Teaching notes · Example 7
Teaching notes: Transylvania in Dracula
Essay questionRead 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.
These notes sit outside the essay. Related candidate scripts belong to their examination boards and are identified by board, year and task. A reported mark applies to that script, not to the Estate’s example.
Chapter C: Aqa course guide, sources and reports · Board-published candidate-response catalogue.
Teaching notes and examiner feedback
Board-published responses
No AQA answer to this exact question has been located in this collection. The nearest board material is AQA’s own Section B example on Dracula: a response to the specimen question on Lucy’s physical state, with examiner commentary but no mark. Note that the pack heads it “Question 4” although it answers the specimen Q05. It is useful for seeing how AQA expects language levels (lexis, grammar, narrative voice) to be tied to the question’s focus. AQA 7707/1 Section B student responses with commentary, pp. 2–3 (AQA’s own material).
What the examiners said
AQA 7707/1 Report on the Examination, June 2023, Section B (PDF):
- Stay on Transylvania. Some students “focused on locations in the novel more generally rather than Transylvania specifically” (p. 10). Whitby and London are contrasts, not the subject.
- Explain the why. Many students repeated the word “significance” without explaining it. The examiners suggest moving from what, where and how to why the writer presents the place in this way (p. 10).
- Analyse point of view. The most successful answers discussed how the narrative viewpoint is constructed and how it shapes what we are told (p. 8). Harker’s journal is the view of Transylvania.
- Use language levels precisely. In Section B, AO1 was weaker than elsewhere on the paper. “Literature-only” answers limited themselves, and some students mislabelled deixis or mixed up syndetic and asyndetic listing (pp. 9–10). Name a feature only when you can say what it does.
- How the examiners view context: for this question they credited the Victorians’ fear of the East, fin-de-siècle “othering”, and the period’s interest in the supernatural and superstition. The stronger answers used the sublime, the supernatural and Gothic conventions inside their analysis of particular passages, not listed in the introduction (p. 11). Two of the three AO3 strands concern genre (p. 11). The mark scheme’s AO3 list adds 19th-century attitudes to travel and other cultures, and Romantic ideas of the picturesque (mark scheme, p. 22).
- Choose other moments well. The mark scheme suggests Chapter 1 (the inn), Chapter 3 (the view from the castle) and Chapter 27 (the pursuit) as passages beyond the extract (mark scheme, p. 22).
Points to test
Does the thesis survive its strongest counter-evidence? Check every quotation’s chapter, speaker and context. Where could a different interpretation change the conclusion?
Prepared by the Bram Stoker Estate. Page last updated 8 November 2026. Report a correction here.