Bram Stoker Dracula
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Perhaps no work of literature has ever been composed without being a product of its era, mainly because the human being responsible for writing it develops their worldview within a particular era. Thus, with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, though we have a vampire myth novel filled with terror, horror, and evil, the story is a thinly veiled disguise of the repressed sexual mores of the Victorian era. If we look to critical interpretation and commentary to win support for such a thesis, we find it aplenty “For erotic Dracula certainly is. ‘Quasi-pornography’ one critic labels it. Another describes it as a ‘kind of incestuous, necrophilious, oral-anal-sadistic all-in-wrestling matching’. A sexual search of the novel unearths the following: seduction, rape, necrophilia, pedophilia, incest, adultery, oral sex, group sex, menstruation, venereal disease, voyeurism” (Leatherdale 155-156). While there are many other interpretations of the novel, such as the vampire as a Satan figure who wishes to take away the mortality Christ won mankind, this analysis will explore how it reads as a story of repressed sexuality and the conflict it creates for the characters living in a repressed Victorian world.Christopher Craft, in his review of the novel, argues that the gender roles of males and females were extremely well-defined and limiting in Victorian society. The male was perceived as the stronger of the sexes, and women were relegated to a voiceless and submissive
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ughout the story. As Harker awaits the approach of Dracula’s wives, rather than sound like he is about to be attacked by some kind of undead monsters who might do him harm he sounds like a man who is erotically charged at the thought of foreplay “Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and I could feel the hot breath on my neck…I could feel the soft shivering touch of the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited—waited with beating heart” (Carter 38).
There can be no denying that the people who are ravished in the novel are innocent young women of the best Victorian manner and qualities. However, once smitten or bitten by the vampire, they become lewd, wanton creatures, a couplet of qualities available only to prostitutes in Victorian society. Any society woman in the Victorian era who exhibited those qualities was ostracized and vilified to the nth degree. Lucy has her head cut off and is stabbed through the heart with a stake because sex was not like death in repressed Vi
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1396
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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