“The Wanderer’s Appetite: Fear and Desire of the Body in Dracula”
“And so the circle goes on, ever widening, like as the ripples from a stone in the water”
— Bram Stoker, Dracula (190)
As a society that defines itself by its boundaries and borders, the Victorians found themselves facing a turning point at the turn of the century. The fin de siècle meant several different things to the Victorians: a new frontier in the fields of medicine and science and ideas of evolution. Along with these breakthroughs, however, came the fear a breakdown of all that the Victorians had fought to preserve: its organization and ideals, and its code of standards and structure. With the fin de siècle came a shift in ideology and a people that rebelled against the boundaries that governed Victorian society. The prevalent fears of contagion and displacement that dominated the era now resonated in a “moral panic” concerning an ‘immoral’ sexuality, “a sore which cannot fail in time to corrupt and taint all,” (Dowling 1). And at the center of looming dangers was “the threat of the wanderer” (Halberstam 256), the female prostitute, with “a sexuality so mobile” (Craft 448) that she became “increasingly seen as the source of danger, and the disruption of gender identity as one of the effects of contagion” (Warwick 204). While many authors of Victorian literature write about the prevalence of contagion and containment throughout the era and the evolution of this preoccupation throughout different realms, Bram Stoker instead turns it on his head. Rather than illustrating a fear of immoral contagion, Stoker examines the underlying thoughts and emotions behind this fear and the role of society’s individuals in cultivating and dealing with their fears. In his novel Dracula, Bram Stoker uses vampirism to create inverse gender roles between the vampire and human characters, and in doing so he interrogates anxieties about the role of prostitution and promiscuity, as well as the role of the Victorians themselves, in the degeneracy of the moral, societal, and physical body.
It is in the late 1800s that the emergence of the new woman and the termed homosexuality makes its way into Victorian society, which introduces a growing sense of “new sexual ‘inversions’” (Marshall 27), which is the same inversion that Stoker alludes to in his gothic creation. Stoker excites both anxieties — prostitution and gender identity — manifesting them in the vampire spectacle. At the center of the ring, and the chief personification of prostitution, promiscuity, and all that it implies, is Stoker’s immortal Transylvanian monster, Count Dracula. His physical appearance is nothing close to ordinary human, closer to animal even:
His face was a strong —a very strong — aquiline, with high bridge of the thin
nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair
growing scantily round the temples, but profusely elsewhere, and his
eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose” along with
descriptions of hair on the middle of his palms and canine sharp teeth. (Stoker 23-24).
While this is not exactly an argument for his feminine characteristics, his appearance as described here is significant in that it is suggestive of his degeneracy, both in terms of sophistication and morally as Victorian studies interrogate the idea of one’s true self being visible on the body (Warwick 208).
From the very beginning, Dracula enters the novel as a mysterious figure, with little knowledge about his past or even present life; his character is vague outside of the direct descriptions given by other characters. Part of the horror behind Dracula's character is the degree to which Stoker keeps him a mystery, keeping him beyond the bounds of traditional placement – another source of fear for the Victorian reader. His human (or at least appearing human) appearance changes throughout the novel in addition to the various other forms — animal and non-animal, dead and undead. His entire existence rests along the boundaries of distinction, making him impossible to clarify, and likewise, impossible to fit in to the Victorian society built upon placement and order. Count Dracula’s vague identity and placement are not only a source of fear as his lack of belong and place, but also in that his lack of story makes him less human, and likewise, degenerative. All that is seen of Dracula is his instinctual, animal-like behavior, which, while free from the moral, cultural, and societal restraints of Victorian London, also excludes him from being able to successfully integrate with any sort of system. Dracula’s presence in the novel, and likewise the only voice or action the audience gets of him through the various letters, diary entries, etc., is that of an animal-like nonhuman – subjectively, this is all Dracula is to the other characters of the novel. He is superficially an evil monster because their witness of perversion and parasitic behavior is all that exists for them. This is not to say that there exists some august romantic that Mina holds back from publication, but it does show how narrative subjectivity can manipulate audience perception. In the case of reality and prostitution, these women are seen as the moral deviants encouraging the defilement of Victorian culture, and even the Victorian woman herself. Like the vampire, the prostitute survives off of blood – the exchange of blood in sexual intercourse and the exchange of her body for money with which to survive. Inherent in this prostitution is promiscuity as, similar to Dracula, the exchange is a matter of survival, not of the Victorian ideals of marriage. As Dracula lures Lucy outside “wandering” on the streets at night and outside in the public during her first episode (Stoker 88), so has the prostitute played a role in bringing sexuality out of the private sphere and into the public sphere, thereby crossing the boundary between private and public and enticing the fears of Victorian society. As the vampire makes his marks on his victim’s neck, so the infected promiscuous, in this case prostitute, make her own marks on the men she defiles. And as Dracula stirs the sexual desires of his victims, so does the movement of the prostitute in the public and in her sexual endeavors breed the fear of moral infection in her society.
