Why Bram Stoker’s Dracula is probably the best thing in the world
This evening, I finished writing the second essay of my academic career on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Even though I was focussing on roughly the same argument (Count Dracula as an embodiment of Fin-de-Siecle anxieties about reverse colonisation and racial purity), the stuff I dug up and the way I discussed it this time was completely different to the way I handled it the first time. And I think I can probably cover it off all over again when I write on it for my MA Dissertation, the title for which I am proposing to be something along the lines of “How has the Role of the Vampire Evolved in Response to Social Anxieties in 19th Century Fiction?” of which Dracula and the Fin-de-Siecle will play a large part.
There’s just something about Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel that I can’t get enough of. It’s so wonderfully thematically complex and obvious at the same time. For example, while the xenophobia thing is a fairly simple allegory to draw, today I read an article that presented Count Dracula as Jewish and cast the whole narrative in a horrendously Anti-Semitic light. I never saw that one coming. Possibly because I’m not an Anti-Semite looking for critical portrayals of Judaism in everything I read (not that the person who wrote this was; I can’t even remember whose article it was now. I’ve read so many). It can also be read in relation to anxieties of disease and medicine, vivisection, premature burial, death, degeneration theory (which I touched on in my essay), Decadence, the Gothic genre, fantastic sensation fiction, the list goes on. Are any other novels this rich in discussion matter? Not in my experience.
Even taken on a superficial reading, Dracula is an awesome story that I could read over and over without ever getting bored of it. I haven’t even started on the whole Renfield side of things and at some point would love to be able to write an essay talking about that side of the narrative because I think it’s a subplot that, sadly, frequently gets overlooked when critics talk about Dracula.
Roll on dissertation time!
