Fatal Finale

The last chapters of Dracula pass rather quickly as Van Helsing, Seward, Morris, and the Harkers search for Dracula and eventually destroy him in order to keep other innocent people from harm as well as to help Mina avoid a dreadful fate.

Throughout the book, Dracula is described as the stereotypical vampire that one generally sees around Halloween. As a vampire, Dracula has a ridiculous amount of power that he uses to overtake his victims and accomplish his goals. He is able to turn into mist or small particles of dust so he can go where he chooses for the most part unnoticed. Dracula can “within his range, direct the elements; the storm, the fog, the thunder” (261). The vampire is able to control the nocturnal “meaner creatures” such as owls, moths, rats, bats, and wolves. One of the passages from an earlier blog entry describes how Dracula has the ability to transform into a dog. Later the reader is able to discern that he is also able to change into a bat, like most people believe a vampire can.

No matter how strong vampires are, they always have weaknesses that lead to their eventual downfall. They are only powerful when the sun is down; sunrise comes and they are weakened, hence, why they usually sleep in the daytime. Dracula “may not enter anywhere…unless there be some one of the household who bid him to come” (264). Vampires cannot cross water unless carried across it somehow (like by sailing in a boat). He has to sleep somewhere that has a connection to his home. In the novel, Dracula keeps boxes of Transylvanian earth in multiple locations around London so he can sleep soundly. Then there are the more obvious limitations such as garlic and holy objects.

Stoker describes Dracula as a bloodthirsty animal, without human emotions (except for rage, fear and the like). With sharp teeth, unimaginable strength, and an insatiable thirst for blood, vampires are monsters that should be feared, according to Stoker.

An Enigmatic Description

After Jonathan’s diary entries in the beginning of the book, there is very little to show the reader what a vampire’s personality is like. Dracula turns Lucy into a vampire and a newspaper excerpt reveals that a woman, who the reader infers to be Lucy, has been seen by many children in the middle of the night. Known as the “Bloofer Lady”, Lucy’s corpse takes children into the graveyard where they are found later with small wounds on their necks. Van Helsing, Arthur Holmwood (Lucy’s fiancé), and Quincey Morris (who had asked for Lucy’s hand but was turned down) went to the cemetery one night and they see her holding a young child. Lucy’s “sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty” (231).
Later on, Renfield, a patient at Seward’s mental institution, is severely beaten; his back is broken and he suffers severe injuries to his head. Renfield admits to letting Dracula inside in the past because he promised to give him the animals he desired. However, Renfield had noticed Mina’s recent weakness, and, believing it was the Count’s fault, he attempted to stop him from entering through the window.
Seward, Van Helsing, and Morris rush up to Mina and Jonathan’s room and break the door down. They find Jonathan cowering in fear on the bed as Dracula holds Mina’s face to his chest, forcing her to drink his blood. This incident had “a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink” (311).
Through these events, the reader can see that in Dracula, vampires are portrayed as ruthless beings. Lucy, who had been so caring in life, was transformed into heartless monster. When Dracula is unable to get his way, he nearly kills whoever is trying to stop him. Stoker doesn’t go much further than this in his descriptions of his vampires. The mystery behind these creatures makes it seem as if they were only meant to be beasts and nothing more. Stoker makes it clear what Dracula the vampire wants, but not what the Dracula with possible feelings and emotions wants.

Death of the Undead

There seem to be as many different ways to kill a vampire as there are vampire stories.

In Dracula, Lucy becomes a vampire. Through a newspaper article, Dr. Van Helsing figures out that she is hurting young children. He takes Dr. Seward to the cemetery where she is buried to keep watch. At one point they open her coffin to find her body missing. Seward, who doesn’t believe Van Helsing, suggests that her body has been taken by grave robbers. They return the next afternoon to find Lucy in her coffin, lips deep red and cheeks rosy as if she were still alive, but sleeping. Van Helsing says that to kill her they must “cut off her head and fill her mouth with garlic, and ... drive a stake through her body” (221).

