I'm struck by the dailiness and petty dramatics of the woman Lucy in Ch. 6. Is it too much to wonder if she is a bit of a vamp herself? She is certainly not averse to telling the stories of the men whose hearts she breaks, despite her friend Mina missing her Jonathan.

I rather suspect that we are meant more to dwell on the contrast between her frivolous ways and Dracula's willfulness and dominance, but we may be meant to sense some comparison with the three weird sisters of the castle in Transylvania. Stoker is interesting enough and can certainly carry on more than one extended metaphor at once.

Ooh. I do like that thought about the comparison between Lucy and the three female vampires. However, she did have three men trying to seduce and win her. Could there also be something in that?

Well, it's a strange kind of inversion, and the more I think about it the less I am confident that I see what Stoker has in mind, but I can't help thinking there is a reason for the number of suitors matching the number of vampire women. A foil is a useful literary device, with compare and contrast wrapped up together.

The weird sisters in the castle have something sexual in their desire for Harker, but we also understand that the need for blood is not sexual at its core but uses "animal magnetism" as part of the way it casts its spell. Is Stoker suggesting that the attraction the suitors feel for Lucy is vampiric, with at least one of them having hardly met her but feeling compelled by her beauty? Maybe. The genuine love she feels for Arthur, and from Arthur, is surely a contrast with the vampiric predatory hunt.

I suspect the well-known Victorian repression of sexuality, matched by secret skulking off to prostitutes, is a kind of stage of movement beyond the ribaldry of 18th century society and towards a healthier sense of the satisfactions of "gentlemen" that came with Victoria's power (and Albert's sublimated, generous masculinity). And Stoker is wrestling with those tensions, trying to "unearth" (sorry) the dark forces that also gave us Jack the Ripper, but in a captivating (sorry) and ultimately hopeful way.

Lucy's sleepwalking, which irritated me very much when I read the book in college, is clearly symbolizing a Jungian shadow side of her dedication to romance. It will make her vulnerable, and suggests that she has some repressed side that already represents vulnerability. A desire to be dominated? Maybe, but more likely a desire to be captivating, to recruit the power of masculine station and willfulness to her own repressed goals of domination over others. She wants to be free, in a way that is not available in daytime society.

Domination is the old way, the way power was maintained for the sake of power but increasingly also for the sake of achieving civilized common life. Dracula's contrasts suggest adaptation to this tension to me, (I like the suggestion that he is "aware" of morality, like a sociopath would be) but he is clearly still committed fully to domination as the reality of "human" nature. Stoker is going to pit otherworldly power against his horrific ways of domination, but not in some modernist, optimistic way, nor with any power of the romantic at all.

Much of the writing in the next few chapters takes the shape of a process we have become familiar with in horror writing. I wonder how new it was at the time. Incident after incident, from the arrival of the ship to the escape of the "zoophagous" madman, takes the shape of revealing what we as readers know to fear, but the people in the story seem oblivious to. We know, because that is the way story works, that Dracula is behind Lucy's repeated exhaustions and pinprick holes in her neck, behind the dog escaping from the ship, behind the madman's obsessions and alternating extremes.

Why can't they see it? This is the maneuver that so many horror films trade in, where we know there is a murderous madman lurking and the characters go on with their lives, perhaps bewildered, but not clued in enough to be alarmed. I wonder if that leads to the actual function of van Helsing - to serve as a transition object for the reader, to contain our horrifying knowledge with some semblance of ability to stand up to the dreaded swirling menace.

I was so annoyed that no one really heeded the signs. And even when Van Helsing kinda knew what was going on....they STILL managed to leave Lucy alone enough to get her killed (unkilled?)

At least stay with her!

I'm wondering about Dracula's many uncanny powers. Not only can he change into animals, he can seemingly influence a "tuned in" madman from afar, can induce sleepiness and even stupefaction in his prey, can cause wolves to obey him, and maybe can control the weather. Some of this may be just trading on "lore" - there were tales of vampires, including a possible connection of the aversion to sunlight from Vlad III, a victim of porphyria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porphyria
and Stoker is going out of his way to make use of the alleged powers and weaknesses in spinning a tale about traditional Christian symbolism having power over the forces of darkness. The exotic seems to feature almost as much as the occult or the metaphorical. In more modern horror tales there seems to be more effort to set up "rules of the game," even in some of Stephen King's really off the wall stuff.

But Stoker is at a disadvantage here, because his readers would probably not have known much about the lore. So he can gradually bring it forth, with one unexpected trick after another emerging in the gradual overpowering of Lucy and of Harker before her, but we are left scratching our heads some of the time as to whether, say, the bumbling of Lucy's mother or the procrastination of van Helsing are influenced by his uncanny powers or just happen to come along at unfortunate times.

Maybe it doesn't matter to the story. Maybe we can just suffer with plot devices that may or may not be powers of the vampire, as the author weaves a chilling story in which the extent and the strategies of the contesting powers are meant to remain mysterious and we just get a sense of relief to have escaped, in the end. But to this modern reader it does feel a little cheap.

Responding to Harry (not using the quote function because it is so tedious when on my phone)

The point you make about how folks of his time might not have been well versed in the lore he was using for his plot devices is interesting. You mention this as possibly having been to his disadvantage, but perhaps it actually helped his story in becoming so well received and considered a classic now.

Very interesting take on why the actions of the characters were either silly or downright irresponsible. I hadn't looked at it from the perspective of Dracs control.

He did seem to have more control over certain types: a somnambulist and the insane. And this did cross my mind. The other characters were supposed to be on their game and strong. I guess that's why I hadn't considered their misses as something Drac may have influenced.

Mr. P wrote:He did seem to have more control over certain types: a somnambulist and the insane. And this did cross my mind. The other characters were supposed to be on their game and strong. I guess that's why I hadn't considered their misses as something Drac may have influenced.

Yeah, I am going to think some more about the susceptibility. Just some Victorian version of "weak minds"? Or something subtler? Lucy's mother seems an obvious possibility for susceptibility, but as you say, some pretty resistant characters also dropped the ball.

Perhaps a connection to the netherworld? Souls touched by damnation of some sort?

Mr. P wrote:Perhaps a connection to the netherworld? Souls touched by damnation of some sort?

Well, if so, I hope Stoker has some point to make about these connections. I don't really mind if the connection is just "people I am turned off by" to help increase the shudder-power of the story. But I would feel more gratified if he had something sort of Jungian or Freudian to connect to.