Category: 2023 Blog Post

The Longman Anthology includes this quote by John Morley, “it was the age of science, new knowledge, searching criticism, followed by multiple doubts and shaken beliefs.” The discoveries of Darwin and the accompanying implications of the contemporary early archaeology have thrown off thousands of years of faith in creationism and made them ridiculous.

May Kendall’s poem “The Lay of the Trilobite” playfully addresses humanity’s new-found upheaval over scientific revelations through the eyes of an ancient arthropod. “’How all your faiths are ghosts and dreams,/ How in the silent sea/ Your ancestors were Monotremes –/ Whatever these may be;/ How you evolved your shining lights/ Of wisdom and perfection/ From Jelly-Fish and Trilobites/ By Natural Selection” (l 25-32). The dismissal of the previously held beliefs as “ghosts and dreams” is excruciating to people who held creationism as not only true but holy up until now, and the apparently ridiculous new truth of natural selection is an especially hard pill to swallow with the ridiculous and degrading assertions that humans descended indirectly from plain animals: a monotreme (an animal that the speaker is unfamiliar with), jelly fish, and the comical and extinct trilobite.

In line 16 the speaker declares “And I should be a Man!” A triumphant statement in which the word man is capitalized and elevated, distinguishing its category above common nature. Up until Darwin’s proposals in On the Origin of Species, people were able to assume that their human form was indeed holy, made in God’s image. With the revelation the people may have simply evolved from beasts, educated society was thrown into tension. A theme strongly depicted in horror literature of the time is rooted in this new reality that humanity was not inherently separate from lower nature, including the absolute fear of regression. In The Island of Doctor Moreau, the titular Doctor attempts to construct new humans surgically from animals and watches them rapidly regress to their animalistic urges. Dracula, in contrast, fully embraces the holiness and nobility of man in an epic battle for the immortality of the human soul, in which the educated protagonists demonstrate their uniquely human nerve and unselfishness in the face of Dracula’s supernatural evil. May Kendall promptly pokes fun at both responses, pointing out the frenzied but circular nature of philosophy, saying “’You’ve Kant to make your brains go round,/ Hegel you have to clear them” (ll 33-34). Yet the Trilobite’s statement that “I never took to rhyme,” (l 54) Kendall draws attention to the absurdity of her own personification of the trilobite to prove a point, assuring readers that her own poem too is absurdist and should be given no more weight than any side of the argument.

In response to the Trilobite’s line “I didn’t care—I didn’t know/ That I was a Crustacean.’” Kendall includes the footnote that “He was not a Crustacean. He has since discovered that he was an Arachnid, or something similar. But he says it does not matter. He says they told him wrong once, and they may again.” Once again, Kendall’s Trilobite asserts that it does not matter. He ridicules both sides of the argument that humanity is so heavily invested in as pointless. Yet he refuses to fix his mistake. For the sake of a rhyme and correcting a technical inaccuracy of the poem, Kendall included this note, but it speaks so perfectly to the human resistance to changing a long-held view. As the Trilobite has observed, people don’t truly form an attachment to the logic of their stance but rather the simple familiarity of them. In this way, the scientific method is a deeply non-ergonomic design in which scientists continually readjust their beliefs and suspicions as to how the world works based off of new information. This naturally creates a distrust of the process that asks people to discard their old beliefs and never promises to be correct. It is uncomfortable, even to the Trilobite, who adopts a humanism in refusing to adjust his previous belief. (This same human tendency is represented in Dracula when Professor Van Helsing must slowly lead John Steward to the conclusion before him. Having built up the logic of one belief system all his life, Steward cannot bring himself to abandon it for the truth.)

The Fin de Siècle was an era filled with revolutionary change. At the heart of changing perspectives, was a shifting discourse surrounding the definition of femininity. The exploration into gender questioned ideas of good and bad, modesty and sin, the devil and God, and how all these comprised a woman’s role in society. This exploratory discourse is represented in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, through the evolutionary shift of damsel, Lucy Westenra. In a concluding passage on her vampirism, the language used to describe Lucy’s metamorphosis shows the polar perspectives of female purity during the end of the Nineteenth century. 

