A journey into fear: Dracula (1897) by Bram Stocker – inspired by the figure of Vlad III, Prince of Valacchia.
Jonathan Harker is a young solicitor travelling to Transylvania to give the mysterious Count Dracula information about his new property in London. Dracula takes the young man prisoner, and Jonathan sees many strange and evil things in the castle before running away into the night.
In England, Jonathan’s fiancée, Mina, is visiting her friend Lucy. Dracula’s ship lands on the part of England where Mina and Lucy are and his first victim is Lucy.
Dr. Seward, the director of an asylum (manicomio) in London, tries to cure Lucy. Together with his friend and teacher Professor Abraham Van Helsing. Van Helsing understands what has happened to Lucy, but cannot save her. He explains to Mina, Jonathan, and Seward the reality of vampires and the danger of this particular one, who was in his human life a great warrior (guerriero) and thinker. All together they decide to destroy Dracula, and, when the Count attacks Mina to make of her a vampire, too, Jonathan succeed in killing him, Mina is safe and the group returns to England.
Dracula is an epistolary novel, written by the different characters and retains (possiede) a remarkable psychological power. Because of the sexual implications of the blood exchange between the vampire and his victims, Dracula may be viewed (visto) as a novel about the struggle between tradition and modernity at the “fin de siècle”, between the world of the past and the emerging modern world of technology, in which women fight for their independence. Van Helsing personifies this struggle because he uses, at the time, extremely modern technologies like blood transfusions and old ones such as garlic (aglio) .