Transylvania 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.

Considered and set aside

• Case for the argument: Harker’s assumptions are challenged by the protective crucifix and the local knowledge he initially dismisses. The plot exposes limits in the visitor’s confident categories.
• Case against: his descriptions can still reproduce hierarchies between England and the East. A corrected judgement does not necessarily erase the prejudice in the language used to describe other people.
• Narrative qualification: the Count writes letters; Harker, Mina and the Dutch Van Helsing describe Transylvania. The local people encountered on the opening journey receive no sustained narrative of their own. Do not turn that inequality into a claim that all descriptions are English or that no Transylvanian writes.
• Deciding evidence: the hunters return using Harker’s diary, and the final note records a castle that remains after its owner’s defeat.
• Judgement: Transylvania tests the visitor’s confidence while remaining a place represented chiefly through visiting narrators. It is a source of danger and useful knowledge, not merely an exotic backdrop.

• Structure: develop the traveller’s view, challenge its judgements, then examine who retains authority to describe the place.
• Extract: “picturesque”, the gestures of faith and the encroaching shadows (Chapter 1). Explain the change in mood and the limits of Harker’s interpretation.
• Constructed setting: books, maps and “Transylvania is not England” (Chapters 1–2). Both Harker and the Count frame the difference.
• Challenge and qualification: the crucifix protects Harker, but local witnesses lack sustained narratives. Account for the Count’s letters and Van Helsing’s later memorandum.
• Return and persistence: Van Helsing navigates by the diary (Chapter 27), while the final note leaves the castle standing. Analyse “of desolation” as a postmodifier, not a premodifier.
• Conclusion: connect the setting’s narrative function to the unequal perspectives through which it is known. Do not add the unsupported detail that the Harkers’ son accompanied the return journey.

Read the extract printed below. This is from the section of the novel where Jonathan Harker first arrives in Transylvania. Explore the significance of Transylvania as a location in the novel. You should consider: the presentation of Transylvania in the extract below and at different points in the novel the use of fantasy elements in constructing a fictional world.

Before Jonathan Harker sees Transylvania, he reads it. His search among books and maps (Chapter 1) prepares a place that the English traveller believes he can classify, yet cannot precisely locate. The opening therefore presents more than an exotic backdrop. It tests a way of looking: local customs first appear as picturesque curiosities or superstition, before events expose the limits of that judgement. I shall argue that Transylvania is both the source of the supernatural threat and the setting in which the novel unsettles the visitor’s confidence. That challenge does not distribute narrative authority equally. The Count writes letters, but the local people Harker meets receive no sustained narrative account comparable to those of the returning hunters.

The extract presents Transylvania as a view, admired from outside and darkening as it is admired. Harker’s first-person narration builds the landscape through a semantic field of height and scale (“lofty steeps”, “towered”, “endless perspective”) and a list of colour adjectives (“deep blue and purple”, “green and brown”). This is the language of the Romantic sublime: the scenery is magnificent because it exceeds the observer. The people are absorbed into the same picture. The evaluative adjective in “all in picturesque attire” makes the “Cszeks and Slovaks” part of the scenery, and the next clause, “but I noticed that goitre was painfully prevalent”, judges them by an English standard of health. Even their faith is something Harker watches. The reflexive pronouns in “crossed himself” and “crossed themselves” keep the act of devotion with the locals, and the kneeling peasant has “neither eyes nor ears for the outer world”: Harker is the outer world, looking in. But the extract does not let the view stay still. As the sun “sank lower and lower behind us”, the personified “shadows of the evening began to creep round us”. The verb gives the dark an intention, and the pronoun “us” pulls the observer into the scene he thought he was observing. The extract’s significance lies in that movement. It sets up the tourist’s frame so that the novel can break it.

Transylvania is a constructed world whose border is drawn in words, and both Harker and the Count draw it. Harker’s journal defines the country by what England has and it lacks: he feels he is “leaving the West and entering the East”, and he jokes that “the further east you go the more unpunctual are the trains”. His simile for the region’s folklore, “as if it were the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool”, treats superstition as an entertaining spectacle. His parenthesis “(Mem., I must ask the Count all about them.)” adds dramatic irony, because the man he plans to ask is the answer. Crucially, the Count insists on the same border: “We are in Transylvania; and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways” (Chapter 2). Repetition and the parallel pronouns “our” and “your” make the difference an instruction, and he uses it to keep his guest from asking questions. In Chapter 3 he takes up Harker’s metaphor himself, boasting of his people’s blood “in the whirlpool of European races”. The traveller’s image for a muddle of superstitions becomes the master’s image for a history of conquest. This is where the fantasy element works hardest. Real names (Bistritz, the Borgo Pass, the Carpathians) anchor an invented castle and invented rules, so the reader accepts the impossible because it arrives in the matter-of-fact declaratives of a solicitor’s journal. The Estate’s account of Bram’s research gives that reading some support. Bram never visited Transylvania. He assembled it from travel books, maps and Emily Gerard’s writing on local superstitions, and his early plans placed the story in Styria. Harker researching in a London library repeats, inside the fiction, how his author made the place. That is not proof of intention. It does confirm that “Transylvania” in this novel is a made world, and that the choice of it was deliberate.

The plot challenges Harker’s judgement through the useful knowledge of the people he initially views from outside. He hesitates over the landlady’s crucifix “as an English Churchman” (Chapter 1), yet it later checks the Count’s approach to his bleeding throat. What he files as superstition can become a means of protection. Stephen Arata’s reading of the confident Western tourist helps illuminate this reversal. Nevertheless, the challenge has limits. Harker’s description of the Szgany continues to generalise, and local witnesses have no sustained written narrative through which to explain their own country. Harker is not the only visitor entitled to describe it: Mina and the Dutch Van Helsing do so on the return. The more defensible distinction is between the visiting narrators’ extensive authority and the restricted representation of the people they encounter.

The return makes the location more than an opening episode to leave behind. Van Helsing uses his memory of Harker’s diary to find the old chapel (Chapter 27): an account first written by a frightened visitor becomes a practical guide. The hunters have gained knowledge, but the setting does not disappear with its master. When the Harkers revisit seven years later, “The castle stood as before, reared high above a waste of desolation” (the final note). The postmodifying phrase “of desolation” intensifies the emptiness around the head noun “waste”. The castle remains, even though the Count has gone. Transylvania outlasts the action through which the visitors believe they have understood and overcome it.

Transylvania is significant because it tests the categories through which visitors try to understand it. The extract begins with a traveller’s view, then lets darkness and uncertainty enter it; the crucifix challenges Harker’s judgement of local belief; the return makes his account a practical guide for the hunters. Different visiting narrators describe the country, so the ending does not leave Harker with an exclusive right to speak. Yet local people still receive little sustained narrative authority of their own. The setting unsettles the visitor’s confidence without erasing the unequal perspectives through which it is represented. Even after the Count’s defeat, the castle remains beyond the story the survivors can prove.

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.