Dracula

“I am longing to be with you, and by the sea, where we can talk together freely and build our castles in the air.“

Dracula, Gothic novel by Bram Stoker is the most popular literary work derived from vampire legends which became the basis for an entire genre of literature and film.

Dracula has been interpreted as an expression of anxiety about eastern Europeans invading western Europe, as represented by a Transylvanian who arrives in London and terrorizes its residents. Others see Stoker’s novel as an exploration of suppressed sexual desire and a reaction to the patriarchal and conservative norms broadly prevalent in Britain during the Victorian period. Notably, it inverts the era’s stereotypical gender roles through the highly sexualized actions of the female vampires. Yet Dracula can also be seen as the evil of temptation personified as he preys on women who must then be protected by the men around them (though those men still fail, particularly in Lucy’s case). The novel’s complexity, especially in its representation of gender, allows numerous, sometimes contradictory, interpretations.