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Summary Of Homosexuality In Bram Stoker's Dracula

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The essay I chose to compare Dracula with was “Kiss Me With Those Red Lips: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” by Christopher Craft. The essay explains the sexuality in Dracula, desire, gender, and even homosexuality. Craft mentions his essay gives an account of Stoker’s “vampire metaphor” (Craft 108). He highlights certain and very valid points in the story of Dracula that breaks the Victorian gender role, writing, “a pivotal anxiety of late Victorian culture.” (Craft 108). Craft examines the usual roles of the Victorian men and women, passive women especially, requiring them to “suffer and be still”. The men of this time were higher up on the important ladder of that era. Craft believes the men are the “doers” or active ones in …show more content…

I believe he did this to show the reader what they thought they knew of the characters in the stories may not be true at …show more content…

Hanker describes Dracula as strong, “saying he moved impulsively forward, and holding out his hand grasped mine with a strength which made me wince.” (Stoker ) So not only is Dracula strong, he made Hanker wince. In that same meeting, he felt the ice coldness of his hand. He also grabs up Hankers luggage instead of calling a servant. Even though he didn’t have servants, I found myself wondering if Dracula was a woman, would he still rush to get Jonathans’ luggage? In my opinion, yes. Dracula wants him to feel comfortable in his castle, and he will do anything to make Johnathan feel that way! I also feel like Dracula is commanding. I think when Dracula controls the wolves, it makes Johnathan uncomfortable much like Craft describes in his article. He describes Johnathan as the womanly figure in the story and Dracula the man. Making him feel like he’s in control is a way to make Johnathan feel even more

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Another noteworthy example of the way Stoker’s lascivious thematic begins outside the immediate circle of ‘good’ characters and then worms its way within is Mina Harker’s decent into vampirism. After Dracula manages to get into Mina’s bedchamber her forces himself upon her, drinking of her blood and forcing her to drink of his. “I was bewildered and strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him” (305), Mina declares as she realizes that even while she had tried to fight against the Count’s urgings she found it difficult not to yield to his demands. This is an intense moment where a pure hearted, if not pious, character is defiled and forced to recognize their own very human, and lustful desires. It is the basis of these humanizing desires

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Throughout the excerpt from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Stoker utilizes diction to convey the central idea that peoples’ worst fears lie in the unknown. In this section, the narrator is being held captive by an unknown entity. He begins to feel that his only hope is to understand the captor and starts to question the manner of the individual. In an effort to express the central idea, Stoker employs diction.

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Dracula’s deceitful traits carry over to his victims that become

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842 Words | 4 Pages

The beloved novel “Dracula” by Bram Stoker is an influential piece of gothic literature. Horror stories typically portray the Victorian woman to be a helpless victim and to be sexually objectified, but the story “Dracula” continuously uses the character Mina Murray Harker to challenges these gender norms. Mina is one of the several protagonists in the story, and it is important to note that she is the only female in the protagonist group. She is engaged to a man named Jonathan Harker who is also in that group. Initially, she embodies the ideal Victorian woman who is gentle, maternalistic, and loyal to her husband, but as the story progresses, her character develops to show independence and take on a more active role in defeating the antagonist, Count Dracula.

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572 Words | 3 Pages

Stoker makes sure he gives us every detail about how the men feel, how they “would give the last drop of blood [of their] body for her” (Stoker 105). The men give her transfusion of their bodily fluids to Lucy so she will become well again. These transfusions are shown in great detail, but they did not work because Lucy was still tempted and Dracula was still taking her life away from her. When she finally died, “Death had given back part of her beauty” (Stoker 139), and now her beauty would become an even more dangerous threat to the people around

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1332 Words | 6 Pages

Later, the men reluctantly allow her to be more involved with the pursuit of the Count because of her telepathic connection to him, but are reluctant to do so because they fear for her health. Because this novel was written during the Victorian era, there was a dramatic gender inequality between men and women, so for Mina to partake at all in their killing of the Count was unusual. Mina is capable and willing to help the men, but is only able to do so as an assistant by typing their diary entries. The gender roles of this time period play a role in who ultimately defeats Dracula, the group of men with Mina only as an onlooker. Although the male characters praise Mina for her help, she is not portrayed as a hero