Lucy Westenra is first introduced to the novel as the embodiment of an angel. She is beautiful, pure, and absolutely captures the attention of all men who cross her path. Lucy is always categorized by the “angelic beauty” of her eyes, and on her deathbed this pure form of beauty is especially present (154). As Lucy succumbs to death her beauty grows, “restoring the beauty of life” back into her corpse (158). Her likeness to “light” and “loveliness” marks a sort of dedication to her purity. While Lucy is a human on earth, she is akin to such adjectives to mark her as a proper, pure woman – the ultimate form anyone could hope for. It is in the peace and serenity of death that she truly shines “every hour seemed to be enhancing her loveliness” and Lucy continues to allure all her male solicitors (162). Stuck between her two forms, and the two worlds of life and death, Lucy is still viewed as pure and lovely. In the liminal space Lucy occupies before her soul is completely overtaken by the “devil” she is able to shift into a transcendent pure beauty. In death, she is akin to an angel more than ever, and the men, specifically her husband Arthur, have trouble resisting her dazzling beauty (155). In life Lucy is just irresistibly beautiful and filled with natural “light and loveliness” (155). Because of her perceived purity, she is given grace even as sin slowly overtakes her fleeting soul. 

Once Lucy is fully transformed into a vampire, her beauty does not leave her but the discourse surrounding her shifts. Where she once embodied purity through her beauty, in her new form her apperance is sinful, transforming her into a sort of seductress. Lucy the vampire’s sweetness has turned to “adamantine heartless cruelty” and her purity to “voluptuous wantonness” (199). Later, the blood stains her, in turn staining her reputation and forever “stain[ing] the purity of her lawn death robe” (200). The  sin has transformed her, and therefore transformed the innocence of her beauty. Lucy is no less beautiful, however the interpretation of her beauty has shifted and turned her into a ravaging seductress. Even her characteristic eyes have changed, they are now “unclean and full of hell fire” no longer the “gentle orbs” they once were (200). Although her appearance has shifted, Lucy’s grip on the men in the story has not, and they are still wildly (just now sinfully) attracted to her. In a climatic moment, Lucy beckons to Arthur, drawing him into her: “leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together” (200). Lucy is more direct than ever, and her call is irresistible – Arthur has to be physically restrained from her as if he is resisting a siren. As Lucy has been overcome by the devil, her beauty has turned to sin. Like the blood that stains her robes, her sexuality has now been asserted – forever staining her reputation. 

Over the course of Dracula, the dialogic shift in the description of Lucy’s beauty tracks the expression of feminine sexuality, and the perception of it during the Fin de Siècle. In life, Lucy’s beauty is representative of an inherent purity marking her as angelic. However, when she overcomes a formal shift, her beauty transforms with her. Lucy the vampire is now seen as dirtied by the blood she craves, newly aligning her to the devil and sin. This classifies beauty as something inherent and uncontrollable, and when a woman becomes in control of it she somehow becomes dangerous – as if she was bloodthirsty. The expression of Lucy’s beauty throughout Dracula tracks the end of the 19th century’s understanding of a woman’s sexuality and, in turn, power.

During Jonathan’s trip to Transylvania, he is fascinated by the way the locals look. In some of the towns he passed through, “[t]he women looked pretty, except when you got near them…” and of course, “[t]he strangest figures we saw were the Slovaks, who are more barbarian than the rest…” (9). He doesn’t even think of them as people. Regarding the Slovaks, he was told that they were “…very harmless and rather wanting in natural self-assertion,” which just goes to show how ignorant he is of cultures outside of England (9). While racism and xenophobia do play a role in this, I think class does too. Jonathan is very dismissive of the peasants’ superstitions and concern for him. When his landlady pleads with him to not go to the Count’s castle on St. George’s Day, he calls it “…very ridiculous…” but he does feel uneasy (11). While this could just be a shortcoming of Jonathan’s character, I think Bram Stoker means it as commentary on the ‘dignified English society’, because part of the reason Jonathan is so skeptical of the locals is that they use crucifixes and idols, which “English Churchm[e]n” look down on (11). However, he does not refuse the crucifix his landlady offers him, because it would be rude, which I think begins to hint at the role of class in the novel (11). 

