NovelGuide: Dracula: Novel Summary: Chapter 4

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Chapter 4

Summary
Harker awakes in his own bed, and thinks that the Count must have carried him there. He is uncertain whether the events of the previous night were real or whether he dreamed them. He thinks of the vampire women with dread, and knows that they are waiting to suck his blood.
Several days later, the Count asks Harker to write three letters. One is to be dated June 12, is to say that he is about to leave for home; a second is to be dated June 19, is to say that he is starting for home the next morning; and the third is to be dated June 29, is to say that he has left the castle and is at Bistritz. It is still only May 19. Harker feels he cannot refuse, as he is utterly in the Count's power. He thinks that the Count intends to kill him, as he knows too much - using the post-dated letters as an alibi to escape detection. Harker plans to escape.
Near the end of May, some gypsies come to the castle and set up camp in the courtyard. Harker secretly writes a letter in shorthand to Mina, explaining his situation. He writes another letter to Hawkins, asking him to contact Mina. In this way, even if the Count intercepts his letters, he will not understand them. Harker throws the letters through the bars of his window with a gold piece to one of the gypsies. The gypsy bows and puts them in his cap, as if he will post them. But later, the Count enters with the letters in his hand. He opens them and becomes angry when he sees the shorthand in the letter to Mina. He declares that this is an outrage upon his friendship and hospitality, and burns it. However, he says he will send on the letter to Hawkins. Then he leaves. Harker tries the door to his room and finds that he is locked in.
One morning, Harker awakes to find that his writing paper, envelopes, and everything he needs to travel outside the castle, including his travel suit and coat, have disappeared.
In the middle of June, some Slovaks arrive with wagons. They unload large, empty boxes into the castle courtyard. Harker tries to attract the attention of the gypsies, but they ignore him.
Harker is looking out of his window one day when he sees the Count emerging from his own window, wearing Harker's suit. Over his shoulder is the bag that the vampire women had taken away. Harker surmises that the Count aims to convince the local people that they have seen Harker alive and posting his own letters, with the bonus that any villainy the Count gets up to will be attributed to Harker.
Later, Harker hears a suppressed wail from the Count's room, and then another wail from a distressed woman in the courtyard. She is calling for her child. Harker hears the Count whispering. A pack of wolves pours into the courtyard and devours the woman.
Harker wonders how he can escape. He knows that one of his post-dated letters - part of a plot, he thinks, to make him disappear - has been mailed. He reflects that it is always at night-time that he has been threatened, and that he has never seen the Count in daylight. Can it be, he wonders, that he sleeps while others wake?
One day, Harker decides to crawl out of his window, creep along the castle wall as he has seen the Count do, and enter the Count's window. He finds the Count's room empty except for a large heap of gold in a corner. He pushes open a door and goes down some stairs, reaching a ruined chapel that has been used as a graveyard. The ground has recently been dug over, and the earth has been placed in the great wooden boxes that the Slovaks brought. Harker examines the boxes of earth and in one, he finds the Count. He is lying with his eyes open but with no signs of life or consciousness. Harker, frightened by the look of hate in the Count's eyes, flees back to his room.
At the end of June, Harker sees the Count leave the castle by his window in Harker's suit, to post his last letter. He falls asleep in the library and is woken by the Count, who tells him that tomorrow he must leave for England. The Count says that he himself will not be there, but he will send his carriage for Harker after some gypsies and Slovaks have called at the castle and left. The carriage will take him to the Borgo Pass to meet the coach. Harker tells the Count he wishes to leave tonight. The Count gives him permission, and opens the unlocked door to let him out, but howling wolves close in, as if by the Count's command. Harker asks him to shut the door, saying he will wait till morning.
As Harker is about to lie down to sleep, he thinks that he hears the Count whispering, "Back, back, to your own place! Your time is not yet come. tomorrow night, is yours!" Harker opens his door to reveal the three vampire women, who laugh and run away.
The next day, Harker runs down to the hall, but the door that was unlocked last night will not budge. He crawls out of a window and enters the Count's room. He finds the Count lying in the same box as before, but looking much younger and with blood trickling from the corners of his mouth. Harker is horror-struck by the thought that he is helping the Count move to London, where he might feed on the millions of residents and create an ever-growing circle of vampires (a reference to the tradition that a person bitten by a vampire becomes one). Harker tries to kill the Count by beating him over the head with a shovel, but as he is about to strike, the Count turns his gaze on him and the shovel glances off, only cutting the Count's face.
Harker hears the gypsies and the Slovaks arriving. He runs for the door to the stairway, but it slams shut and he cannot open it. He hears the gypsies and Slovaks leaving the castle. He aims to take some of the Count's gold, crawl from a window, and scale the castle wall to escape. His last, desperate journal entry reads, "Goodbye, all! Mina!"
Analysis
The Count's net is tightening around Harker. Several incidents support this notion: the Count's ordering of the post-dated letters; Harker's thwarted attempt to send letters out via the gypsies; the fact that the Count controls the wolves that circle the castle door; and the Count's apparent ability to control the doors of the castle by his will. Harker cannot even take the last recourse of a trapped man and kill his captor: he tries, but his weapon merely grazes the Count.
Harker's realization that he is helping the Count establish a base in London from which he will turn his victims into more vampires reprises a major theme of the novel: that of normal sexual reproduction perverted. While normal sexual reproduction - a hallowed function of the respectable Victorian family - involves love and creating new life, vampiric reproduction involves destructiveness and creates more vampires, that is, 'undead' people. The undead are not alive in the normal sense but are animated corpses that suck the life out of others. Thus, vampires reproduce death. This is another sense in which Dracula represents the reverse of Victorian respectability.
The chapter ends on (quite literally!) a cliff-hanger, as we know Harker's desperate plan to escape by scaling the castle wall and precipice, but not whether he succeeds.