Ledger and Lockhurst’s “The Victorian Age” focuses on the feelings of anxiety and ambiguity in the Victorian era. Be it intentional or not, Stoker’s Dracula essentially embodies this mindset, particularly in the way Stoker chose to end his story. In comparison to the intense suspicious atmosphere beginning with Jonathan Harker, then with Lucy, and finally the men’s subsequent vampiric hunt, the culmination of it all feels rather disappointing, or anti-climatic. Count Dracula’s death is uneventful, as he merely turns to dust in the snow: “It was like a miracle; but before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight. I shall be glad as long as I live that even in that moment of final dissolution, there was in the face a look of peace, such as I never could have imagined might have rested there” (Stoker 401). There is no bloody ordeal with the cutting off his head (and neither is he properly stabbed in the heart with a stake?). The vampire’s body is even so old and so ready for release from its evil vampiric form that it disappears into thin air. A final feeling of horror remains in the back of the mind—is it possible Dracula was able to turn into dust himself with the setting of the sun at the exact moment Jonathan and Mr. Morris managed to “fatally” stab him? Mina uses objective words to describe Dracula himself, allowing for no humane identification of the monster with the “body” and its “dissolution.” Not long after, Quincey Morris is given a proper death as he “died, a gallant gentleman” (Stoker 401). Despite Dracula’s demonic characteristics, however, he is able to achieve what Mina believes to be peace in his “dissolution,” or to put it more humanely, death.
Mina talks of happiness in the idea that this horrible monster could have found peace in death like her Lucy did, just as Ledger and Lockhurst pinpoint one cause for Victorian anxiety surrounding their faith: what happens to us after death? The newly established idea of time in the fin de siecle is the source of this anxiety: “On the one hand, there was not enough of it: the accelerated pace of change kept people too busy to assimilate the torrent of new ideas and technologies….Victorians felt they had little opportunity for reflection and often took scant comfort in it” (1055-1056). “Little opportunity of reflection” may go on to mean the purpose of life and what comes afterwards—what we are all living towards.
This fear of not having the chance to reflect on one’s life stretches to everyone in Stoker’s novel. It occurs when Mina is in danger of becoming a vampire, as time becomes more and more of the essence: “You are but a mortal woman. Time is now to be dreaded—since once he put that mark upon your throat” (Stoker 334). Even the vampires, who are caught between life and death, are given an opportunity to reflect. Lucy Westenra is freed from the shackles of vampirism in her “true death” by the hands of Arthur and takes on a “calm that was to reign forever” (Stoker 231). Though less explicit, Count Dracula, despite the fact that he has acted as the ultimate antagonist of the novel, receives the same fate. He is freed and reduced to dust, and now Mina, Dr. Seward, Van Helsing, and Arthur are all freed of their anxiety of what may come of the Count. Speaking for them all, Mina finds satisfaction with both the dissolution of their dangerous enemy and what comes next.