After his harrowing ride with the superstitious peasants and wolves to the Count’s castle, the Count’s civilized “…courteous welcome seemed to have dissipated all [Jonathan’s] doubts and fears” (23). I think it’s funny that Jonathan can pinpoint what it is about the peasants that makes him feel uneasy: they are funny looking, superstitious, and worship idols, but he can’t with Dracula. When “the Count leaned over [him] and his hands touched [him, he] could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank…” (25). And this comes after Jonathan describes Dracula’s as having fangs, claws, and hair growing out of his palms (24-25). Because Dracula has thus far acted respectable and courteous toward Jonathan and is a count who knows a lot about England and can speak English, he sees no reason to see any of these features and doubt Dracula’s humanity like he did with the Slovaks. It made me wonder if Jonathan had ever seen a Romanian or if he thought all Romanians were as alarming looking as Dracula. This also plays into Stoker’s possible commentary on English society during the fin de siècle because Jonathan’s obviously an educated person since he passed his solicitor examination before leaving London (22). It says a lot about English society that an educated person knows so little about people outside of England, especially because with new technology like the trains Jonathan takes to get to Romania, it is not difficult to travel anymore.  

I feel like Stoker could be pointing out the irony of a person from a country that prided itself on being scientific and advanced and superior to other countries being completely out of place in another country that’s considered inferior. And he doesn’t stand out because he’s better than everyone else, he’s just ill-equipped. He doesn’t speak the language the peasants speak (he has to pull out his polyglot dictionary to figure out that the locals are talking about witches and hell [12]). He doesn’t take their superstitions seriously and ends up being kidnapped by a creature the scientifically minded British don’t believe exist, and he doesn’t understand paprika. One would think that someone who lives in a country that had colonized almost half the world would know a little bit more about people and cultures outside of their small English bubble. 

In the book Dracula, Lucy Westenra is turned into a vampire. Lucy before her vampire days was truly a pure woman in the eyes of society. She had three marriage suitors who she wished to marry because she did not want to make any of them sad. She is the daughter of wealth and Dracula’s first English victim who falls under his spell of vampirism. When four men first see her form, she is described as “sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness” (225). In this description there is the obvious indicator of who she was before, sweet, caring, and pure. This vampirism turned her into the opposite of what she once was, pure turned impure. Using the word adamantine, there is the connotation that Lucy now has her own authority. She has made up her own mind and will not be persuaded. Instead of wanting to pick three men to marry, she instead now wants to likely destroy them all. Seeing her autonomy as a negative word, due to the way the setup of the sentence is with good to bad adjectives, there is the idea that men do not like a woman with their own autonomy. Not only this, but the men also see her as “heartless” and with “wantonness.” Wantonness means having a reckless sort of freedom which Lucy now possesses as she does not have the constrictions of time and mortality as the humans have. She also now does not have to be tied and married to a man. Instead, she can be free. The fact that the men in the story view this as reckless also goes to show that they are unsure if she can make her own choices correctly. Like the “new woman” we discussed in class, Lucy has total freedom and autonomy and the men in the story are intimidated by it. Lucy takes on this “new woman” form and through the eyes of men she is seen as evil. Not only this, but the element of purity is also mentioned a few times on page 225 when the men of the story are witnessing her new form in the graveyard. “The lips were crimson with fresh blood, and that the stream had trickled over her chin and stained the purity of her lawn death-robe” (225). Purity is mentioned as something that has become stained and taken away from her due to this vampire that lurks. It is even seen in her story that she is killing children and this is likely where the blood came from, an obvious pushback against the idea that all women should have children. The children that she killed are the source of the stain on her purity. To the men, she is a completely different woman and one they would likely not marry. The idea of purity in a woman goes far back in time, even in looking at medieval romances. In French medieval romances, there is the depiction of women as either Mary or Eve, pure or evil and tempting. In this vampire form, Lucy becomes Eve and continues this dichotomy of women as only one of two things in the eyes of men. “at that moment the remnant of my love passed into hate and loathing” (225). Through the writing of her character, Lucy goes from seeing herself as unworthy of men but being wanted by them, to realizing she does not need them and being hated by them. Lucy writes to Mina in the beginning part of the book “why are men so noble when we women are so little worthy of them?” (67). This is a sharp contrast to her later on when she tries to lure Arthur to her vampire form, once again displaying this idea of a tempting woman. Lucy is a very interesting character to read as she changes from one extreme to the other, she displays the only view that men had of women during the Victorian era, either a “new woman” or their pure view of a woman who bends to the will of men. Women were pushed into one category and there was not much room to be in-between.