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1350 Words | 6 Pages

The fact that there were some role reversals in the novel, especially among the female characters, made most characters all the more dynamic. All the same, the novel was very obviously influenced by gender roles and when Stoker was writing Dracula there was an obvious dividing line between male and female characters that he would not cross. Stoker’s preoccupation with female sexuality in Dracula “is attested to by the fact that [gender roles] actually come to dominate the story, with the vampire hunters mainly concerned not with Dracula himself but with his effect on their beloved companions” (Dixon) While Mina, who represented the ideal Victorian woman, acted as a support system and assistant to the heroic group of men. While things have changed significantly for men and women alike in the modern age, Dracula will likely remain in place as one of the most famous and telling critiques of Victorian gender

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932 Words | 4 Pages

In Dracula, the two leading ladies, Mina and Lucy, represent the two stereotypes of women that existed during the time period. The way each woman is described frames them directly against one another, because even if they are close friends, a woman’s worth is determined by how she is compared to other women. Each woman is described, as in Frankenstein, relative to their position to men and how they interacted with men. Moving past Jonathan’s time in Transylvania and back to London, the two main women, Mina and Lucy, are both markedly feminine. They don’t do anything that is “improper” by society’s standards, which makes them worthy of the respect and attention that the male characters pay them.

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Gothic horror novel Dracula, the title character makes only several relatively short appearances, some of which are while in disguise. Throughout the novel, Stoker keeps Count Dracula in the shadows, both literally and figuratively. This essay will describe these appearances and analyze Stoker’s use of them to determine what effect they might have on the impression of the character and the novel overall. It will be claimed that by keeping his title character hidden for much of the novel, Stoker’s Dracula is made much more frightening to the reader. Human beings tend to fear the unknown, and by leaving Dracula to the imagination,

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2103 Words | 9 Pages

In Dracula, the author demonstrates women as being subordinate

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In the novel Dracula, author Bram Stoker creates a peculiar situation that pushes the main characters to decipher the supernatural from reality. Originally thought of as a myth, Dracula quickly becomes something more than the supernatural. By slowly building the conflict of Dracula himself, Stoker depicts all stages of the change from believing that Dracula is a fictitious character to being face to face with Dracula himself. As he terrorizes the lives of the characters in the novel, they soon come to the realization that Dracula is more than what they formerly believed, and in actuality he is their harsh reality.

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1991 Words | 8 Pages

Dracula can be seen through a feminist and patriarchal lens, analyzing Lucy Westenra, Mina Harker, and the three brides of Dracula and how

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332 Words | 2 Pages

The topic I have chosen for my essay is how Dracula is meant to remind society of the importance of religion, specifically Christianity, in Stoker’s time. I intend to do this through analyzing symbols in Dracula, drawing connections between these symbols and Christianity, and analyzing the implications Stoker attempts to make. I chose this topic because vampires and their sacrilegious implications, such as burning when touching a cross, have always been of interest to me, hence why I chose to study Dracula in the first place. My thesis is: Stoker uses Count Dracula as symbol to represent what society may become if they abandon religious beliefs.

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1329 Words | 6 Pages

This sheds a light on Dracula as a figure who truly does feel homosexual affection towards Harker. When Harker disobeys Dracula he finds himself in a room where Dracula’s three wives are. Harker journal entry recalling this event describes it in very close details. He describes the women in a very erotic way, saying “I could feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle” (Stoker, 48), and the “soft shivering touch of lips.

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469 Words | 2 Pages

When you think of Dracula, you remember the fairy tale you were told as a child about vampires, but in reality how much of the story was a myth? The name Dracula reminds children and adults alike of the vampire they have so often heard of in movies and books. However, his story was quite different from what they may have heard. This story blurs the line between fiction and fact, when Bram Stoker gains inspiration from actual events and creates a legendary character Dracula is a vampire, hundreds of years old, with supernatural powers and weaknesses. He 's extremely physically strong and can shapeshift into several different forms.

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