Repressed Sexuality in Bram Stokers Dracula Essay

Repressed Sexuality in Bram Stokers Dracula Perhaps no work of literature has ever been composed without being a product of its era, mainly because the human being responsible for writing it develops their worldview within a particular era. Thus, with Bram Stokers Dracula, though we have a vampire myth novel filled with terror, horror, and evil, the story is a thinly veiled disguise of the repressed sexual mores of the Victorian era. If we look to critical interpretation and commentary to win support for such a thesis, we find it aplenty For erotic Dracula certainly is. Quasi-pornography one critic labels it. Another describes it as a kind of incestuous, necrophilious, oral-anal-sadistic all-in-wrestling matching. A†¦show more content†¦Of course, the female vampires in the novel take the active role more than Victorian restrictions allowed women in society, so we see an inversion of those roles in Dracula. Of course, throughout the novel we see that vampirism most equates with sexuality. Without overdoing a Freudian analysis of the story, there are enough sexual references to satisfy the least Victorian in nature among us. However, the Victorian repression theme plays a role in the sexuality of the novel because though good women and men were able to control their sexual appetites in Victorian society, we see them unable to resist giving into their desires in Dracula. As Carrol Fry writes Mina says: Strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him. But perhaps the most suggestive passage in the novel occurs when Jonathan Harker describes his experienced while in a trance induced by Draculas wives. As the fair bride approaches him, he finds in her a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and he feels a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips (Carter 38). 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