The fin de siècle proved challenging times with the many advancements at the end of the century. Notably, Gothic novels told tales of fantastical monsters preying upon powerless humans, as portrayed by the vampires in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. During the same time period, the British Empire expanded and occupied nearly half the known world. Dracula exemplifies many aspects of the fin de siècle through its characters. In the passage where Lucy is first bit by a vampire, Dracula’s lust for blood mimics the actions of the ever-growing British Empire.

Stoker’s use of contrasting colors paints Lucy as the vulnerable innocent and Dracula as the unknown monster, as is the common dynamic in Gothic texts. In the passage where Mina searches for a lost sleeping-walking Lucy, she finds her friend asleep on their bench by the church with “something, long and black, bending over the half-reclining white figure” (101). Lucy’s position as a figure “half-reclining with her head lying over the back of the seat” leaves her vulnerable, with her neck exposed to any vampire that happens upon her, such as Dracula. As the audience, we know Dracula is the former figure since Mina later describes his “white face and red, gleaming eyes” (101), which are tell-tale vampire traits throughout the book. Furthermore, vampires are more monster than human as Mina notes that Dracula looked like “whether man or beast, I could not tell” (101). Mina continuously describes Dracula as “something dark” and Lucy as “snowy white” (101). In this way, Stoker associates dark, shadowed colors with Gothic monsters, in this case vampires, while pure white colors associate with innocent, helpless prey, such as humans. This contrast between the two figures fits the Gothic theme of unnatural monsters preying upon human victims.

The one anomaly to this color contrast is that Dracula, a dark figure, also has a “white face” (101), even though white is the color associated with Lucy and innocent humans. However, this anomaly allows Dracula to mirror the actions of the British Empire at the time of the fin de siècle. By 1919, the British Empire ruled most of the world, including Canada, Australia, parts of Africa, and multiple pieces of other continents (as depicted in the map from Washington Post shown in class). According to the Longman Anthology text, the Empire perceived this rapid expansion as their “duty to spread British order and culture throughout the world” (1064). This expansion led to some wars and displeasure from the conquered people, some of whom died in British concentration camps (Longman 1064). Interestingly, this duty was phrased “The White Man’s Burden,” and Dracula is a terrifying vampire with a “white face” who sucks blood in order to spread vampirism. Cambridge historian J.R. Seeley, in 1883, describes the empire’s expansion as one who seemed “to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence mind” (Longman 1064). Similarly, Dracula has “a fit of absent mind” since doesn’t care who his victims are—as long as if he eats blood to sustain himself, it doesn’t matter who it takes it from. The British Empire, to some extent, didn’t care who they conquered as long as if the resources from that continent sustained the empire.

