Vampire Legend

The purpose of this research is to examine the ways in which the legend of the vampire, encased within Bram Stoker's Dracula, emerges as an index of the position of women amid findesiecle decadence. The plan of the research will be to set forth the principal elements of the climate of social and sexual repression that defined prevailing ideas about women in Victorian society and culture, and then to discuss aspects of the novel that show it to be as much (if not more) a product of such closely held attitudes as a commentary upon them. Throughout, reference will be made, from a twentiethcentury perspective, to the status of the socalled New Woman, whose identity was at the time of the novel's publication just beginning to emerge.

The power and sensual attractiveness of the vampire offer access to forbidden (sexual) fruit that could not fail to appeal to the elements of repression of Victorian culture. Precisely because of the strict moral sanctions against what today would be referred to as acting out depraved sensibilities, Dracula offers those behaving under the guidelines of a repressive culture the opportunityin the form of an unsought moral obligationto explore the abyss of profane knowledge and activity and render it powerless in the world. Initially, of course, the obligation comes to light as a depraved thrill, in Harker's halfwaking, halfsexual experience in Dracula's castle with the three vampire women. "There was something about them that made

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