Evil in the Worlds of D racula and The H istorian
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Speaking of her friend Dr. Seward, Mina says, “How good and thoughtful
he is; the world seems full of good men—even if there are monsters in it” (254).
Her words well express the main theme of Stoker’s novel. Even though Mina is
diseased from Dracula’s bites, she can still ask her friends to take some pity on
the Count. He has to be destroyed so that “his better part may have spiritual
immortality” (349). Mina’s belief that “perhaps we are the instruments of
ultimate good” and Jonathan’s exclamation that “We are in the hands of God!”
are just two examples of how Stoker sets up the opposition to evil in this
fictional world (357, 401). At the end of the wild race to Castle Dracula, the
Count is killed by a slash through the throat and a knife thrust to the heart.
Before he crumbles into dust, Mina tells us in her journal that “there was in [his]
face a look of peace, such as I never could have imagined might have rested
there” (424).
The curse passes from Mina, who is now released from Dracula’s spell and
the blood disease. The novel concludes with Jonathan’s “Note” written seven
years later. He and Mina are living happily and have a son. Love, friendship, and
faith in the good triumph over Dracula’s horrendous evil and his plan to spread
that evil. Stoker’s novel allows the reader to believe that the threat of the
vampire is gone from the world with Dracula’s death, but such is not the case at
the conclusion of Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, the novel to which we now
turn.
The Nature of Evil in Kostova’s The Historian
Kostova’s debut novel took about ten years to research and write, and it has
been published in over thirty languages. According to commentator Jessica
Treadway, The Historian is “intriguing for its thorough examination of what
constitutes evil and why it exists” (ii). Her novel is inspired by Stoker’s
Dracula, yet it surpasses that earlier work in