Chapter one Flashcards
(12 cards)
Describe the setting of Chapter one - Transylvanian landscape
Mountains, dark forests, archaic villages, evoking the sublime and the unknown, instilling dread and terror.
Quote of the Transylvanian landscape
Describe the setting of Chapter one - Dracula’s castle
Liminal space, cut off from civilisation. Gothic trope of entrapment.
Quote of Dracula’s castle
Describe the sense of foreboding in chapter one
The locals fear the castle and warn Jonathon Harker; superstition vs reality begins to emerge.
Quote of sense of foreboding
Describe Harker as a rational outsider
He is a modern English solicitor entering a world of irrationality.
Describe the tension between Enlightenment values and Eastern European superstition.
Represents Gothic anxiety about the collapse of empirical understanding and the fin de siecle.
Why is Dracula presented as uncanny.
His uncanny nature suggest how the East is othered, it plays on the fin de siecle fears, and the fears of Eastern invasion.
What form does Stoker use in Dracula?
An epistolary form, Harker’s journal provides a subjective lens - Gothic trope of unreliable narration. It builds tension by restricting knowledge for the reader, enhancing horror.
It is fragmented, explores contemporary fears in a mundane way.
How is male vulnerability shown through Harker’s character?
At the beginning of the novel Harker is embarking on a business trip, he then gradually loses his autonomy and becomes incarcerated. He almost becomes ‘damseled’
What is the main idea in Chapter One?
Liminality, othering the Easr, moving from rationality to irrationality.
