These two features, together with his social and economic status, make it possible to claim that his writing is analogous to the novel, a literary form that in England emerges in the eighteenth century, in keeping with the transition to a market economy detrimental to the patronage system (Watt, 1959 Eagleton, 2005) and the consolidation of the bourgeoisie (LukГЎcs, 1971). His travel narrative (Seed, 1985 Arata, 1990) is prosaic in two aspects: it is not in verse and it is related to his mundane experience. A strategy this young man uses to wage that battle is to keep a written record of his stay in the castle: in order to survive the chaos unleashed by his aristocratic client, the lawyer writes a journal in which he jots down every factual piece of information so that he can retain his sanity. The dispute clearly suggests a conflict between the evil aristocracyвЂ“DraculaвЂ™s, not HolmwoodвЂ™s, a character who eventually receives the title of Lord Godalming and manages to inherit LucyвЂ™s property after her demiseвЂ“ and the free-thinking bourgeoisie led by Jonathan. John Seward, the American Quincey Morris, and the aristocratic Arthur Holmwood, who finally gains her favourвЂ“and of Abraham Van Helsing, the physicianвЂ™s ex teacher. After he escapes his imprisonment in the vampireвЂ™s abode, he sets to hunt him down with the aid of LucyвЂ™s former suitorsвЂ“Dr. However, her process of vampirisation is interrupted because of the intervention of her fiancГ© Jonathan Harker, a promising solicitor who initially travels to Transylvania to assist Dracula in his purchase of property in London and falls prey to his villainy.

Her friend Mina Harker, a self-sufficient teacher who writes down how events in the novel unfold, is subjected to a similar attack. One of his victims is Lucy Westenra, a girl from an affluent family, constantly praised due to her beauty, who turns into a voluptuous creature as she falls under his influence. Published in 1897, the novel presents readers with the vampiric eponymous count who plans to expand his territorial possessions, a process during which he displays supernatural powers, such as vampirising women whose bodies become more explicitly erotic. In this way, both MinaвЂ™s writing and StokerвЂ™s narrative, made up of fragments of different genres that can be nevertheless, appreciated as a whole, undergo an interrupted process of vampirisation.Д«ram StokerвЂ™s Dracula makes an exhaustive use of the vampire: this piece of fiction absorbs the unearthly being as an object of narration at the same time as it employs it at a formal level. Given these menвЂ™s success, MinaвЂ™s writing does not thrive and, as the anticipatory note to the novel promises, a вЂњsequence will be made manifestвЂќ, which will realistically organise the events unchained by the vampire. All male main characters in StokerвЂ™s piece put in constant effort to counter such menace. This proposal is one of the greatest threats that Dracula poses to the Victorian period through the use of the gothic. MinaвЂ™s chronicles destabilise the novel as a form by proposing a new language for women and, specifically, for the woman writer. It is through writing that she becomes different from other highly sexualised vampires in the novel, namely her friend Lucy Westenra and the three women who inhabit the CountвЂ™s castle. While JonathanвЂ™s accounts display features of the realist novel, Mina attempts to create a new narrative that entails a particular conception of the woman writer: a bourgeoning member of the middle class whose insights into reality are analytically critical and who incipiently acknowledges her sexual dimension, as suggested by the process of vampirisation she experiences.

This chaos gains special significance in fin-de-siГЁcle Great Britain, sieged by the decadence of the empire and the conflicts brought about by industrialisation. Similarly, her fiancГ© Jonathan Harker, the vampiric CountвЂ™s solicitor, documents their adventures in order to keep some sanity in the light of the sexual, psychological and social disorder Dracula triggers. In Dracula, Mina Harker is a character who manages to record in her journal the events that unfold in the work of fiction, as well as her analysis of them.

The fictional female characters play a particular role in such process: whereas the status of women in Bram StokerвЂ™s piece has been widely studied in terms of how their vampiric sexualisation affects their position in society and their relationships with men, there has been little analysis of their condition as writers and their relation to the novel as a genre. This article sets out to explore how Dracula narrates the crisis that the novel as a genre faces by the end of the nineteenth century.

This castle is a creature of chaos