Dracula by Bram Stoker

Introduction

Dracula is a novel published in 1897 by Irishman Bram Stoker. The horror novel has become your human player in the most famous vampire. It is said that the writer based on discussions with a scholar named Arminius Vambery Hungarian, and it was who told him about Vlad Dracula (Senf, pp. 201). The novel, written in the form of letters, has other issues as the role of women in the Victorian age, sexuality, immigration, colonialism and folklore. As a curiosity, note that Bram Stoker did not invent the vampire legend, but the influence of the novel has made it to the theater, film and television. Since its publication in 1897, the novel has never ceased to be outstanding, and contemporary issues happen. However, until 1983 only marginal land would leave the sensationalist literature to join the classics of the University of Oxford.

Discussion

The Victorian Era represented 19th century ideals such as devotion to family life, public and private responsibility, and above all, obedience to the law. These values shown by the monarch herself; Queen Victoria led by example. It is not new to note that this conservative society found sex, and topics that are in any way related to sex, a taboo (Roth, pp. 87). Ironically, it is also in this era that prostitution not only became more rampant but most profitable, as well. What men cannot do in polite society, they obviously do elsewhere. The turn of the century was not only a time of change and an age for industrialization; it was also an era of repression.

Victorian Era as an Age of Repression

It was in this age that members of the female gender seen as a lady - or not. To be a lady requires purity, chastity, innocence and breeding. One must follow the rules and decorum set by polite society. Anybody who goes beyond these borders not considered ladies. There was no middle ground. You were either a virgin or a whore. These values were clearly shown in the female characters of the novel Dracula. Wilhelmina Mina Murray and Lucy Westenra are the ladies of the story. Godly and pure, it is their virtues that the men seek to defend from the corruption of Dracula (Stoker, pp. 25).

Juxtapose Lucy and Mina with the three Brides of Dracula who seduced Jonathan Harker in Dracula's castle. These women were epitomes of monster women, for real women in Victorian society not allowed to display such voluptuousness and wantonness.

All throughout the book, no other scene, can come close to the sensuality that Jonathan encountered with these women. His scenes with his own wife Mina remain innocent and platonic -proper, as Victorian society would call it. This exhibits the belief that women of virtue cannot feel desire nor become objects of desire. Mina, being a proper woman, always held at arm's length by her own husband, because that is the way things is and should always be. Women such as the Brides are, therefore, not real women, but witches or demons, ...