Fear in Dracula

The five stages below lead to the finished essay. After planning, use steps 6 and 7 of the writing guide to draft and revise your own response.

Each bullet states a paragraph’s main point and explains how it contributes to the essay’s overall argument.

Because the storyworld makes the supernatural real, therefore the essay should test whether Stoker treats fear as evidence. But it must also ask when fear misleads.

Considered and set aside

• For the knowledge argument: Jonathan’s recognition prompts Mina to read the journal; later his own account connects restored resolve with accepting the reality of his experience.
• Complication: fear can also silence or restrict. Mina hesitates to distress Jonathan, and the men’s fear for her contributes to excluding her.
• Counterevidence: the Demeter captain dies, yet his account contributes to later understanding. The castle escape and final pursuit also show fear coexisting with action.
• Judgement: fear is not knowledge by itself, nor is it always disabling. Its significance lies in how characters interpret it, record it and decide whether to share what it has made them notice.

• Structure: build a cumulative argument, then test it with evidence that prevents an absolute rule.
• Opening and extract: Jonathan’s alarm at the London sighting, followed by Mina’s response. Distinguish what she sees from what he can explain.
• Mina’s decision: trace the movement from fear of causing harm to the resolve to read the journal. Analyse viewpoint and sequence, not just the emotion named.
• Wider novel: compare Jonathan’s solitary fear in Chapter 2 with his reflection in his own journal in Chapter 14. Introduce the Demeter log as testimony that becomes useful after its writer’s death.
• Counterargument: cultural anxiety explains objects of fear; protective fear can also obstruct the hunters’ circulation of knowledge. Neither reading has to exclude the other.
• Ending: separate the survivors’ shared conviction from publicly convincing proof. Conclude that interpretation and communication shape fear’s consequences.

The castle escape (Chapter 4) and final pursuit (Chapters 26–27) are useful tests of any claim that fear prevents action. Radcliffe belongs to the analysis of literary effects on readers; do not treat a character’s paralysis as a complete account of a reader’s response.

Read the extract printed below. This is from the section of the novel where Mina gives an account of Jonathan’s reaction to seeing Dracula when they are in London. Explore the significance of fear in the novel. You should consider: the presentation of fear in the extract below and at different points in the novel the use of fantasy elements in constructing a fictional world.

Jonathan Harker recognises the Count in London, but cannot explain what he has seen. Mina observes his alarm and then his lapse into forgetfulness (Chapter 13). The extract makes fear both a genuine response to danger and an experience that needs interpretation. I shall argue that its significance lies in what characters do with it: fear can prompt investigation and recording, but can also silence a witness or encourage protective exclusion. The reality of the supernatural gives Jonathan’s terror a cause his companions must learn to recognise; it does not make every frightened judgement correct. Mina’s decision to read his journal shows an alarming perception beginning to become usable knowledge.

The extract presents Jonathan’s fear as a crisis of knowledge rather than of courage. Because it reaches us through Mina’s homodiegetic narration, we see the fear from outside: she reads its signs, and the intensifiers in “very greatly terrified” record what she observes, as a nurse might. Jonathan’s direct speech, however, is organised around uncertainty. The mental verb in “I believe it is the Count” carries an epistemic modality that his exclamatives cannot resolve, and the conditional “if this be so” and the repeated “If I only knew! if I only knew!” (Chapter 13) place the horror in the gap between what he sees and what he can allow himself to know. The fantasy element sharpens the point. “He has grown young” is precisely the detail a rational observer would discount, yet in Stoker’s storyworld it is true: the Count has been feeding. Fear registers the truth before reason will accept it. Here, though, it leads not to action but to oblivion. Jonathan wakes “quite cheerfully”, having “forgotten all about the dark stranger”, and the repetition of “forgotten” and “forgetfulness” shows the break in Jonathan’s ability to explain his alarm, even though Mina has witnessed it. Mina’s worry about “injury to the brain” uses the medical vocabulary of a man who has already suffered “brain fever”; the reader, who has read his castle journal, can recognise both his justified fear and his psychological distress.

