Notes

The terrifying events of the voyage form a story within a story, a frightening foretaste of what is to come and one of the novel's great successes. Dracula destroys the entire crew, allowing them to live only long enough to facilitate his voyage to England. The ship's name, Demeter, is an allusion to the Greek earth goddess whose sorrow for her missing daughter causes winter. The name fits the vessel, which transports the earth that Dracula needs for his sleep. The story of the goddess has certain parallels to what is to come: Demeter's daughter Persephone, a beautiful and virtuous young woman, was taken and forced to wed Hades, lord of the Underworld. Demeter's mourning for her daughter, who must spend a certain part of the year in the realm of the dead, is the cause of winter. Like Persephone, Lucy and Mina are two virtuous and beautiful young women. Like Persephone, they will be forced to enter a kind of marriage with a lord of the Underworld. And like Persephone, they will dwell partly in the world of the living and partly in the world of the dead. Note also that during the sea voyage, Dracula (or Stoker) operates in a way that is very conscious of hierarchy: he kills the sailors first, and leaves the first mate and captain for last. Dracula's method on the voyage is consistent with the contempt of peasants he expressed to Jonathan Harker‹he kills off the subordinates first, saving the higher-ups for last. On the other hand, rather than act as commentary on Dracula's predilections, the valorization of the captain and the one-dimensional victim status of the common sailors may say something about Stoker's conceptions of class and leadership.