Gender, Power, & Fear: Perverse Identities & Victorian Anxieties in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

Citations

Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/76537285h

Abstract

This thesis examines how gendered portrayals of identity in Bram Stoker’s Dracula express Victorian social anxieties. Medical journals, marriage guides, and philosophic texts provide historical attitudes on gender, religion, and sexual affinities, providing the groundwork for understanding the conservative values reflected in the text. The book’s use of gender inversion conflicts with its explicit establishment of a traditional binary, thus revealing complex associations through the interdependence of its characters and their identities. Furthermore, the contrast between religious influence on human protagonists and the perversion of monstrous antagonists provides commentary on the gendered division of sex, power, purity, marriage, and parenthood. Close reading will expose how the Victorian period’s driving social fears took root in this novel and, thus, how its portrayal of inversive identities expresses the looming anxieties and guiltiest pleasures of the time.

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