Literature advice

Hello, I was just looking for a little guidance on how to structure my writing better. Last year, I managed to do quite well, but I feel like most of my good grades were mostly due to getting lucky with the passages. My teachers tell me I have to improve clarity, come up with ideas more quickly and improve the length of my essays, but that's easier said than done. Most of the time I end up writing myself into a self-contradiction or philosphical paradox and having to spend a considerable amount of time thinking about how to fix the mess.

I tried to read some journal articles on Dracula, but if anything it turned my writing into even more of a garbled mess for some reason.

Here's a sample of my writing just as reference:

Shrouded in the ubiquitous sexual and economic repression of the deeply capitalist Victorian England, Bram Stoker, in his 1897 novel Dracula, questions the veracity of the manner in which the ‘red spark’ of ‘voluptuous’ desire is represented. The Count is veritably accentuated to be a ‘prosaic’ arbiter of immaterial and monopolistic, feudal capital, the equivalence of which to the ‘chains’ of human sexuality is betrayed through the trepidatious ‘startling’ catalysed by both. Thus, these Freudian abjurations manifest in a perceived inverse of the mission civilisatrice, shifting the burden of one’s ‘mirror’ image onto the Orient.

Ritualistic religious fervour is employed by the ‘wafer’-wielding Van Helsing group to justify the destruction of the Count. However, the ambivalence of the role thereof is underlined by the affricate ‘f’ in ‘wafer’, reducing the Holy object to one analogous to the frivolous epistles of Jonathan. Dracula’s anaphorically phrased leaving of his ‘barren land’, ‘barren of peoples', to become, as Moses, a ‘stranger in a strange land’ serves to conflate religion with the banality of rustling ‘timetables’. It is thus that Stoker emphasises that the prophetic omniscience of the Count, who through the ‘split’ sides of the ‘river banks’, which alludes to the splitting of the Red Sea, undermines Victorian values due only to a subversion of social values, as opposed to the legal documentation of the ‘solicitor’, facilitating the leading of ‘immense’ accumulated monetary ‘value’ to the promised land of England, populated with innumerable specimens of ‘standing corn’. Indeed, the Biblical ‘pillar of fire’ is used by Stoker to emphasise an identification with the father figure, who immediately preceding passage II infantilises Mina as a ‘kitten’, revealing an underlying matricidal tendency. The role of religion is sardonically manipulated into a mere racial factor, as evinced by Dracula’s stereotypically semitic ‘aquiline nose’; this perceived threat on the social order thus purportedly vindicates the repressed pleasure in murder as observed in Arthur’s ‘beads of sweat’ and ‘Thor-like figure’ whilst driving the phallic stake into Lucy. The embodiment of the ‘dark fog’ links the imagery of high faith associated with the Count to a supersensible premonition of ‘sunlight’, which although immaterial, is able to penetrate through Mina’s eyelids. Bram Stoker ostensibly alludes to the elusive Marxian commodity and alienation of labour, plunging Dracula into the role of the accumulation of capital. The inevitable march towards the feudal mode of production manifests as fear, contradicting the society which represses its inherent hedonism as a ‘foul bauble of man’s vanity’. Sibilance is in fact associated with femininity in passage I through Jonathan’s obsequious ‘speak[ing]’ with the Count and becoming ‘diffuse’, compounding the homoerotic connotations of the word ‘strange’.

(I used the passages from the 2022 VCAA exam)

Note that this is a highly edited passage from my essay I made after writing the initial timed practice essay (which was only around 540 words). The fact that I should be aiming to write almost double that in one hour makes me a bit (very) worried. How do you think I could improve? Thanks in advance.