The two central incidents of these chapters involve Mina's encounter with Dracula and her coming under his evil influence. Second, these chapters are also concerned with the discovery and "sterilization" of the fifty boxes of earth which Dracula brought with him.
Since we earlier heard that a vampire can only enter an establishment if invited, we are at first surprised that he has been able to enter Mina's room, and we are inclined to wonder if she invited him in. Later, however, we learn that Dracula had used the "zoöphagous" patient Renfield to invite Dracula into the house. It is now clear why Stoker has been using the patient in the novel and also why all the principal characters are visitors in Seward's house. Later, Van Helsing uses the fate of Renfield to prove that Dracula is expanding his sphere of influence and is using innocent people to accomplish his aims — therefore, Dracula must be searched out and destroyed.
It becomes clear in these chapters that Dracula has some kind of mind control over his victims — that is, he can induce them to open windows, for example, in order to let him enter the home. Evidently Stoker was interested in hypnosis or "animal magnetism," since Van Helsing, through hypnotizing Mina, is able to learn of Dracula's whereabouts. Dracula, too, can hypnotize and, indeed, he is an individual of great personal magnetism. It is in these chapters that we learn that Stoker was, in fact, creating a gothic villain which would be similar to many gothic villains in earlier literature. Among other things, Count Dracula is a member of the corrupt aristocracy. The gothic villain/aristocrat was probably derived from Richardson's novels Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747), in which the villain's persecution of the innocent maiden dramatized for middle-class audiences the exaggerated nature of the class struggle.
It is important for the reader to understand the dramatic and philosophical importance of the villain's aristocratic heritage; if Dracula were a peasant, the story would hardly be as dramatic.