Mina’s fear, by contrast, becomes a decision. The word recurs in three senses within a few lines: “I feared to keep his mind on the subject” is anxiety that silences her; “for fear I shall do more harm than good” is protective restraint; “The time is come, I fear” is only a hedge on a judgement she has already made. The modal verbs move with it, from the prohibition “I must not ask him” to the obligation “I must somehow learn the facts”. In one paragraph fear changes its function: what began as a reason for silence ends as a reason to read. Her agency is grammatical as well as moral – “I drew him away” makes her the subject and Jonathan the object – and it is qualified by her request for forgiveness “if I do wrong”. The decision matters because it reverses Jonathan’s own. When he handed her the journal he said, “The secret is here, and I do not want to know it” (Chapter 9). Fear, in Mina’s hands, is the beginning of an investigation.

Across the novel, Jonathan’s responses show how the interpretation of fear can change. At the castle he writes, “I doubt; I fear; I think strange things” (Chapter 2): observation has not become an explanation he can confidently share. In his own journal on 26 September he says that doubt had overwhelmed him, whereas knowing the reality of the threat restores his resolve (Chapter 14). That sequence supports a connection between understanding and action, not a universal claim that only certainty can overcome fear. The Demeter log supplies a necessary qualification. Its captain dies, but his testimony survives in the newspaper material and helps the group understand the Count’s arrival. Fear can produce a useful record even when it cannot save its first witness. Radcliffe’s distinction between terror and horror concerns imaginative effects on readers; Jonathan’s paralysis concerns a character’s capacity to act. Stoker can depict the latter while producing suspense through the former.

The strongest objection is that this makes fear too rational. Stephen Arata reads the novel’s fear as cultural: the Count is the East reversing the journey of empire, and his appearance on Piccadilly, among the shops of fashionable London, is that anxiety made visible. On this account fear is significant for what it is fear of – the foreign, the degenerate – not for what it lets characters know. Arata explains the object well, and the extract’s “dark man” and “dark stranger” invite his reading. But the extract does not stage a city’s panic; it stages one man’s disabled perception and one woman’s response to it, and the plot rewards characters who turn fear into records, whatever its object. The more serious qualification comes from inside the hunting band. Fear for others can blind as badly as fear of the Count. Van Helsing praises Mina and, in the same speech, excludes her because “her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors” (Chapter 18). Mina, “kept in the dark” (Chapter 19), is left without the knowledge that might have protected her when the Count reaches her. Protective fear repeats Jonathan’s forgetting at the level of the group. Mina herself nearly makes the same mistake in the extract – “for fear I shall do more harm than good” – and chooses otherwise.

Later in the pursuit Jonathan finds a physical reminder of their experience in the scar on Mina’s forehead: “Whilst that lasts, there can be no disbelief” (Chapter 24). The mark supports conviction for those who know its history; it is not simply fear itself made into proof. In the final note, seven years later, the survivors distinguish that shared experience from what their typescripts could establish to outsiders. “We ask none to believe us” declines to demand public acceptance. The documentary form has made testimony useful for action without resolving every question about verification. Fear has consequences because it prompts attention and recording, but neither the emotion nor the record guarantees that every reader will be persuaded.

Fear is significant because Stoker makes its meaning and consequences depend on interpretation. In the extract Jonathan recognises a real threat but cannot explain it, while Mina turns anxiety into a decision to investigate. Elsewhere protective fear withholds information, and a dead captain’s record helps people he never met. Fear does not always paralyse, and it does not become knowledge merely by being felt. The novel’s documentary form lets readers follow the work that converts an alarming perception into something others can test and use. What matters is not simply being frightened, but what the frightened person can make known.

The essay ends here. For board-published candidate responses, assessment commentary and points to test, open the separate teaching notes.

All nine examples · 60 Estate practice questions · Quotations and evidence.