Sexuality in Bram Stoker's DraculaBram Stoker's Dracula, favorably received by critics upon publication in 1897, entertained its Victorian audience with unspeakable horrors such as vampires invading bedrooms to prey on beautiful maidens under the guise of night. The novel's eroticism proved even more unspeakable. Received in the era of repression, it remains questionable whether Dracula's readership perceived the sexuality flowing from the page. An advocate for the censorship of sexual material, Stoker himself may have been unconscious of his own novel's sexual qualities. Perhaps if he knew of the Dracula criticism written in the last thirty years, he would turn in his grave from personal horror.
Since the 1970s, with its conglomerate of feminist critics reveling in the sexual revolution, Freudian psychoanalysts, and marginal sex groups, Dracula's sexuality continues as an issue of great debate, attracting more attention from its centennial anniversary in 1997. More titillating than the novel itself, numerous sexual interpretations exist from key scenes in Dracula: the trio of female vampires attacking Jonathan, Lucy's vampiric transformation and subsequent staking, and Mina's forced drinking of Dracula's blood.
Dracula (first edition cover), Bram Stoker's vampi...
English: Bram Stoker (1847-1912), novelist born in...
English: The Fog at Slains. This is the famous Sla...Critics debate whether these crucial scenes reveal men's fear of female sexuality, the dualism of Victorian sexuality, the threat of foreign sexuality, Oedipal fantasies, sexual repression, Bram Stoker's sexuality, and homosexuality. The list of sexual topics is endless.
The popularity of Freud's theories of sexuality makes Freudian analyses of Dracula's sexuality almost impossible to avoid. Even feminist critics who resent Freud's misogyny, find his sexual observations difficult to ignore, especially in regard to Dracula's sexual content. The fact that Stoker and Freud are contemporaries writing at the same time legitimizes the critical use of Freud's psychoanalysis to explore Stoker's novel. More importantly, critics can easily apply with little work Freud's theories to Dracula's medley of sexually repressed characters, aggressively sexual...