This paper offers a thematic analysis of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula, examining its narrative structure, key characters, and the layered Victorian anxieties the novel encodes. The paper traces the story from Jonathan Harker's journey to Transylvania through the collective battle against the Count, while focusing on the novel's treatment of women, sexuality, and mortality. Drawing on Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, the Malleus Maleficarum, and Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film adaptation, the analysis argues that Stoker constructs a binary of female identity — the saintly and the sensual — that ultimately reflects Victorian society's contradictory attitudes toward female empowerment, desire, and death.
Dracula, written by Bram Stoker in 1897, was originally published by Archibald Constable and Company. The modern edition is published by Penguin Classics, London. The novel is set in 1893, four years prior to its publication date. Stoker takes the reader on a journey beginning with a young solicitor named Jonathan Harker, then unfolding through a series of individual accounts that illuminate Victorian life and the behavioral expectations of its social classes.
Stoker employs a mix of narratives written in the past tense, using journals, diaries, personal letters, and phonographic recordings, all collectively assembled by one of the characters within the book.
Apart from Dracula himself — who is absent from the novel for nearly three-quarters of the narratives — there are several other key figures drawn from the middle to higher classes of Victorian society: Jonathan Harker, Sir Arthur Holmwood (later Lord Godalming), Dr. John (Jack) Seward, Quincey P. Morris, Professor Abraham Van Helsing, Lucy Westenra, and Wilhelmina (Mina) Murray (Harker). Minor but important roles are also played by Renfield and the three voluptuous women Harker encounters during his stay at Castle Dracula.
Dracula has generated many arguments concerning blood, power, sexual symbolism, politics, and even the occult. The central question, with regard to both the book and its author, is what Stoker had in mind when he created this masterpiece. The novel is, in a sense, Stoker's own Frankenstein's monster: he drew from nearly every influential aspect of his life, from holidays in Cruden Bay and Whitby to the people around him who became the characters within his pages.
The book opens with the travels of Jonathan Harker, seen through his journal. He is sent to serve the legal needs of an elderly client, Dracula, who has sought the services of Harker's Exeter-based firm in order to purchase property in London. Even before Harker reaches his client's desolate home, he encounters the deep superstition of the Transylvanian region. As the local people learn of his destination — Castle Dracula in the Borgo Pass — their fears for him intensify.
Throughout Harker's stay at the castle, he becomes witness to the strange and macabre world of his host. Once he discovers the true nature of Dracula and the other inhabitants of the ancient castle, he grows fearful for his life — especially when the Count promises him to the three voluptuous young women as a token of his affection for them.
After the Count departs his domain, the story shifts to the lives of two young women: Wilhelmina Murray, a schoolteacher and the betrothed of Jonathan Harker, and Miss Lucy Westenra. Their letters reveal a narrow, self-contained world. Westenra is preoccupied with the three men who have each proposed marriage to her, while Murray is chiefly concerned with Jonathan and her work as a schoolmistress.
Once the two friends are settled together in the fishing town of Whitby, the story darkens. They witness an unnatural storm that drives a schooner onto the bay, and their nightmare begins. Lucy falls victim to a sleepwalking compulsion; it is within the churchyard — the women's favourite haunt — that Mina first glimpses the man who will come to haunt her.
Dracula does not make a direct appearance in the narrative for several chapters after leaving Harker in Transylvania. The reader instead receives peripheral glimpses of his deeds: the symbolic violation of Lucy Westenra, the gradual seduction of Mina Murray, and the death of his servant Renfield.
Dracula's nemesis is the learned Professor Abraham Van Helsing, who takes on a paternal role, instructing the group on how to defeat vampires. The novel then becomes a battle of wits — a kind of human chess match in which Dracula, as the Black King, has only one piece in play, while Van Helsing commands several. Eventually, the Black King is cornered by the White pieces, and a desperate fight for survival reaches a bittersweet conclusion.
There are several major themes within Dracula: religion, sexual symbolism, paternal and maternal attitudes, love, and, most prominently, the matter of life and death. The theme that most thoroughly encompasses the taboos of Victorian life is mortality. Many Victorians regarded death as a subject to be kept locked away from polite society until the event itself arrived. This attitude is well illustrated by Queen Victoria's transformation following the death of Prince Albert: before his death she was a gay, happy woman whose spirit was reflected in society at large; after his death she entered a prolonged mourning that endured for the rest of her life and cast its shadow across the culture of the age.
In Dracula, death is a central concern from the very first pages. Stoker draws on Bürger's Lenore (1773), a German poem in which the line "the dead ride fast" appears repeatedly. Stoker translates this as "Denn die Todten reiten Schnell" — "For the dead travel fast" (1993, 19). Death is presented as an irresistible force, the ultimate victor, one that cannot be outrun and that regards no distinctions of race, class, age, or wealth.
Yet despite their reluctance to discuss death openly, the Victorians maintained a peculiar relationship with places of burial. They built lavish new cemeteries on the outskirts of cities and took Sunday family strolls through them. The Victorian cemetery served as a collective, culturally sanctioned space for contemplating mortality — a telling contradiction that Stoker's novel implicitly addresses.
