Spooky In Dracula

Spooky Indeed
Gothic fiction is a genre of literature and film that is fictional and often includes horror and death, along with drawing it’s setting from the era of medieval castles. What are the characteristics most commonly associated with gothic fiction? Death, madness, gloominess, menacing characters, and supernatural elements are the majority of those. Even though all are used in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, (widely considered a classic gothic fiction novel) gloominess is the most prominent characteristic used by Bram’s description of setting in multiple locations throughout the novel. Three separate locations Stoker describes as gloomy are Dracula’s castle, Lucy Westenra’s tomb, and Dracula’s second castle at Carfax.
To begin, at the start
In this particular instance, Bram uses the most interesting way to convey the gothic nature of the novel by referring back to other spooky settings within the novel. Jonathan Harker describes his and the other characters’ experience, “we pressed on the door, the rusty hinges creaked, and it slowly opened . . . like the image conveyed to me in Dr. Seward’s diary of the opening of Miss Westenra’s tomb . . . the same idea seemed to strike the others, for with one accord they shrank back (Stoker 439). It’s easy to see that Stoker wants his readers to get the same feel from the opening of Lucy’s tomb. Later, on the next page, Mr. Harker compares his experience at Dracula’s other castle in Transylvania to his other at Carfax by recording, “I suppose it was the recollection . . . by the grim surroundings, of that terrible experience in Transylvania. I think the feeling was common for us all, for I noticed that the others kept looking over their shoulders at every sound and every new shadow” (Stoker 440). Yet again, Stoker relies on his earlier descriptions of the horror within the novel and the reader’s memory of such settings so that the reader can grasp the immense shroud of darkness
Stoker definitely performs a spectacular act of writing a tale that is meant to be scary and full of horror, and not just by his conflict or his tone, but more importantly, how he conveys the setting throughout the whole twenty-seven chapters within his classic novel. Reading this story, it’s very easy to tell why it is so widely studied and why it has been proclaimed a classic after such a long time. To one that has not yet cracked open a copy of this particular novel, the only two warnings another could give to him or her is that for one, its use of the English language is very complex; and two, Dracula, is most definitely not for the