Duality In Dracula

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With fluidity between reality and the supernatural, Gothic Fiction succeeds in examining moral questions pertinent to the human psyche and its ultimate degeneration. Suspense, fear and archetypal gothic motifs act to exacerbate and intensify this impossible dialogue of morality, in a world yet corrupted. Evident in Bram Stoker's’ seminal text, Dracula (1897), the degeneration of man is explored with the duality of the human psyche, and its ever-present notoriety as something that extends the human realm despite the physical figure of man, to a greater force of evil; the Supernatural. An examination of suppressed sexual endeavours bear further testimony to the weakness, and ultimate degeneration of man. Aided by Freudian sentiment, a psychoanalytic …show more content…
The supernatural realm is one outside the propriety and the facades of society ; it is animal, and carnal, and yet it connects to all. Freudian psychoanalysts, emerging largely during Dracula’s publication began to explore Freud's’ thesis on cognitive divides - the id, acting as the primitive and instinctual part of the mind, the superego acting as a moral drive, and the ego to mediate the id and superego. Within the gothic realm, conflict between the superego and the id, epitomises the conflict between reality, and the supernatural in polarised division. Given this polarisation acts as a thematic technique of contrast, it also reveals that the dark capacity of man extends the human spectrum into the Supernatural. This polarization also gives way to address the dual existence of man, in good and evil. In Dracula, Jonathan Harker's’ superego exclaims “As an English churchman, I have been taught to regard such things (of immoral nature) as in some measure idolatrous”, but when the Vampirettes appear to him, his id is filled with an uneasy and unholy longing from extended sexual suppression, the crux of human weakness. He is willing- eager, even to compromise his moral groundings with a “deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive”, and the reality of his virtuous wife, for an immoral transgression into the supernatural. Despite the ambiguity at the present segment, an immoral sexual transgression of man into supernatural, can be identified in keeping with the "incestuous-necrophilious, oral-anal-sadistic all-in wrestling match", that is Dracula, as analysed by Maurice Richardson. The id, and the Supernatural in even the case of

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