{"id":1061,"date":"2023-09-29T13:23:03","date_gmt":"2023-09-29T17:23:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/?p=1061"},"modified":"2023-09-29T13:23:03","modified_gmt":"2023-09-29T17:23:03","slug":"were-all-sinners-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/2023\/09\/29\/were-all-sinners-here\/","title":{"rendered":"We’re all Sinners here"},"content":{"rendered":"

Themes of Good vs. Evil and Sin vs. Virtue are at the heart of Bram Stoker\u2019s <\/span>Dracula. <\/span><\/i>Immediately there is strong opposition between a fearless band of heroes and the demonic-beast Dracula. Through the binaries these oppositional identities create, Stoker projects ideas of Imperialism and Christian hegemony to create a highly fictionalized tale rooted in the actual world. Carol Senf does not ignore this discourse, and in <\/span>Dracula: The Unseen Face in the Mirror <\/span><\/i>she dissects the \u201creal\u201d differences between the \u201cheroes’ ‘ and \u201cvillains\u201d of the nineteenth century novel. Although the gang of heroes uphold a \u201cmoral backbone\u201d to justify their actions, it is evident that the story of <\/span>Dracula i<\/span><\/i>s not as simple as separating Good from Evil.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Because of the epistolary format of Stoker\u2019s <\/span>Dracula,<\/span><\/i> the reader is immediately immersed in a set point of view. Proper Englishman, Jonathan Harker is the first of the gang to experience the evil of Dracula, and describes him with \u201cdeep burning eyes\u201d reminiscent of the \u201cdemons of the pit\u201d and \u201cflames of hell\u201d (Stoker 44\/55). The Count is akinned to images of Hell and Satan, and his home, Transylvania, is more broadly depicted as a \u201ccursed land, where the devil and his children\u201d are \u201cfearless without religion\u201d (Stoker 57). Dracula and the \u201cway of life which he represents\u201d is composed of everything \u201cother\u201d and therefore explicitly evil (Senf 425). Therefore, Dracula must be the incarnation of everything Empirical English society fears – making him into an antichrist, and everyone else as a necessary savior.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Polar imagery and societal ideas influence this reading of Dracula as completely oppositional to the English world the gang inhabits. Our band of heroes takes on a collective voice, even though they are each representative of different classic literary archetypes. Just as Dracula is meant to represent all evil, they collectively represent all good as it is defined by English morality. Through this, the gang of heroes is able to wield their perceived morality and justness against Dracula to justify their gory acts of violence. Because these characters use their \u201crigorous moral arguments\u201d to justify their wrongdoings, the reader\u2019s perception of their evils are never equated to that of Dracula\u2019s. Regardless of the similarities between the actions (Senf 425). This \u201cmoral blindness\u201d is indicative of the narrator\u2019s inability to objectively see their own actions, and the reader\u2019s perception of the story through the \u201cheroes\u201d eyes (Senf 425).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The lens of morality as it is understood by Christian society ignores the gang\u2019s inherent wrong doings. This is especially present at the grave of Lucy Westerna, who, subjected to the evil of Dracula, has become completely unrecognizable. The once virginal image of Lucy is now overtaken by demonic powers of evil; her \u201csweetness turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty\u201d and her \u201cpurity to voluptuous wantonness\u201d (Stoker 199). Lucy must undergo this complete formal shift for the men\u2019s violent murder of her to be justified. If her purity was not \u201cstained\u201d then her murder would be an unjust one, but because she has been overtaken by the powers of evil and sin as they are represented in <\/span>Dracula, <\/span><\/i>she is deserving of death (Stoker 200). Through this lens, the murder of Lucy Westerna is deemed a necessary saving instead of a merciless homicide.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Because of the subjectivity of the journal entries and letters the story is composed of, the average reader of <\/span>Dracula <\/span><\/i>is going to align with the gang\u2019s own justification of the violence they commit. Neither their morality or actions are ever called into question on the basis that religious individuals can never commit sin or sinful acts. It is this perceived \u201cduty to defend innocents\u201d that grants the heroes their titles, regardless of the similarities between their actions and The Counts\u2019. The concealment of objectivity through the epistolary narrative therefore protects the gang under England\u2019s guiding \u201crubric of religion\u201d (Senf 428). Moral duty is the sole justification the band has against their actions, and without the influence of Christian, English society the lines between good and evil become blurred.\u00a0 Therefore, Dracula must draw on cultural representations of fear for the book to be read in such a subjective manner. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Themes of Good vs. Evil and Sin vs. Virtue are at the heart of Bram Stoker\u2019s Dracula. Immediately there is strong opposition between a fearless band of heroes and the demonic-beast Dracula. Through the binaries these oppositional identities create, Stoker projects ideas of Imperialism and Christian hegemony to create a highly fictionalized tale rooted in … Continue reading We’re all Sinners here<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5328,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125361],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2023-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5328"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1061\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}