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Summary A* Context in 'Dracula'
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A* level context and arguments for the prose section of English Literature Edexcel A-level - DRACULA by Bram Stoker
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East vs. West Harker represents the judicial, Seward science and Godalming the aristocracy. Van Helsing
merges east and west and Morris the American pragmatist (other)
Marxist interp: associate the boom with class struggle (1897 same year Lenin announced
Western imperialism had reached its Zenith)
Social Anxieties
Vampire is a metaphor for the anxious equivocation of the relationship between desire and gender –
pivotal anxiety of Victorian culture
Conventions require willing effort, whereas to succumb to the vampire, involves a
relinquishing of strenuous boarders, arrival at a somnambulistic world (appears menacing
but once you’re inside it is restful and trancelike – shows the fear and allure of 19th century
decadence)
Modern is haunted by its own past. ‘Formation of conscious that has never been
conscious… passes from the parent’s unconscious to the child’s’. Vampire in the enterprise
of the modern – attempts to break from Vampiric pull of past, but it will never be fully
possible to be rid of the dead. Dracula signifies the notion that new cultural movements
always contain the relics of a past that can’t be buried, how can we bury the past if we
don’t always know where it is. Dracula is an attempt to be rid of the past, but the
longevity and survival of the myth marks the impossibility of banishment. (Maybe ghost
that lives in the machine…)
o Chap 14, VH ‘there are things old and new which must not be contemplate by men’s
eyes… we see around us everyday the growth of new beliefs, which think themselves
new; and which are yet but the old, which pretend to be young.’
Polidori (perhaps with influence of Byron) transitioned the vampire from a dishevelled,
eastern peasant to an alluring, seductive aristocrat – socially mobile (exploitative authority
figures etc)
Throughout the 19 century the vampire begins to crosscut with other issues of the time:
th
o Tuberculosis, female victims impact is described as though they suffered from
tuberculosis – in this period tuberculin females were seen as alluring in some way
(Elizabeth Syddell, Rosetti’s mistress is regularly featured as a tubercular woman, put
in cold baths to make her even more pallid), (Edgar Allen Poe wrote of feeling
aroused as his wife played the piano and blood fell onto her white blouse) à Lucy
Westenra
o Discovery of bacillus, notion of a microbe invading the body of society and polluting
it is honed onto the vampire (motif of the outsider that decompose society)
Psychology
Freud’s Id, ego, superego
– subconscious sexual motivation. Lucy is vulnerable when asleep, therefore Dracula attacks her
repressed desires
Freud:
Van Helsing is the ego (serving the purpose of quashing chaos and libidinal fulfilment, that
would damage social/psychological organisation)
Dracula (endless passion and desire of the unconscious – has to be repressed on the eve of
marriage to maintain social stability. Dracula is undead because desire never dies –
gratification is only postponed)
Freud – the uncanny - the double is immortality, yet also a sign of approaching death.
Double is a manifestation of repressed desires. (Drac and VH?)
o Focus on uncanny appearance – Shklovsky (formalism)
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