Personal Reflection

Over the process of the classic novel study, I feel that I’ve matured greatly as a writer. Processing, analyzing and studying a Classic Novel and novelist contributed greatly to my ability to organize my thoughts within my writing, being able to touch on all subjects I wanted to cover while still being efficient and avoiding writing too “flowery”. This was also brought about by my mindfulness that peers would be reading my posts as well.

The novel Dracula, by Bram Stoker itself, has given me great insight into the kind of monsters that can be created whenever people:

a) Let all of their primal urges and feelings loose on the world through their actions or

b) Keep all of these feelings inside, repressed from their minds. This is a very important thing to anyone to understand, as human beings can be turned into “vampirism” figures by following through with both approaches.

It has also given me more exposure into the conflict between actions based off of Faith and Feelings (like Doctor Van Helsing) and those based off of Rationality and Fact (like Mina). I myself have always had a divided standpoint in the debate, although I more often than not lean in the direction that Mina did. Nevertheless, the clash between these two mental tactics was interesting and entertaining in Dracula and was certainly food for thought.

I’ve noticed a trend in many older forms of literature (not necessarily Classic Literature) out of the same time period as Dracula (late 19th century to early 20th century) are written in first person, often but not always to be read as journal excerpts. Such examples are Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and 20 000 Leagues Under the Sea, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land that Time Forgot and most everything I’ve read by H.P. Lovecraft. This kind of narrative is very popular still today but seemed to have a real dominance over literature in this era. I wonder why exactly it lost a bit of its hold on the world of books.

All in all, Dracula was a fantastic novel to read and the Classic Novel Study gave me a great deal of growth and maturity as a writer and student.