In summarizing the works of Sigmund Freud, Robert Michaels concluded, “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power” (Seeling 118). Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic horror novel Dracula is no exception to this primordial certainty. With disregard to the negative attitudes exhibited toward human sexuality throughout the Victorian era, the pages of Dracula are implicitly saturated with erotic symbolism, imagery, and allegory. Consequently, for more than a century, many of the various illustrations used as cover art for the novel have echoed the book’s exploration of the forbidden fruit, the titillating, and taboo. The Dracula cover art as pictured above, conspicuously portrays the duality of the male obsession with feminine sexuality and the repressive societal constraints on the expression thereof. The cover art we will focus on for the purposes of this paper makes use of an artistic technique called collage. A …show more content…
Further, it represents menstrual taboo within society. While erotic images of the naked female body are celebrated and embraced (as in the collage), womanhood is reviled openly because of the idea that naturally occurring biological cycles are repulsive; therefore, women are also repulsive. The manner with which the one feminine figure takes the place of the man’s mouth represents that the idea of women as sexual beings is unspeakable. It relays that men enjoy the sensual nature of women, yet the topic should be suppressed. The only distinguishable facial characteristic on the male’s face, the eye, is also very important. The eye represents the all-seeing, authority, and supremacy. The male eye can look upon the females naked bodies. He can derive pleasure from the women yet return upon them judgement and shame. The eye, therefore is the figurative representation of unbalanced power between the