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Summary Of The Mask Of Sanity By Bram Stoker

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To understand why Stoker essayed to bring the nature of the mentally disturbed individual to light, one need only look to the summer of 1888, nine years before Dracula was published, when the Jack the Ripper killings took place. Despite the fact that the killings took place in Whitechapel, an area that housed primarily immigrants and Jews, the killings were of such a barbaric nature, and so popularized by the media, that the entirety of Victorian society was affected. It became the titular case of too much press, poor police work, and public mania. Even after the killings stopped, the questions remained: Who did it, and why? Why do people do monstrous things? Stoker attempts to answer that question with Dracula, a supernatural predator in human form.
Despite his supernatural nature, Dracula’s character should be …show more content…

This author uses the definition provided by the Oxford Dictionaries Online for psychopath: a person suffering from a chronic mental condition with abnormal or violent social behavior. This author has chosen to use the criteria provided by Dr. Hervey M. Cleckley, an American psychiatrist and pioneer in the field of psychopathy. His book, The Mask of Sanity published in 1941, details his research into the realm of psychopathy, his assertion that psychopaths are capable of providing a charming and benevolent face to the world while hiding a mental disorder, and the criteria by which he (Hervey) determines the psychopathy. Cleckley’s book became a seminal work on the subject, and his criterion is still used today. Cleckley’s list includes: Superficial charm and good intelligence; Absence of delusions and other signs of irrational thinking; Absence of nervousness or psychoneurotic manifestations; Unreliability; Untruthfulness and insincerity; Lack of remorse and shame; Inadequately motivated antisocial behavior; Poor judgment and failure to learn by experience; Pathologic egocentricity

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