Dracula: Chapter 16 Summary & Analysis

Morris does not seem worried by the problems of vampirism, but instead feels that, if Seward and Van Helsing are playing a joke on him, that would be an affront to his manhood. In this way, Morris's gentlemanly nature is represented as being typically American, or cowboy-like—Morris is the most "manly" of the men of the group, and also the least willing to be taken for a fool.

One wonders what the looks on the faces of the other group members are, when Van Helsing takes this bizarre paste and streaks it on the tomb. There are moments when the preparations against vampires approach kitsch or humor, and these moments tend to be downplayed by Stoker, who does not wish to interrupt the horror of his narrative.

No one is laughing, however, when Lucy actually returns to them in the shade of her former self. Lucy's vampirism does seem slightly different that Dracula's, perhaps because she is only a recent "convert" to undeadness—while Dracula appears as a man, Lucy, on the other hand, is more of a wraith or ghost, haunting the cemetery in which she was entombed.

It is not clear why Van Helsing decides they need one more day to plan, but perhaps he and the rest of the group simply don't have the supplies necessary to carry on with the "true killing" of Lucy. Van Helsing might also want to give Arthur more time to make sure he is ready to "release" his fiancée from the terrible fate forced upon her her by Dracula.

This scene, in which Lucy is freed from her vampiric form, is one of the most chilling and bizarre of the novel, and Stoker's restraint here is admirable—the sober way in which the events are described, from this point until the end of the chapter, makes the events seem all the more plausible and real.

Lucy's peace is disturbed, initially, by the stake into her heart, but this is only the demonic shout of the shade which has infected her soul—her true and pure soul, however, is released and is allowed to live in heaven, with other Christian souls. This final Christian consolation is what causes Arthur to believe that it is right to drive a stake into Lucy's heart. All of this also establishes that the vampires are themselves trapped—it's not just that the original person has turned evil, but rather that they have become infected by evil and forced to stay within the now-evil shell of their body. In the logic of the novel, vampires, in the moment of being killed, actually find freedom and peace.

Again, here the description of the terrible violence done to Lucy's body is quite clear and written in a matter-of-fact style, which only makes its gruesomeness all the more chilling, especially considering that this violence is enacted upon her by her close friends and acquaintances. At the same time, there is an extent to which it is hard to not to see these events as a metaphor for how Victorian England treated women who had sex out of marriage—they were cut off by family and friends, and thrown out of society.