Modern Reception of Dracula

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Modern Reception of Dracula

AO5 requires students to explore literary texts informed by different interpretations. As such, integrating the ideas of literary critics alongside your own interpretations is important in an exam response.

Robert McCrum's 100 best novels

Writer and editor for The Guardian, Robert McCrum, placed Dracula no. 31 on his 100 best novels (2014 -2015), saying how the Stoker’s work “was very much of its time but still resonates more than a century later”.
McCrum’s top 30 consisted of 5 other Gothic novels: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (27), Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (13), Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (12), Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (9) and Mary Shelly’s seminal work Frankenstein (8).

Greg Buzwell - British Library

Writing for the British Library, Greg Buzwell makes the connection between the locations of Dracula’s London “lairs” with both real-life and literary crime: he has “one in Chicksand Street, Whitechapel – an area notorious for the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888 – and one in Bermondsey, the location of Jacob’s Island – the low-life rookery immortalised by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist.”

Emily Carmichael - 'new woman'

Emily Carmichael, writing about the ‘new woman’ suggests that both Mina and Lucy “exemplify the ideals of Victorian womanhood, although in different ways: while Lucy is representative of the emotional and domesticated view of women which was held by men of the time, Mina maintains no life of luxury or idleness as does Lucy. She is sensible and devoted to both God and her husband, qualities which were held in high regard in the Victorian era..."

Emily Carmichael (cont.)

"...However, both women also represent the emerging phenomenon known as the "New Woman" – although again, in differing ways [...] Lucy represents the augmented importance of women's sexuality and its implications, Mina embodies all other aspects of the New Woman, retaining a job and a sense of practicality evident throughout the novel.”

Sue Chaplin

Sue Chaplin adopts a Marxist perspective suggesting that Dracula “conforms to earlier representations of decadent aristocrats whose reliance on inherited wealth allowed them to exert a leaden, one might say vampiric, influence upon a society [...] The Count’s aristocratic privilege, in the form of his family’s wealth and the cultural superiority associated with his nobility, allows him to infiltrate English society in spite of the strangeness, even ferocity, of his appearances.”

Sue Chaplin (cont.)

Chaplin also evokes more recent gender studies, suggesting Dracula’s preying of “young middle-class women [...] evokes [current] cultural anxieties concerning the sexual exploitation of this group of women.”
Perhaps this is why the novel continues to resonate with readers today.