Priya Jha

ENGL 119-01

Response Paper #1

September 20, 2010

One of the reasons I am so passionate about reading is because it helps me to see how the world isn’t so cut and dry. Dracula, which ostensibly gives us a monstrous figure who is out to pollute the ordered city of London is much more complex. We have all grown up knowing about Dracula, the vampire, as evil and something that must be destroyed. As a side note, this is one reason, why my reading of the book has already been given to me. But, when we look more closely at the novel, we find that while his actions may be seen as monstrous, he is not quite the monster we expect him to be. As Matt pointed out in class, as someone who is old – older than time itself perhaps – his sense of mortality, of being in the world is very different from human beings. It’s too easy to see him as a villainous figure and more interesting to see him as a sympathetic one. One scene that stands out in this regard is when he voraciously devours English knowledge (Stoker 36). In that moment, he ceases to be a monster and instead, becomes someone whose desire to know – to understand – supersedes all other desires.

What would it mean to see Dracula as a figure with whom we could sympathize? Would it mean that he would then become human and therefore, worthy of our consideration? I would argue that it is worth pursuing this reading of the character because then we could begin to think outside the us/them binary which haunts us to this day. By reading Dracula through its multiple ambiguities, we could perhaps begin to see human beings as the complex beings that we are rather than as monsters that terrify us.