Menace in Dracula and Dorian Gray

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

Argument outline

Overall argument: both locate menace behind respectable surfaces; Stoker externalises it so that it can be destroyed, while Wilde internalises it so that it cannot, except by self-destruction.

paragraph 1 claim: both writers begin menace in courteous speech and respectable places, but the Count’s manners hide the threat while Lord Henry’s words are the threat. So the difference between external and internal is set from the start.

paragraph 2 claim: both use supernatural images and the science of reading the body, but Stoker’s menace proves legible and Wilde’s does not. So Stoker’s menace can be hunted and Wilde’s can only be hidden.

paragraph 3 claim (counter): Stoker too finds menace in respectable desire; the 2019 exemplar’s “deviance” reading. So the contrast is one of where the plot puts the menace, not of what the novels know.

paragraph 4 claim (deciding): the endings — collective destruction against self-destruction recognised by rings. So Wilde’s menace outlives its bearer in the society that sustained it.

Paragraph plan

Compare how Stoker and Wilde present menace in Dracula and The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Menace is not harm but the threat of it. It lives in the gap between what we see now and what that surface seems to promise. Stoker and Wilde both open that gap behind respectable surfaces: a courteous host, a beautiful young gentleman. They differ in where they finally locate the threat. Stoker gives menace a body outside the self that can be read, hunted and destroyed, even though it first stirs desire in respectable men. Wilde lodges it in the self and in a society that prefers the surface, so in Dorian Gray menace can end only in self-destruction, and the society that sustained it is left unchanged.

Both writers begin menace in courteous speech, but the Count’s manners hide the threat, while Lord Henry’s words are the threat. The Count’s welcome, “Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you bring!” (Dracula, Chapter 2), sounds like a blessing. Its final clause, though, is a demand: the guest must leave something behind. The imperatives are hospitable on the surface and acquisitive underneath, and the reader, who knows the genre, hears the second meaning before Harker does. Lord Henry’s menace is different in kind. “There is no such thing as a good influence” (Dorian Gray, Chapter 2) is an epigram whose danger lies in being believed, and his later boast, “I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit” (Chapter 6), places the threat in Dorian’s own unacted wishes. Wilde’s narrator adds that society “feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals” (Chapter 11), so the surface is protected by the people who enjoy it. The settings follow the same pattern. Stoker’s menace enters respectable London: Harker sees the Count in daylight in Piccadilly, “grown young” (Chapter 13), an image of the reverse colonisation that Arata and the period’s fears of invasion from the East explain. Wilde’s is kept inside a respectable house, behind “the key that never left him now” (Chapter 11), and visited in the opium dens “where one could buy oblivion” (Chapter 16). One menace crosses a border into the city; the other is already at home in it.

Both novels test whether menace can be read from the body, and here the difference becomes decisive: Stoker’s menace proves legible, Wilde’s does not. Harker’s discovery that “there was no reflection of him in the mirror!” (Dracula, Chapter 2) exposes the Count as outside the human order, an absence the novel can name. Dorian’s portrait does the opposite. It records a growing presence, beginning with “a touch of cruelty in the mouth” (Chapter 7), so that the picture becomes, in his own phrase, “the most magical of mirrors” (Chapter 8). Its menace is delayed and watched, and the reader waits for each new change. Context sharpens the contrast. Late-Victorian criminal anthropology held that criminality could be read in the body, and Stoker’s hunters apply it with success. Mina concludes that “The Count is a criminal and of criminal type. Nordau and Lombroso would so classify him” (Chapter 25), and the classification helps predict his flight. Wilde gives Basil a moral version of the same belief: “Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed” (Chapter 12). The plot proves him fatally wrong. Dorian’s face stays pure, and Basil, who has trusted that face against the rumours, is killed once he sees the picture. For Stoker, then, menace can be classified and therefore hunted. For Wilde, the faith that wickedness must show is itself part of the danger.

A reader might object that this contrast is too neat, because Stoker also finds menace inside the respectable. In the castle Harker admits “a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me” (Chapter 3), and the Count’s “This man belongs to me!” makes the Englishman an object of possessive desire. A published response to this question pushes the reading further: Stoker treats deviance as the menace, while Wilde shows society menacing those who deviate. That reading has real force. Stoker’s narrative endorses the men who define and destroy what lies outside the domestic ideal, while Dorian’s “Each of us has heaven and hell in him” (Chapter 13) refuses any such line between insiders and outsiders. But the objection shows where Stoker’s plot puts the menace, not what his novel knows. Dracula records the threat within respectable desire, then gives that threat a foreign body, so it can be expelled. The context of the two writers’ lives supports keeping this distinction textual. Wilde had courted Florence Balcombe before she married Bram, so the two writers shared a world. But Bram’s working notes begin in 1890, five years before Wilde’s trials, so Dracula cannot simply be read as a response to them.

The endings decide the comparison, because where menace can be ended shows where each writer finally places it. The Count frames his menace as a threat in time: “My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side” (Chapter 23). The novel answers with a collective effort. Documents are combined, the pursuit is coordinated, and the Count is destroyed by others. Stoker’s ending is not entirely secure. The final note admits there is “hardly one authentic document” to prove any of it. But what survives is doubt about the proof, not a continuing threat. The menace has gone, and only the record of it is uncertain. By the closing chapter James Vane, who pursued Dorian, is dead; no external pursuer now brings him to justice. He resolves that the knife “would kill this monstrous soul-life” (Chapter 20) and stabs the picture, and the servants find a corpse “withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage”. Then comes Wilde’s last, quiet sentence: “It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.” Even in death, respectable society identifies Dorian by his possessions, the surface that protected him. Stoker’s menace is removed from the world. Wilde’s is removed only from the man, and the habits that sheltered it remain.

Both novels present menace as the threat behind a trusted surface, and both make readers uneasy about whom to trust. But they differ in where the menace is finally located, and that difference governs everything else. Stoker externalises it, giving it a body that can be read, hunted and killed, so his novel can end with menace defeated. Wilde internalises it, in the self and in a society that values manners above morals, so his novel can end only with self-destruction, and with the surface still being read as before. The difference matches each writer’s target. Stoker’s menace dramatises a fear of invasion that a united, respectable group can repel. Wilde’s dramatises a hypocrisy that no group can repel, because the group is where it lives.

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.