- 20

th
century vampire:
- 19
th
century vampire fiction dichotomized structures of belief
- 20
th
century increasingly skeptical about such categories
- The Christian ideology begins to disappear
- Rather than being its devils work, vampirism is explained in new ways: vival
infection or the product of an evolutionary process
VAMPIRES OF BLOOD
- Much of the power of the vampire concept is derived from this relationship
- Foucault: The History of Sexuality
o Blood has traditionally operated as a reality with a symbolic function, a
substance which is simultaneously both a liberal and figurative source of
power
- Blood is, culturally as well as textually, and item of multi discursive significance
- May signify at various times notions of family, race, religion and gender

- The fluid nature of blood makes both the substance and its meaning particularly
vulnerable

o It is, as Foucault suggests, easily spilled, mixed or diluted
o Unwingled, it is a guaranty of purity, and thus of strength a strength which
may be desired by others
o Diluted and depleted it may signify simultaneously personal lassitude
alongside racial, familiar, or normal decline and degeneration
o Transferred or transfused by medical, occult or sexual means, it may either
revive or prostrate
o The vamire in this context constitutes a node, a place or conjunction

- BRAM STOKER a novelist, biographer, critic and manager of the actor Henry
Irving
- Dracula established the type of vampire for future generations and produced one of
the most enduring of all literary myths
- The Jevel of Seven Stars, The Lady of the Shroud and The Lair of the White Worm


- Dracula Victorian Gothic insists on the modernity of its setting
- Trip trough Transylvania back in England
- Particular emphasis on London, the urban nucleus of the modern world (familiar to
the contemporary reader)
- The modernity of the text is emphasized by references to recent technological
advances: telegraphs, typewriters, telephones, phonographs, cameras


- Dracula associated with the disruption and transgression of accepted limits and
boundaries
- Shape shiifter; resists any stable fixed ideology
- undead; breaches the ultimate boundary between life and death
- Usually absent and yet strangely present
o He practically disappears after arriving in London; his presence is felt as a
troubling presence in the mind
o His significance lies not so much in the way he embodies transgression as in
the way he functions as the catalyst for transgression in others

- Transgression is a source of both pleasure and fear
o Jonathan begins to succumb to the female vampires he feels a wicked
burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips
o Mina, that good, good woman also demonstrates ambivalence; when
Dracula forces her to feed from a wound in his breast with horror, she has to
admit that strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him

The loss of imperialistic power
- The inverse colonization colonizing the colonizing empire
- British victorian society VS. The rest of the world (Slavic regions) introduction to
the novel
- The fear of racial degeneration which would corrupt and destabilize identity

Dracula clearly has plans for colonization:
- You, gives that you all love are mine already he tells the vampire hunters and
trhough them you and others shall yet be mine my creatures, to do my bidding and
to be my jackals when I want to feel.

Draculas foreignness explicit
- The image of the monstrous Jew constructed by the 19
th
century anti-semitic
discourse

The Victorian inability to evade this colonization forces the British to express their racial
intolerance
- Quincy not completely a member of the vampire-slaying group precisely because of
his lack of British background

Dracula is being confronted by the best that late victorian society has to offer
- Lawyers and doctors
- Arthur Holmwood considered a sort of an aristocratic reminder of the England that
used to be
- - Dr Van Helsing represents a combination of a professor, doctor, lawyer
philosopher and scientist

Dr Van Helsing
- Key figure, polyvalent nature
- A connecting the line between rational victorian surroundings and the wild
superstitious other world (Transylvania, the occult)
- Constantly reaching for unconventional methods in order to fight evil (admits the
existence of vampires; emphasized superstition as sth to learn from, uses the cross
and other sacral objects in order to fight demons)
- A character to complete the victorian society, by itself is unable to oppose the
vampire
- A posterr boy, a character whose function is propagate victorian values and fight the
oppositions by any means


BACKDOWN OF GENDER ROLES
- Victorian middle-class gender ideology
o Police the boundaries of male and female quite rigorously
o Aiming to control by defining and delimiting the nature and roles of the sexes
in a manner that particularly constrained women
o The challenge to gender ideology led to the emergence of the New Woman;
referred to in Dracula

New Woman
- Characterized by her demends of both social and sexual autonomy
- Caused the presence of acute anxiety withing the text
- Female vampires feeding on children-indicators of the rejection of maternity
- Lucys barley repressed sensuality turning into a voluptuous nightmare of Lucy

Loss of sexual power
- Dracula penetrates Victorian society by a passage that is most convenient to him
- He uses Lucy Westenra ( a nave girl with uncertain ideas about her sexuality) not
only

- The Vampire manifestation of the hidden male sexuality within the Victorian
context

o He attracks men ant the patriarchal system that they use, by attacking women
- And alter-ego to numerous suitors who had for months uselessly court Lucy
- Limited by their Victorian customs
- Dracula grabs what he wants
- A dark figure that feeds from objects


- Unsanctioned and uncontrolled approach to sexuality imposes the necessity to
punish the guilty ones and regain control over personal sexuality
- Helsing as a social catalyst to oppose the libertine threat; hope of regeining control
once more over their own sexuality and over the object of their sexual desires
- On a symbolic level he is the mirror and the shadow of Victorian masculinity, a
monstrous figure of male desire that distinguishes what mean are becoming fromwhat
they should become (Botting)

Lucy:
- After becoming a vampire, becomes even more attractive, undermining the role of
men even further
- Trying to seduce post mortem her fiance Arthur
- Van Helsing makes Arthur kill Lucy all over again
- He kills the female sexuality and he is regaining his masculinity by reinstating the
patriarchal social order