Dracula vs. Jack the Ripper

3/27/2012

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1 Comment
Ava J.
3/27/2012 01:31:36 pm

Dracula vs. Jack the Ripper
This article was really interesting and helpful in placing and comparing Dr. Jekyll and M. Hyde, Jack the Ripper and Dracula.
As a first time reader of Dracula and an avid researcher of Jack the Ripper, it's been interesting to compare the atrocities they both commit and the aura that surrounds them. Jack and Count Dracula both are creatures of the night and scour the streets of Victorian England, spill blood, took lives and disappeared without a trace. Interesting enough, even after all the atrocities we've been through as a species its still cases like theirs that frighten us the most. It’s in my opinion that their stories that trigger our fear because of the mystery and the open ended-ness of them. Jack the Ripper was never caught and thus the story didn't end with justice being brought or the "good" overcoming the "bad". That's why Dracula freaked everyone out in its coming out, because the Ripper events was still fresh in the memory; which is probably what added to the success.
Chapters twelve to fifteen depict Lucy’s death and her resurrection as a vampire:

On the bed lay two women, Lucy and her mother. The latter lay
furthest in, and she was covered with a white sheet, the edge of which had been
blown back by the draught through the broken window, showing the drawn, white
face and the look of terror fixed upon it. By her side lay Lucy, with face
white and still more drawn. The flowers which had been round her neck we found
upon her mother’s bosom, and her throat was bare, showing the two little wounds
we had noticed before, but looking horribly white and mangled


In some strange why this recalls the chapter when Jekyll drinks the potion and finally unleashes Hyde into the world. There's a dark morbidity to it yet there's a sense of beginning to it. Unlike the real women in J&K and the Ripper cases,
Lucy didn't meet a tragic and gory death. Instead she was brought back beautiful only to be slayed by the very humans who fear the looming monster that's Dracula.
It’s obvious that you that you can only judge his “Essence” since it’s the only tangible thing… ironically.

http://casebook.org/dissertations/rip-thirst.html

http://www.worstpreviews.com/headline.php?id=18000

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