Dracula and the Mafia

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Recommended: Morality in literature

“If we fail in this our fight he must surely win; and then where end we? Life is nothings…but to fail here is not mere life or death. It is that we become as him; that we hence forward become foul things of the night like him–without heart or conscience, preying on the bodies and the souls of those we love best” (Stoker 253). With these words Van Helsing explains that it is a human impulse to destroy the other out of fear of becoming the other. Dracula’s otherness frightens Van Helsing because he represents the destruction of human moral. If he does not kill the other, he will ultimately become the other capable of infinite evils. If we are to remain as moral individuals we must beat “the other” which seeks to destroy us. In essence it is the notion “kill or be killed”. To save ourselves, we must kill the other.

Like Dracula, the Mafia represents the other in the 20th century. The Mafia is foreign, in other words, their origin is different from mainstream Americans. Their organization is ruthless as well as exclusive, and they live outside the law. We have the fear that they will control us, and due to that fear, we must destroy and control them. In a way, the Mafia is the ultimate vampire of modern day society because they invoke fear, repulsion and anxiety much like the reactions felt by Jonathan Harker, Van Helsing, Mina and the other vampire hunters in Stoker’s Dracula. Both vampires and the Mafia appeal to our most private selves through sexuality, they operate with the greatest power at night, and run their organizations in a parallel manner.

Dracula and the mafia are a threat to the people of the society they invade because of their ability to entice the opposite sex to be strongly attracted to them. We all know that the...

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...Cited

Catanzaro, Raimondo. “Enforcers, Entrepreneurs, and Survivors: How the Mafia has Adapted to Change.” The British Journal of Sociology 36.1: 34-57. JSTOR. Web. 15 Feb. 2011. .

Coe, Richard M. “It Takes Capital to Defeat Dracula: A New Rhetorical Essay.” College English 48.3 (1986): 231-242. JSTOR. Web. 16 Feb. 2011. .

Cressey, Donald R. “Methodological Problems in the Study of Organized Crime as a Social Problem.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 374: 101-112. JSTOR. Web. 15 Feb. 2011. .

Stevenson, John Allen. “A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula.” PMLA 103.2 (1988): 139-149. JSTOR. Web. 17 Feb. 2011. .

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Ed. Maurice Hindle. N.p.: Penguin Classics, 1993. Print.

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