Stoker AO5

Question 1

Anderson

Answer 1

Much of it is misogynist.
Voluptuous but veiled sexuality is a strong element of Stoker’s Dracula.
After their metaphoric defloration by Dracula, the women become insatiable monsters whose desires are totally beyond the ability of respectable men to satisfy.
Male heroes of the novel feel morally obliged to break Lucy’s obsessive attachment to Dracula through figurative gang-rape replete with spermicetti candle and wooden stake.

Question 2

Ashley

Answer 2

Invasion literature: Victorian fears of the creeping foreign other.

Question 3

Barber

Answer 3

The popular belief that the breaking of a mirror leads to bad luck stems from the superstition that the mirror can contain one’s soul in the form of reflection.

Question 4

Barker-Benfield

Answer 4

Spermatic economy- 1970s coining but similar concepts/rhetoric featured in medical discourse of Stoker’s day. Ties in with the creation of a culture of fear/guilt surrounding sex/eroticism. Exchange of bodily fluids associated with sex- blood and sperm hold similar significance.
Repercussions of sex- control. Biologically operating.

Question 5

Bentley

Answer 5

[re: the stake through Lucy’s chest] the phallic symbolism in this process is evident and Lucy’s reactions are described in terms reminiscent of sexual intercourse and orgasm.

Question 6

Berthin

Answer 6

Lucy becomes connected to Renfield, without their stories ever crossing paths, by the buzzing of the flies.

Question 7

Botting

Answer 7

The labyrinth: associated with fear, confusion, and alienation. Site of darkness, horror, and desire. Utter separation from all social rule. They lead readers on fatal paths.

Question 8

Braun

Answer 8

The diseased woman, a figure who not only offers the numbing excess of passionate desire, but also threatens to retract her offer and strike at any moment.

Question 9

Bristow

Answer 9

Stoker’s racism was common among his contemporaries.

Question 10

Case

Answer 10

Blood is accepted as a weakening device.
Make myths of menstruation, where a woman’s monthly loss of blood was associated with their pale, weak image.

Question 11

Chez

Answer 11

The female vampires represent the New Woman, patriarchy seeks to destroy them.

Question 12

Cluley

Answer 12

It may be that Dracula is the ultimate patriarchal fantasy. Dracula’s consumption of blood is a triumph over fears of menstruation. His ability to usurp the female role of creating life in creating more vampires.

Question 13

Davison

Answer 13

Dracula is essentially a social polluter who threatens to infect the British nation.
Rats are a longstanding symbol of the plague. Since the Middle Ages it was believed that Jews spread this and other infections, while, as a result of demonic pacts made with the devil, they remained immune.

Question 14

Farson

Answer 14

Promoted the idea that Stoker (his great-uncle) died as a result of complications of syphilis.
Bram was chained to a beautiful but frigid wife. When his wife’s frigidity drove him to other women (prostitutes) Bram’s writing showed signs of guilt and sexual frustration.

Question 15

Foster

Answer 15

There’s no such thing as a wholly original work of literature.

Question 16

Gates

Answer 16

The four men in Dracula have all the standard virtues and all the depth of character of cardboard figures. In this aspect, Stoker is really no different from any other Gothic romance writer.
The men are practically indistinguishable from each other in terms of character.

Question 17

Glover

Answer 17

Stoker’s text reveals a fixation with unfixing the boundaries, with the attractions of liminality, in order that the lines of demarcation might be all the more strictly controlled.

Question 18

Grand

Answer 18

Lucy can be read as a warning about the injurious effects of dysfunctional mothering and the dangers of sexual ignorance.

Question 19

Griffin

Answer 19

Long held association of moon with menstruation and supposed insanity- under the light of the moon this raging, hungry female force is released.

Question 20

Grossman

Answer 20

Lucy becomes a femme fatale because of her desires, desires that violate sexual and social taboos.
Dracula plays out its conservatism by maintaining all of the cultural oppositions it represents.

Question 21

Hollinger

Answer 21

Blood-sucking and vampire-staking are coded as heterosexual practices.

Question 22

Hughes

Answer 22

The vampires condensation of demonic hostilities towards both resident and immigrant Jewry; the recurrant myth of the wandering Jew.

Question 23

Hypnos and Thanatos

Answer 23

Twin brothers. Respectively, they are the Gods of sleep and death.

