Vampiric Seduction and Vicissitudes of Masculine Identity in Bram Stoker's Dracula
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12411152 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Dejan Kuzmanovic (University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2009 |
| Volume | 37 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 411-425 |
| Publication date | 2009-06-11 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Victorian Literature and Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1060-1503 • E-ISSN: 1470-1553 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s1060150309090263 |
| OpenAlex | W2105719556 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 6 |
Most critics who discuss vampirism in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) as a type of seduction focus on the symbolic corruption of English womanhood as the central theme in the novel and emphasize the significance of “the seduction of Lucy and Mina, to which the experience of Harker at Castle Dracula,” according to Phyllis Roth, “provides a preface.” Roth believes that Harker's role as “a hero, one whose narrative encloses the others and with whom, therefore, one might readily identify . . . is a defense against the central identification of the novel with Dracula and his attacks on the women” (61–62). Other critics have observed that, in addition to preserving the symbolic purity of Englishwomen, Stoker's novel is also about the symbolic education of Englishmen, through which members of different professions and classes that carry the bourgeois order learn to work together and, pooling their various backgrounds and knowledge and combining tradition with progress in order to save the women, confirm the strength of their own manhood, and destroy the symbolic threat of the vampire. Both groups of critics, however, tend to overlook the unique position that the young solicitor Jonathan Harker occupies in the narrative: he is the only character who is both an object of the vampire's seduction and an agent of his destruction. While some critics pay due attention to Harker's sensational seduction by Dracula and the three vampiric women in the first part of the novel, they either simplify the meaning of that seduction or underestimate Harker's continuing significance in the rest of the novel because he gradually blends into the group of several valiant vampire hunters. At the same time, his membership in that group has been too easily taken for granted by most critics. What has remained insufficiently explored is the significance of the twofold nature of Harker's experiences: he yields to Dracula's seduction and then recuperates from its consequences by participating in vampire hunting. It is through Harker's experiences throughout the narrative that the paradox of the novel's simultaneously conservative and subversive tendencies becomes most conspicuous
Aesthetics · Art · Dracula · HERO · Identity (music · Literature · Mythology · Narrative · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · The Symbolic · Theme (computing · Vampire · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Psychology · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,21 |
| Citation span | 2012 - 2025 (14) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |