Headscratchers / Dracula

Dracula during the day, or not

After Dracula arrives in England, he is sometimes seen during the day, which makes sense given that sunlight only weakens him and doesn't hurt him very badly. However, earlier in the novel, Jonathan had never seen Dracula by day (except later in one of his boxes), which was one of the oddities that aroused his suspicion in the first place. If Dracula had the ability to be out and about by day, why did he never take advantage of that ability when Jonathan first visited his castle?

• He does. The incident where Dracula catches Harker shaving and throws away his shaving mirror occurs in the morning after another all-night chat session. Also, Dracula seems to do the cooking and cleaning and place-setting during the day. His coffin time seems to be more about recovery and security than a hard and fast 'rests during the daylight hours' rule.
• He's gotta sleep sometime. He had a lot more to do once he came to England and began putting his plan into motion, so he got less rest.
• Castle Dracula is also pretty big, and Jonathan notes that there are a lot of rooms he's prevented from entering. Could be Dracula is also just doing his thing in parts of the castle where Jonathan currently isn't and then seeks him out when he needs / wants Jonathan's services or company.
• One critic speculates that his coffin has some power over him as well, restraining him from leaving outside of set times.
• Or he was out and about in England because it's a new place he'd never seen before, while his castle is where he's spent the last few hundred years and therefore knows so well as to be almost bored of it.

After all efforts to prevent Lucy being killed by Dracula have failed, van Helsing, who knew what was coming next, allows her to be buried, knowing she would rise again as a vampire, kill other people (children, in fact), and give the vampire hunters an extra - and dangerous - complication: in that they'd have to divert attention from the search for Dracula in order to hunt her down. Wouldn't it have been ethically, morally and practically better to have staked her right there, before she rose again as a vampire?

Although van Helsing knows how to fight vampires, it's not revealed if he has ever actually fought against one before the novel. Perhaps he doubted whether it was true that she would rise, and was unwilling to go to the extreme of staking her if he wasn't absolutely sure.Also, it would have been rather difficult to convince anyone else in the house that staking and beheading her was necessary at that point. If van Helsing had insisted on it they might have simply called him deranged and sent him off to Dr. Seward's care.

• I second the problem in convincing everyone else. It's a gamble, but letting them actually see Lucy turn into a monstrosity would dispel any doubts about the necessity of their course of action.
• Van Helsing does plan to do this in the original novel before Lucy is buried; he freaks Dr. Seward when he asks him to bring a set of autopsy knives one night and help him cut off her head, remove her heart, and stuff her mouth with garlic. In the meantime, for no clearly explained reason, he places a crucifix on the body. Later, he finds out a maid stole the (golden) crucifix and subsequently tells Dr. Seward there's no point in doing what he was planning now. So, yes, it would have made more sense to stake Lucy before she was buried and had time to rise and hunt, and Van Helsing planned to do this, but, for some reason that's not clearly explained, he can't. After she rises, he also explains that he doesn't want to stake her without Arthur seeing what she's become, or he'll spend the rest of his life thinking his fiancée either had her body desecrated or, worse, was Buried Alive and then killed later.
• Note that in the novel, no children are actually killed, just bitten once, and they all get better.
• We maybe need to also acknowledge that Van Helsing doesn't actually have the power or influence to "allow" anything in this situation. Van Helsing is brought in as Lucy Westenra's doctor and has full authority over her treatment and care, however unorthodox, for as long as she needs it — but his authority and influence over what happens to her body after that ends the split second she (apparently) dies. Furthermore, we know that all of this is necessary because we're reading all the letters and diary entries and such that make it clear that an actual honest-to-God vampire is creeping about the place, but no one else does. If he had suggested or demanded any of this to her relatives, friends, or anyone with half an ounce of influence over what happened to Lucy Westenra's body after death, they would have likely summoned the nearest servant / policeman / insane asylum attendant to drag him out of their presence immediately with a flea in his ear about what a reprehensible monster he was, and if he'd done it without permission he'd have been arrested for desecrating a corpse, thus making it near-impossible for him to address the bigger threat — Dracula. In short, Van Helsing knows what's about to happen, but his hands are pretty much tied; all he can do is wait until he has proof to show the people he needs to convince that Lucy is now of the undead.

OK, in the novel it's implied that Renfield ONLY eats his prey alive.

It's also implied that he doesn't eat them right away but saves them for later. I can see how this would work for sparrows, and maybe spiders. But how does he preserve the flies?

• Well, he was catching them using sugar.
  • That doesn't answer my question. I know how he was catching them but how was he preserving them? its implied that he saves them for later but he couldn't keep them for more than 24 hours without them dying.
  • Why can't he? As long as they're still hanging about his cell, there will be more and more flies and thus lives. They needn't be the same flies.
    • Besides, flies live for weeks. It's (adult) MAYFLIES that die within hours.
• As I remember it he was feeding the flies to the spiders so as to concentrate the life essence.

I'm confused about the effect sunlight has on vampires' shapeshifting abilities.

When Van Helsing explains that vampires can't change their form when the sun is up, does he mean that the sun causes Shapeshifter Mode Lock, trapping the vampire in whatever form they were in at the time, or that the sun triggers Shapeshifter Default Form, returning the vampire to human form?

• It's more like the latter. During the day, Dracula is just like any human, except if I remember correctly he keeps his Super-Strength. However he can't change his form at all during the day.
  • Van Helsing actually points out he can change at three times during the day; Dawn, High Noon (during which point his powers increase beyond even his night time capacity) and Dusk. Once the sun is fully down however, he can change at will.

The fact that the novel is composed almost entirely of journal entries, while awesome in its own right, seems to stretch the suspension of disbelief a little TOO much sometimes.

First, how are these people able to recall entire conversations verbatim, regardless of whether or not the conversations took place just before they started writing the entry? Human recollection can't be THAT accurate...

• That's a trope common to ALL Epistolary Novels; it's a side-effect of the medium itself. Mr. Lockwood, Nellie Dean, Gilbert Markham, Robert Walton, and others all share the Harkers' iron-clad memory. Willing Suspension of Disbelief. Now, if some author in the future wanted to deconstruct this and show what the authors' recollections of past events would realistically look like, that would certainly be interesting...

Second, it's an automatic spoiler, in that when the characters are embarking on something dangerous or terrifying, you know at least whoever is writing the current entry made it out alive and with their mental faculties intact enough to write a journal entry.

• We can still be surprised in other ways. For example, we knew the first time we read it that Mina Harker survived but not that Quincey Morris didn't. Actually, we only know that the person survived the events chronicled in the entry we're currently reading; until it's the last entry, we never know which entry up ahead will tell us of someone else's death besides that author.
• also, 1st person narrative is fairly common, and this form allows the viewpoint to shift between characters as opposed to just one POV throughout.

Third, what's with the written stuttering? One character chokes up at the end of one of the entries, but s-stuttering t-typically isn't s-something you *write* down. And there's a part where Mina hesitates, triple-dots and all, to write the word "Vampire". When a person hesitates to write something, they stop their hand for a moment; they don't express the hesitation in the actual writing. I can't help but be reminded of the Monty Python line "Well, if he was dying, he wouldn't have bothered to write 'aaaAAAuuUGH', he'd just say it!"

• But what we're reading aren't the original handwritten entries, as Jonathan laments at the end; they're Mina's typewritten transcripts. While typing the part where she remembered how she hesitated to write the word "vampire," she could have added ellipses to capture the effect. Also, Dr. Seward recorded his spoken diary on a phonograph, complete with pauses and stutterings that Mina had to translate into print somehow. She had to (well, she at least wanted to) express the act of hesitation within the limits of the print medium. If I were writing about a conversation I had with someone and remembered them or myself stuttering, I would indicate so in my writing, too.
• Creative nonfiction can explain the dramatic use of ellipses. And from reading first hand accounts from the Edwardian era, people back then really did write like that. If someone talked funny, they damn well wanted to record it for future embarrassment. Also, ellipses were used as a writing trope in journals to pass over unmentionable things. In many WWI narratives, ellipses are used to pass over sources of intense trauma.
  • Also, in my personal diary, I do use ellipses from time to time to convey that I'm hesitant or uncertain about something. When I reread my diary in the future, I want my future self to remember that uncertainty. Would Mina have done the same thing? Maybe not. But it's not impossible.
• Have fun imagining Mina transcribing the account of her husband's seduction by female vampires from shorthand.

• For what it's worth, Fred Saberhagen's The Dracula Tape kind of plays with the questions raised by the OP; Dracula himself often notes at times that he suspects that a bit of Unreliable Narrator was at work to make various parties sound better than they were, and it's revealed that several of the entries were concocted by Dracula and the entry-writer (who, unknown to the others, he'd won over to sympathise with him) to throw the others off the scent, and some of the more dramatic flourishes were thrown in because neither was exactly a master storyteller; the others were just too blinkered to notice. In either case, the entries are unrealistically detailed because the writer was at times essentially making shit up.

Which year this novel is set in? And what are exactly the boxes in Dracula's house?

• The boxes are the easiest question to answer. They are boxes of earth as Dracula must sleep in the soil of his homeland/original grave/consecrated earth. The year is a bit trickier as the dates and information can be VERY contradictory. Popular speculation suggests either 1890, 1893, or 1888. the first for the simple reason that the afterword of the novel states "seven years later". Implying that the events happened around seven years before. The second is gathered from at least two different instances of the novel. One in which a date is given as a Tuesday and another where Van Helsing laments the death of a fellow physican named Charcot who died in that year. The last one is often an attempt at working with the first one and linking the events of the novel of that of the Whitechapel murders.
  • There's nothing explicitly written in the novel to support the contention that vampires must sleep in any type of soil. None of the female vampires (Lucy/The Sisters) are depicted as sleeping in soil, only in their coffins/tombs. Van Helsing seems to think that Dracula's normal resting place is within the huge DRACULA tomb he finds in the castle crypt (the one Harker somehow completely missed). Going purely by what's shown in the novel itself (rather than what character in the novel infer from folklore, etc) Dracula's idea of piling earth from the castle's old graveyard (which he - wasn't - buried in) into boxes to use as mobile extensions of his home is a kind of 'One Cool Trick' modern twist on the old folklore about vampires needing to return to their graves and pretty revolutionary. He's effectively applying a cheat code to the dark magic underlying his Undead existence, otherwise his plan to conquer Victorian Britain would be a non-starter.
  • Based on Alan Moore, the events happened about a year ago (i.e, 1897).
  • Various scholars (notably Leonard Wolf and Elizabeth Miller) have looked at this problem, even checking dates against the phases of the moon mentioned in the book, and no answer emerges as entirely satisfying. One may speculate that this wasn't something Stoker cared that much about, and in Victorian literature it's not unusual for works to lack such specifics.
• A study of the dates given would suggest that the book takes place in 1893. It's impossible to check the dates based on the phases of the moon mentioned in Dracula as Stoker's moon is always full for dramatic purposes.
  • Miller's case for 1893

Okay, so I get that vampires can be killed by cold iron, and that's why Dracula could die from being stabbed with a knife. But if it was that easy, why didn't they just stab Lucy, rather than go through the stake-and-decapitation shtick?

• Maybe the stake was all they had? Van Helsing wanted Arthur to be the one to do it so using a stake could have been easier for him. All he had to do was bring the hammer down on the stake, when it was above her heart. Stabbing her with a knife might have been more difficult for him to do. Plus it is sometimes suggested that Van Helsing only knew the theory of vampires and had never actually killed one before. Using a knife could have worked but perhaps the books only said to use a stake?

What happened to all that gold Jonathan Harker took with him from Dracula's castle?

• Dracula has a fair quantity of gold in his castle and when Jonathan Harker makes his escape, he pockets some of the gold to take with him. Later on, when Mina is contacted by a hospital where Jonathan is recovering, it is mentioned he doesn't have sufficient money with him. So what happened to the gold Jonathan took from the castle?
  • He must have used it all up traveling to that point. He had nothing on him but his clothes and his journal when he left the castle — no papers, no tickets, no food, nothing you would need for a long journey. Innkeepers, merchants, and coachmen aren't going to be very trusting of a distraught foreigner with no identification and no plausible explanation for where he came from or why he's so frantic to get home unless a lot of money vouches for him.
  • He may also have given some to Sister Agatha as thanks for nursing him back to health.

Where did the idea of Mina as Dracula's reincarnated wife come from?

• Playing Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, I quickly realized that Strahd von Zarovich was an Expy of Count Dracula, so I sort of assumed that the plot element of Tatyana continually being reincarnated was an element taken from the original story. Bear in mind that I had never read or seen other versions of Dracula before. So when the Coppola version came out in 1992, I assumed the fact that Mina looked exactly like Dracula's dead wife was part of the original story, and that that was what TSR drew on for the Tatyana curse for Strahd. Imagine my surprise when I read the novel not long after that and discovered that that wasn't part of the original story. I thought it was weird but then sort of forgot about it until recently, when two other Dracula adaptations, Dracula Untold and the NBC's Dracula (2013) used the same plot development. I thought this was kind of funny, because it seemed as though this idea has fully entered the Dracula canon from a possible plot for the original Ravenloft adventure module back in 1983. Is that right? Was there any earlier origin to this plot development?
  • So far, the earliest version of this story I can find — my research, admittedly, being mainly clicking on links to various adaptations on The Other Wiki — is a 1973 adaptation of the novel starring Jack Palance (also called Bram Stoker's Dracula, funnily enough), which suggests that Lucy Westenra is a reincarnation of Dracula's dead wife. Then there's Fred Saberhagen's The Dracula Tape, published in 1975, which involves a Relationship Upgrade between Dracula and Mina as part of the overall Perspective Flip on the original novel. I assume (although, given the earlier note on the depth of my scholarship, I wouldn't exactly stake my life and reputation on it) that it kind of emerged from those two works over time in the way that Word of Dante does.
    • A similar dynamic exists in the earlier television show Dark Shadows, created by Dan Curtis — the director of the 1973 adaptation.
  • It can be noted that an extremely similar dynamic plays out in The Mummy (1932), which is almost a remake of Dracula (1931) in many respects.
  • If we look to the text itself, Mina's probably the most dynamic (certainly the most notable) female character, doesn't get killed off halfway through, and the novel climaxes with Dracula turning his sights on her to make her a vampire bride. If you were adding an element of Love Interest for Dracula (even if an unwilling one), she's the logical main choice really. As for the "reincarnated soulmate" stuff, beyond the above suggestions I've no idea where that particular piece of the puzzle came from, but given the supernatural elements already in the text and the rather melodramatic and operatic approaches the material lends itself to, having the reason Dracula becomes fixated on Mina be that she's the reincarnation of his lost love seems kind of appropriate.
    • Interestingly enough, in the 1973 version it is Lucy who is the reincarnation of Prince Vlad's lost love. Her staking mid-narrative motivates him to pursue Mina instead.

On that note, where does this notion of Dracula being "King" of the vampires come from?

We don't even see evidence of any kind of vampire society in the novel.

• At one point Harker muses that, "This was the being I was helping to transfer to London, where, perhaps, for centuries to come he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless." Similarly, Seward writes, "He is experimenting, and doing it well; and if it had not been that we have crossed his path he would be yet—he may be yet if we fail—the father or furtherer of a new order of beings, whose road must lead through Death, not Life." So the idea of him creating and ruling over other vampires is in there, even if it's just an idea. But yes, there's little enough evidence in the novel of a large number of vampires existing, though those that do appear (the three "sisters" and Lucy) clearly defer to Dracula.
• Also, some of this is just a meta-acknowledgement of the fact that Dracula is basically the Trope Codifier for most of the modern approach to the vampire mythos. Dracula is "King" of the vampires because he's basically become regarded as the archetypal vampire in modern popular culture, much as Sherlock Holmes is the Great Detective, Superman is the superhero of the DC universe that everyone looks up to, and so on. They're basically the characters in their genres that all the other characters who followed them owe a debt of some kind to in a meta-sense, so this is transferred into the world of the story as a kind of acknowledgement of this.

The trip on the Demeter

In this world, vampires Cannot Cross Running Water. Doesn't this mean they need to be in their coffin to cross natural bodies of water? I gathered, yes, due to all the preparations Dracula needs to make to travel across the sea to England, and for his return trip back to Europe at the end. So, on his first trip to England, how was he able to leave his coffin to feed on the crew of the Demeter while it was still at sea?

• My personal guess is that crossing an ocean, like sunlight, would weaken but not completely incapacitate Dracula, leaving him not quite at full power but still capable of sneaking around and feeding off the sailors one by one when they're alone and distracted.
• I always thought oceans and seas do not count as running water because they're to big. When thinking in running water I always thought in rivers. If that wasn't the case then islands like Britain would not have vampires at all.
• To be precise, Van Helsing says, "It is said, too, that he can only pass running water at the slack or the flood of the tide." Van Helsing is only relating a rumour here, nothing else in the story confirms or denies it, so it could be false. Or maybe it depends on when the ship embarks.
• This weakness has been explored over time, off and on. The "standard" seems to be that vampires can't cross running water on its own, but can, for instance, walk across a bridge over a river, or on streets over storm drains or sewers. But they can't wade through or fly over a river, unless at a spot where it's "enclosed." Under that logic, Dracula would be unable to leave the Demeter, though he could move about freely on the ship itself, as the boat "encloses" the water beneath it.

Why would Dracula go all the way across Europe (remember, travel is difficult for vampires, at best) to London, when Vienna and Budapest are so much closer, and he'd fit in better?

• Because it was the place to be and the place where everything was happening. At the time, London was the centre of the most powerful and influential empire of the day. It was the world's biggest and busiest city, a global centre of trade and finance, a place of art and culture, a place full of new people and new things happening every day. And, of course, on a Doylist level because Bram Stoker lived and worked in Britain, and not in Turkey or Austria.
  • Another factor in his choice—albeit not one stated in the text, as he could hardly admit the motive to his Muggle solicitor—is that the English were much less likely to know how to recognize and kill vampires than were people in Eastern Europe, who were closer to those legends' point of origin.

Why didn't the Demeter crew search INSIDE the boxes in the cargo hold?

• The crew of the Demeter conducts a search of the entire ship after one of them spotted Dracula. They search every inch of the ship...yet it never occurs to any of them to search inside the boxes of earth. Did it not occur to them that their mysterious stranger might have been hiding in one of those boxes? What is really surprising is that the ship set out from Varna, Bulgaria so some of that crew must have been Slavic natives; you wouldn't expect them to be Genre Blind in beliefs about vampires.
  • Well, no...after all, it's an earth box, a box of dirt; one look will tell you no living person would be hiding in there for any length of time; when the mate finally does start searching them, he mentions that they are screwed up so Dracula might even be shapeshifting to get in and out in the first place. And the captain specifically says that there are only nine people on board—five hands, two mates, the cook and the captain himself—one of whom went missing, so yes it's entirely possible that few or none were Slavic, and even if they were Slavic that doesn't mean they know much about vampires (bear in mind the ones in Transylvania actually live next to one, so their belief is to be expected). And the earth boxes are private property and it would be kind of criminal to search them. And besides all that, if one of the crew did find Dracula, he could always just hypnotise them to forget.
    • It's stated that at least two of the Crew are Russian, and the First Mate Rumanian. The first crewman to go missing has a Russian name. It's very likely they are all Slavic.

How on Earth do Arthur and Dr. Seward happen to know and be friends with Quincey, an American man, in the first place? Haven't the two of them presumably lived their whole lives in England?

• Note this letter that Quincey sends to Holmwood: "We’ve told yarns by the camp-fire in the prairies; and dressed one another’s wounds after trying a landing at the Marquesas; and drunk healths on the shore of Titicaca. There are more yarns to be told, and other wounds to be healed, and another health to be drunk. Won’t you let this be at my camp-fire to-morrow night? I have no hesitation in asking you, as I know a certain lady is engaged to a certain dinner-party, and that you are free. There will only be one other, our old pal at the Korea, Jack Seward..."
• Far from having lived their whole lives in England, Holmwood and Seward have travelled the world, and Morris with them. Several times I have encountered this odd idea that people in the 19th century did not travel, when in fact, upper and upper-middle class males were expected to do so.
• And even apart from that, clearly Quincey has travelled to England, so it's not exactly a stretch that he would be the one making friends.
• Given their youth (Seward is referred to as being 29 at the time of the novel) it's quite possible that all three are University friends. Arthur would have been sent there to achieve the classic Gentleman's degree, Seward would have done a medical degree before going on to study under Van Helsing in Amsterdam, while Quincey obviously comes from a wealthy Texan family, and at the time American 'new money' were prone to sending their sons to Oxford or Cambridge to have the rough edges buffed off them, which Lucy notes is definitely true of the well-spoken and very 'gentlemanly' Quincey, when he's not putting on folksy American stylings to amuse her.

Where do people say this is about destructive female sexuality?

"The story is often interpreted as a metaphor for female sexuality and how a sexually active woman is dangerous to civilized Victorian society." By whom and how? The titular vampire is male. The female vampires are secondary antagonists. The two women in the story are both sexual (Lucy is sexually curious and Mina seems to have a healthy sex life with Jonathan) but are portrayed as virtuous and good. So what up? Sounds like someone was desperate for a term paper subject.

• Do some actual research. Bram Dijkstra's Idols of Perversity and Christopher Craft's article "Kiss Me With Those Red Lips" are good starting places.
• I haven't read those texts, but even to start with, though; Lucy's sexual curiosity eventually leads her to become an undead abomination parasitically feeding on children, and the operative words in the Mina example are 'seems to' — it's not like either go into lengthy detail about their sex lives. So the former example is hardly an enthusiastic endorsement or depiction of the "active female sexuality is awesome!" position, and the latter is at best ambiguous, since the standards for what was a healthy sex life for a married couple in late nineteenth century Britain were quite different for what they are today.
• Also, if we stick with the Lucy example for a moment and look at what happens to her over the story while stripping away anything overtly "vampire-y", this is what we get: she starts off being a good, virtuous girl but allows her (sexual) curiosity towards a mysterious and beguiling stranger to lead her to imprudent actions which in turn ruins her health and cuts her off from decent society forever. The end result for her is becoming a fallen women, a lady of the night, wandering the streets using what remains of her charms and guile to survive by seducing people into her company so that she can get physical with them and they in turn can provide her with that which she needs to sustain her existence — and this, in turn, corrupts their innocence. And this physicality typically involves 'sucking' (nudge-nudge). Does This Remind You Of Anything? Either way, still not exactly a "Yay Active Female Sexuality!" message.
• Considering how, in the original novel, Van Helsing laughs at someone who interprets blood transfusion as sexual or sexually symbolic, my theory is that Stoker laughed at the "it's symbolic of something related to sex" interpretation (even if his novel didn't exist yet, it's been overly common as long as humans have been writing books). Besides, Lucy, the virgin ingenue, dies; Mina, the New Woman and wife, survives. And neither of them pursues Dracula — he's a predator who hunts them down against their will (he assaults Mina and bites Lucy when she's sleepwalking, and therefore unable to consent). Dracula is not some symbol of assertive sexuality — he's a symbolic rapist and literal sexual assaulter. The women he bites remain locked in his castle for eternity with no freedom, not go on to university or get jobs and live independently and have as many sexual partners as they want. There's nothing "liberating" about Dracula's treatment of his victims. The brides are not independent women who are used to teach "this is an independent woman, and she's evil." Dracula is not portrayed as a just force punishing evil women but a monster whose controlling, forceful behavior towards unwilling victims is unquestionably wrong and evil and must be stopped. If you want a sexual moral from it, it's that rapists are evil and should be hunted down, and women should be free to choose their husband and help men get things done (as the heroes learn after they try to leave Mina out of things for her own safety), not enslaved to the will of another man.
• No argument about the "rapists are evil" message of the novel, but you seem to be changing the goalposts slightly here, though, or at the very least applying twenty-first century attitudes and standards to a nineteenth century text. No one (here at least) is arguing that Dracula isn't a monster, but because the novel takes a "rapists are evil" message doesn't mean it can't also be engaging in a bit of "female sexuality is bad" messaging as well; remember, this was a time where (even moreso than now) a rape victim was still considered 'ruined' and in some way to blame for her own 'disgrace'. Lucy is depicted as innocent and an ingenue, yes, but if we take the points above to be true then the novel still arguably suggests that her own innocent curiosity towards 'sex' and Dracula leads to her downfall. Mina's a New Woman, true, but the fact the 'wife' part is nevertheless telling; even the Victorians weren't entirely opposed to women having sex with their husbands, and we can safely assume that Mina waited until marriage. And Dracula's brides might be prisoners in his mansion, but there's still the scene where they get very... frisky with Jonathan Harker, which is used to further suggest how wicked they are. No one (here at least) is arguing that Dracula's liberating these women in the twenty-first century sense of letting them get jobs and degrees and multiple sexual partners; they're simply arguing that the novel may nevertheless still reinforce mainstream Victorian values about women and their sexuality as well as denouncing men who prey on them. It can be two things.
• While Stoker was certainly a man of his time and was not likely to champion women's rights to any great degree I think you are giving him a little less credit than he deserves here. Yes, there was an attitude that a rape victim was "ruined" and indeed Mina herself is clearly terrified by this concept when Dracula turns his attentions to her. However all the men in the story assure her that she is not ruined and any corruption that has occurred can be reversed. It's not a modern attitude but at the same time it doesn't jibe with the idea Lucy is being somehow punished for her supposed moral failing. Furthermore the idea that Lucy is "sexually curious" seems quite a stretch to me and likely based on later versions of the story. In the book she only ever shows romantic interest in her fiancee and never even mentions anything to do with sex. She certainly doesn't show "curiosity towards a mysterious and beguiling stranger." She never so much as meets Dracula when not mind controlled. The interest is entirely one sided on Dracula's side and the book never once implies that Lucy is in any way to blame for her fate, rather that she is the innocent victim of a monster.
  • Lucy being sexual or promiscuous in any way is not in the book, and only comes in later adaptations. Lucy is repeatedly said to be pure, virtuous and sweet - she's compared to a lily more than once. Dracula's attack on her comes from the fact that she sleepwalks - so he can get her while she's vulnerable outside the house. It's not a willing seduction; it's rape and Lucy's own decisions have no part in it. What happens to her is presented as nothing but a tragedy, and after she dies, she said to join "other angels" in Heaven. Meaning that she is not ruined because of what Dracula did to her. The suitors being repulsed by how sexual she is as a vampire is not necessarily because of the sexuality - but because it's so different from her true personality. And Lucy is only sexual when confronted with her suitors; before then she attacks children. If you take the supernatural stuff out, her plotline involves being raped, abused and abducted by someone who forces her to do things she wouldn't otherwise. The adaptations are to blame - the 1931 one making her a woman with implied dark fetishes, and the 1992 for making her a shameless flirt. Lucy also dies a virgin, while Mina marries and saves the day while not a virgin.
    • Lucy is a self-described "horrid flirt" and describes the exultation she feels at getting multiple marriage offers. he even asks, albeit in jest, "Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as pleases her?” It's not like NONE of her sexualization is present in the novel, and it's relatively easy for a reader to construct her fate as punishment for her promiscuous appetites. It is after all Van Helsing who proclaims (to her own fiancé) that she is headed to heaven after being staked; it's hardly "confirmed" in a broader sense. Also, her sleepwalking may be understood as not strictly "innocent" — criminologist Cesare Lombroso (whom Stoker mentions in the text) lists it among characteristics of female criminal types, so it may be that “Lucy’s latent criminal nature ‘bids’ Dracula to come to her, despite her acquired morality and her betrothal to Arthur” (to quote Ernest Fontana). Dispute these interpretations if you wish to, but it's not as if there's no basis for them.
  • Well the line about wanting to marry several men at once is because she sincerely loves all three of her suitors and doesn't want to reject any of them. She attracts so many because she's kind and charismatic - and though she accuses herself of being a "horrid flirt" none of her behaviour bears this out, as she treats Seward and Quincey with great affection and respect and doesn't lead them on in any way. It seems less a commentary on sexuality and more on the aristocracy who defined a woman's importance by who she married - Mina representing the modern woman who's more proactive and intelligent.
  • Not every feminist scholar is so negative about Dracula — Nina Auerbach for instance sees some value in the way that Mina turns Dracula's power against himself. Elizabeth Miller takes it upon herself to counter many of the sexual readings of the novel: https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/ron/1900-v1-n1-ron1433/014002ar/.
  • It's also perhaps worth noting that, from what we can tell about the man through his writings and contemporary descriptions, Bram Stoker in general doesn't seem to have had a particularly high opinion of independent, liberated women or open expression of female sexuality. It's not a huge leap to read a criticism of female liberation into a novel by a man whose other writings and attitudes on the subject in general also tended to be critical of it.
  • Actually digging through the novel, about the worst you could say is that it has a minor element of fear of sexuality, full stop. The "Brides" and Vampire Lucy are described in somewhat sexual terms and repellent because of it, but the horror is more that they're monsters out to drain life and spread disease (Lucy's slow wasting away as Dracula keeps feeding on her and the attempts to treat her fail is much more like watching anyone with a terminal illness slowly die than anything to do with sex). Vampire Lucy isn't horrific because she's taken ownership of her sexuality, she's horrific because she uses all the tools at her disposal — including beauty and sexuality — to draw in people to consume, kill, and spread her affliction. The Weird Sisters aren't scary because they're hot chicks but Jonathan is too British to enjoy their interest, they're scary because they want to drink his blood and kill him. Even applying the sexuality metaphor to vampirism — which the narrative itself seems to dismiss at least once — Lucy and the Sisters are "sexual" in the same way Dracula is: rapists, forcing their advances on others by disregarding or actively suppressing their consent. This is vilified, because it should be, rape is not sexy. And the actual text of the novel has very little support for sexual metaphors to begin with. Much of the discussion of the sexual politics of Dracula is based on the adaptations, not the original novel.

How does Dracula turn people into vampires?

This has always confused me. It seems that when Dracula drank Lucy's blood, she turned into a vampire after a while. But if that is so, how did Harker not become a vampire when the Brides fed on him? Or, for that matter, how did the baby not become a vampire? Is there something else to the process?

• One thing worth noting is that unlike the other examples, Dracula feeds off Lucy over a prolonged period of time. Presumably vampirism (in this telling at least) is not a one-bite-is-enough deal but is a relatively long process.
  • This might tie into the generally-accepted "you become a vampire if they drain you unto death", and also takes care to account for the fact that a human-sized stomach would have trouble accommodating about 2.5 liters of blood in a single sucking. Especially if you plan on flying off afterwards.
• Harker never tastes the blood of the three vampires the way Mina does Dracula's; presumably that means that she'll become a vampire upon death. Lucy must have gotten her helping of the same stuff off-page.
• The brides never got to "bite" Jonathan all the way — Drac pulled the first one who tried off him before they could drain any blood. I always assumed Jonathan felt her lips or even the tips of her fangs touch his throat, but she never got to break the skin or draw any blood. As for the baby, they didn't just drink its blood — I got the impression they tore it to pieces like a wolf eating its prey, that they ate it. My interpretation of how vampirism spreads in Stoker's universe is:
  • Once the vampire bites you and sucks your blood, you slowly become a vampire (the transformation takes a long time, and only 1 bite is necessary).
  • If the vampire that bit you is killed before you fully turn, you become human again.
  • If you die of something else after being bitten, you instantly become a vampire — this is what happened to Lucy (she died from loss of blood because Dracula kept returning to feed on her more, apparently just for his own pleasure).
  • If you drink a vampire's blood, the vampire forms an unwilling mind link with you, allowing him to control and read your mind (but, if you know what you're doing, the link works both ways) — this is what happened to Mina.
    • Van Helsing's lines in the book suggests that a bite means you will turn into a vampire when you die but will not itself kill you. When Dracula flees England he notes that they have kill Dracula or Mina will turn when she dies, bringing up dying of old age but not suggesting that the bite will turn her by itself. She then does start to turn but I always got the impression the blood he forced her to drink was now causing her to change .

What did Drac DO all day for 500 years or so?

Assuming he is Vlad III, he must have been in Romania for about that time. Just... alone in a huge castle with no servants and just three concubines he's losing interest in? How could he even have kept himself fed for all that time, when the neighboring villages demonstrate sufficient knowledge of folklore to take the adequate precautions against him? Even if they didn't, Drac would either have an army of vampires by now, or people would have worked out what was going on and fled town. Neither appears to be the case. What did he do before it occurred to him to spread out to England?

• He has a large library already before Jonathan Harker comes and so on, if you track the history of those lands and cultures, that he must have spent his time hiding from the Ottomans (who after all conquered his land and nation), and then trying to hide himself from the authorities, and the Ottoman State and others. Maybe Dracula in the first hundred years or so tried to lead La Résistance against the Ottomans but he realized soon that the experience of becoming immortal had removed the human sentiments of Romanian and feudal nationalism, and then like most lazy aristocrats of his time and place, he didn't like the Enlightenment, and nationalism, and the liberal democratizing turn either, so he stocked up on books and so on, becoming a relic and in the course of Dracula, he saw Victorian Britain and its Empire as a new base from which to spread its power, learning the ways of capitalism (hence purchasing property and so on).
• Hyperlong hibernation? Also is it ever stated that he has to feed to survive? Vampires on Buffy can't starve, after all.
• In the novel Van Helsing notes that Dracula making a plan and looking to increase his influence is unusual for vampires and most just don't seem to do much with themselves, noting that even Dracula has a "child brain" and has only recently started experimenting with something beyond lurking in his castle. It seems vampires usually suffer from Creative Sterility.

