Vampires and Victorians: Count Dracula and the Return of the Repressive Hypothesis

Abstract

This essay is not a reading of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). It is an examination of the myths and assumptions which operate when modern culture approaches this text, and the way it represents its central figure, the undead Transylvanian count. It proposes to historicise that which often forgets that it has a history: the ‘sexuality’ which Count Dracula supposedly embodies. It is a commonplace in contemporary critical and cinematic discourse that vampirism has an erotic ‘meaning’. However, what for many critics is ‘simple, evident, unavoidabl’³ will perhaps appear less obvious when history is brought to an assumption that reveals more about the myths and desires of ‘modernity’, than it does about Stoker’s text or the folklore of vampirism. This essay will approach this subject from three perspectives: the history of cinematic and critical representations of Dracula; the history of sexuality; and what could be called the erotic history of the vampire. The former will be dealt with first. To do this it is necessary to go back to where it all began; not to the Transylvania or London of the 1890s, but to Bray in Berkshire and 1958, the year Hammer studios released its first Dracula movie.

What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.

Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality¹

The [vampire] myth is loaded with sexual excitement; yet there is no mention of sexuality.

James Twitchell, ‘The Vampire Myth’²