“Betwixt Sunset and Sunrise”: Liminality in Dracula

1. “Betwixt Sunset and Sunrise”: Liminality in Dracula Mark M. Hennelly, Jr.

2. H. Clay Trumbull, The Threshold Covenant 35 In various ways, among widely different primitive peoples, the marriage customs go to show that the home threshold cannot be passed except by overcoming a barrier of some kind, and making an offering, bloody or bloodless, at this primal family altar.

3. Bram Stoker, Dracula 2:25-26 “Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!” [The Count] made no motion of stepping to meet me, but stood like a statue, as though his gesture of welcome had fixed him into stone. The instant, however, that I had stepped over the threshold [of Castle Dracula], he moved impulsively forward.

4. Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage 20 [T]he door is the boundary between the foreign and domestic worlds in the case of an ordinary dwelling, between the profane and the sacred worlds in the case of a temple. Therefore to cross the threshold is to unite oneself with a new world.

5. Consider that the idea of the liminal is not always a place, but sometimes a transition: initiations, sacrifice, etc.