Other books, movies, and TV series claim there are other methods to killing vampires. In “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” as well as many movies, the only way to kill a vampire is to drive a stake through its heart. There is an old myth that I’ve heard that says that if you decapitate a vampire and throw its head in a fast-moving river, the river will trap the vampire’s spirit, thereby killing it. Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight argues that the only way to be sure a vampire is dead is to tear the body into small pieces and then scatter the remains. There are other books and many movies that portray vampires as slightly more human, dying only from serious injury (serious being more serious than a normal human being, but not to the point where they have to have their heads severed from their bodies).

Though there are differences in the techniques to vampire slaying there is one thing that they generally have in common. Most killings involve severe mutilation of the vampire’s body.

Transformations

Another important aspect to vampire stories is the transformation. How does one become a vampire? The answer to this question, as seen in most movies and novels, is that someone becomes a vampire by being bitten by a vampire.

This is what seems to be the case in Dracula. Lucy Westenra, Mina’s best friend, gets into the habit of sleepwalking. One night, Mina finds her gone. She runs around town and when she finds Lucy, there is a large red-eyed figure looming over her. As Mina comes closer, the figure runs off leaving Lucy asleep and unaware of what happened. Mina walks Lucy home and notices that she has two small puncture wounds on her neck near one of the major veins. Over the next few weeks, Lucy starts to weaken. She complains of nightmares and is sometimes frightened of sleep.

Eventually Lucy becomes so weak that her mother becomes concerned. She calls Dr. Seward who notices that Lucy has lost a lot of blood. The doctor is unsure what is happening to her as she shows no signs of anemia. He calls his friend Dr. Van Helsing. He comes and upon examining her, starts to fill the room with garlic. Lucy starts to recover in the days afterwards. Seeing her daughter’s noticeable improvement, Mrs. Westenra removes the garlic despite Van Helsing’s orders.

Van Helsing returns the next morning to find Lucy looking worse that she did before. He and Seward place the garlic back and hope for the best. That night, a wolf breaks into the house and gives Lucy’s mother a fatal heart attack and Lucy loses consciousness. Seward and Van Helsing find them but it is too late. They try to keep Lucy alive, but she dies despite their efforts. As she dies, they notice her face is extremely pale, her canine teeth are elongated, and the puncture wounds on her neck have disappeared.

From what happened, it is obvious that Dracula bit Lucy multiple times. Lucy became weak and eventually died. She appears to have become a vampire by the time she died. The vampire transformation in Dracula appears to require enough blood loss to weaken the victim considerably but leave them to die on their own. I have read many books with transformations similar to this. However, there is one book I have read that claims otherwise. The Cirque du Freak series says that vampires are created when the vampire and the victim exchange blood willingly. Dracula seems to follow the typical pattern as far as transformations are concerned.

Other Vampires of Olden Times

I decided to look up information on older vampire myths and legends and I found a good article on howstuffworks.com. According to this article, the first vampires showed up around 4,000 years ago. Mesopotamia’s Lamastu and Lilith were mostly used to explain infertility and early childhood deaths, as they would steal or kill children in their beds in the middle of the night. These first vampires and vampire-like demons were all described as part woman and part animal. Vampire type figures in Asia were more like the blood-sucking, reanimated corpses that most people know today.

Vampires were very well known in Eastern Europe. The Russians and Greeks said that sinners, unbaptized people, non-Christians, and witches were most likely to be vampires after death. There were many occurrences in the 1600s and 1700s of people digging up dead bodies to burn them or stake them because they were afraid they were vampires. For Dracula, Stoker chose bits and pieces of the eastern European vampire myths and added some of his own details, such as vulnerability to sunlight and crucifixes. Unlike the general myths of the time, Dracula had no reflection and was very smart.

The rest of the article goes into detail about some of the different early vampire forms. It also explains some diseases that look similar to vampirism that could have spurred some of the vampire “witch-hunts” in Europe. If interested the link is below. These vampires all seem to have at least one thing in common: they all place human fear of death into a monster.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/vampire.htm