Dracula

Bram Stoker's Dracula is a gothic novel charged with anxieties about gender. In fact, while there is considerable terror generated by vampires alone, the horror of the novel stems from characters who transgress the cultural norms for their gender. Stoker takes a narrow, conservative view of femininity and masculinity, creating lurid scenes in which men and women fail to follow the prescribed gender roles of Victorian society. The character, Dracula himself, appears to represent all that his conservative author considered deviant in terms of gender. In other words, Dracula is portrayed as a monster not only because he is a vampire ...