Chapters VIII-XIV

The way the scene where Lucy is on the bench when Dracula first attacks her is written leaves me with a very eerie feeling. It was the most frightening scene of the book so far. The way Stoker describes Dracula's red eyes as he looks up and stares at Mina is quite terrifying. I think he did a great job incorporating the feeling of horror into this scene. I do not understand one thing about it, though. Why does Dracula choose Lucy? Why not Mina or even Lucy's mother, for instance? I expected him to go straight for Mina, since she is Jonathan's sweetheart and all. My guess is that he was using Lucy to frighten Mina first, because Mina is the one he really wants.

Also, after reading these two chapters, I am now sure that the patient Renfield is in some correlation with Dracula himself. He runs and falls at the door at Carfax (the house Dracula buys) and talks about his 'master' (presumably Dracula). He is so desperate to escape because his "master is at hand". This leaves barely any doubt in my mind that Renfield is some kind of slave to Dracula. But how and why did Dracula get to him? Does Renfield's previous psychological condition have anything to do with it?

This novel is not purely horror, however. I think that there are many reasons as to why vampires are commonly associated with passionate love today presented even in this book. Stoker incorporates elements of purity in romance that are completely separate from the terrors of Dracula. For instance, Jonathan Harker was believed to be on his death bed with brain fever and he and Mina insisted that they marry immediately. He was supposedly about to die, but they persisted with the marriage. It is quite heart-wrenching that they are so passionately in love and it was touching to see them 'seal the deal' despite all that was going on. Another instance where romance was incorporated were when all three of the men gave Lucy their blood for her to live. They commented that “No man knows, till he experiences it, what it is to feel his own life-blood drawn away into the veins of the woman he loves,” and they also didn't tell her fiance Arthur that they gave her their blood as well for fear that it would seem inappropriate. It was like they believed that the fact that they all gave Lucy their blood was similar to polygamy. The scene with the three women vampires that attack Harker was filled with references to eroticism. There are countless points in the novel where romance is evident, and this may have been the seed for the excessive romanticism of vampires today.

By the way, I am beginning to appreciate the style of the novel in diary entries now. It is interesting to see most of the points of view of the characters in the book and also the compilation is creative, in my opinion. For example, there is the newspaper article about the missing children and the Bloofer Lady (after Lucy's death) they keep claiming they see at night. Letters to each other are also incorporated. It makes the book seem more real because these are actual artifacts from the events as they happened. It's growing on me.

A further question that arose in my mind while reading this bulk of chapters was that of Van Helsing's motives. Was there something in it for him? To learn more about the political motives of not only Van Helsing, but the rest of the characters of the novel, check out this article by Richard Wasson called "The Politics of Dracula": it can be found at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/elt/summary/v009/9.1.wasson.html. I was confused as to why he would keep his suspicions about vampirism a secret. Obviously that was what he suspected because he ordered all of that garlic and made obscure hints toward it to the other characters but never quite came out and told them what he thought was going on. Why wouldn't he just keep them up to date and keep them informed? Also, it seemed peculiar to me that at the drop of a hat, when Seward called him to help with Lucy, he dropped all of his duties at home and threw himself headfirst into this affair. He seemed overly devoted to healing Lucy and fighting whatever has inflicted that pain upon her. But then my mind was changed. His sacrifice of his own blood to Lucy was proof enough that his motives were innocent. He would not have gone as far as to put himself in danger if he was in it for the wrong reasons. I am no longer suspicious of Van Helsing.
Van Helsing from the 2004 Stephen Sommers film.

One short note about Renfield: his licking of Seward's blood from the floor made it concrete in my mind that he is in liaison with Dracula. Now the important thing is to find out how. I am anxious to seeing how this all ties together.