No Clocks in His Castle: The Threat of the Durée in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

This study reveals that Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) reflects the tension between quantitative and qualitative understandings of time during a period of global spatiotemporal standardization. The novel embodies the conflict between positivist science, represented by the vampire hunters who reject subjective experience in favor of clock time and scientific measurement, and metaphysical interpretations of time, embodied by Dracula's Bergsonian durée. Written after the 1884 International Meridian Conference established Greenwich as longitude zero, Dracula critiques the repression of intuitive, qualitative time in favor of standardized, measurable time. The research analyzes how the novel destabilizes the vampire hunters' faith in narratives and scientific rationality, exposing the fragility of their worldview when confronted with Dracula's supernatural, subjective experience of time.

Fletcher, A. (2013). No Clocks in His Castle: The Threat of the Durée in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Victorian Review, 39(1), 55–69. https://doi.org/10.1353/vcr.2013.0009