NovelGuide: Dracula: Novel Summary: Chapter 5

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Chapter 5

Summary
In this chapter, the narrative is no longer given through Harker's journal but through letters between some of the other characters, a diary entry, and a telegram.
The first letter, from Harker's fianc�e Mina to her friend Lucy Westenra, tells us that Mina is working as an assistant schoolmistress. She is studying shorthand and typing so that she can help her husband in his work. She has heard from Harker and expects him home in about a week.
Lucy replies to Mina, telling her about Arthur Holmwood, who has been visiting her and her mother. She admits that she loves him, though she is not yet sure of his feelings for her. She has also met Dr John Seward, who runs the lunatic asylum (near the Count's new property, though Lucy is unaware of this).
In her next letter to Mina, Lucy reveals that she has had three proposals of marriage in one day. The first was from Seward. She refused him, admitting that she had feelings for someone else. The second proposal was from a rich American from Texas, Quincey P Morris. She refuses him, too, and again admits that she loves someone else. He asks for a kiss "to keep off the darkness now and then," which she gives him. The third proposal she accepts delightedly, without mentioning the man's name, though we can guess from what she has told us already that it is Holmwood.
Dr Seward's diary entry tells us that he is downhearted at Lucy's rebuff, but is trying to distract himself with work amongst the patients at his asylum. One patient, Mr Renfield, has particularly aroused his interest. Renfield is prey to "some fixed idea which I [Seward] cannot make out," and Seward believes he may be dangerous.
A letter written by Quincey Morris to Holmwood invites Holmwood to visit the following night and celebrate his successful bid for Lucy's hand. Seward will also be there. In a telegram, Holmwood accepts Morris's invitation.
Analysis
This chapter helps to establish the characters of the two main female characters, Mina and Lucy. Both are examples of respectable Victorian womanhood, being pure, virtuous and beautiful, and as such, they stand at the opposite pole to the three vampire women that tormented Harker.
However, there are important differences between Mina and Lucy. Mina is serious and practical, studying shorthand and typing so that she can help her husband-to-be in his work. (It is ironic that she mentions that he is keeping a shorthand journal of his travels abroad - implying that it is for a civilized parlour amusement - when in fact he is using shorthand in a desperate attempt to escape the Count.) Lucy, on the other hand, is more overtly sexualized, attracting no less than three marriage proposals in one day. Feeling guilty for making two of her suitors unhappy by her refusal, she writes to Mina, "Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?" While she makes this remark out of compassion for the men, it hovers dangerously close to promiscuity by the standards of respectable Victorian England. She herself condemns her own words as "heresy" in the next sentence, but that does not cancel out the fact that she thought them. This character trait is emphasized by her willingness to kiss Morris after she has refused him. She is edging slightly towards the dividing line that separates respectable women from the vampire women. The Count's fearsome power lies in his ability to turn the first into the second. He is therefore a threat not only to individuals but to the very fabric of society.
We are introduced to the character of the lunatic Renfield, who fascinates the highly rational Seward. It is no accident that Seward, a man so wedded to science and technology that he keeps his diary on a phonograph, feels particularly drawn to Renfield after his rebuff by Lucy. It is as if Seward's melancholy mood pushes him towards the world of the irrational, the bestial, and the mad - a world that belongs to the Count. In this respect, Seward's melancholy plays the same role as Lucy's sexuality: it provides a window into evil or, as psychoanalytic theory would say, into the unconscious.