The Longman Anthology also states that an Englishman had a duty similar to “The White Man’s Burden,” where he deserved to “rule whatever childlike or womanly peoples he came across” (1063). Lucy resembles both a childlike and womanlike figure. When Mina leads her freshly bitten friend home, she comments Lucy had “the obedience of a child.” As Lucy wakes from her sleep walking, Mina’s description of Lucy’s “moaning” and how she “always wakes prettily…she did not lose her grace” sexualizes her feminine beauty (102). Dracula’s preying upon whatever childlike and womanly peoples he comes across—since he can thrive off the blood of anyone—fits both the description of a Victorian Englishman and the broader implications of the British Empire conquering the world.

Even though Dracula is a foreigner from Transylvania in the novel, he perfects his Englishman façade and moves to England. Dracula, determined to pass as a real Englishman in every way, even learns to perfect the English accent (27). Dracula’s actions mirror not just an Englishman but the entire British Empire at the time. In the same way vampirism sucks the life out of others to selfishly empower the vampire, the British Empire’s expansion trampled foreign lands in order to empower the empire.

Content warning: discussion of sexual assault

It is no surprise that John Gray, a Catholic priest, would include a subtil serpent in his poetry. In Gray’s poem “The Vines,” there is a snake who facilitates the immoral sexual activities of personified plants; he does this by using words and social position to create a stupefying environment. This leaves the feminine plants prone sexual predation. In this way, the poem depicts and condemns rape and the people who let it happen.

The first characters introduced are Bramble and Woodbine, a newly married couple. Bramble “clutches for his bride, / Lately she was by his side,” implying a dazed bedroom scene, as if the Bramble is groping through his bed half asleep. The second part of the quotation may be a paraphrase of Bramble’s words, like he is mumbling and looking for the Woodbine. The next line introduces Woodbine as having “gummy hands.” It may be a criticism from Bramble, that Woodbine sticks to other things and is unfaithful to him. However, it could also be the speaker undercutting Bramble’s expectation that Woodbine is sexually available to him. She is clinging to anything she can to get away from the Bramble.

Stanza four has two of the same lines as the first, those being “Bramble clutches for his bride” and “Woodbine, with her gummy hands,” which establish a return to the scene after stanzas two and three. Now, Bramble has found Woodbine, and “All his horny claws expands; / She has withered in his grasp.” The word “horny” carries its modern meaning of “lecherous.” The word “claws” makes this image explicitly menacing. The peculiar choice to use an antiquated plural (“claws expands” instead of “claws expand”) works to posit Bramble as old, ugly, lecherous, and violent. The Woodbine cannot get away, but why?

Her gummy hands may be one reason. But before this scene, other scenes of languid violence littered this picture. Something terrible has happened to “painted ivy”; she is “stretched upon the bank, all torn, / Sinewy though she be.” The combination of her being “painted” and “torn” evoke a pretty woman, maybe even a prostitute, brutalized and left “stretched” in a vulnerable position. This was once a strong woman, however, as she is “sinewy.”  This confirms that the “winter” has made a change to these plants, possibly including the Woodbine. Convolvuluses are “love-lorn” flowers that “cease to creep” as they did before. Flowers are associated with female genitalia and youth. Such a verb as “creep” implies furtivity. I posit that the convolvuluses are young girls who are frightened and saddened by what they see has happened to the ivy, as if they had crept closer to see.

These plant characters are in a stupor, unable to stop themselves or others from acting on their impulses. But let us not assume that this is an organic phenomenon. I propose that the snake has dictated this condition. The poem starts with a quotation from an unnamed speaker: “have you seen the listening snake?” The snake who dictates when winter is over is one that no one has seen, at least not lately. They may even doubt if he is real. The other characters must know that he is their watchman, because they trust his authority about when the dawn is coming, although he is underground. This act of “listening,” and telling plants to “listen” as he does in the last stanza, is his way of denying what is happening to the female plants. Someone asks “who tells dawning,” and he  continues stalling, saying “listen, soon.” I am watching, he says, trust me. He will do this until the “day burst winter’s bands” and brings the plants back to full consciousness. In this stanza, it says the snake “listens for the dawn of day,” but in the last stanza he moves the time to the afternoon. He is doing this is in self-preservation. He is “listening death away,” meaning his life is being sustained by making these heinous things happen. If we interpret “death” as the French “La Petite Mort,” he is also observing the sex out of existence.

