The Most Preposterous Ideas May Be the Wisest
Reason: the power of the mind to think and understand in a logical way. Madness: behavior of thinking that is very foolish or dangerous. Imagine finding out that one’s world consists of vampires or that a loved one has been bitten by one, and is no longer human. How would one cope with themselves if they could not decipher between what was logical versus madness in the world? In the novel, the characters are faced challenges that they were not accustomed to because they often could not be solved by reason alone. Bram Stoker discusses the issue that where reason fails, madness is sure to follow. The idea of madness and reason reveals itself in Bram Stoker’s Dracula through characterization and…show more content… Lucy Westenra’s friends try to figure out the reason behind her sudden sickness and cannot come up with any logical answers. After she dies her friend Dr Van Helsing stumbles upon the mad idea that she was bitten by a vampire. No one else believes him because they do not believe it is logical, even though there were reports saying that children had been bitten by something and were left with the same marks Lucy had on her neck. Van Helsing was able to discover the answer to the dilemma because he was able to look passed the madness. Stoker had Lucy bite the children so that Van Helsing could discover the truth and develop the plot. “You think that those so small holes in the children’s throats were made by the same that made the hole in Miss Lucy? …They were made by Miss Lucy!” (Stoker 208). If Lucy had never gotten sick and became a vampire, Stoker could not have continued with the plot and Dracula could not have been eliminated. Dr Seward could not see past the madness in Van Helsing’s theory because he worked around people who were mentally insane or mad, therefore he relied solely on logic and reason. Furthermore, when they begin to hunt down Dracula, Mina Harker is hypnotized to try to see where Dracula’s location was. If Mina had not learned about Lucy and accepted it, she would have gone mad. She had accepted the fact that there were vampires and tried to reason with it, even…show more content… Dracula made people think about their understanding of the world because of the way that the characters had to overcome things that seemed impossible. It began to show that when reason and logic fell through, madness soon took place. “Scientific achievement was completely reshaping people’s understanding of and relationship with the world around them. …The tension between science and superstition id literalized in Dracula, given Van Helsing’s status as a man of reason and learning and Dracula’s supernatural origins and spectral powers” (Gale Student Resources in Context 1). Stoker’s novel began to open people’s eyes about the relationship between madness and
