FREE ESSAY ON SPIRIT OF A LATE VICTORIAN AGE

SPIRIT OF A LATE VICTORIAN AGE

The Spirit of a late Victorian Age.
With reference to Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Stoker's monstrous figure, Count Dracula, has today reached epic and almost mythical
proportions, like Frankestein (not the doctor), the Gordon Medusa, even Virginia Woolf
(thanks to Albee). Like the aforementioned examples, what we associate in our minds to be
these monsters, mostly conditioned by popular culture and Hollywood, are merely visual
representation. In the novel itself, however, according to other essayists who have
thoroughly examined this piece, Dracula represents an entire genre of thinking and human
development, concentrated in the prose of literature.
Mark M. Hennelly, Jr. identifies Dracula as an allegory of rival epistimologies in quest
of a gnosis which will rehabilitate the Victorian wasteland; and as its conclusion
dramatizes, this rehabilitation demands, a transfusion, the metaphor is inevitable, from
the blood-knowledge of Dracula (Literature of the Occult, 140). By the Victorian
wasteland the essayist here is referring the superfluity and the redundancy of the
Victorians, particularly the nouveau riche and the middle class. The homes of these upper
classes are lacking space as much as the small rooms in which the proletariat are forced
to stay; the former lack space because of an accumulation of furniture and objects, the
latter because of the smallness of the rooms themselves. The epistimologies in rival are
the rational and the irrational. Beneath the ordered society of his time each [novelist
of the Irrational] say an unordered chaos, a world disintegrating, a new order waiting to
be established (Literature of the Occult, 143). This duality between the rational and the
irrational could only be captured in a novel that is unmistakably Gothic and Romantic.
The novel begins with a travel diary (Dracula: Between Tradition and Modernism, 35) of
Jonothan Harkens, the young British lawyer who has been hired to handle Count Dracula's
estate. Particularly, Count Dracula's strange castle which stands at the edge of a cliff.
Jonothan Harkens becomes a prisoner (Dracula, 47) in this enormous tower in which there
are no servants (Dracula, 32) and yet there is a redundancy of furniture and space and
books. This device as a literary device works on the reader because he becomes engrossed
in Harkens sincere writings and becomes a part of the castle. The castle itself
represents one aspect of the Gothic, the second of which I will expatiate upon later.
The castle itself becomes a body, a vessel, if you will, from which there is no escape
unless the owner of the castle allows him to. There is a kind of Medieval morbidity that
underlies this idea but what Stoker was doing was using the gothic genre to push against
the rational and tend into the realm of fantasy and the occult. By rendering Count
Dracula's as a silent character creates a stable focus for the rest of the changing
narrators. That is to say, while the narration passes from Mina to Harkens to Lucy the
castle itself remains a silent counterpart.
Why is this important? Like I have mentioned earlier, there is a kind of Medieval
morbidity to personifying the castle. This represents both the body and the spirit
screaming to a God who as pious persons we must believe in but in actuality we never do
get to see. There is no doubt that the Western European characters are at least nominal
Christians or that the English characters are adherents to the Church of England, Carol
Senf writes in Dracula: Between Tradition and Modernism (67). A good example of this is
when Jonothan Harkens is offered a rosary. I did not know what to do, for as an English
Churchman, I have been taught that these things as...idolatrous, and yet it seemed so
ungracious to refuse an old lady (Dracula, 67). This kind of ambivalence and rival of
epistimologies runs throughout the entire novel, where the very nature of duality is
concentrated. 
The blood is the life, and for Victorian scientists, genetic material circulated in the
bloodstream...because it contained the information that communicated the animal's or
human's mental and physical makeup (Dracula: Between Tradition and Modernism, 75).
Although this theory is unmistakably Darwin, what it tends to identify is a group of
people who believed in Darwin's biology and Newton's physics. In fact, according to the
essay For Blood is the Life it talks about Darwin's nephew, Francis Galton putting his
uncle's theories into practice, by transfusing the blood of one animal into the body of
the other in order to influence the offspring (Dracula: Between Tradition and Modernism,
75)
Bibliography
Dracula movie