The “half-born tendrils” in the last line may be the offspring of these plant unions. They, too, are grasping, just like their father “clutche[d] for his bride.” The evil done here creates more evil. This serpent is a facilitator only truly evil sex: rape.

Dracula is a fascinating novel, telling of many of the conflicting ideals present in the fin de siècle – within it, Stoker’s indirect commentary on many issues such as foreign presence within England, the social place of a woman, religious ideology and the virtues of spreading technology are very present. As Dr. Seward’s diary describes the vampiric Lucy as he, Van Helsing, Arthur, and Quincey stand over her body to, in Van Helsing’s words, help her to “die in truth” (229), Stoker’s description of Lucy’s body lends itself to a deeper read relating to many of the topics he skirts around.

“She seemed like a nightmare of Lucy as she lay there; the pointed teeth, the bloodstained, voluptuous mouth – which it made one shudder to see – the whole carnal and unspiritual appearance, seeming like a devilish mockery of Lucy’s sweet purity” (228). In this passage, “sweet purity” can relate to many forms of purity, including religious and sexual – additionally, as the proper woman during this time was supposed to be above such base inclinations and revelatory expressions, and Lucy has succumbed to corruption in her transition to vampire. Such focus on her mouth as the means of feeding and transmitting her corruption to others also brings to mind sexual undertones – describing it to have “pointed teeth”, a “bloodstained… mouth” relates it to greed and unnatural hunger, animalistic and inhuman in nature. This connects Lucy again to religious corruption, as she cannot help but to become a gluttonous version of her former pure self; additionally, much like the vampire women Johnathan Harker witnessed at Dracula’s castle, her mouth is described as “voluptuous”, and her whole self as “carnal”. This “devilish mockery” of the former Lucy’s innocence and vivacity creates a sacrilegious departure from “sweet purity” and the goodness of the once-human woman. Van Helsing’s words on page 232: “No longer is she the devil’s Un-Dead. She is God’s true dead, whose soul is with Him!” illustrate quite clearly that those fallen to corruption – that of gluttony, lust, or a departure from Christianity altogether – now, according to the beliefs Stoker is reflecting of his time, belong to the devil.

Here, we are viewing Lucy corrupted: where before she was sweet and pure, now she is a carnal representation of sensuality, greedy desire, and a “devilish mockery” of Christian morality and the “ideal woman”. Where we see this in Lucy’s corrupted form, the opposite of this is now contrasted through Mina’s representation of an ideal woman, as she comforts Arthur maternally on pg. 244-45. She is continuously attributed as being “one of God’s women” by Van Helsing, and other similar praise-worthy descriptors: dear, sweet, kind; additionally, he later says that she is a woman with a “man’s brain… and woman’s heart” (250). Despite this and her considerable contributions in aiding their hunt for Dracula, she is excluded from any information regarding the men’s pursuits in deference towards her woman-ness.

During class, we discussed some of the deeper metaphors behind vampirism in Stoker’s novel. We talked about xenophobia, classism, and immigrants. In this passage, as it relates vampires to the idea of a foreign agent introducing corruption to the good people of England, we see that foreign equals bad things – indeed, it is equated to the devil. Stoker also equates the loss of purity with being corrupted at all, and adds a new level by linking it to an inherent absence of Christian values, as vampires are repelled by a cross.