How to kill Dracula

• So you need an elaborate ritual with prayers, wooden stakes, and garlic to take out lesser vampires, but Dracula himself you can just stab with a normal knife? Even after he shrugged off a shovel to the head? And you know he's dead because he turned into a cloud of dust, even though this is an established part of his powers which he used to attack Lucy?
  • It was never said that the ritual, prayers, stakes, or garlic were strictly necessary.
  • There was no elaborate magical ritual when Lucy was staked, just a stake and a hammer. That's only one way to kill... er, destroy(?) a vampire, however; check your local lore to see how sharp, steel or Cold Iron objects like knives or needles work just as well. Van Helsing also mentioned silver bullets and branches of wild rose as possibilities. You know he's dead because of No Ontological Inertia — his victim (Mina) is no longer a pending vampire.
  • The entire plot of The Dracula Tape is built around this observation.
  • Van Helsing is not, despite how he is portrayed elsewhere, a vampire expert. He's just a very clever man open-minded enough to consider the supernatural when presented with the appropriate evidence. As such while she is doing his best to research how to kill a vampire he's ultimately never tried it before. As such he's going to try everything his books say even if much of it is probably superstition. As it turns out just stabbing the heart will get it done but without the pressure of time present in the Dracula chase Van Helsing was hedging his bets.

Why does Dracula flee Britain after the confrontation in Piccadilly?

• As Van Helsing himself suggests, he has no real reason to. Sure, he’s had setbacks. The heroes have somehow made all but one of his Earth boxes inhospitable to him, exposed his lairs and generally put him on the back foot, but he has one Earth box left, and with something as simple as a horse and cart (which he rapidly gets hold of) he can go anywhere he likes in London and hole up while he gets a grip on the situation. He could bury it somewhere, then slip in and out as mist. He could take it down into the capital’s sewers. Hell, he could take it outside London and bury it in a field, returning to the capital to rest in the graves of suicides if need be. But instead he takes it to the docks and books it as cargo on the first ship he can find heading to Rumania, which is basically the worst thing he could do. Remember, this is a creature that memorises train timetables for fun, and who has spent much of the day angrily pondering how a team of men including a rich English Lord and a property lawyer had managed to find out where his houses other than Carfax were. Taking a slow boat to Transylvania when trains travelled quicker was just asking for trouble. He’d have been far better served just going underground for a bit and recruiting a small army of vampires to join him in stalking and killing his pursuers.
  • Dracula's essentially immortal. His plan to nest in Britain has met unexpected opposition, but he's immortal; he can just come back and try again another time. But he'd presumably rather go back to familiar turf to lick his wounds and force his enemies, if they're that devoted to his destruction, to coming to fight him on his home ground, where he knows what's what and has the advantage, rather than going to ground in an unfamiliar and now-hostile place where his enemies have all the local knowledge and advantages.
  • The novel leaves it really vague on exactly how one becomes a vampire, but it seems to be a protracted process. Down to one box of native soil and with determined and intelligent enemies closing in, Dracula may not have had time to raise reinforcements. But the three "Weird Sisters" are back at the castle. He's got reinforcements waiting for him there, and as mentioned, knows the castle and grounds and has the advantage.

Why does Dracula come ashore at Whitby in the form of a wolf during the storm?

• It's odd behaviour. Sure, he may just be very eager to have his paws on solid ground again after a month at sea, but he also puts himself in real danger. If he'd stayed in one of his boxes he would have been safe, and safety is obviously very important to him. In wolf form he drew attention to himself and then had the problem of finding somewhere to rest, since the Demeter would have been crawling with locals from the moment the storm ebbed. He was lucky enough to find a suicide's grave to sleep in, but unless someone familiar with Whitby had told him in advance where it was that was a hell of a risk for him to take.
  • Rule of Drama. What's a cooler and more dramatic image for a scary story; a giant wolf (who, unknown to any of the witnesses, is actually a powerful vampire) charging off a shipwreck full of drained corpses and disappearing into the stormy night to the shock and bewilderment of the locals, or... a vampire who decides to just lie in his box of dirt for a few days until everyone goes away, and then sneaking onto shore in such a way that no one notices him? The former is (rightly) considered an iconic moment of the story, whether or not it makes complete logical sense; the latter would be boring, no matter how crushingly common-sense it is.
  • He may have also been concerned at local investigators disrupting his boxes. Spilling a crate of dirt is no big loss, spilling the crate Dracula happens to be in at the time would a bigger problem.

What was Mr Swales doing up at the graveyard seat on the night of the 9th August?

• We are told that Mr Swales has to be at his daughter's house for teatime every day, and that his habit is to spend much of the day up on the High Seat bossing his coterie of former sailors around. Why on earth was he up there at night/early in the morning? And if, as the story implies, he fell and broke his neck because Dracula appeared from the grave he was sitting over, that would mean he was there at dawn on the 10th. Pretty early for a man pushing 100.
  • He's an old man who likes the sunrise and wants to see as many of them as possible before his last one dawns. And as an old sailor, he likely got into the habit of rising early with the sun and keeping irregular hours. He's old and stubborn, it's not impossible.

Why is Dracula old at the start of the novel while The Sisters are young and beautiful?

• The Doylist answer is obviously because Stoker wanted to show the Count getting younger and more dangerous as he fed, while the role of the Sisters was always to be sexy and seductive, but the Watsonian answer could be either that Dracula was already an old man when he became a vampire (though Vlad Tepes was 45 when he was killed) while the Sisters were in the ripeness of youth, or their ability to remain young while he seemed old was something to do with either their propensity to stay confined within the castle/their tombs unless there was something happening to wake them up (like Harker arriving) while Dracula himself was pushing his limitations to see what he could get away with (travelling away from the castle, seeing how much he could do during daylight, experimenting with sleeping somewhere other than in his tomb), or with their diet being confined to babies, or both.
• Also, the Count perhaps stayed looking ancient because he was trapped in his castle and couldn't be bothered putting on youth, whereas the brides were specifically trying to seduce / feed on Jonathan, so make themselves look young and beautiful.
• Plus, of course, Rule of Sexy By Victorian Standards.
• I think it's something of a riff on the Fisher King. Dracula is old and decayed because the land around him is old and decayed. Then he's rejuvenated by moving to a "younger" country.
• It's implied that one of the reasons Dracula wants to move is because the locals are too savvy about vampires and feeding opportunities are steadily dwindling. Dracula may barely be scraping by, and thus can't maintain his youth as effectively. Once in London, surrounded by warm, vital people who neither know about nor believe in vampires, he get a lot more blood much more easily, and get his youth back. The Sisters are a sticking point, but perhaps they're "younger" or less powerful, so "spend" less blood on supernatural strength and so have "more" to maintain youth and beauty. But it seems like even they're just barely getting enough to survive. Or perhaps the inverse is true: Dracula is more powerful than the Sisters, surviving on an amount of blood that leaves him looking old and withered, but would result in them starving to death (if vampires can starve to death).

