Dracula

Symbols in DRACULA

    First, I want to talk about the three Weird Sisters Harker encounters in Dracula’s castle. As you can see in the quote, these women offer Harker more sexual satisfaction than his fiancée Mina does. They represent what the Victorian ideal women should not be. They symbolize both the dream and the nightmare of the Victorian male imagination in general, which threats the foundation of a male-dominated society by compromising men’s ability to reason and to maintain control.

    Animals in this novel also carry a symbolic meaning. Take Bats, for example, they are active at night, and through flying allows them access to places Dracula might not otherwise be able to reach. Usually, characters are unaware of them or they aren’t worried about the bats at all. However, they eventually realize that Dracula has the ability to turn himself into a bat and that the bat has the capacity to eavesdrop. Therefore, Bats have a symbol of evil slipping into the subconscious at night, relatively undetected, but doing substantial harm. On the contrary, wolves are associated with danger and they represent a more apparent kind of evil and can create an immediate sense of fear in the novel. They also have a reputation for being “lone” creatures, which acts as a good metaphor for Dracula himself. Unlike bats, the characters are afraid of wolves. 

    And the most commonly used symbol in the novel is blood, and it takes on several different roles. I’m going to talk about two of them. First of all, it symbolizes life and death. It’s vital for both humans and vampires. We see the value of blood for humans when Lucy was bitten by Dracula and dying from blood loss, and its value for vampires as their only form of nourishment and the source of power, Dracula drinks the blood of humans to stay alive, but at the same time is taking away lives. Then, the consumption and transfusion of blood symbolize intimacy and sexual desire. What’s more in 19th-century medical knowledge, semen is regarded as a product of the blood, which means that people then thought that the blood transfusion is closer to having sexual intercourse. Therefore, it also shows the reason why Arthur, Lucy's fiancé, thinks that by transfusing his blood into her veins, he felt Lucy were “truly” his bride.

    After knowing the symbolism of blood, we can explain why in the story Dracula wants Mina under his control and forces her to drink his blood: it can create a bond between them. Therefore, he can spy on Johnathan and Van Helsing, who already knows his true identity,  and can get revenge on his hunters before they take action. However, it’s ironic that Dracula is eventually defeated because Van Helsing chase him back to his castle using Mina’s bond with him.