Desire 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 novel’s records are kept by the people who hunt the vampires, but the vampires carry most of its explicit desire, therefore the essay must ask how desire gets from one to the other, and with what effect.

Considered and set aside

Argument outline

Overall argument: confessed by the narrators, relocated in vampire bodies, destroyed by the plot — and the confessions remain.

paragraph 2 claim: desire first appears as Harker’s confession, recorded against his own wish. So it is human before it is monstrous, and the reader becomes a confidant.

paragraph 3 claim: Lucy’s desire is voiced, censored, then made monstrous and “purified” by the stake. So the plot and its vocabulary contain desire by placing it in a woman’s body (Roth, qualified).

Possession and coercion: the Count’s possessive speech and Mina’s imposed blood exchange complicate the separation between respectable humanity and monstrous appetite. Analyse impaired agency without treating the assault as consent.

paragraph 5 claim: Van Helsing confesses the desire he destroys and links it to protection. So the hunters’ chivalry and the vampire’s appetite are not cleanly opposed (deciding paragraph).

Paragraph plan

The Count’s wish for London and “I too can love” (set aside in Step 2). Renfield. A separate context paragraph on the New Woman – one sentence on Patmore and Acton inside paragraph 3 does the work.

In what ways, and with what effects, does Stoker present desire in the novel?

The most openly desiring sentences in Dracula are written not by vampires but by the men who destroy them. Harker records his “wicked, burning desire” for the women in the castle; Van Helsing, on the novel’s last day of action, admits that a vampire woman is “so exquisitely voluptuous” that his “head whirl[s]”. Yet the plot places desire, and punishes it, in the bodies of vampires, above all female ones. Stoker presents desire as a human feeling his respectable narrators confess and his plot then relocates where it can be destroyed. The effect is a horror that punishes desire while, because the documents keep the confessions, implicating the men who punish it.

Desire first appears as a confession, and the form preserves it against the writer’s own wish. Before the vampire women in Chapter 3, Harker feels “some longing and at the same time some deadly fear”, and then “a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips”. The moral adjective “wicked” judges the feeling in the act of admitting it; “burning” insists on its force. He adds at once, “It is not good to note this down, lest some day it should meet Mina’s eyes and cause her pain” – and notes it down. The journal holds exactly what its writer says should not be held. Its effect on the reader is a kind of complicity: we read what Mina was not meant to, and the woman’s “deliberate voluptuousness” is described as “both thrilling and repulsive”, the double response the whole novel asks of us. Harker’s passivity sharpens the transgression. He closes his eyes “in a languorous ecstasy” and waits, the man in the place a Victorian reader expected a woman to occupy. The women receive no record in which to explain their own desire; we know it only as Harker’s.

The plot then moves desire from the men who confess it to the woman who can be destroyed for it. Lucy’s letter in Chapter 5 voices a wish of her own – “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?” – and censors it in the next breath: “But this is heresy.” The joke belongs to a private letter, and its exaggeration and affection matter; it is not a programme. But it shows that desire in Lucy is human before the Count arrives. When she returns as a vampire, Seward gives her a version of the same wish, now monstrous: “Come to me, Arthur … My arms are hungry for you” (Chapter 16). His vocabulary converts it into evil: “The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness.” The opposition of “purity” and “wantonness” drew on a powerful ideal. Patmore’s Angel in the House and the physician William Acton’s claim that respectable women were little troubled by sexual feeling made a woman’s appetite seem not merely sinful but unnatural. Arthur, “like a figure of Thor”, drives the stake, and Seward finds in the coffin a face “of unequalled sweetness and purity”. Phyllis Roth reads this violence as anxiety about sexual women, and the language supports her. Yet the plot qualifies her reading: Lucy changes because she has been attacked, so the stake cannot simply be punishment for her joke. What the novel punishes is desire in a body the Count has made – but it describes that desire, and its cure, in the moral language of female purity.

Possession extends the pattern from Lucy to Mina, whom the alliance idealises. The Count’s “This man belongs to me!” (Chapter 3) and his boast that “Your girls that you all love are mine already” (Chapter 23) make desire a contest between men conducted across bodies, as Christopher Craft argues: the men’s own intimacy is expressed through women and blood, as when Van Helsing laughs at Arthur’s belief that his transfusion made Lucy “truly his bride” and calls her a “polyandrist” (Chapter 13). Elizabeth Miller’s caution is a fair one – such patterns are evidence about the novel’s language, not about Stoker’s private life – but within the novel the pattern holds. Its most disturbing instance is Mina. Seward sees her at the Count’s breast as “a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk” (Chapter 21), an image that makes the Count’s force explicit without granting Mina a choice. Mina’s own account makes the coercion still more disturbing: “strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him.” She calls her compliance “part of the horrible curse”, and cries “Unclean, unclean!” Her account describes impaired agency under supernatural coercion, not free consent. The parallel with Harker is the narration of a troubling response, not an equivalence between his longing and her assault.

The deciding evidence comes from the novel’s moral authority. In Chapter 27, Van Helsing enters the vampire women’s tomb to destroy them, and finds one “so radiantly beautiful, so exquisitely voluptuous, that the very instinct of man in me, which calls some of my sex to love and to protect one of hers, made my head whirl with new emotion”. “Voluptuous” is Seward’s word for the undead Lucy; here it describes what the professor himself feels. More striking is what he calls the instinct: the same impulse “to love and to protect” that drives the whole crusade on behalf of Lucy and Mina. He is moved to “a yearning for delay which seemed to paralyse my faculties”, and what rescues him is not reason but a sound: “that soul-wail of my dear Madam Mina had not died out of my ears”. The cure for one woman’s appeal is the memory of another woman’s suffering, so even the hunters’ resistance to desire depends on a woman’s body. The strongest objection to my reading is that the plot overrides all this: Van Helsing recovers, the women are destroyed, and the novel ends with a marriage and a child. Desire, on this view, is presented in order to be contained, as Roth would argue. The plot does contain it. But the form does not. A novel that wished only to condemn desire had no need to give its wisest character this confession; Stoker could have let him destroy the women unmoved. Instead it is Van Helsing’s own memorandum that tells us chivalry and appetite spring from one instinct, and the novel keeps it.

Stoker therefore presents desire in three connected ways: as a confession in the hunters’ own documents, as an appetite relocated in vampire bodies, and as possession fought over through women. The effects pull against each other. The plot and its vocabulary of “purity” associate the sexualised vampire Lucy with horror and stage her destruction through the stake. The documentary form produces something more uneasy: a record in which Harker and Van Helsing admit feelings the plot associates with its monsters. Dracula does not liberate desire, but it cannot quite disown it either; the reader closes the book having read the men’s confessions as well as the vampires’ crimes.

The essay ends here. Open the separate teaching notes for discussion questions and guidance on using this example.

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

The original question and assessment source notes remain available in the UK and Irish guide. That assessment context is separate from AP scoring. The literary argument here has been retained; the preparation is presented for US classroom use.