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The Symbolism Of Blood In Dracula By Bram Stoker

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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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Everybody knows the classic tale of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It is most famous for its introduction of the character of Count Dracula into both deep-rooted and contemporary literature and media. One critic claimed,” Bram Stoker set the ground rules for what a vampire should be.” It follows the story of Jonathan Harker, an English solicitor who visits Count Dracula in his castle in Transylvania – soon realising that he is being kept as a prisoner. Dracula forms a liking to the character of Lucy which ultimately leads to her death.

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Blood is involved way more in the story of Dracula than people are able to see just by simply reading the story. During the writing of Dracula, victorian England was a society governed by the strict morals of society. Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in order to voice an opinion on politics and the morality of society when it was incredibly looked down upon to do so in public. The book was significant because it was one of the first to indicate sexual topics in a novel without explicitly saying them. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Blood is the driving force that transfers the book from plot point to plot point and is active spiritually and physically.

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Bram Stoker, describes one of the verbal taboos of the Victorian era, violence, through the representation of vampires as “monsters” through the point of view of their victims in his novel Dracula. Stoker portrays violence in three distinct categories- physical, visual and psychological. Each one of these categories is described by one of the antagonists in the Novel, with Count Dracula as the physical aspect of violence, his underlings, the female vampires as the visual and Renfield, the patient at Dr. Seward’s mental asylum, as the psychological aspect of violence. This essay looks at the portrayal of such Categorical violence as different renditions of a “monster” and considers why Stoker would segregate violence in such a manner.

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Bram Stoker's Dracula is filled with interesting symbology and religious comparisons. Dracula is a gothic novel set in late 1800s Britain and Transylvania. Dracula is an epistolary, meaning it is told through a series of journal entries, news clippings, etc. It’s like the written version of found film. Dracula draws from many old myths for its villain and is the basis for the modern vampire.

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Van Helsing begins to treat lucy without much explanation for the other narrators. He wants them to come to the same conclusion he has come to without bias. This is a very interesting point if the reader were to think back to Stoker’s preface. Stoker states that the truth of the book will become clear at the end of the book. He does not want to bias your interaction with the truth just like Van Helsing wants the group to come to the conclusion on their own.

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Amber Levels- 9th Grade research project The Printing Press Today we sit here and type papers on our computers never thinking about how we are able to do what we can today. We never think of how it all started or how it was to copy papers, book, newspapers all by hand. What started it all was the printing press made by Johannes Gutenberg, In 1440.

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The horror genre of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, combined with mild eroticism is able to draw in readers due to the fact that Stoker is able to intricately weave suspenseful sexual scenes/scenes of desire throughout the novel—making it clear that

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At first glance, the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker appears to be a typical gothic horror novel set in the late 1890s that gives readers an exciting look into the fight between good and evil. Upon closer inspection, it becomes apparent that Dracula is a statement piece about gender roles and expectations for men and women during the Victorian age. Looking at the personalities, actions, and character development of each of the characters in Dracula bring to light startling revelations about Victorian society and how Stoker viewed the roles of men and women during this time period. To really understand Dracula, it is important to note that this novel was written during a time “of political and social upheaval, with anxieties not just about the

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Metonymy is exploited in Dracula when the topic of gloom and horror is introduced. This displays fundamental essences that provide principals of mystery and the supernatural. Doom and horror develop the storyline as it portrays how the weather and atmosphere can affect the story. This can be shown at the introduction of the story, Jonathan Harker is on business trip, he’s supposed to meet up with a man by the name of Count Dracula, all is well until Harker recognizes that Dracula isn’t so-called Human, and is placed with 3 undead women who want to suck his blood. By this time, the sun had already set and the moon was shining, this creates a mystifying and intimidating atmosphere, which then allows the audience to acknowledge that the atmosphere

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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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Dracula’s castle was just the beginning of what was to come. Jonathan 's meeting of the three female vampires it was a catalyst for what he believed was right and wrong. With the 3 women being polar opposites of what was expected from a 19th-century Victorian woman compared to the pure and proper Mina the 3 vampires are straight forward and dominant. Something that he had never experienced before and he can 't help that he is both attracted and repulsed by them. “ There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear.

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What is the true meaning of Dracula? What purpose was it written for? In the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker, there are many literary elements that fall into the tome. Many of which can be detected with ease and some of which that are trying to recognize. Bram Stoker intended the novel to be this way and wrote it so the reader would find more elements with each endeavor.

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To Kill A Mockingbird has several themes, but to me the one that stands out the most is growing up and how your perspective on things change as you age. I feel that young readers today can still align with this theme because as you get older your opinions, actions and thoughts do and should change based on your experiences. Throughout this essay I will be citing some specific examples to support my thesis. One of the main characters in the story is Scout. Scout is the narrator of the whole book.

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During the Victorian period in which Dracula was written, morals and ethics were often strictly enforced. Some of the morals that were upheld had to do with personal duty, hard work, honesty, as well as sexual proprietary. It was very important during this period that one was proper in their sexual behaviors and conventional in whom they had sexual relations with. However, during this period, many authors sought to challenge the ‘norm’ with ideas of reform and change and Bram Stoker was no exception to this. In his novel, Dracula, Stoker provides a critique of this rigidity in his portrayal of Dracula and Dracula’s relationship with Jonathan Harker.

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Stoker’s Dracula was written at a much different time when sex and homosexuality was a very controversial topic. This was a time when putting such topics in text was not suggested and often came with caution. During this time men held most of the freedoms whereas women had little. There we high and strict expectations for both sexes in the patriarchal society. With the freedoms men received the justification for their desires and pleasures followed.

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