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The Symbolism Of Blood In Dracula By Bram Stoker

1734 Words7 Pages

In Dracula, Bram Stoker uses the mingling of blood and its symbolic meaning to convey an erotic male to male bond in nearly all of the male leads; with Van Helsing being the orchestrator of nearly all the male dominance in the novel. Blood is used as a symbol for this connection due to its duality between life and death. This lewd connection serves as a device to strengthen the novel’s overall theme of Dracula being the embodiment of real world horrors, mainly the terror that is the modern patriarchy. The blood transfusion was a very new procedure in nineteenth century England, yet the procedure takes up a massive amount of the middle third of the novel. These procedures are described in great detail, and nearly every man donates to Lucy. …show more content…

During Seward’s transfusion, he describes Van Helsing as having a “warming finger” and smooth talks Seward while the entire operation is occurring. Of all the transfusions, this one feels the most overly erotic, due to Seward speaking of the professor so tenderly. The professor feels this connection as well, and drugs Lucy to keep the moment between Seward and himself. This transfusion also speaks negatively of the heterosexual mixing of blood, when Seward says “No man knows… what it is to have his own life-blood drawn away into the veins of the woman he loves.” This phrasing has an extremely negative connotation due to the male characters realizing the pitfalls of opposite sex erotic …show more content…

Harker’s experience with the overtly sexualized female vampires in Castle Dracula enforces yet another male homosexual relationship in the novel. This scene with the ladies is extremely interesting in that it again puts women in a dominating position over Jonathan, only for a male pairing to forcefully stop it. Dracula’s ladies are excited to feed on a “young and strong” man and this scene nearly becomes pornographic, then the Count has to come and stop the heterosexually impassioned moment to create a homosexual one between two men. Harker’s infatuation with the women immediately disappears once the count establishes his male dominance over them by choking them, which is again a dominant sexual act to show women’s inferiority. After this choking, Jonathan becomes fascinated by the counts physical prowess and his “positively blazing” eyes. The Count then claims Jonathan as his own, again rejecting a heterosexual pairing in favor of a fairly explicit male to male

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