Teaching notes: Desire in Dracula

Board-published responses

• VCAA (Victoria, Australia), VCE Literature 2024, Section A, high-scoring responses on Dracula. The set passage was Van Helsing in the vampire women’s tomb. One high-scoring sample tracks a single word – “voluptuous” – from Van Helsing’s account back to the undead Lucy, and argues that the protagonists’ moral judgement turns a “fair” woman into a “thing”. That is the move our ¶5 makes, though we read the word as evidence about the men who use it. The report reproduces full responses; VCAA says they are examples, not models to copy. VCAA, 2024 VCE Literature external assessment report (the board’s own material).
• Pearson Edexcel 2023, full-mark (40/40) Dracula and Dorian Gray answer on “supernatural beings or events”. One paragraph reads the undead Lucy as a demonised image of female desire that the novel punishes, and attributes that reading to feminist critics – a model for using Roth-style criticism as an interpretation rather than a fact. Pearson 9ET0/02 report, June 2023, pp. 54–56 (the board’s own material).

What the examiners said

• Very few candidates answered this question, and answers tended to be at Level 3 or below (out of six levels). Cambridge 9695 Principal Examiner Report, June 2022, Paper 43, p. 59
• Most wrote about the three vampire women and Harker’s response to them, and read Dracula’s attacks as sexual – a reasonable start, but a narrow range of the novel. Same report, p. 59
• The weakest misread “desire” as any wish a character has, giving the example “Jonathan desires business, then desires to leave”. Define the key term from the text before you start. Same report, p. 59
• The paper’s key messages: plan strategically and select rather than include everything; remember that characters are constructs, and keep the writer and their choices in view. Same report, Paper 43 general comments, p. 57
• On the companion Dracula question that June (Paper 41, female characters as victims), strong answers drew on psychoanalytic and socio-cultural readings, and argued that the vampire women had been victims who became predators. Same report, Paper 41, p. 46
• How the examiners view context: for Cambridge, context must “illuminate” the reading and be relevant to the question; examiners complain that candidates include material of little relevance and that context is sometimes “presented as fact when it is really speculation”, naming a writer’s sexuality as an area needing care. For a desire question on Dracula, that means: use the period’s ideas of female purity to explain the novel’s language, and treat claims about Stoker’s own feelings as speculation unless you can show what they add to your reading. Same report, Paper 43 general comments, p. 57