#I guess it's because I've been seeing some dracula daily posts and they got me thinking with all the hype for johnathan/mina

[girlartemisia]

The thing I like about Dracula is how suited it is for a psychoanalytical reading. Dracula is the embodyment of the Different: foreigner, devilish, seductive, swings both ways, isolated (so he is the opposite of society, a barbarian), night creature, the embodyment of death who feeds on the life of others aka blood, etc. And the squad that hunts him down and kills him represent victorian traditional values such as family (woman+man+children under marriage), religion, sexual repression, western (english) culture, life (both because they are alive and because two of them have a child), light, society (as they are a squad). They react against Dracula who is perceived as a threat, as the devil (he IS the devil), because, if not stopped, he will conquer all of the 'civilized' world (we are talking about English people after all, to them England is the world ahemehm) and corrupt it, bring it to eternal damnation. And the perception of some great evil looming over proper society that needs to be exorcised is perfectly understandable inside the picture of 19th century western Europe, where nationalism, colonialism and imperialism were the key-words of the socio-political asset and where, at the same time, there was the general perception that the world as people knew it was on the verge of catastrophically collapsing (think about Symbolism, for example). Things were feeling precarious and Dracula seems like the extreme attempt to cling on tradition but at the same time it is an extremely daring book (and it was classified as a yellow book when it came out) that puts in plain sight the silent, purposefully ignored underground tension caused by this repression of spontaneity and nature in favour of rational mechanic systems perpetrated by the industrial revolution and philosophical positivism. Dracula moves at night and he is hunted and killed at night, in secret.

If we consider Victorian England specifically then, we can also analyse the theme of sexuality and sexual freedom through the equation taking-blood=having-sex. Dracula represents a threat this way too, and all the blood tranfusions and drinking and lack of marriages are symbols of a dis-order of sexuality, thus the child that is born at the end after marriage is the comforting re-estabilishment of a traditional family. But the book does not fully exorcise the evil because the child ends up having Dracula's blood too, so the seed for evil unknowingly remains there, silent and never fully overcome.

What I'm saying here is I think this book is great because it gives a fine portrait of the general collective conscience of Victorian England and western politics.