Dracula context

• Stoker allows Dracula to heavily resemble his fearsome ancestor Vlad the impaler and this historical allusion gives Dracula a semblance of truth
• Dracula was published in 1897 which was the height of the British empires expansion highlighting the beginning of the decline in the British power and the rise of the US and European power threatening to unseat Britain as the worlds most powerful nation
• Britain's fear of foreign powers links to xenophobia and degrading of Romania/Transylvania within Dracula to help Britain be perceived as superior which is further symbolised in an alternative ending in which Dracula's castle is burned down
• Around the peak of the empire there was also a steady rise in immigration which brought unfamiliar races and cultures onto British soil further linking to xenophobia and the fear of mixing blood with foreigners as it will make them dirty and unpure
• Social degeneration was the fear that civilisation was in decline due to biological change
• Sigmund Freud began publishing his theories of sexuality and the unconscious in 1895 which Dr Seward and Dr Van Helsing are partitioners of
• Wilde in 1895 was a produce of the same Dublin society as Stoker and was prosecuted for homosexuality and the publicity and hostility surrounding the trial would have had an effect on Stoker and this shows through Dracula which embodies the authors suspicion and anxiety toward all forms of sexuality
• It is difficult to say whether Dracula is a symbol for foreign influence or repressed homosexuality as Dracula takes many threatening forms such as the invasion from the east; the power of hypnotic suggestion; and the sexually tinged assault on woman
• The term new woman was coined by Sarah Grand in 1894 due to dissatisfaction with domesticity leading to a growing support in breaking ideals and allowing women to compete with men
• Dracula could be a parody of christ - liberator limitations of the moral will; Dracula represents the unknown emotional ambivalence -> crazed individual who stands for sadism and sexual perversion
• Homosexuality was coined in 1869 and outlawed in 1885 by English law through the 'gross indecency between men' : Harkers encounter with the three female vampires shows his sexual abandon and highlights his homoerotic repossession by Dracula exclaiming 'He belongs to me!'
• [Kosofsky]'virtuous homosocial brotherhood' 'dangerous homosexual desire' which is evident in Harkers relationship with Dracula and the brotherhood fighting him as at the time most people were so paranoid that they distanced their relations with men
• Novels they may have influenced Dracula are Carmilla [Le Fanu], Variety the vampire [James Malcolm Rymer], The vampire [John Polidon]
• Madonna/whore dichtomy tends to reduce a woman's complex identity into a singular aspects of her being her sexuality
• Novel introduces scientific techniques and technological projects in its campaign against evil including phonographs, blood transfusions and type writers
• Lucys persona maker she the most susceptible to Dracula as she is a flirtatious free spirit which is a contrast from a good victorian woman ; she is the woman who desires the most wandering
• The idea of a new woman describes a woman who is the embodiment of both assertive and feminine qualities
• Mina's ambiguous sexual and gender status is the crew's most enabling factor for the defeat of Dracula which Van Helsing embodies when he says "she has a mans brain...and a woman's heart"
• Dracula in Wallachian language means devil
• Fin de siecle links to Van Helsing and his belief in both mythology and Science
• "Dracula" was published in 1897 during the Victorian era, a time marked by a fascination with the macabre, supernatural, and the exotic. The novel reflects contemporary anxieties about immigration, sexuality, and the clash between modernity and ancient superstitions.