The Language of Mistrust and Fear

From the incurning, Bram fire-eater kick ins it clear that take genus genus genus genus Dracula should be viewed as The contrarywise, a mental distinction that has been used to describe the bureau people view the world in them and us. firefighter uses the concept of The separate to show how different Dracula is from the incline and to create an underlying tension betwixt the remaining characters and the vampire. He in like manner uses the mental distinction as a path of pr flushting the characters from determining the nature of the vampire antecedent as they argon aw argon that they forecast societal diversitys from the ac view.The characters choose to overlook legion(predicate) of the early contendnings of the oddness of the Count because they were appalled they were acting out of a misapprehend about the cultural differences. stoker manages to collapse Count Dracula as the other(a) easily within the first chapter of the novel. In the first chapter, th e impressions we have of Count Dracula all come from Jonathan Harkers ledger and Stoker throwes early on that Harker is disquieting with his surroundings.The impression I had was that we were leaving the western hemisp here(predicate) and entering the East the most western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, similarlyk us among the traditions of Turkish rule (Stoker, Chapter 1). Even in his paper, Stoker decides to play up the strangeness of the filth with the strange spelling of Budapest as Buda-Pesth. He turn overes immediately that Harker is leaving the educate world and going to a exclusively different land.He uses the lure and the mystique of the East to establish the difference all within the first paragraph of the book that Count Dracula is different from e veryone else. As Harker travels inland, we hold in that the count is from the edge of Hungary near the Carpathian Mountains, one of the wildest and to the lowest degree known tidy sums of europium. (Chapter 1) This is a nonher attempt by the author to establish that Dracula is weird, and strange the other characters. By claiming that he is from a wild and unknown region, Stoker is relying on the themes of Romanticism to imply that he is potentially evil and dangerous.And just a a few(prenominal) paragraphs later he tells us that I say that evenry known bigotry in the world is gathered into the fit of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of nearly come obscure of imaginative whirlpool if so my stand by may be very interesting. (Chapter 1). These lines establish clear that Harker believes the people of Hungary to be less(prenominal) educated and different from the people of England. Furthermore, by establishing that he has heard they are a superstitious folk, he wad liberate their odd behavior to himself and non nous the decisions that he is making (going alone to the Counts castle despite their warnings).Throughout the novel, Stoker relies on the concept of the other to attach his main characters from the world around them and never is this as evident as in Harkers initial journey to refer the count. All a coherent the mien, Harker is the tourist, intrigued and yet tiny of local population. The women looked pretty, except when you got near them, and they were very clunky about the waist. (Chapter 1) He describes the traditional dress and the more rotund nature of the populace as clumsy about the waist emphasizing the formulate of the term in Britain to be very thin with corsets cinching the waist in even farther.And, to the men, he is even less generous. The strangest figures we truism were the Slovaks, who were more barbarian than the rest, with their big cow-boy hats, commodious baggy dirty-white trousers, white linen shirts, and terrific heavy leather belts, nearly a foot wide, all studded over with brass nails. They wore high boots, with their trousers tucked into them, and had long sic k hair and heavy black moustaches. They are very picturesque, tho do non look prepossessing. On the decimal point they would be set down at once as some gray Oriental band of brigands.They are, however, I am told, very harmless and rather wanting(p) in natural self-assertion. To the average lecturer at the time of this writing, Stokers words about the people of Europe would have been strange and more than a bit worshipsome, driven by the care of the unknown. The author, realizing this, includes that very rumination in Harkers journal, when he hastens to explain that despite the some(prenominal) odd things in his journal, he had not overindulged in either food or drink, going so far as to list what he has eaten.There too, Stoker attempts to make the reader revile the locals with a similitude of their dinner to the unbiased style of the capital of the United Kingdom cats meat (Chapter 1). Having established the physical differences among the inhabitants of Eastern Europe and those in capital of the United Kingdom and draw attention to their different stylus of dress and food, Stoker is ready to truncated the last tie which power declare the dickens groups together organized religion. On the eve of Harkers approach to Draculas castle, the innkeepers wife attempts to foreclose him from going.She relays the upkeep that something untoward will risk to him at the Castle and begs him to take her rood. I did not know what to do, for, as an face Churchman, I have been taught to regard much(prenominal) things as in some bank note idolatrous, and yet it seemed so ungracious to avert an old lady meaning so well and in such a state of mind. She saw, I suppose, the doubt in my face, for she put the rosary round my manage and said, For your mothers saki, and went out of the room. I am writing up this part of the diary whilst I am waiting for the coach, which is, of course, late and the crucifix is still round my neck.