Foreigners and belonging 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 stage ends by explaining what it contributes to the next. The evidence points are labelled by the job they do in the argument.

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

Because two of the five male hunters are foreign, Step 2 must gather evidence on both sides. Including Mina, the central alliance contains six people.

Considered and set aside

Because the evidence divides the foreigners by whose side they serve and who describes them, Step 3 needs contexts and critics that explain those two things.

But Arata and Halberstam describe the Count, and Van Helsing and Quincey are untouched by either reading. Therefore Step 4 must decide what separates the two groups.

• Case for the statement: the Count’s threatening foreignness and the descriptions of the Szgany and Hildesheim connect difference with danger or inferiority. Identify the narrator of each account.
• Case against: Van Helsing and Quincey are foreign and essential to the victory. The kindly landlady protects Harker without joining the hunters or writing a document of her own.
• Qualification: the hunters’ dependence on foreigners does not free their language from prejudice. Hildesheim’s signed receipt and useful information coexist with Harker’s hostile description.
• Judgement: the novel does not consistently condemn foreignness itself. It admires particular foreign allies and helpers while reproducing prejudiced representations of others. Narrative authority shapes those representations but does not alone determine approval.

• Structure: establish the statement’s strongest evidence, challenge its generalisation, then test the limits of that challenge.
• Opening and first case: Harker’s crossing from West to East (Chapter 1), the Count’s wish to pass unnoticed in London (Chapter 2) and his ancestry (Chapter 3). Read threat through the opening narrator’s language.
• Van Helsing: expertise and “power of combination” (Chapters 9 and 18). His central authority prevents an equation of foreignness with evil.
• Quincey: the “moral Viking” (Chapter 13), his sacrifice (Chapter 27) and the Harkers’ son in the final note. He is commemorated in the child’s name, not the band’s.
• Counterevidence: the Szgany and Hildesheim, including Hildesheim’s receipt (Chapter 26). Their representation limits any claim that the heroes have escaped prejudice.
• Narrative qualification: compare the landlady’s kindness (Chapter 1) with the absence of her own document. Control of narration influences depth of representation, but is not a rule for who receives approval.
• Conclusion: distinguish foreignness, allegiance, narrative authority and prejudice rather than making any one explain every character.

“In Dracula, foreigners are presented negatively.” With reference to Stoker’s narrative methods, and relevant contextual information, show to what extent you agree with the above statement.

The English hunters cannot defeat Dracula without a Dutchman and a Texan. That fact makes a blanket claim about negative foreignness inadequate, but it does not make the novel free from prejudice. “Foreigners” here includes the Count, the castle women, Van Helsing, Quincey Morris and the people the travellers encounter abroad. Their presentation varies with their actions, their relationship to the hunters and the narrators through whom readers meet them. I shall argue that Stoker makes foreign help indispensable while preserving disturbing hierarchies in the language of his English protagonists. The novel challenges an equation of foreignness with danger without consistently escaping it.

The case for the statement is real, and the first narrator helps construct it. Harker writes that “we were leaving the West and entering the East” (Chapter 1), marking a cultural division before he understands the country. The Count then insists that “Transylvania is not England” while studying how to move unnoticed among English people (Chapter 2). His ambition makes familiarity itself threatening: foreign power can learn the habits of the society it enters. Stephen Arata’s account of reverse colonisation illuminates this movement towards the imperial centre. Yet perspective matters. Harker and, later, the Dutch Van Helsing narrate the castle women; hostile foreignness is not represented only through English documents. The women lack a sustained account of their own, which is a narrower and more defensible observation about narrative power.

The inclusion of Van Helsing, however, stops foreignness from belonging exclusively to the villain. Seward introduces his old teacher as “a philosopher and a metaphysician, and one of the most advanced scientists of his day”, with “an absolutely open mind” (Chapter 9). Van Helsing’s English is broken, and Stoker sometimes plays it for comedy. But the man who speaks it leads the hunt, diagnoses Lucy, and draws up the rules for fighting the vampire. When he lists the band’s advantages, the first is “power of combination” (Chapter 18). A group made up of English professionals, an English aristocrat, a Dutch doctor, an American and a woman is strong precisely because it combines them. His knowledge is itself international: he has asked “my friend Arminius, of Buda-Pesth University” for the Count’s history. The knowledge that defeats the East comes partly from the East.

Quincey Morris makes the positive case through action as well as expertise. Seward calls him “a moral Viking” and imagines the strength of a country that can produce men like him (Chapter 13). The praise uses a national stereotype, but its direction is admiring. Quincey gives blood to Lucy, contributes to the pursuit and dies after helping destroy the Count. In the final note the Harkers commemorate him in their son’s name. The naming places an American companion within the family’s memory of its survival. Foreignness is compatible with the fullest loyalty the ending celebrates.

The hunters’ reliance on foreigners does not abolish prejudice in their accounts of people outside the group. Harker’s description of the Szgany as “fearless and without religion, save superstition” (Chapter 4) reduces a community to a set of supposed traits. In Chapter 26 his description of Hildesheim draws on an antisemitic stage stereotype. Yet Hildesheim also supplies useful information, and the captain produces a receipt bearing his signature. He therefore has a documentary presence, although not a sustained narrative of his own. The contrast between his practical contribution and the hostile framing of his appearance gives the statement renewed force: the protagonists can depend on a foreign intermediary while describing him through prejudice.

Documentary authority helps explain the unevenness, but cannot be its complete explanation. Van Helsing contributes letters and a memorandum; Quincey contributes a letter in Chapter 5. Their voices receive space within the record. The landlady at Bistritz, however, has no document of her own and is nevertheless presented as kind: the crucifix she gives Harker protects him at the castle. Harker’s initial condescension is corrected by events. A person can therefore be positively represented without joining the band or writing the record. The formal distinction concerns how fully people can explain themselves, rather than a dependable rule that writers are honoured and everyone else condemned.

Foreigners are presented negatively in important parts of the novel, but not consistently or simply because they are foreign. Van Helsing and Quincey make foreign expertise and loyalty essential to the ending; the landlady offers protective knowledge beyond the central alliance. Against those examples stand descriptions that reproduce prejudice even while the plot depends on the people described. Perhaps this mixed alliance would have appealed to Stoker, a Dublin-born former civil servant who built his career managing London’s Lyceum Theatre for the English actor Henry Irving: England is defended by locals and incomers together. That possibility cannot establish his intention. What the text establishes is a victory made possible by foreign help, narrated by people whose boundaries of sympathy remain uneven.

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.