Dracula is the ultimate vehicle of contagion, meaning that he covers the range of various possible contaminations and corruptions that the Victorian society fears in reality. For Dracula, “The blood is the life!” (130) — it is literally the means of his survival. It is important to note that along with this reliance on blood to survive is the idea that sexual lust – blood lust – has part in the fulfillment of his appetite. And in fulfilling his appetite, in disregard for his victim, Dracula becomes the representation of “degeneracy and the disease of blood lust” (Halberstam 256). Not only does he feed off the life of another, but also in doing so he imparts illness and eventually “death from disease and corruption” of his victim’s blood (Warwick 215). Dracula’s appetite for blood, much like appetite for the sexual desire, can only be satisfied through the exchange of bodily fluids, represented solely through blood in the realm of vampirism. Like the prostitute in Victorian London, Dracula’s appetite is promiscuous, and in his promiscuity he, and the prostitute, are the major sources for the contagion of disease. Though the actual disease that Stoker has in mind in Dracula is never specified, and as Seward says, “The disease — for not to be all well is a disease” (108), most critics tend to agree that it would be syphilis. Stoker himself is speculated to have died from tertiary syphilis, but this would have been around the release of the novel, not during its writing stages. But the significance of even this speculation, whether true or not, is how prevalent the disease was in the late 1800s, and not only in young adult females but also in males and especially, starting latter in the century, infants (Acton). Stoker also exposes the fears of this contamination not only across the society, but also from mother to child, as he inverts the traditional relationship of woman and child as well. The Victorian woman infected with sexual desire and contaminated blood, as like with Lucy, “the sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness” (187). In the scene just before her death, in which Lucy is holding an infant to her chest, not feeding but feeding on it (187), Stoker criticizes the way in which the sexual woman literally infects and/or kills her offspring in her sexual promiscuity, as her tainted blood will pass on to the child, who Stoker illustrates, is the only innocent infected (Stoker 211).
Though he is the central villain and cause for the turmoil that takes place, Dracula’s voice is left out of the compilation of the other characters’ letters, journals, telegraphs, and such. The silence of this central character reflects the treatment of the prostitute throughout much of Victorian text, such as Gabriel Rossetti’s Jenny who is silenced in sleep, voiceless in her own poem (Michie 60). As Helena Michie points out, Rossetti’s Jenny is only a reflection of others’ desires and thoughts of her (61). The prostitute, though a central topic of resentment, fear, and debate, is virtually a shadow; Dracula, likewise, floats as mist and dust, as well as a shadow, bewildering Jonathan when he tries to strike the vampire with his knife (Stoker 226, 132). While these figures, are central, their stories are less about them than they are about those whom they deal with – their ‘clients’ or ‘victims,’ one could say. While is by no means innocent, and Dracula is not exactly a simple lunch buddy, Stoker suggests, as does other critics of the period, that they are not wholly to blame for the contagion they inspire, but are used themselves as a “cipher of displaced lust” (Michie 71). What Stoker suggests in his gender inversion, is that both sexes, not only the female in reality and not only the vampire in Dracula, are responsible for their participation in their sexual actors or behaviors, which Stoker explicitly outlines in the text. Though Dracula is the monster that seduces those he bites, each of his conquests, so to speak, has agency in the act. Mina shows her part in that she doesn’t run away she is conscious as she is caught by her desires, similarly to Jonathan’s mix of fear and desire when the three vamps pin him down. More explicitly, however, Stoker explains through Van Helsing that Dracula “may not enter anywhere at the first, unless there be some one of the household bid him to come; though afterwards he can come as he please” (211). Here, Stoker specifies this presence of shared responsibility and complicity to assert the truth behind the blame game in contagion, especially in an era when venereal disease cases skyrocketed (Acton). Still, however, women were burdened with the blame of the spread of syphilis infection (Warwick 211) The Contagion Disease Acts of the 1860s was seen by many as a way of policing what was seen as immoral behavior instead of concern over disease (Halberstam 79) as women and girls were taken in, some prostitutes, some not, on a simple suspicion or suggestion that she had an infectious disease (Acton). In his novel, Stoker forces his audience to look inward at their own judgments and preconceived notions of gender by putting the Dracula in the role of seducer.
