How Setting Is Used in Dracula Book Review

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Dracula

Bram Stoker's Dracula represented for the Victorian reader the assault of the libertine on Victorian sexual morality. Dracula was a predator who stalked at night and had the capacity to transform himself into a beast in order to escape deduction. His method was seduction, which led to death, and in an age when propriety concealed all such discussions as sexual adventurism (which had to some extent characterized the preceding Romantic Era with another author of Gothic fiction Mary Shelley depicted her husband the poet Percy through the lens of Dr. Frankenstein, the man bent on using pure Reason to achieve his ludicrous aim), Dracula served up a hearty dish of danger and taboo that gave the Victorian audience exactly what it wanted -- a whiff of the underlying sexual tension that the moral code of the time disallowed in public. Prying open Dracula's coffin was like prying open the underbelly of the Victorian era and releasing a vibe of sexuality into the open.

That such was dangerous is what serves to support the conflict of the novel. Dracula must be stopped and only the enlightened Van Helsing can stop him. He is the man who has researched the vampire and his cult and understood the danger of the vampire's methods.

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Moreover, he has understood the nature of the disease that spreads from the vampire to the victim -- the thirst for blood. This bloodlust or lust of the blood provided graphic imagery and metaphor for the Victorian public: when Van Helsing gives a blood transfusion to Lucy, he states, "She wants blood, and blood she must have or die" (123). It was a symbol of the pent up sexual frustration lurking beneath society, which Stoker himself felt and which his contemporaries, men like Oscar Wilde, knew all too well (Wilde himself would be imprisoned for his own sexual adventurism in England). Thus, Dracula's ability to bring "bloodlust" into the public sphere was a testament to his power and his danger, and as Mina would go on to describe it, this power made Dracula a "brute, and more than brute; he is devil" (237).

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Geography is important in Dracula and the first clue that one has of this is the fact that it begins on a train, in the middle of the action, as Harker is speeding from one destination to another. He is leaving the familiar for the….....

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