#Justice4Lucy

[cheriemorte]

These are really great explanations from a practical standpoint and psychological standpoint, and I would add that as much as it seems counterintuitive to continue to return to the same person when it would be easier to pick a new one, especially in such a crowded country, there is also an explanation that is about survival. In his home country, the Count has become enshrouded in a sense of inevitability because he was already an estabilshed threat for centuries before any of the people who now live there were even born. They know not to go to his castle, but they also know that from time to time he will come and he will take someone and there is acceptance of the fact, because it has always been so. Nevertheless, they have his number. They have him in a very frustrated situation. The Count is old from lack of feeding when Jonathan meets him. He can prey only on the ignorant (like our collective bestie) or on those utterly incapable of defending themselves (he goes grocery shopping for babies when his three potsmoking roommates/wives clearly have an appetite for something bigger, which is why Jonathan was such an irresistible snacc) because the people there know how to protect themselves from him. No one is going to his home to try to kill him--for all of recallable history, he has just been an evil that exists and cannot be fully stopped, a force of nature, you don't try to fight a hurricane--but they keep him out of theirs. He obviously operated brazenly for some amount of time and it backfired big time.

Dracula II: This Time I'm British Tho is trying to learn from his mistakes. He had to go to considerable trouble just to orchaestrate the move to England and he doesn't want the people to catch on to him. Obviously, he doesn't want to attract the attention of vampire hunters, but he also doesn't want to live contained and unable to feed except when lucky and constantly outsmarted by locals who know what you are and don't think it's cute anymore. If you feed on one person at a time and just keep coming back to them, it's nigh undetectable, especially in a land that doesn't know your legend and how to identify the signs of what's happening. Lucy is just one sad story. How many people waste away from illnesses and eventually die in England every day? He isn't dropping bodies he doesn't need to (he's still got all the vitality from drinking our friends on the Demeter, RIP y'all were real ones), he's feeding just enough to keep one victim for as long as possible. It's a good strategy and it should have given him a hot new hunting ground for a long, long time. He just so happens to have had the bad luck to have stumbled upon a victim who knows a guy who knows a guy who has 75 PhDs and one of them is in Vampires.

Granted, he should probably have taken the hint the first time he got to her window and it was Garlic O'Clock that someone had his number, but I think the stubbornness with which he persues Lucy despite that just returns to the OPs original point. By now, Lucy is his all-you-can-eat buffet of renewable blood and his ego and stubbornness have blinded him to the fact that he should move on rather than try to claim her. Let's see how that turns out for him. >:)

Forgive me if this was explained already and I missed it, but why is Dracula obsessed with nomming Lucy in particular? Aren't there at least a hundred other young ladies who can be eaten without throwing a wolf through the window? Are we supposed to understand this as "By chance, Dracula started feeding on a woman who is connected to Jo Harker, and is obsessed with / determined to get his way" or is there something more going on?

It isn't explained in the text, so you aren't missing anything.

So, as with most things in the book, there is a Doylist and Watsonian reading. The Doylist one is rather boring, so I'll start with that. If the Count moved on and preyed on someone else, we would have to shift to some other set of characters somewhere else in London. Which would understandably make the narrative bigger. So Stoker chooses to keep it limited.

But I really do think the Watsonian explanation is way better in this case. He won't give up because he has laid claim to someone and he refuses to be defeated or told no. She isn't particularly special to him- she's just the person who sleepwalked into the graveyard. But like with his claim on Jonathan ("this man is mine"), once he has decided to sink his teeth into someone, they become his. He'll come back to Lucy over and over because he's claimed her.

The fact that someone is clearly giving her blood and guarding her room against him means that there is a battle being fought for her soul. He knows he has adversaries. So no matter how much easier it would be to find someone else, he will not let anyone keep him from what he thinks is his. He will do whatever he has to in order to get past those guards, because that's how he proves that no one can stop his claim.

And he'll also leave her with just enough life that the people trying to thwart him have to watch her fade away, because that's how he shows that he's more powerful than them. It isn't about Lucy, it's about winning.