While Stoker’s representation of the prostitute and promiscuity is directed most specifically to the monster villain Dracula, the inverse of gender roles and behaviors in regard to sexuality is significant in the other characters as well, both mortal and immortal alike. While Mina and Lucy are moderates in terms of Victorian women, they each have masculine characteristics that drive their presence in the novel: Mina is on an equal playing field with her more feminine husband (she says that she is not prone to faint and hysteria, both of which are associated with women and both of which Jonathan suffers in the course of the novel (Stoker 44, 141)), often taking a head role in her marriage as she is also an academic, the mastermind behind the compilation, and a leading force in Dracula’s demise; Lucy, on the other hand, while girlish many ways, she is less shy about her desires (which we see in her letter to Mina describing her “three proposals in one day!” in which she asks, “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?” (Stoker 57-60)). And these are only their conscious personalities and behaviors; subconsciously, both Mina and Lucy give in to their desires and take on aggressive sexual behaviors more commonly associated with men. Even the female vamps seem more masculine than feminine in their intense, erotic behaviors, as they take over the feminine Jonathan Harker is what has all the bearings of a representation of a gang rape scene in the making:
There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing
and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked,
burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips …
I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly
under the lashes. The fair girl went on her knees, and bent over me,
fairly gloating. (42).
While Jonathan is terrified and “repulsed” by the three female vampires, this passage and further description of seem are full of latent eroticism, showing not only his fears but also his desires behind this strange, inverse sexual experience. This is the first scene of its kind in which Stoker links the excitement of fear and desire together. In showing Jonathan’s mixed feelings of excitement, as well as that of the others throughout the text including the virtuous (granted unconscious) Mina when she is under the seductive powers of Dracula, Stoker interrogates the Victorians’ preoccupation with the concept of temptation. The fact that there is fear of contagion in becoming vulnerable to these temptations and desires suggests that natural inner thoughts and desires, even of the Victorian era, are not bound or immune to temptation and giving in to decadence. Throughout his novel and specifically within the scenes of vampire activity, Stoker commentates on Victorian fears and desires behind their attitudes toward the represented sexual acts and ‘degeneration’ of the fin de siècle.
The Victorian reader, therefore, would see in Dracula the dramatization of the generation’s greatest fears through the medium of fantastical fiction. While the mode of literature and the use of vampirism initiates some distance between fiction and reality, Stoker uses his elements of structure (his compilation effect) and dates as close to the novel’s publication as possible, as well as strict attention to the fears he represents. In making this sensation fiction as authentic as possible, and in his detailed connection between his audience’s real fears and those sensational reactions to literature, Stoker surfaces the underlying emotions and motives and unresolved issues in the Victorian societal structure. Fear of contagion, particularly of moral corruption by another individual’s behavior suggests vulnerability on the past of the ‘moral’ individuals doing the judging. Stoker is a product of his time, a conservative in the midst of a ‘decaying’ society lost in a transition of contradicting ideologies that define the turn of the century. In the suit of crafting literature to “hold as ‘twere a mirror up to nature,” Stoker exposes his readers to themselves. By holding a mirror up to the fears and desires of his Victorian audiences, Stoker illustrates a simultaneous reflection and inversion (Michie 8) of the moral Victorian dilemma, Stoker completes his “fantastic fiction written for socially progressive ends” (Marshall 1). Instead of casting blame on a particular gender or class, Stoker suggests that each individual take responsibility, not just for himself but also for the society as a whole, and work towards the reform is needed to purge the Victorian society of its contaminations.
Works Cited
Acton, William. “Prostitution, considered in its Moral, Social, and Sanitary Aspects. 2nd ed. 1870. http://www.victorianlondon.org/disease/venerealdisese.htm
Craft, Christopher. “Kiss Me with Those Red Lips: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Regents of the University of California, 1982. 444-459.
Dowling, Linda. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithica and London: Cornell
UP, 1994.
Halberstam, Judith. “Technologies of Monstrocitiy.” Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siecle. Eds. Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken. NY: Cambridge UP, 1995. 248-263.
Marshall, Gail. The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siecle (Cambridge Companions to Literature). New York: Cambridge UP, 2007. 21.
Michie, Helena. The Flesh Made World: Female Figures and Women’s Bodies. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.
Warwick, Alexandra. “Vampires and the Empire.” Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siecle. Eds. Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken. NY: Cambridge UP, 1995. 202-219.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. NY: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc, 1997.
