ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the way in which the story of Dracula is told, before relating the narrative strategies to some of the social anxieties and uncertainties that are expressed through the text. Later in nineteenth-century, medical writers, such as Andrew Wynter and Henry Maudsley, drew attention to the ease with which men and women could slip from normality to a state of madness, linking clinical judgement with social comment that reflected contemporary fears about degeneration. The sharing of experiences and the collating of evidence is the textual equivalent of the bonding in a common onslaught against the threat of Dracula. The 'hysteria' of the women in the novel makes them susceptible to the hypnotic powers of Dracula. The fact that Dracula can be seen as both colonizer and colonized is an indication of the novel's ambiguities.
