Sexual Politics and Political Repression in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Abstract

The characters and situations portrayed in Bram Stoker’s Dracula provide fascinating insights into the social, political and psychological crises experienced by the middle classes in late-nineteenth-century Britain. Dracula is a compendium of the conflicting discourses which constituted bourgeois ideology in the late nineteenth century. Yet Dracula is not a socially critical text; rather it reproduces fictionally the contradictions within bourgeois ideology and then resolves or neutralises them. In this essay I have concentrated mainly on the ways in which Stoker’s text responds to the challenge to patriarchal bourgeois society and ideology posed by the Women’s Movement and the phenomenon of the ‘New Woman’. I have considered the ways in which female characters are constituted in/by the text, and the kinds of situations in which the text places them and by which it asserts the (ideological) claims of male power and dominance. I have also considered briefly the characterisation of Dracula himself. The characterisation of the Count and the incidents in which he is involved may also be seen as dramatising some of the political and social dilemmas faced by the bourgeoisie in the late nineteenth century.