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Welcome to our week 5 discussion of Dracula.

How does the search for Dracula’s boxes of earth combine the themes of science versus the irrational? Does Stoker lean on the presumed “scientific�� knowledge of Van Helsing to make this incredible scene credible to his readers?

Why do you think Stoker spends so much time on Renfield in these chapters?

Well, we get a no turn point in the story.

I have a doubt about the Count. It's said that he cannot trespass the water, but how he travelled in a ship crossing the Mediterranean?

Rafael wrote: "Well, we get a no turn point in the story.

I have a doubt about the Count. It's said that he cannot trespass the water, but how he travelled in a ship crossing the Mediterranean?"

Stoker isn't entirely consistent about a vampire's abilities and limitations. Sometimes characters say something the attentive reader will notice is not quite true to the story as it has already transpired.

Stoker may mean *running* water, which in a number of traditions poses a barrier to supernatural beings and magical powers. (Of course, in some traditions such water provides a home or refuge for other supernatural beings.) So perhaps the Atlantic and the Mediterranean don't count: they aren't streams or rivers.

Remember, he already got to England by ship, using those large boxes of his native earth as a place to rest while at sea (emerging to prey on the crew, of course), as well as finding refuge in them when ashore. On that evidence, he might have been uncomfortable at sea, but not in immediate danger (unless the ship sank with him aboard...)

Some modern writers on vampires, working out details generated in a century-longer literary tradition, have explicitly postulated that such "native soil" would provide a sort of insulation from various deleterious forces to which Vampires are subject.

I don't think Stoker ever got quite so explicit about Dracula, and he may not have thought it all out before he started writing. And then, too, one can suppose that Van Helsing didn't know as much about vampires as he thought!

Thank you for this explanation, Ian. I kind of have this idea, but thought that I was wrong. He (Stoker) spoke about high and low tide as well. I guess that in the sea the tides were unable to be perceived so maybe he, the Count, would be not affected by them.