It is the women of this novel that merit particular attention, especially with reference to Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film adaptation, Bram Stoker's Dracula. Before examining the female roles within the book and film, it is important to understand how women were perceived during the Victorian era and what was expected of them within the confines of social convention.
Women have long been viewed with a mixture of superstition and fear. The Malleus Maleficarum states: "There is no head above the head of a serpent: and there is no wrath above that of a woman… women are naturally more impressionable and are more ready to receive the influence of a disembodied spirit… they have slippery tongues… since they are feebler both in mind and body it is not surprising they should come more and more under the spell of witchcraft" (Malleus Maleficarum, Part One, Question 6).
With this fifteenth-century attitude in mind, and with little substantive change in view until the twentieth century, we can begin to understand how women must have been regarded. Their status occupied one of two positions: they were either harlots and servants of the devil, or they were saints. No middle ground existed.
With the onset of the nineteenth century, attitudes toward sexual matters shifted from open disgust to a more suffocating embarrassment. Discussing or writing about sexuality became nearly impossible, yet many authors found ways to circumvent these constraints. Charlotte Brontë, for instance, illustrates society's disdain for women of volatile sexual nature in her description of Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre, a character whose appetite "all but defies the humanity within her" (Leatherdale 134). Brontë writes: "I never saw a face like it! It was a discolored face — it was a savage face. I wish I could forget the roll of the red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments!… of that foul German spectre — the Vampyre" (Brontë).
Drawing on this cultural context, we can better understand Stoker's construction of his female characters. On one hand, there is the virtuous Wilhelmina (Mina) Murray, saintly and pure, yet still drawn into a form of adulterous union with Dracula through the sharing of blood. On the other are the three voluptuous women of Castle Dracula, whom Stoker describes thus:
"Two were dark, and had high aquiline noses… and great dark, piercing eyes, that seemed to be almost red when contrasted with the pale yellow moon. The other was fair, as fair as can be, with great masses of golden hair and eyes like pale sapphires… All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear" (Stoker 53).
Between these two poles stands Lucy Westenra — before and after her union with the Count. Before her transformation, Lucy has been described as "a silly, transparent, gushy, giggly, beautiful and good girl, and also as a fragile, simple-minded porcelain-like creature" (Leatherdale 135). She is selfish, sexually self-aware, and primarily interested in men for the power they represent. She has shown little concern for her friend Mina, who has had almost no contact with her fiancé Harker for weeks. Lucy typifies what might be called a "phallic" teaser, delighting in her collection of three marriage proposals: "Three proposals in one day! Isn't it awful! I feel sorry, really and truly sorry, for two of the poor fellows" (Stoker 77). She also displays a knowing awareness of the gap between how wives are expected to behave and how they actually do: "Men like women, certainly their wives, to be quite as fair as they are. And women, I am afraid, are not always quite as fair as they should be" (Stoker 77).
The contrast between the living Lucy and the undead Lucy is stark. When the group first encounters her after her transformation, she appears radiantly beautiful: "She was, if possible, more radiantly beautiful than ever, and I could not believe that she was dead. The lips were red, nay redder than before, and on the cheeks was a delicate bloom" (Stoker 257). When she returns with her prey, however, the change is complete: "When Lucy — I call the thing that was before us Lucy because it bore her shape — saw us she drew back with an angry snarl, such as a cat gives when taken unawares… Lucy's eyes in form and color, but Lucy's eyes unclean and full of hell-fire, instead of the pure, gentle orbs we knew… As she looked, her eyes blazed with unholy light, and the face became wreathed with a voluptuous smile" (Stoker 271).
Stoker has thus presented both forms of womanhood that society and the church had long classified: the saintly figure in Mina, and the harlot or concubine of the devil in the three vampiresses and the transformed Lucy. Yet we must ask what Stoker's intention truly is. Are these women present merely to validate the church's binary view of female nature?
Stoker uses his female characters to illuminate the sexual desires of men — as Lucy herself aptly observed. He appears to see the virtuous Mina as a symbol of the Virgin Mary: a woman of high esteem and, in many ways, incorruptible. Yet even she eventually succumbs to the seductive power of the Count. She cries out: "Unclean, unclean! I must touch him or kiss him no more. Oh, that it should be that it is I who am now his worst enemy, and whom he may have most cause to fear" (Stoker 366). Meanwhile, the vampiric Lucy continues to seek union with her human betrothed: "Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come!" (Stoker 272). When true death finally releases Lucy, she is transformed once more: the group sees not the foul creature they had destroyed, but "Lucy as we had seen her in life, with her face of unequalled sweetness and purity" (Stoker 278).
"Female power and sexuality in Stoker's narrative"
To sum up, we can argue that Dracula by Bram Stoker is a book of many sublayers and intermingling themes: from the Count who is addicted to the blood and life of his ancestors, to the whimsical and submissive Harker who has his sexual desires fulfilled by the three sirens of the Count yet remains reluctant to share that knowledge with his new bride, out of guilt over his non-sexual but nonetheless adulterous encounter.
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