Dracula PowerPoint 1 - Wilmot Union High School

Dracula
Bram Stoker
Who… or what
is Dracula?
Where the story takes place…
Transylvania
The Sights of Transylvania… SPOOKY
Where does the character Dracula come from?
•Vlad III has also been
known as Dracula or Vlad
the Impaler .
•Vlad III was the prince of
Wallachia (today Romania).
•His surname 'Dracula'
seems to come from his
father's surname 'Dracul',
due to the 'Order of the
Dragon' he got from the
Emperor Sigismund.
Vlad the Impaler
Vlad is known for…
•His resistance against the Ottoman
Empire
•Cruel punishments on his enemies.
Cruel Punishments
•Impalement was Vlad's preferred method of torture and execution.
“His method of torture was a horse attached to each of the victim's legs as a
sharpened stake was gradually forced into the body. Death by impalement
was slow and agonizing. Victims sometimes endured for hours or even days.
Vlad often had the stakes arranged in various geometric patterns. The most
common pattern was a ring of concentric circles in the outskirts of a city that
constituted his target. The height of the spear indicated the rank of the victim.
The corpses were often left decaying for months.”
•The cruel history of the Impaler fits Stoker's purposes.
•There have been vampire-like creatures in various stories from across the world.
• An epidemic of vampirism swept through Eastern 17th -18th century.
• The legend of the vampire was and still is deeply rooted in Transylvania.
•The number of reported cases rose dramatically in Hungary and the Balkans.
•Travelers returning from the Balkans brought with them tales of the undead, igniting an interest
in the vampire that has continued to this day.
•Philosophers in the West began to study the phenomenon.
•It was during this period that authors and playwrights first began to explore the vampire legend.
•Stoker's was inspired by the reports coming from the Balkans and Hungary.
•It is natural that Stoker should place his great vampire in Transylvania.
•Vlad Dracula would stand out as one of the most notorious rulers of the selected region.
• He was obscure enough that few would recognize the name and those who did would know him
for his acts of brutal cruelty; Dracula was a natural candidate for vampirism.
Dracula
Possible
Residencies
of Dracula
Location 1
Location 2
Location 3
Grandpa Rudd
Just
Kidding!
Dracula:
 Transylvanian count who has been "Un-Dead" for several hundred years.
He keeps his vitality by sucking blood from live victims which motivates his
desire to move from the barren and desolate Transylvania, which is sparsely
populated, to the more populous England.
Jonathan Harker
London solicitor who is sent to Transylvania to finalize the transfer of real estate
in England to Count Dracula.
 He keeps account of his stay at the Castle Dracula by journal. Harker is engaged
to Mina Murray.
Dr. Abraham Van Helsing
M.D., a Ph.D., and a D.Litt., as well as an attorney.
He is a lonely, unmarried old bachelor who is both kindly and fatherly.
From Amsterdam has knowledge of medicine, folklore and the occult.
He is also chiefly in charge of tracking down Count Dracula.
Miss Mina (Wilhelmina) Murray
Fancée of Jonathan Harker
An assistant schoolmistress
She will later become Mina Harker and will assist in tracking down Count Dracula.
Mina Murray's closest friend.
Miss Lucy Westenra
Dr. John Seward
Head of a lunatic asylum
One of Lucy Westenra's suitors
He is an intelligent and determined man.
Arthur Holmwood
A vigorous man, twenty-nine years old,
Only son of Lord Godalming
His affection for Lucy convinces him join in hunting Dracula.
Quincey P. Morris
Another of Lucy's suitors.
Morris is an American from Texas.
His great wealth allows him to pay many of the expenses incurred in tracking down Dracula.
R. M. Renfield
 Fifty-nine-year-old mad patient of Dr. Seward; he also comes under the influence of Dracula.

Religious
The most effective weapons in combating supernatural evil are symbols of unearthly good.
Indeed, in the fight against Dracula, these symbols of good take the form of the icons of Christian faith, such as the crucifix.
The Weird Sisters
The three beautiful vampires Harker encounters in Dracula’s castle are both his dream and his nightmare
The sisters represent what the Victorian ideal stipulates women should not be—voluptuous and sexually aggressive—thus making
their beauty both a promise of sexual fulfillment and a curse.
These women offer Harker more sexual gratification in two paragraphs than his fiancée Mina does during the course of the entire
novel.
However, this sexual proficiency threatens to undermine the foundations of a male-dominated society by compromising men’s ability
to reason and maintain control.
For this reason, the sexually aggressive women in the novel must be destroyed.

Tone - Gothic, dark, melodramatic, righteous

Point of view - Shifts among the first-person perspectives of several characters

Themes -The promise of Christian salvation; the dangers of female sexual expression

Conflict - Between the world of the past — full of folklore, legend, and religious piety — and
the emerging modern world of technology, positivism, and secularism. Rational/superstitious
conflict