Both writers use secretive, desolate settings to highlight liminality and to establish suspense and mystery, as well as to represent the transgression from reality to the unnatural. In Dracula, at the beginning of the epistolary novel, Stoker establishes a conventional gothic setting of “a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light” in Transylvania in order to construct an ominous, menacing, and sinister tone. Also, the adjective “vast” has connotations of the castle as colossal, and monumental, which could be symbolic of the scale of danger that awaits Jonathan Harker in his journey. However, it could also highlight the immense power that Dracula has control over. Similarly, in The Crucible, Arthur Miller establishes a liminal setting of a forest in order to …show more content…
It is a remote and foreboding environment, foreign to the daily lives of Stoker's English readers. It creates an atmosphere of folklore, superstition, and primal horror, creating a sense of the primitive as the uncanny and threatening, with the potential to erupt into the rational ordered lives of the modern European. The travel of Dracula to England shows the disruptive potential of the irrational erupting into an almost stereotypical vision of the peaceful ordered life of the English village. As is typical of the sensation novel, it creates horror by suggesting that even the most peaceful, orderly, rational, and innocent lives are not safe from external threats.” CRITIC. Stoker also describes “the pine woods that seemed in the darkness” to be “closing down” upon the castle which highlights how the surrounding landscape is forbidding and threatening, also symbolising entrapment which forebodes how attempting to escape is improbable. The “darkness” suggests an air of secrecy, mystique and danger which is established in order to accentuate fear in the reader as well as to represent