from the country they move to.

Even though Dracula as a novel and the character are so well known today, a few of the vampire stereotypes that we have in current vampire literature were not included in Dracula. For example, Dracula was not young and beautiful as many modern vampires seem to be. Many recent vampire novels have the vampire returning to a point in youth where they were most beautiful when they are made into a vampire. In Dracula, Count Dracula was old, with a white mustache, pointy ears, and hairy palms. Dracula in the novel does not have a reflection in mirrors. In modern stories, the vampires sometimes will have a reflection, as in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series. However, the aversion to garlic and religious objects which are sometimes in modern stories of the vampire are also in Dracula.

The theme of Dracula, and why I believe it is an important novel, deals with many things we are currently dealing with in modern times. Dracula deals with the fear of the unknown and xenophobia. It also deals with superstitions and how people react when confronted with them. The people of Transylvania very much believed that Dracula was a true vampire, something to be feared, while people elsewhere did not take the threat so seriously until presented with proof about the existence of vampires. Count Dracula was an outsider to England, and when strange attacks began happening, the blame was placed on the odd looking man from a different country. In Dracula it turned out that the foreigner was the cause of the attacks, but in modern times so often the minorities in a country are the ones blamed for anything that goes wrong, even if that group of people were not involved in the crime. Dracula is a story about good versus evil, and the use of Christian symbols against Dracula could be seen as an idea that through faith, especially the Catholic faith, evils are able to be defeated and overcome.”

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