— Bram Stoker, Dracula (190)
As a society that defines itself by its boundaries and borders, the Victorians found themselves facing a turning point at the turn of the century. The fin de siècle meant several different things to the Victorians: a new frontier in the fields of medicine and science and ideas of evolution. Along with these breakthroughs, however, came the fear a breakdown of all that the Victorians had fought to preserve: its organization and ideals, and its code of standards and structure. With the fin de siècle came a shift in ideology and a people that rebelled against the boundaries that governed Victorian society. The prevalent fears of contagion and displacement that dominated the era now resonated in a “moral panic” concerning an ‘immoral’ sexuality, “a sore which cannot fail in time to corrupt and taint all,” (Dowling 1). And at the center of looming dangers was “the threat of the wanderer” (Halberstam 256), the female prostitute, with “a sexuality so mobile” (Craft 448) that she became “increasingly seen as the source of danger, and the disruption of gender identity as one of the effects of contagion” (Warwick 204). While many authors of Victorian literature write about the prevalence of contagion and containment throughout the era and the evolution of this preoccupation throughout different realms, Bram Stoker instead turns it on his head. Rather than illustrating a fear of immoral contagion, Stoker examines the underlying thoughts and emotions behind this fear and the role of society’s individuals in cultivating and dealing with their fears. In his novel Dracula, Bram Stoker uses vampirism to create inverse gender roles between the vampire and human characters, and in doing so he interrogates anxieties about the role of prostitution and promiscuity, as well as the role of the Victorians themselves, in the degeneracy of the moral, societal, and physical body.
It is in the late 1800s that the emergence of the new woman and the termed homosexuality makes its way into Victorian society, which introduces a growing sense of “new sexual ‘inversions’” (Marshall 27), which is the same inversion that Stoker alludes to in his gothic creation. Stoker excites both anxieties — prostitution and gender identity — manifesting them in the vampire spectacle. At the center of the ring, and the chief personification of prostitution, promiscuity, and all that it implies, is Stoker’s immortal Transylvanian monster, Count Dracula. His physical appearance is nothing close to ordinary human, closer to animal even:
His face was a strong —a very strong — aquiline, with high bridge of the thin
nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair
growing scantily round the temples, but profusely elsewhere, and his
eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose” along with
descriptions of hair on the middle of his palms and canine sharp teeth. (Stoker 23-24).
While this is not exactly an argument for his feminine characteristics, his appearance as described here is significant in that it is suggestive of his degeneracy, both in terms of sophistication and morally as Victorian studies interrogate the idea of one’s true self being visible on the body (Warwick 208).
From the very beginning, Dracula enters the novel as a mysterious figure, with little knowledge about his past or even present life; his character is vague outside of the direct descriptions given by other characters. Part of the horror behind Dracula's character is the degree to which Stoker keeps him a mystery, keeping him beyond the bounds of traditional placement – another source of fear for the Victorian reader. His human (or at least appearing human) appearance changes throughout the novel in addition to the various other forms — animal and non-animal, dead and undead. His entire existence rests along the boundaries of distinction, making him impossible to clarify, and likewise, impossible to fit in to the Victorian society built upon placement and order. Count Dracula’s vague identity and placement are not only a source of fear as his lack of belong and place, but also in that his lack of story makes him less human, and likewise, degenerative. All that is seen of Dracula is his instinctual, animal-like behavior, which, while free from the moral, cultural, and societal restraints of Victorian London, also excludes him from being able to successfully integrate with any sort of system. Dracula’s presence in the novel, and likewise the only voice or action the audience gets of him through the various letters, diary entries, etc., is that of an animal-like nonhuman – subjectively, this is all Dracula is to the other characters of the novel. He is superficially an evil monster because their witness of perversion and parasitic behavior is all that exists for them. This is not to say that there exists some august romantic that Mina holds back from publication, but it does show how narrative subjectivity can manipulate audience perception. In the case of reality and prostitution, these women are seen as the moral deviants encouraging the defilement of Victorian culture, and even the Victorian woman herself. Like the vampire, the prostitute survives off of blood – the exchange of blood in sexual intercourse and the exchange of her body for money with which to survive. Inherent in this prostitution is promiscuity as, similar to Dracula, the exchange is a matter of survival, not of the Victorian ideals of marriage. As Dracula lures Lucy outside “wandering” on the streets at night and outside in the public during her first episode (Stoker 88), so has the prostitute played a role in bringing sexuality out of the private sphere and into the public sphere, thereby crossing the boundary between private and public and enticing the fears of Victorian society. As the vampire makes his marks on his victim’s neck, so the infected promiscuous, in this case prostitute, make her own marks on the men she defiles. And as Dracula stirs the sexual desires of his victims, so does the movement of the prostitute in the public and in her sexual endeavors breed the fear of moral infection in her society.
