ABSTRACT
The ability to learn new skills is the key to Dracula's powers here, though later he will be transformed by Van Helsing's classification of him as a creature with a “child-brain” to a being who can only repeat old behaviors. Harold Perkin's description of The Rise of Professional Society helps to explain Jonathan Harker's centrality as a professional man to plots of circulation and vampirism. The emergent ideology of professionalism opposed earlier means to power/prestige/wealth based on land and bloodties or on investment and entrepreneurship with the ideal that society should “reward expert service based on selection by merit and long arduous training”. The solicitor solicits; as a professional, his desire is to be desired, and his passivity places him in an increasingly effeminized role as his stay in the castle progresses. The eventual substitution of Dracula for Harker highlights the dangerous instability presented by professional society.
