Abstract
Criticism of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) falls into three broadly related categories: class, race and sexuality.1 The first of these sees the novel as an example of bourgeois hatred of a parasitic aristocracy characterized as ‘blood sucking vampires’, while the second views the figure of the Count as the focus of fears concerning the decline and degeneration of the British race.2 The third category, which accounts for the bulk of writing on Dracula and on which I want to dwell briefly, represents so many variations on David Pirie’s claim that the novel portrays ‘the great submerged force of Victorian libido breaking out to punish the repressive society which had imprisoned it’.3 Hence the reader’s attention is directed to the transgressive nature of female sexuality, as in Lucy’s desire to marry three men; to the hints of bisexuality in the novel evident in Mina looking at Lucy through the eyes of Arthur, her gaze lingering on that ‘sweet puckered look […] which Arthur says he loves, and indeed, I don’t wonder that he does’ (p. 128); and to the homoeroti-cism that characterizes the relationship between the male characters in the book, the most intense expression of which is Dracula’s fury when he sees the three vampire women about to feed on Harker. ‘[T]his man belongs to me’ he hisses, pulling them back and, in answer to their taunt that he has never loved, he looks ‘attentively’ into Harker’s face and says, ‘in a soft whisper: — “Yes, I too can love” ’ (p. 55).
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Notes
Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Maurice Hindle (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993). Further references are given in the text by page number in this edition.
D. Read, Press and People 1790–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1961), p. 53; Alexander Warwick, ‘Vampires and the Empire: Fears and Fictions of the 1890s’, in Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (eds), Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 202–20.
David Pirie, A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema, 1946–1972 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 4.
Christopher Craft, ‘“ Kiss me with those red lips”: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, in Elaine Showalter (ed.), Speaking of Gender (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 86–104.
Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), p. 110.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, 3 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), I; Robert Mighall discusses the failure of critics of Dracula to engage with Foucault in ‘Vampires and Victorians: Count Dracula and the Return of the Repressive Hypothesis’, in Gary Day (ed.), Varieties of Victorianism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 198–214.
The major studies on poverty were Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People of London (1889), William Booth, In Darkest England (1890), and B. Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty: A Study of Town Life (1901). These and other works suggested that poverty was caused by the structure of capitalism and could not be attributed, as it had been throughout most of the nineteenth century, to individual weakness. For more detail, see Donald Read, The Age of Urban Democracy: England, 1868–1914 (London: Longman, 1994) pp. 287–94.
Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society 1780–1880 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 326.
Stuart Hall and Bill Schwartz, ‘State and Society, 1880–1930’, in Mary Langan and Bill Schwartz (eds), Crises in the British State, 1880–1930 (London: Hutchinson, 1985), pp. 7–32; p. 19.
R. C. K. Ensor, England, 1870–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 124.
Robin Gilmour, The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature (Harlow: Longman, 1987), p. 174.
Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction (London: Hutchinson, 1978), p. 102.
François Bedarida, A Social History of England, trans. A. S. Forster (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 110.
Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 167.
E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968; repr. and rev. 1990), p. 192.
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1959), pp. 72–3.
Derek Sayer, Capitalism and Modernity (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 77.
Thomas Bender, ‘The Cultures of Intellectual Life: The City and the Professions’, in J. Higham and P. K. Conkins (eds), New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 181–95 (p. 190).
Karl Marx, Early Writings, ed. Lucio Colletti (New York: Routledge, 1975), p. 108.
Janet Roebuck, The Making of Modern English Society from 1851 (London: Routledge, 1973), p. 40.
Brian Doyle, English and Englishness (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 22.
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Day, G. (2000). The State of Dracula: Bureaucracy and the Vampire. In: Jenkins, A., John, J. (eds) Rereading Victorian Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371149_6
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