(Chapter 1) In this con passage , Stoker firmly establishes that the Hungarians are not like the English, establishing them firmly as The Other, unless he also manages to establish their humanity. When the charr asks him to take the crucifix, For your mothers sake, Stoker overcomes the barrier amongst them, pointing to a plebeian bond among all humans, the complete of a mother for her child. This is done for twain reasons first, to illustrate to the reader that the oddities of the count are in fact unnatural and second, to begin to create a mood, to explain the beginnings of the fear that Harker recovers as he approaches the castle.The reader is meant to feel that Harkers observations about his trepidation as he approaches the castle at mid darkness are justified, that he is not merely some frightened little boy who starts at the darkness. This concept that the fear might be justified is building all on Harkers journey to the castle and might have built more if he had understood the languages his fellow pa ssengers spoke, Stoker writes, over again playing to the classical definition of the other as soulfulness outside our form understanding, separated by culture, religion and sometimes, by language.Then, in a subtle critical review of the Carpathians, other form of creating distance amongst groups, Harker observes that the roadstead and rough and that the driver seemed to go away over it with a feverish haste. (Chapter 1) This observation is meant to again set the people apart from the English who, it is implied, would never think of parkway at such a ill-treat and would have most trustedly unploughed the road in better repair. I was told that this road is in summertime excellent, notwithstanding that it had not yet been put in order after the winter snows.In this extol it is different from the general run of roads in the Carpathians, for it is an old tradition that they are not to be kept in too good order. Of old the Hospadars would not repair them, lest the Turk should think that they were preparing to bring in foreign troops, and so hasten the war which was always really at incumbrance point. (Chapter 1). Even in his discussion of the fear of the Turks, Stoker is driving a rack between the English and the Hungarians, as the British never feared invasion from aggressive neighbors thank to the fact that they were on an island.This is just another means of driving a billet between the two cultures. For the normally speechless British, the thought of extraterrestrials giving Harker gifts along the way also helps to establish the difference between the cultures. One by one several(prenominal) of the passengers offered me gifts, which they pressed upon me with an earnestness which would take no denial. These were certainly of an odd and varied kind, but each was given in simple good faith, with a kindly word, and a blessing, and that same strange mixture of fear-meaning movements which I had seen outside the hotel at Bistritz the sign of the sw ing and the guard against the evil eye. (Chapter 1). This passage really plays on English attitudes in two matters First, it would have been unconscionable to give a random gift to a stranger and make him feel that he essential accept it. Second, the fact that they were actively demonstrating their religion and superstition was an act the British of the time would have found completely unacceptable. The British largely believed that church, the Church of England, was something you did when you went to services and not something to be practiced at whatsoever other time.Furthermore, the concept that you would let someone catch you making a nemesis sign of any sort was scarce unbelievable. The British would simply be too polite to have anything in common with these heathens, further establishing them as The Other. In the end, Stokers work is masterful at clearly establishing the differences between class lines and cultures and creating The Other on numerous different levels. He es tablishes that Mina and Jonathan are the others when equalized to Lucy and her well-to-go friends, both of them having been raise with next to nothing.He establishes Renfield as the other via his frenzy and his actions during his fall to Draculas domination and even Lucy is somewhat established in this manner, being the least learned and scientific of the group. Stoker make each of the characters odd and bound them to one another, but also invested in making clear divides between them to create an additional tension and wonder in the book that is just abstruse by the arrival of Count Dracula. Upon the counts arrival in London, he is regarded as exotic and interesting, a vista as completely a portion of The Other as the fear and trepidation.Often we are fascinated by those things that are different from us and we desire to see them, to learn more about them and even to come after them while still holding them at a distance, knowing that they are not like we are. The fact that Stoker tangle it necessary to establish this extreme difference when Dracula could easily have set out the other certainly by impartiality of being a creature of the night implies that Stoker was perhaps attempting to force the scholars that would read his novel to recognize a certain xenophobia within their culture.His depiction of the Eastern Europeans as highly different, almost medieval compare to the bustling and modern London can hardly be considered accidental. Stoker clearly had some thoughts about the way that the British observed the world around them and made Harker the extreme viewpoint of that British charm. Harker had to be an extreme, the most British of British subjects in his observations for stoker to force his audience to see how absurd such characterizations could be. Works Cited Stoker, Bram. Dracula Accessed at http//www. literature. org/authors/stoker-bram/dracula/chapter-01. html, December 9, 2007.