Draculs context Flashcards
This historical allusion gives Dracula a semblance of truth
Stoker clearly makes the count resemble his fearsome ancestor, Vlad the Impaler
Dracula was published, was the height of the British Empire’s expansion.
1897, the year But this high point was also the beginning of a decline in British power. The rise of the United States and European powers such as Germany and Austro-Hungary threatened to unseat Britain as the world’s most powerful nation.
At the same time, there was a steady rise in immigration brought unfamiliar races and cultures onto British soil
A year after Dracula’s publication, British author H.G. Wells exploited similar anxieties in his alien-invasion novel The War of the Worlds.
Dr. Seward and Dr. Van Helsing are practitioners of this new (in Stoker’s day) science of the mind.
Sigmund Freud began publishing his theories of sexuality and the unconscious in 1895,
The publicity and hostility surrounding the trial must have had an impact on Stoker, and Dracula shows the evidence of the author’s suspicion and anxiety toward all forms of sexuality.
1895 was also the year that Oscar Wilde, a product of the same Dublin society as Stoker, was prosecuted for homosexuality.
It is impossible to say that Count Dracula is simply a symbol for something else, whether foreign influence or repressed homosexuality.
But the specific forms that Dracula’s threat takes in Stoker’s novel - the invasion from the East, the power of hypnotic suggestion, the sexually-tinged assault on women - reflect the concerns of the place and time in which the novel was written.
The ‘middle class woman’ was often a source of scorn in the conservative press.
The term ‘New Woman’ was coined by Sarah Grand in 1894.
Characterised by Oscar Wilde.
Decadent movement of 1890s.
He’s a liberator - limitations of the moral will.
Dracula is a parody of Christ
Dracula represents the unkown
Emotional Ambivalence. Be is also a crazed individualist - stands for sadism and sexual perversion.
Trance of liberation
Only in a transic state that you can enjoy Dracula’s pleasure.
Mawkishness
Overly sentimental or sickly
Freud regarded two scenes as ‘primal’.
Harker’s encounter with the three female vampires - shows his sexual abandon and his homoerotic repossession by Dracula
Dracula’s invasion of Mina’s bed - this is Dracula taunting the men.
Homosexuality was coined in 1869.
English law outlawed acts of ‘gross indecency between men’ in 1885.
Social Degeneration - the fear that civilisation was in decline due to biological change.
Became popular in the 1890s through the work of Max Nordau.
