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.

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 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 agains

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Approximate Word count = 772
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)