NovelGuide: Dracula: Novel Summary: Chapter 8

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Chapter 8

Summary
Mina records in her journal how one full moon night, she awakes to find Lucy's bed empty. Mina leaves the house and runs towards the churchyard. She finds Lucy still asleep and half-reclining in their favorite seat, with a dark figure bending over her. Mina calls Lucy's name, and the figure raises its head, revealing a white face and red eyes. By the time Mina reaches Lucy, the figure has disappeared. Lucy is breathing in heavy gasps, as if short of breath. Mina fastens a shawl with a pin around Lucy's throat. She thinks she may have pricked her with the pin, as Lucy puts her hand to her throat and moans in pain. Mina leads her home, puts her to bed, and locks their bedroom door.
Next morning, Mina notes that Lucy looks healthier than usual. Mina thinks that she must have hurt Lucy with the pin, as there are two red points like pin-pricks on her throat.
The following night, Lucy sleepwalks again. Twice she tries the door in an attempt to get out, and when she finds it locked, she seems impatient. The next night, Mina wakes to find Lucy sitting up and, still asleep, pointing at the window, where a large bat can be seen flitting about. The following day at sunset, Mina and Lucy go for a walk. Lucy sees a dark figure sitting on their favorite seat, and remarks on his red eyes.
In the evening, Lucy retires early to bed and Mina goes out for a stroll. When she comes back to the house, she sees Lucy's head leaning out of the window. She is asleep and a large bird is sitting on the window-sill next to her. As Mina enters the room, she is holding her hand to her throat. Mina notices that she looks pale and haggard, and feels that she is anxious about something.
The next day, Lucy is tired. Holmwood's father, who has been sick, is better, and wants the marriage to take place soon. Lucy's mother is mortally ill with a heart problem, and not likely to live long, though she has not told Lucy. Lucy's mother has not been told about Lucy's sleepwalking, as any shock could kill her.
Mina is worried that she has not heard from Harker. She worries too about Lucy, whose strength is failing daily. The wounds in her throat are still open and growing larger.
The narrative continues with a letter from Samuel Billington, the Count's Whitby solicitor, to a solicitor in London. The London solicitor is to deliver the fifty boxes of earth from the Demeter to the chapel on the Carfax estate, which the Count has bought. The London solicitor replies, confirming that the boxes have been delivered.
Mina's journal records that Lucy is somewhat better. Mina asks her what happened on the night she found her on the seat in the churchyard. Lucy says that the events seemed real, rather than a dream. She had felt impelled to come to the seat, and remembers something dark with red eyes. She had felt "something very sweet and very bitter all around me at once," and then had an almost mystical out-of-body experience.
On August 19, Mina hears news of Harker at last. He has been ill, and that is why he has not been able to write. A nun and nurse called Sister Agatha has written to Hawkins to say that Harker has been at her hospital in Budapest, Hungary for six weeks with a violent brain fever. Hawkins passed on the letter to Mina. Sister Agatha writes that Harker has had some terrible shock, and has been raving in his delirium about wolves, ghosts and demons. He had arrived in Budapest on a train, shouting for a ticket for home.
Mina plans to leave for Budapest the next morning, to bring Harker home.
Seward's diary records a sudden change in Renfield. He has become violent and has developed a haughty attitude to the asylum staff, saying, "you don't count now; the Master is at hand." He no longer cares about his pets. That night, Renfield escapes. Seward and his staff track him down to the neighboring estate, Carfax, which the Count has bought. They find him pressed against the door of the chapel, calling to his "Master," and telling him that he is here to do his bidding. They return him to the asylum, restrain him in a strait-jacket and chain him in a padded cell.
Analysis
The sexual symbolism of vampirism is hinted at in Mina's fear for Lucy's "reputation" if the story of her sleepwalking adventure should get out and, perhaps, be distorted. It is also significant that Lucy looks healthier after her first encounter with the Count, though we are to see in future chapters that repeated encounters weaken her. Taking the exchange of blood in vampirism as symbolic of the exchange of bodily fluids in sex, Lucy's initial upsurge in health reflects the Victorian belief that a limited amount of sex (but only within marriage!) was beneficial and could even cure anemia in a young woman, whereas excessive indulgence was enfeebling or even fatal.
Lucy's own description of what happened, with its intense sensory stimulation ("something very sweet and very bitter"; "a sort of agonizing feeling, as if I were in an earthquake") and its flavor of mystical experience ("my soul seemed to go out from my body and float about the air") makes the experience sound like a sexual orgasm. Lucy's impatience at being locked in her bedroom the next night shows her longing to repeat her adventure with the Count. She has begun to change from a demure Victorian maiden into the sexually depraved creature she finally becomes.
All this presents a problem. Lucy is about to marry Holmwood, and as a respectable Victorian girl, she was expected to be a virgin on her wedding night. But she has been penetrated in a way that draws blood, and thus symbolically deflowered, by the Count. She is damaged goods. By the conventions of respectable society and of the fiction of the time, it is simply not possible for her to marry Holmwood.
The sense of escalating danger is conveyed by the worsening condition of the homicidal lunatic Renfield, who looks forward to the arrival of his "Master," the Count. The suspense is intensified by Seward's ignorance of the significance and power of the boxes of earth that have been delivered to Carfax. We know this, and Renfield senses it, but Seward has no idea of the danger he faces.