The Third Time is Not the Charm: A "Dracula" Discussion

Context is key – what kind of fears and anxieties of the 1890s do you think this novel might address?

This was my third time reading this novel, and it’s just one of those novels that I can’t get into for some reason. That being said, I think – especially given the context of the past year – invisible killers are an obvious application to this. Germs were not understood, as an example; it’s human nature to personify that which we don’t understand. It’s almost as though we think that by giving something a human face, we can understand it better. It no different than the anthropomorphizing of the gods from the Greek and Roman pantheons, giving concepts and ideas human visages: ocean, sky, death, love, war etc.

So, some invisible killer is lurking about. It seems that the expected thing to do is to personify the notion and give something an identity as a scary bastardization of the human ideal. Vampires are depicted as human, but not. There’s a removal from the human in some distinct and intrinsic way, but it’s difficult to describe. I think the application vampires would have been a way that people could reconcile loss; in some ways, it’s probably easier to imagine some supernatural monster came and wreaked havoc than accepting the reality of the situation whether it was a matter of death, disappearance, or drastic change in health. In some ways, the belief in vampires is actually very understandable. It’s easier to believe a vampire or a person inhabited by a demon was at fault than to accept that your child just died or went missing. It’s an explanation that is easier to swallow because it veils the problems that people may or may not have wanted or been able to confront.

Vampires, by the time of Stoker, were a metaphor about confronting the unseen and unexplainable in many ways. There are myths all over the world about vampires – in every culture there is mythology surrounding the undead, and mythology was able to bridge the gap in people’s explanations.