format that facilitates the so-calledback-at-the-ranch device so common in nineteenth-century fiction, in which (in this case) one character's letters or journal can fill the reader in on what has been happening elsewhere in the story meanwhile.

Foreshadowing is so standard in novels that it would be surprising if Dracula did not employ this device. In the opening chapters, before he reaches the castle, Jonathan Harker is given numerous indications that some terrible thing is going to happen, but he dismisses all of them as superstitious nonsense. The supposedly ignorant locals are more knowledgeable than Harker, an educated professional man. To say this is ironic would be an understatement. Irony, however, another standard device, is much more in evidence in Dracula than has been acknowledged by people who have considered it a "straightforward" and not especially subtle horror story. I would identify the following as the most significant instances of irony in the novel:

1. The (at first) amiable and polished manner in which Dracula acts. It's ironic in the extreme that such a pleasant, sophisticated and wealthy man is actually a blood-sucking monster. If this apparent paradox doesn't strike us as especially surprising today, it is only because the outwardly smooth and elegant characterization of a vampire has been repeated so many times in literature and film that it has become a cliché. It is also ironic that as Dracula tells Harker the history of Transylvania, he (Dracula) appears as a noble patriot, a representative of the sufferings and the all-too-human complexities of the story of Transylvania's people.

2. The apparent fealty shown to Dracula by the various ethnic groups in the vicinity of the castle. An obvious instance is the backfired attempt by Harker to send letters for help by throwing them to a peasant in the courtyard of the castle, who then promptly turns them over to Dracula.

3. The presence of vampirism in the "modern" world, in a setting replete with the technology of the time. A remarkable irony (again, however, so often seen in vampire sagas that it doesn't seem unusual any longer) is the juxtaposition of modern medicine (the blood transfusions given to Lucy), the typewriter, Seward's psychoanalytic observations on Renfield, and other manifestations of modernity in present-day (the 1890s) Europe with the existence of the supernatural.

Dracula himself is more a symbol than an actual being. He is a personification not merely of "evil" but of the primitive—the primal destructive forces that exist in the subconscious. Vampirism itself is often interpreted as a metaphor of sexuality or, more specifically, "transgressive" or "aberrant" sexuality. In her book Our Vampires, Ourselves the literary critic and historian Nina Auerbach relates Dracula to the public reaction to the nearly contemporaneous trial of Oscar Wilde. It is a truism that beneath a straitlaced facade, Victorian literature embodies a subversiveness that could not be openly expressed because of the censorship and cultural norms of the period. In Dracula, we have a prime example of an allegorical exploration of the "dark" side of human nature and, specifically, sexuality, disguised as a thrilling tale of the supernatural.