Dracula Critics

‘female lust and vampirism appear synonymous’

Ray Cluley, women and vampires

‘[Dracula] was the perfect vessel for the fears and desires of the era’

Eric Nuzum, reflection of the time

‘The power of love manifests itself in self-sacrifice’

David Gates, sacrifice

‘The virtuous characters in Dracula have the power of love […] which sustains them when in distress’

David Gates, love

‘They make use of “modern” equipment to combat evil’

David Gates, modernity

‘Dracula once must have been a victim himself; he is an actively evil force which must be destroyed

David Gates, cycle of vampirism

‘Lucy is an inversion of the modest and virtuous Victorian woman; she becomes sexually aggressive and anti-maternal’

David Gates, Lucy’s femininity

‘Dracula is a religious inversion’

David Punter, religion

‘Van Helsing is a superman’

David Punter, Van Helsing

‘[Dracula] blurs the line between man and beast’

David Punter, animality

‘The men view the transfusions as metaphors for intercourse’

Rebecca A. Pope, sexuality of the blood transfusions

‘The castle whose chambers contain the mystery that the protagonist must solve; the sublime scenery that emphasises his isolation’

John Mullan, Dracula’s castle

‘[Dracula addresses] the fragmentation of identity and disorientated consciousness’

Matthew Brennan, identity

‘vampirism is itself a psychological disorder, an addictive activity’

Judith Halberstam, vampirism

‘Mina transcends monstrosity and breaks the pattern so common to female characters of her genre’

Ester M. Stuart, Mina

‘In crossing the borders between East and West he undoes cultural distinctions between civilisation and barbarity, reason and irrationality, home and abroad’

Frank Botting, East vs West

‘The central theme of Dracula is the battle for supremacy between good and evil’

David Fares, morality

‘Vampirism […] is a type of imprisonment […] the soul is trapped in limbo between life and death’

David Gates, vampirism as entrapment

‘Stoker’s women fall into two classes, victims and survivors’

David Gates, women

‘Dracula is the embodiment of an unleashed id’

Les Daniels, Dracula’s Freudianism

‘The vampire is the willing representative of the temptations’

Leonard Wolf, temptation

'Dracula is another modification of pre-bourgeois fears of tyrannical violence’

David Punter, threat to social order

'Dracula's passion is the endless desire of the unconscious for gratification'

David Punter, satisfaction

'Dracula acts out the repressed fantasies of the others’

Phyllis A. Roth, liberation

‘Men act and women appear. Men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at’

John Berger, gender

‘Dracula himself is a kind of figure for the Anti-Christ’

David Punter, Anti-Christ

‘[the Demeter] thoroughly and methodically documents the systematic decimation of its crew.’

Richard Walker, the Demeter

‘the vampire is involved in a process of disturbing national identity.’

Richard Walker, social threat of vampirism

'‘Not even his castle can be said to belong to one place’

Deinz

‘To the peasantry of central Europe, it may well have seemed that the feudal lord was immortal’

David Punter, aristocracy

‘Dracula is a dramatised conflict of social forces and attitudes’

David Punter, social conflict

‘the vampire is also used to create a horrific image of deviant sexuality’

Hanson, sexuality

‘the basic role of the vampire in fiction is the disruption of reality’

Hanson, reality

‘we can say he is a vampire 'because we cannot say he is gay’

Hanson, homosexuality

‘erotically-charged language reflects Victorian patriarchal fears about the power of female sexuality’

Ray Cluley, female sexuality

‘his bite a kind of demonic procreation’

Ray Cluley, procreation

‘An exercise in masculine anxiety and nationalist paranoia’

Waters, masculinity

‘Dracula is physically 'other': the dark, unconscious, the sexuality that Victorian England denied’

Hatlan, Dracula as “the other”

‘Its underlying misogyny is the real heart of ‘Dracula’

Griffin, misogyny

‘the worst horror it can imagine is not Dracula at all, but the released, transforming sexuality of the Good Woman’

Griffin, female sexuality

‘Mina […] stands for everything Stoker sees as morally upright and respectable’

Buzwell, Mina

‘the act of vampirism... suggests the fear of sexually transmitted diseases’

Buzwell, STI’s

‘Stoker uses the character of Lucy to attack the concept of the New Woman’

Buzwell, Lucy

‘Mina appears to adhere to the victim-like stereotype as she is portrayed as sexless, nurturing and motherly’

Clamp, Mina

‘The place of the heroine is taken by naïve Jonathan Harker’

Botting, Jonathan

‘female demon lovers’

Botting, vampire women

‘The progress of modernity, threatened by Dracula’

Botting, modernity

‘[Gothic novels] reinforce a sense of British superiority to the European in terms of conduct and morality’

Cavender, Britain

‘The worst horror [Victorian England] could imagine is not Dracula at all, but the released, transforming sexuality of the Good Woman’

Griffin, the New Woman