Historical Context
Dracula is a work of fantasy.
Its eerie effectiveness comes from its ability to play on universal human fears. But
Stoker’s novel also reflects the anxieties which troubled his era; the figure
of Count Dracula is both a timeless vision of evil and the incarnation of
turn-of-the-century England’s strongest fears.
1897, the year Dracula was published, was the height of the
British Empire’s expansion. Britain
had conquered huge expanses of land in Africa, Asia, and North America, and used
these colonies to fuel its tremendous military and economic power. 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 a steady rise in immigration brought
unfamiliar races and cultures onto British soil; in England as in America, the
turn of the century saw a sometimes violent reaction against the foreigner.
Dracula, as an immigrant from the easternmost edge of Europe, represents
many of the popular prejudices against outsiders.
A year after Dracula’s publication, British author H.G. Wells
exploited similar anxieties in his alien-invasion novel The War of the Worlds.
The turn-of-the-century fear of outsiders was mirrored by new fears about
the inside, the contents of the human mind.
The late nineteenth century saw the birth of modern psychology and
psychiatry. Sigmund Freud began
publishing his theories of sexuality and the unconscious in 1895, but he was
only one of hundreds of researchers in Europe and North America who suggested
that the human mind is a much darker and more mysterious place than we might
suppose. Dr. Seward and Dr. Van
Helsing are practitioners of this new (in Stoker’s day) science of the mind.
The examples of hypnosis, mental suggestion, and compulsive behavior in Dracula
reflect public interest in the
1895 was also the year that Oscar Wilde, a product of the same Dublin
society as Stoker, was prosecuted for homosexuality.
Wilde, then an international celebrity, was ruined by the trial, served
two years in prison, and died in obscurity a few years later.
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, especially those considered
“perverse.” The vampire’s
hypnotic power, his preference for young female victims, and the sensuality of
many of the descriptions of bloodsucking, suggest that Stoker had more on his
mind than monsters. If, as critics
have suggested, Dracula is modeled on Stoker’s revered but demanding employer,
the actor Henry Irving, then it is certainly possible that the evil attractions
of the Count indicate Stoker’s fears about his own sexuality.
It is impossible to say
that Count Dracula is simply a symbol for something else, whether foreign
influence or repressed homosexuality. Dracula
is a fully realized character, more so than even the book’s heroes,
and the vampire myth does date back centuries in Europe.
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.
