Dracula: Evil or Warped?

At the end of the novel Count Dracula is slain by Jonathan Harker and Quincy Morris while Dr. Van Helsing watches over Mina, who is in the crucial state of almost becoming a vampire. Van Helsing also kills the three female vampires that attempted to seduce Jonathan at the start in the process, thus eliminating a significant amount of danger for the others. Once Dracula is killed (unfortunately, Quincy dies as well), Mina’s transformation ceases, leaving her as human as she was before being bitten.

Dracula, the source of all the suffering, demonic occurrences and evil is finally stopped in the last few pages of this book. But was he really a manifestation of evil, or just a puppet of its influence? As Mina Harker describes his dead (yes, it’s not un-dead anymore at this point) corpse “there was in the face a look of peace, such as I never could have imagined might have rested there.” Mere seconds before Quincy Morris’s knife was forced into the vampire’s chest, her description was more along the lines of “the red eyes glared with the horrible vindictive look which I knew so well”. Strange. This is not unlike the situation with her best friend Lucy when she was a vampire. The Count may have been a villain for the majority of the novel and that’s what his place in popular culture will likely forever be, but at one point in his existence, he was very likely a carefree, innocent human being that would have shuttered at the thought of what he would become.

Much like someone going insane due to traumatic experiences and isolation or an animal going mad as a result of disease, Dracula likely had no choice in his nature. How could he? When Lucy was bitten, the creature that many saw as Lucy, indeed had her body, but it was not her mind or soul performing its deeds. And as she was finally laid to rest when the “vampire” was killed, so was Dracula.

What Bram Stoker was trying to communicate with us here, I believe, is that such things as mental instability, primal “instincts” (animalistic behavior, aggression) and evil from within are blind to ones personality and can affect any human being if the right circumstances should occur. This is why I think that Dracula while yes, destructive and a creature that needed to be stopped was still, at point, a man.