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DRACULA Critical Quotes (AO4)
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Comprehensive list of critical quotes for Bram Stoker's Dracula, useful for gaining top grades in essay writing.
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Alexandra Warwick: “Vampires and the empire: fears and fictions of the 1890s”:- “Men are only directly attacked by women; but their contact with male vampires causes a different kind
of infection”
- Harker’s illness feminises him. He becomes “weak, pale, hysterical and ineffectual – impotent, in fact”
- “Lucy declares her wish to marry ‘as many as want her’. This has usually been read as indicating a
dangerous (masculine) sexual independence, but her desire seems to be more confused that this would
suggest, as it embodies only a willingness to be possessed by those who want her, her wish is still shaped
by passivity”
- “the manifestations of vampirism in women is freedom of movement, connected with the inability of men
to restrain them”
- “the wandering woman… can only be stopped by the transparently phallic stake, wielded by a man”
- “vampirism is likened far more closely to disease rather than to possession, which might be the
immediate religious comparison, and the disease that has already been observed as equivalent to
vampirism is, syphilis”
- contagious diseases act
- “invasive surgery that violates in order to cure”
- “the mother/child relationship is often picked up in the vampire fantasies to focus the monstrosity of the
women; the children become the victims of their mothers’ or other woman’s infection”
Amanda M. Podonsky – “Bram Stoker’s now legendary novel, Dracula, is not just any piece of cult-
spawning fiction, but rather a time capsule containing the popular thoughts, ideas, and beliefs of the
Victorian era that paints an elaborate picture of what society was like for Bram Stoker’s generation”
Arata – “his vampirism is interwoven with his status as a conqueror and invader”
Athenaeum, 1897 – “At times Mr Stoker almost succeeds in creating the sense of possibility in
impossibility; at others he merely commands an array of crude statements of incredible actions”
Bram Dijkstra, 1986: “Metamorphoses of the Vampire: Dracula and His Daughters”:
- “Lucy… does not stand a chance before the onslaught of the demon of bestial hunger, for Stoker makes it
quite clear that in her the attempt of acculturation has failed”
- “she bears the degenerative stamp of the New Woman, for in rapid succession she is confronted with
three different men”
- “Stoker leaves not the slightest doubt about the fact that these transfusions should be equated with a
sexual union between Lucy and her donors.” Thus, Lucy gets her wish – the blood, the symbolic semen – of
“as many as want her”
- “Fed by the seed of four men, Lucy turns into a wild woman, one of those horrible creatures who prey
upon that central symbol of the future potential of mankind: the child”
- “Women’s misplaced virginity, that masculinising force which in real life encouraged feminists to
renounce the holy duties of motherhood and, as it were, prey upon their as yet unconceived babies,
manifests itself henceforth in Lucy in the form of a determined bloodlust for children… she slides back into
a state of primal bestiality”
- Arthur’s action: “vigorously monogamous assertion of masculine right over woman’s bestial inclinations”
, - “Lucy… has been transformed into that ideal creature of feminine virtue of the mid-nineteenth century:
the dead woman”
Bram Stoker – “I suppose that every book of the kind must contain some lesson, but I prefer that readers
find it out for themselves”
Burton Hatlan, 1980:
- “Dracula is physically ‘other’: the dark, unconscious, the sexuality that Victorian England denied”
- “He is also culturally ‘other’: the embodiment of all the social forces that lurked just beneath the frontiers
of Victorian middle-class consciousness, everything that was socially ‘other’ to the Victorian bourgeoisie”
- “He represents all dark, foreign (i.e. non-English) races; all ‘dark’, foreign (i.e. non-bourgeois) classes; and
(paradoxically) the ‘dark’, exotic aristocracy, which, though moribund, might suddenly revive”
Carol A. Senf – “On the surface the novel appears to be a mythic re-enactment of the opposition between
Good and Evil because the narrators attribute their pursuit and ultimate defeat of Dracula to a high moral
purpose… Yet, in spite of the narrator’s moral language, Stoker reveals that Dracula is primarily a sexual
threat, a missionary of desire whose only true kingdom will be the human body”
Christopher Gist Raible – “Dracula is, of course, a morality play. Forces of good and evil, clearly identified,
clash until the climax and final destruction of the dread vampire. If the evil is more suave and seductive –
more intelligent and attractive – than is the devil in medieval morality dramas, that may be simply an
expression of modern sophistication”
contemporary review in ‘The Spectator’ – “The up-to-dateness of the book… hardly fits with the medieval
methods which ultimately secure victory for Count Dracula’s foes”
David Gates – “The virtuous characters in Dracula have the power of love, which sustains them when in
distress”
Diana Wallace – “legal and political backdrops are behind Gothic writing”
Edward Said – “Orientalism – the influence of the east on the west. The Orient is ‘a space that is intriguing,
yet potentially dangerous and to an extent incoherent.’ The binary opposite to western culture”
Fred Botting:
- “Gothic fictions presented different, more exciting worlds in which heroines in particular could encounter
not only frightening violence but also adventurous freedom”
- “Gothic fictions seemed to promote vice and violence, giving free reign to selfish ambitions and sexual
desires beyond the prescriptions of law or familial duty”
Freud – the uncanny
Gilbert and Gubar (madwoman in the attic) – “19th Century writers always make their characters angels or
monsters”
Greg Buzzwell, Vampires, Perversity and Victorian Anxieties:
- “The vampire has always been a contradictory figure. At once repulsive and blood-sucking yet also an
alluring symbol of sexuality”
- “Stoker uses the vampire as a thinly-veiled shorthand for the Victorian fin-de-siècle”
- “Lucy’s moral weakness allows Dracula to prey repeatedly upon her”
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