Dracula is the ultimate vehicle of contagion, meaning that he covers the range of various possible contaminations and corruptions that the Victorian society fears in reality. For Dracula, “The blood is the life!” (130) — it is literally the means of his survival. It is important to note that along with this reliance on blood to survive is the idea that sexual lust – blood lust – has part in the fulfillment of his appetite. And in fulfilling his appetite, in disregard for his victim, Dracula becomes the representation of “degeneracy and the disease of blood lust” (Halberstam 256). Not only does he feed off the life of another, but also in doing so he imparts illness and eventually “death from disease and corruption” of his victim’s blood (Warwick 215). Dracula’s appetite for blood, much like appetite for the sexual desire, can only be satisfied through the exchange of bodily fluids, represented solely through blood in the realm of vampirism. Like the prostitute in Victorian London, Dracula’s appetite is promiscuous, and in his promiscuity he, and the prostitute, are the major sources for the contagion of disease. Though the actual disease that Stoker has in mind in Dracula is never specified, and as Seward says, “The disease — for not to be all well is a disease” (108), most critics tend to agree that it would be syphilis. Stoker himself is speculated to have died from tertiary syphilis, but this would have been around the release of the novel, not during its writing stages. But the significance of even this speculation, whether true or not, is how prevalent the disease was in the late 1800s, and not only in young adult females but also in males and especially, starting latter in the century, infants (Acton). Stoker also exposes the fears of this contamination not only across the society, but also from mother to child, as he inverts the traditional relationship of woman and child as well. The Victorian woman infected with sexual desire and contaminated blood, as like with Lucy, “the sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness” (187). In the scene just before her death, in which Lucy is holding an infant to her chest, not feeding but feeding on it (187), Stoker criticizes the way in which the sexual woman literally infects and/or kills her offspring in her sexual promiscuity, as her tainted blood will pass on to the child, who Stoker illustrates, is the only innocent infected (Stoker 211).
Though he is the central villain and cause for the turmoil that takes place, Dracula’s voice is left out of the compilation of the other characters’ letters, journals, telegraphs, and such. The silence of this central character reflects the treatment of the prostitute throughout much of Victorian text, such as Gabriel Rossetti’s Jenny who is silenced in sleep, voiceless in her own poem (Michie 60). As Helena Michie points out, Rossetti’s Jenny is only a reflection of others’ desires and thoughts of her (61). The prostitute, though a central topic of resentment, fear, and debate, is virtually a shadow; Dracula, likewise, floats as mist and dust, as well as a shadow, bewildering Jonathan when he tries to strike the vampire with his knife (Stoker 226, 132). While these figures, are central, their stories are less about them than they are about those whom they deal with – their ‘clients’ or ‘victims,’ one could say. While is by no means innocent, and Dracula is not exactly a simple lunch buddy, Stoker suggests, as does other critics of the period, that they are not wholly to blame for the contagion they inspire, but are used themselves as a “cipher of displaced lust” (Michie 71). What Stoker suggests in his gender inversion, is that both sexes, not only the female in reality and not only the vampire in Dracula, are responsible for their participation in their sexual actors or behaviors, which Stoker explicitly outlines in the text. Though Dracula is the monster that seduces those he bites, each of his conquests, so to speak, has agency in the act. Mina shows her part in that she doesn’t run away she is conscious as she is caught by her desires, similarly to Jonathan’s mix of fear and desire when the three vamps pin him down. More explicitly, however, Stoker explains through Van Helsing that Dracula “may not enter anywhere at the first, unless there be some one of the household bid him to come; though afterwards he can come as he please” (211). Here, Stoker specifies this presence of shared responsibility and complicity to assert the truth behind the blame game in contagion, especially in an era when venereal disease cases skyrocketed (Acton). Still, however, women were burdened with the blame of the spread of syphilis infection (Warwick 211) The Contagion Disease Acts of the 1860s was seen by many as a way of policing what was seen as immoral behavior instead of concern over disease (Halberstam 79) as women and girls were taken in, some prostitutes, some not, on a simple suspicion or suggestion that she had an infectious disease (Acton). In his novel, Stoker forces his audience to look inward at their own judgments and preconceived notions of gender by putting the Dracula in the role of seducer.
