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| Odilon Redon, Portrait of Marie Botkin (1900) |
Answer TWO of the following:
Q1: Discuss how Lucy is described by Seward as they
gradually accept that she must be killed, and is not Lucy—at least the Lucy
they once knew. Remember that we have to take this with a grain of salt, since
Seward is the narrator, not an omniscient narrator; these are his biased and passion-addled
diary entries. How does he see the new Lucy, and/or how does Van Helsing help
him ‘translate’ her new appearance? You might consider the passage where he
reflects, “I was, in fact, beginning to shudder at the presence of this being,
this Un-Dead, as Van Helsing called it, and to loathe it” (188).
Q2: While there is a definite theme of English vs.
“Oriental” (that is, of the world beyond the British Empire ),
many readers also read this book as also Christian vs. Pagan, or science vs.
superstition (even faith vs. magic). How does Stoker complicate this reading
through the characters of Van Helsing and Mina? You might also remember that
even Dr. Seward describes Arthur slaying Un-Dead Lucy as looking “like a figure
of Thor.”
Q3: Dracula is an extremely self-aware novel; that
is, it is a gothic novel about writing a gothic novel. Stoker explicitly
shows Mina “making” the book throughout, and even Arthur, examining all of her
transcriptions, adds, “it does make a pretty good pile...Did you write all
this, Mrs. Harker?” Why do you think Stoker calls our attention to the writing
of the novel? What might be the advantage of this approach?
Q4: At one point, Van Helsing tells Mina, “We are men, and
are able to bear; but you must be our star and our hope, and we shall act all
the more free that you are not in the danger, such as we are” (225). Do you
think Stoker intends this to be a misogynistic novel, one that puts “New Women”
in their place, or simply believes that only men can save the empire? Or is
this another example of the shortsightedness (and ineffectiveness) of the
masculine ideal?
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