Dracula (Oxford Playscripts)

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Most critics agree that Dracula is, as much as anything else, a novel that indulges the Victorian male imagination, particularly regarding the topic of female sexuality. In Victorian England, women’s sexual behavior was dictated by society’s extremely rigid expectations. A Victorian woman effectively had only two options: she was either a virgin—a model of purity and innocence—or else she was a wife and mother. If she was neither of these, she was considered a whore, and thus of no consequence to society. When Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania, he is going to a real place. Transylvania is an area of Romania in eastern Europe. The town mentioned by Harker, Bistritz, is now called Bistrița. Jonathan Harker, a young English lawyer, travels to Castle Dracula in the Eastern European country of Transylvania to conclude a real estate transaction with a nobleman named Count Dracula. As Harker wends his way through the picturesque countryside, the local peasants warn him about his destination, giving him crucifixes and other charms against evil and uttering strange words that Harker later translates into “vampire.” Riverkeepby Martin Stewart. Wull’s father has been possessed by an evil spirit. It’s up to Wull to hunt down a potential cure. Library copies available. The protagonists in Dracula are fighting a supernatural monster, and they are successful in their plans eventually, but at a cost.It took the arrival of Van Helsing to expand the field of observation and therefore countenance the possibility of a spiritual or supernatural origin to Lucy’s deterioration healthwise. Stoker seems to be advocating an open-mindedness to knowledge that would not dismiss certain areas as being too ridiculous. It is crosses, wafers, and garlic that are able to ward off the vampire, rather than guns or bombs. In Chapter XVII, when Van Helsing warns Seward that “to rid the earth of this terrible monster we must have all the knowledge and all the help which we can get,” he literally means all the knowledge. Van Helsing works not only to understand modern Western methods, but to incorporate the ancient and foreign schools of thought that the modern West dismisses. “It is the fault of our science,” he says, “that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.” Here, Van Helsing points to the dire consequences of subscribing only to contemporary currents of thought. Without an understanding of history—indeed, without different understandings of history—the world is left terribly vulnerable when history inevitably repeats itself. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-10-09 14:06:35 Associated-names Balderston, John L. (John Lloyd), 1889-1954; Stoker, Bram, 1847-1912. Dracula Boxid IA40257410 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier Jonathan Harker has travelled to Romania to help an aristocrat with some legal work. Once there, he is imprisoned in Count Dracula’s castle and soon realises the Count is actually some sort of monster. Meanwhile Dracula arrives in England, and starts to prey on fresh victims, including Jonathan’s fiancée, Mina, and her friend, Lucy. Authors – Bram Stoker and David Calcutt Did you know Bram Stoker mentions the number 3 more than 50 times in the original novel? How many can you spot in the dramatised version?

Some writers believe that vampires were inspired by real life illnesses from times before medical understanding. You can read about some examples here. Rights Respecting Schools Renfield quotes a poem by William Blake called Auguries of Innocence. You can read the whole poem here. NumeracyThe folk legends and traditions Van Helsing draws upon suggest that the most effective weapons in combating supernatural evil are symbols of unearthly good. Indeed, in the fight against Dracula, these symbols of good take the form of the icons of Christian faith, such as the crucifix. The novel is so invested in the strength and power of these Christian symbols that it reads, at times, like a propagandistic Christian promise of salvation. Mina Murray is the ultimate Victorian woman. Van Helsing’s praise of Mina testifies to the fact that she is indeed the embodiment of the virtues of the age. She is “one of God’s women, fashioned by His own hand to show us men and other women that there is a heaven where we can enter, and that its light can be here on earth. So true, so sweet, so noble. . . .” Mina stands as the model of domestic propriety, an assistant schoolmistress who dutifully studies newfangled machines like the typewriter so as to be useful to her husband. Unlike Lucy, she is not most noteworthy for her physical beauty, which spares Mina her friend’s fate of being transformed into a voluptuous she-devil. Early in the novel, as Harker becomes uncomfortable with his lodgings and his host at Castle Dracula, he notes that “unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.” Here, Harker voices one of the central concerns of the Victorian era. The end of the nineteenth century brought drastic developments that forced English society to question the systems of belief that had governed it for centuries. Darwin’s theory of evolution, for instance, called the validity of long-held sacred religious doctrines into question. Likewise, the Industrial Revolution brought profound economic and social change to the previously agrarian England.