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 fin-de-siecle 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 twentieth-century perspective, to the status of the so-called 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 opportunity--in the form of an unsought moral obligation--to 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 half-waking, half-sexual experience in Dracula's castle with the three vampire women. "There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear . . . The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive . . . I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited--waited with beating heart" (Stoker, Bantam 39). Jonathan hopes Mina will never read of this experience, but he is transfixed by it. Later, he comes to think of his room in the castle as a source of spir...