Question 24

Kraepelin

Answer 24

The linking of genetic factors and psychopathy (inborn defect; moral insanity)- Victorian concepts.

Question 25

Ledger

Answer 25

Mina is a woman who, firmly rooted in the maternal paradigm, settles for the ‘ideal’ of middle-class Victorian womanhood

Question 26

Lombroso

Answer 26

Atavism/biological theory of criminality- criminality is inherited and that someone ‘born criminal’ could be identified by the way they look (their skull shape).

Question 27

Luckhurst

Answer 27

The novel is absurd, sensationalist, ridiculous, almost unbelievable, isn’t literary.
The novel is a condensation and cauldron of anxieties of the late Victorian era- sexual excess, new woman, immigrants, Jewish people, Catholics, decline of the British empire, disease, debauchery, drugs, new technology.
Remains persistently relevant. The novel’s debates are timeless.
Driven by sexuality, sexual perversity.
Male desire devours its prey, and woman is trichotomised into mother, virgin, whore.

Question 28

McElligott

Answer 28

As a British subject, Stoker was a loyal and patriotic supporter of the monarchy.
He was a strong supporter of the British empire.

Question 29

Miller

Answer 29

The three witches of Macbeth are reincarnated as the three vampire women at Dracula’s castle.

Question 30

Mulvey- Roberts

Answer 30

Reading Dracula as a menstrual narrative has its starting point with the menarche (first occurance of menstruation) and moves onto the pathologies associated with menopause represented by the death of the vampire.

Question 31

Pandora

Answer 31

Myth- Greek.
Opened the jar/box and unleashed all evils, disease, etc. leaving only hope.

Question 32

Phillips

Answer 32

Dracula has mastered the skill of mingling with the crowd in the modern city…more horrifying than the animal-like Nosferatu or the visibly different Semite.

Question 33

Prescott

Answer 33

Mina’s presence as silent mother attests to the reinscription of homosociality and patriarchy. Normativity seems restored without a hitch, symbolised by silent, maternal Mina holding her child.

Question 34

Rath

Answer 34

Lycanthropy- traceable to Medieval peasants- nocturnal patients (sunlight harmful); excessive hair-growth/malformation of teeth; blood transfusions can alleviate symptoms- not available, sufferers were ‘known’ to attack others and ingest blood.

Question 35

Seed

Answer 35

All of the protagonists except Mina are superficial and easy to grasp.

Question 36

Senf

Answer 36

Sexual freedom is the marker of the New Woman.
Stoker was so horrified at sexual openness that he chooses the female vampire as a shocking metaphor for the new liberated woman.
As the narrators race to Transylvania, Mina becomes more and more marginalised, and by the end of the novel totally silent.
7 years after their victory, the woman who assembled the documents that allowed them to destroy Dracula is no longer writing or typing…instead her male colleagues celebrate her maternal skills…it is as though she can no longer speak for herself.

Question 37

Skal

Answer 37

Oscar Wilde was persecuted as a sexual threat to Victorian London at the same cultural moment Stoker created the greatest sex monster of all time.

Question 38

Stott

Answer 38

The femme fatale is always other. She is always outside, either literally or metaphorically.
She represents chaos, darkness, and death, and all that lies beyond the safe, known, and the normal.

Question 39

Theseus and the Minotaur

Answer 39

Myth- greek

Question 40

Tracy

Answer 40

Lucy symbolises Stoker’s fury at the prostitutes who infected him.

Question 41

Valenti

Answer 41

The Purity Myth: Part of the fear and hatred of menstruation stems from the notion females lose their ‘innocence’ once they start menstruating- that it represents the dawn of their existence as sexual creatures.
Bleeding women are guilty of being sexual.
If being premenstrual is ‘innocence’, does that make those with periods guilty?
The fetishisation of purity- menstruation is read as the loss of girlhood

Question 42

Walsh

Answer 42

Dracula exists apart from the chain of being: he is a kind of anti-creation opposing the natural life-to-death cycle of human existence.

Question 43

Warner

Answer 43

In myth and fairytale, the metaphor of devouring often stands in for sex.

Question 44

Waters

Answer 44

An exercise in masculine anxiety and nationalist paranoia. Stoker’s novel is filled with scenes that are staggeringly lurid and perverse.

Question 45

Zieger

Answer 45

Addiction is the story of a person uniquely torn between disease and desire.