DRACULA

The work contains a study of the meaning of "sanity" and "insanity," of "wellness" and "illness." The treatment for both "insanity" and "illness" in the novel is confinement, which recurs throughout. Practically, every character in the group questions his or her wellness or sanity at some point: Jonathan Harker, on his trip to Dracula's castle, is confined within the castle as a prisoner of Dracula's; Lucy is afflicted with bouts of sleepwalking, one of which takes her out in the moors of England, where she is first attacked by Dracula.

The function of this theme in the novel is manifold. First, the theme draws out late-Victorian cultural attitudes toward illness and madness—that is, any socially-aberrant behavior is "mad," and women are more prone to this behavior than men; both illness and madness require the patient to be removed from society. Dracula is compared, often, to a poison, or to vermin—he is an illness, a social virus that must be isolated and destroyed. His boxes of earth are systematically "sanitized" by means of communion wafers, meaning the Count cannot sleep in them, and, finally, Dracula himself, the viral host, is destroyed in Transylvania, by Morris and the others.