Stoker takes a political stance on multiple levels. In this case the stance is most visible on the topics of women’s place in society and the disapproval of foreign influence on the English; additionally, Stoker is providing indirect commentary on the benefits of innovation. As the paragraph on page 228 continues, Van Helsing uses his scientific knowledge of doctoral procedures (i.e. science) to prevent Lucy’s continuing “Un-Death”. Although Stoker has married the innovation of the Industrial Revolution with superstition, his moral heroes use modern technology such as railways, medicine, typewriters, and telegrams to begin to coordinate their efforts to stop the foreign influence of the pre-Industrial era: see Dracula’s ship, letters instead of telegrams, etc.

Dracula is a fascinating case study of late Victorian England’s negative attitudes toward immigrants. The fin de siècle was a tumultuous and uncertain time for English society as a whole and was marked by changes that were seen as frightening, unwelcome and overwhelming. This led many to resist change in various forms, including immigration of people from other countries, due to fears about England becoming tainted or corrupted by foreign influence. This was accompanied by the Social Darwinist movement, which used Darwin’s studies of evolution in birds to justify treating non-white and non-English people with contempt and disgust. In Dracula, Bram Stoker encapsulates and reflects the many anxieties surrounding foreign immigration and influence, especially through the character of Dracula.  

The idea that immigrants could corrupt England and force it backward in time is evident from the very first chapter. When Jonathan Harker first arrives in Eastern Europe and informs people there of his eventual destination, they desperately try to convince him to turn around and leave. An older woman begs him not to leave, or at least to go on a different night, and when she realizes she can’t convince him, she gives him a protective charm. Instead of listening to her, however, Jonathan brushes off her concerns as “very ridiculous” and says she was making him “not feel comfortable” (4). The use of the phrase “very ridiculous” suggests that Jonathan considers himself superior to the people whose country he is in simply because he is British and there on “important business” (4). Additionally, Jonathan’s complaint that the lady who was desperately trying to help him was making him uncomfortable further conveys his sense of superiority over others simply because he is British. He seems to think that these people are “backwards” and too superstitious to bother listening to them. Furthermore, when Jonathan arrives at Dracula’s castle, he quotes Dracula saying “I rejoice also that there is a chapel of old times. We Transylvanian nobles love not to think that our bones may lie amongst the common dead” (20). Jonathan’s modern, young, and well-furnished lifestyle is instantly contrasted with old Dracula’s preoccupation with history and death, shown by his reference to “a chapel of old times” and where his family’s “bones” will lie. This serves to reflect the English sentiment of the time that they were more modern and therefore more “advanced” than other societies, due to the widespread trend of the development of new technologies that were propelling their country forward, while leaving others behind. 

Not only is the “modern” Jonathan contrasted with the ancient foreigner Dracula, but Stoker also adds a more sinister aspect to this contrast with the implication that foreigners might attempt to corrupt England and drag it into the past or destroy it forever. For example, Jonathan discovers early on that Dracula’s castle is “a veritable prison” and that he is “a prisoner” (22). This use of the words ‘prison’ and ‘prisoner’ preys on the fears of English people at the time to suggest that foreigners might want to ‘trap’ or ‘imprison’ England’s progress and modernity, as well as its people. Furthermore, the novel opens with the premise that Dracula requires assistance from Jonathan to move from Transylvania to England, but he is later discovered to be a blood-sucking monster. This is accompanied by a scene in which he is caught feeding off Lucy. Stoker describes this scene as follows: “There was undoubtedly something, long and black, bending over the half-reclining white figure. I called in fright, “Lucy! Lucy!” and something raised a head, and from where I was I could see a white face and red, gleaming eyes.” The use of the imagery of “half-reclining white figure” contrasted with “something long and black” suggests a corruption of someone who is “white” and “pure” with something that is “black” and “impure.” The implications of this contrast are numerous, but in this context, the imagery serves to reinforce the message of an evil foreigner who is determined to come to England to spread corruption and evil. In this way, then, Stoker’s Dracula successfully and memorably reflects the anxieties of the time concerning foreigners.  

I love Dracula!