What does Dracula represent? A Victorian reading

Bram Stoker's Dracula represents the fears of late Victorian England projected onto a single monstrous figure: sexual transgression, colonial reversal, foreign invasion, the undead body, and the dissolution of everything the Victorian social order was built to contain.

Stoker published Dracula in 1897. It was not an immediate sensation but it was never out of print, and it became the most culturally generative horror novel in the English language. What it represents has been argued over by critics for more than a century, and the readings have multiplied rather than converged.

What does Dracula represent in terms of sexuality?#

The Victorian era was one of the most sexually anxious periods in British cultural history -- publicly devoted to chastity, domesticity, and female purity while privately consumed by the exact opposite. Dracula is the embodiment of transgressive sexuality.

His biting is unmistakably erotic. His victims experience something closer to pleasure than terror during the attacks. The novel's female characters are divided into the pure (Mina, Lucy-before-infection) and the corrupted (the three vampire women of the castle, Lucy-after-infection). The corruption is presented as a kind of sexual awakening -- Lucy becomes "voluptuous" and aggressive after her infection, which horrifies the male characters in exact proportion to how clearly they recognise what they are horrified by.

The critic Christopher Craft, in his 1984 essay "Kiss Me with those Red Lips" published in Representations, argued that Dracula embodies anxieties about same-sex desire as well as heterosexual transgression -- that the count's desire to penetrate male bodies is what drives the specifically homosocial intensity of the male characters' response.

What does Dracula represent about colonialism?#

Dracula arrives from the East -- specifically from Transylvania, a region Britain associated with barbarism, superstition, and the threatening periphery of European civilisation. He travels to England with boxes of his native soil. He buys properties in London. He intends to spread his kind through the population of the most powerful empire on earth.

Stephen Arata, in his essay "The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonialism" (Victorian Studies, 1990), argued that this is the novel's colonial nightmare: the colonised returning to colonise the coloniser. England had spent decades extracting resources and exerting power across the globe. Dracula is what happens when that logic reverses -- when something from the periphery arrives in the centre with the same extractive intention.

What does Dracula represent about modernity?#

The novel is striking in how modern its vampire hunters are. Van Helsing uses the latest medical knowledge. They use phonographs, typewriters, and telegrams. Mina Harker is explicitly presented as a "New Woman" -- educated, capable, and indispensable to the investigation.

Dracula, by contrast, is ancient. He cannot cross running water without assistance. He must sleep in his native soil. He is bound by the rules of a pre-modern supernatural order. The confrontation is between the rational, scientific, modern West and something very old that the modern world believed it had left behind.

Stoker's argument is that it has not left it behind. The ancient and irrational survive and threaten. The New Woman and the doctor and the American cowboy and all their modern equipment are necessary precisely because modernity alone is not enough.

What does Dracula represent about death?#

At its simplest and perhaps most durable level, Dracula represents the fear of death that will not stay dead -- the fear that the boundary between the living and the dead is not as firm as we need it to be. The novel's vampires are not ghosts. They are bodies. They eat. They move. They remember. They desire. They are death with an appetite, which is exactly what the Victorian obsession with death, grief, and mourning found most threatening.

For a companion piece on another Victorian novel that stages a confrontation with the monstrous body, what the monster in Frankenstein represents covers the earlier version of this fear.

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Further reading#

For the gothic tradition Dracula belongs to, the best gothic novels in the public domain includes Stoker alongside the Brontes, Shelley, and others.

For what to read after Dracula, what to read after Dracula has recommendations across several directions.

Dracula is in the Foxing catalog, free.

Sources#

• Bram Stoker, Dracula, Archibald Constable and Company, 1897
• Christopher Craft, "Kiss Me with those Red Lips: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula," Representations, 1984
• Stephen Arata, "The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonialism," Victorian Studies, 1990