Issues of Sexuality in Bram Stoker's Dracula

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature grade: 1.7 University of Cologne course: Gothic and Neo-Gothic Ficiton language: English abstract: Taking a look (an not even a close one) at movies or TV-series dealing with vampires one immediately recognizes the vampire as a sexed-up figure conveying the notion of the lascivious vamp as in Underworld the noble alpha-male as in Blood Ties or the longed-for guardian and lover as in Moonlight. In her novels Anne Rice describes the vampire's bite as a liturgical act (cf. Brittnacher 1994:131) Sheridan Le Fanu's female vampire Carmilla is actually a lesbian (cf. Leatherdale 1985 54) and John Polidori's early story The Vampyre is considered to have successfully combined the vampire-motif with a seducing romanticism (Hurst 2002 139; Leatherdale 1985 51). There is a long tradition in sexing up vampire-figures reaching back even to Bram Stocker's Dracula. Indeed Bram Stoker combined different aspects of the literary vampire when he created Count Dracula (cf. Brittnacher 1994 119ff; Hurst 141f). This mixture of well-tried elements may be one of the reasons why Bram Stoker's novel is widely seen as the by far best-known literary treatment of the vampire myth (Bentley 1972 27). Amazingly Dracula has never been out of print since it was first published in 1897 (Leatherdale 1985 11; McNally et.al. 1994 133) and can thus be said to have become the figurehead for the vampirism-phenomena. Consequently James Twitchell asserts that vampire and Dracula have become synonymous (1981 132).