Given Van Helsing's claim that Lucy only looks beautiful in un-death because she was turned while sleepwalking and thus her 'sleeping form' doesn't bear the ugliness of other vampires, why would the Sisters be so incredibly beautiful at rest that Van Helsing almost goes into a worshipful coma of lust?

• Could be any number of answers. Van Helsing was completely wrong to believe that bit of folklore. Van Helsing was right, but the Sisters were also innocents who were turned while in their sleep so have the same exemption from ugliness as Lucy. Van Helsing was right, but the Sisters are so old and powerful that they can cast a glamour even when asleep that makes them nigh irresistible to potential foes.
• Also, to be totally fair to him, Van Helsing only knows what he knows about vampires from books. He's never seen the Sisters, so could be totally wrong about this.
• Or he's straight up lying. "Oh, shit, she doesn't look like a bloodsucking demon, she's hot! Uh. . . she was an innocent girl, so still looks that way, even though she's a foul beast! Yeah, that's it..."

Why doesn’t Dracula shapeshift into a bat to leave his castle, rather than crawl down the wall?

• It’s noticeable that Dracula doesn’t use his fearsome shapeshifting abilities until he reaches English soil, when he emerges from the bloodbath on The Demeter as a wolf and goes on to feed on Lucy in bat-form. Surely it would have been easier for him to fly out of his castle window than to crawl out. Now, on one occasion at least he’s dressed in Harker’s clothes and carrying a bag, so we’ll mark that one down as explained, but the other times? Maybe it takes a lot of blood-fuelled energy to shapeshift, energy he just can’t usually spare on his sparse Carpathian diet, but once he’s got access to all the blood he can guzzle it’s a whole new ball-game.
• He might just like the practice and the exercise. He's a vampire, who knows what he does for fun.
• Also, in England he needs to conceal himself as long as possible, hence why he shapeshifts — so that people will not associate the terrifying bloodbath hound or the bat that likes to drink the blood of English maidens with the mysterious foreign count who's just shown up. In his own house, who cares? There's only Jonathan, and he's basically a prisoner Dracula intends to abandon to his death anyway.
  • It could have been sadism. Jonathan has realized there's something wrong but heh as been isolated and forced to depend on the count, even though he now knows he can't trust the him. Dracula could be taunting Jonathan just for fun.

Why does Dracula hire the services of an Exeter law-firm to buy a house in Essex?

• It's certainly very random. All of the other legal firms and portering companies Dracula hires are locally based to the properties they're dealing with, it's only the purchase of Carfax that goes through a firm that is based just about as far away from London as you can get in England while still having running water and the telegram. It's also odd that Jonathan Harker is the one to handle the surveying of Carfax and the trip to Transylvania. Yes, Mr Hawkins certainly seems to think the world of him (enough to will his entire company and fortune to Harker the day before he dies) but the firm is said to have a London agent (he attends Mr Hawkins' funeral) who could just as easily do the job. There's really no rational explanation other than Stoker wanted Exeter included in the novel in some manner.
  • Dracula is a vampire who's lived in a mouldy old castle isolated from most of civilisation for literal centuries. He probably wasn't very familiar with locations in England and had limited sources of information when he first started making inquiries, and just went with the first agency he managed to get information for or the first agency that he managed to get a response from. He was able to find and start employing closer and more efficient services when he got more familiar with things, but he would still have had to start somewhere.
  • Though it's perhaps worth noting that while London would certainly be the more logical choice to start your business on the surface, if you're travelling or sending something from Transylvania to England via sea the first major port or harbour you would arrive at is Plymouth, which is in the same county as and only a few hours away from Exeter. This might have had something to do with it; the Count's first outreaches to England may have come and gone via sea and entered / exited the country via Plymouth, meaning that while the agency at Exeter was furthest from where the Count ended up it was technically closest for his initial purposes and resources. (This would also be likely why Dracula, on making his way to England, chooses to go via sea rather than over land.)
    • Unless he was traveling from Wales or Scotland, then the only way to get to England is by sea, England is on an island.
    • Well yes, but the point being made is that, given as he starts in Transylvania, Dracula basically has two options to get to and communicate with England. He can go entirely by sea via the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, or he go overland through Europe (you know, that big chunk of land he's on that's between him and England) before then crossing the English Channel — which, FWIW, is the way-in-reverse that Jonathan Harker uses to get to him. If Dracula were to chose the latter he'd likely enter England via the Calais-Dover route, which would take him closer to London; the fact that he goes entirely by sea suggests that his communications with England may have also gone via the all-sea route rather than by land across Europe.
  • This is actually addressed in the novel. Dracula says it makes little sense, especially since he wants to hire locals for other interests, but gives his reason for going with an Exeter firm to buy property in London as not wanting a local Londoner letting their local Londoner interests get into the Count's business (say, by pushing a property in an area where the solicitor's brother's moving company, bother-in-law's construction company, and cousin's shop would all be on hand to see to the Count's needs... and take his money). How sincere this reason is is up for debate, but over the course of this discussion, Jonathan notes that the business arrangement Dracula wants is one common among those "who don't want all their business known by any one person." Basically, Dracula wanted different groups and companies involved so no one person had access to all the information that would reveal his scheme.

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