While Stoker’s representation of the prostitute and promiscuity is directed most specifically to the monster villain Dracula, the inverse of gender roles and behaviors in regard to sexuality is significant in the other characters as well, both mortal and immortal alike. While Mina and Lucy are moderates in terms of Victorian women, they each have masculine characteristics that drive their presence in the novel: Mina is on an equal playing field with her more feminine husband (she says that she is not prone to faint and hysteria, both of which are associated with women and both of which Jonathan suffers in the course of the novel (Stoker 44, 141)), often taking a head role in her marriage as she is also an academic, the mastermind behind the compilation, and a leading force in Dracula’s demise; Lucy, on the other hand, while girlish many ways, she is less shy about her desires (which we see in her letter to Mina describing her “three proposals in one day!” in which she asks, “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?” (Stoker 57-60)). And these are only their conscious personalities and behaviors; subconsciously, both Mina and Lucy give in to their desires and take on aggressive sexual behaviors more commonly associated with men. Even the female vamps seem more masculine than feminine in their intense, erotic behaviors, as they take over the feminine Jonathan Harker is what has all the bearings of a representation of a gang rape scene in the making:
There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing
and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked,
burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips …
I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly
under the lashes. The fair girl went on her knees, and bent over me,
fairly gloating. (42).
While Jonathan is terrified and “repulsed” by the three female vampires, this passage and further description of seem are full of latent eroticism, showing not only his fears but also his desires behind this strange, inverse sexual experience. This is the first scene of its kind in which Stoker links the excitement of fear and desire together. In showing Jonathan’s mixed feelings of excitement, as well as that of the others throughout the text including the virtuous (granted unconscious) Mina when she is under the seductive powers of Dracula, Stoker interrogates the Victorians’ preoccupation with the concept of temptation. The fact that there is fear of contagion in becoming vulnerable to these temptations and desires suggests that natural inner thoughts and desires, even of the Victorian era, are not bound or immune to temptation and giving in to decadence. Throughout his novel and specifically within the scenes of vampire activity, Stoker commentates on Victorian fears and desires behind their attitudes toward the represented sexual acts and ‘degeneration’ of the fin de siècle.
The Victorian reader, therefore, would see in Dracula the dramatization of the generation’s greatest fears through the medium of fantastical fiction. While the mode of literature and the use of vampirism initiates some distance between fiction and reality, Stoker uses his elements of structure (his compilation effect) and dates as close to the novel’s publication as possible, as well as strict attention to the fears he represents. In making this sensation fiction as authentic as possible, and in his detailed connection between his audience’s real fears and those sensational reactions to literature, Stoker surfaces the underlying emotions and motives and unresolved issues in the Victorian societal structure. Fear of contagion, particularly of moral corruption by another individual’s behavior suggests vulnerability on the past of the ‘moral’ individuals doing the judging. Stoker is a product of his time, a conservative in the midst of a ‘decaying’ society lost in a transition of contradicting ideologies that define the turn of the century. In the suit of crafting literature to “hold as ‘twere a mirror up to nature,” Stoker exposes his readers to themselves. By holding a mirror up to the fears and desires of his Victorian audiences, Stoker illustrates a simultaneous reflection and inversion (Michie 8) of the moral Victorian dilemma, Stoker completes his “fantastic fiction written for socially progressive ends” (Marshall 1). Instead of casting blame on a particular gender or class, Stoker suggests that each individual take responsibility, not just for himself but also for the society as a whole, and work towards the reform is needed to purge the Victorian society of its contaminations.
Works Cited
Acton, William. “Prostitution, considered in its Moral, Social, and Sanitary Aspects. 2nd ed. 1870. http://www.victorianlondon.org/disease/venerealdisese.htm
Craft, Christopher. “Kiss Me with Those Red Lips: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Regents of the University of California, 1982. 444-459.
Dowling, Linda. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithica and London: Cornell
UP, 1994.
Halberstam, Judith. “Technologies of Monstrocitiy.” Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siecle. Eds. Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken. NY: Cambridge UP, 1995. 248-263.
Marshall, Gail. The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siecle (Cambridge Companions to Literature). New York: Cambridge UP, 2007. 21.
Michie, Helena. The Flesh Made World: Female Figures and Women’s Bodies. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.
Warwick, Alexandra. “Vampires and the Empire.” Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siecle. Eds. Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken. NY: Cambridge UP, 1995. 202-219.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. NY: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc, 1997.