Dracula

Like many books from this time, Bram Stoker’s Dracula deals with one of the greatest human conflicts: the struggle between good and evil. In Dracula, Bram Stoker highlights the interplay of good and evil through the use of characters, symbols, and natural elements.

Stoker acknowledges the complexity of the conflict by showing good characters attracted to evil. When Jonathan Harker goes into a room he discovers at the castle and falls asleep against the Count’s warning, he is encountered by three female vampires, who he finds fearful, but at the same time attractive. “There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips.” As Jonathan sat there “ . . . in an agony of delightful anticipation . . .” he continued to let the vampires pleasure him until the Count shows up. In this scene, as well as others, Stoker implicates the fact that evil is an almost irresistible force which requires great spiritual strength to overcome.

The superstitions of the Carpathians symbolize the struggle going on in the opening chapter of the novel, when Jonathan is on his way to the Count’s castle. The Carpathians try to persuade him to not go because they know that only evil will endure if he goes to the castle. “It is the eve of St. George’s Day. Do you know that to-night when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway?” Jonathan, however, ignores the warning and wishes to continue on his trip. Before he goes a lady gives him a crucifix from around her neck as a symbol of savior against evil. He is hesitant to take it at first for he “ . . . did not know what to do, for, as an English Churchman, I have been taught to regard such things as in some measure idolatrous, and yet it seemed so ungracious to refuse an old lady meaning so well and in such a state of mind”