Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Fears and Anxieties in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle

Abstract

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is a Gothic novel published at the turn of the twentieth century, as interstitial moment known as fin-de siècle and characterized by new cultural, social, industrial and scientific changes that were perceived by some conservative factions as being odds with hegemonic Victorian values. This clash between progress and conservatism created a sense of unrest and crisis in the society of that time that can be perceived in several literary pieces of the period by authors such H.G. Wells, Henry Rider Haggard or Robert Louis Stevenson, the renowned vampire novel being one of them. This dissertation will analyse Stoker’s Dracula in terms of novel’s articulation of Victorian fears and anxieties by focusing on particular attitudes towards new advancements and major social and cultural changes. In this sense, Stoker’s novel articulates a series of issues at stake in fin-de-siècle England, from the social and political uneasiness resulting from Britain’s loss of political supremacy in world politics, to the apprehension caused by strongly controversial topics such as the fear of “reverse colonization” and immigration or progressive visibility of women. To pursue this aim, this dissertation will be informed by critical studies tackling the above-mentioned issues, such as Elaine Showlater’s Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-siècle (1990) or Stephen Arata’s Fictions of Loss in the in the Victorian Fin-de siècle (1996), among others, which will illuminate how the novel articulates fear of progress as shared by Bram Stoker and his contemporaries at this complex moment of transition between the nineteenth and the twentieth century.