Reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula Through a Queer Lens

BRAM STOKER’S Dracula is a late nineteenth-century gothic novel—or horror if it pleases you—that’s intrigued me for decades, or “oceans of time,” as Count Dracula would say. Dracula, the work itself, is akin to the vampire’s esoteric, complex, and polymorphic state. There are numerous ways to deconstruct this book to uncover and interpret multiple meanings and transgressive readings submerged within the text and existing externally upon the pages. The “perversity” of the homosexual, of the homoerotic, of reversing traditional gender roles permeates this Victorian novel in the textual relationship between Dracula and Jonathon Harker and within the relationship between the vampiric women and Harker. Stoker shows the correlation between the colonized and colonizer, the fear and fascination of the “exotic stranger,” which is easier to unveil in the reading by looking a the text through a contemporary eye. But he also shows a movement to go beyond entrenched modes of stereotypical physical “masculinism” and assumptions of normative heterosexuality toward investigations into the “deviant,” the “other.” 

Dracula is a novel that exists on many levels, including queerness. While one can point out myriad psycho-sexual relevance and apply many theories, not just “Queer Theory,” one cannot fully clarify all that the novel is. It is impossible to claim that Dracula has any specific, defined “essence,” for its essentialism is based on the nature of taboo, mystery, and psycho-sexual ambiguities. Dracula, himself, feels no guilt; he has life without the fear of death, and he has sexual encounters without the burden of shame or the threat of disease. Syphilis is no match for Vampiric blood. There is room to maneuver and explore the nature of “sexual deviance” in the novel and decode sexual fluidity, uninhibited behaviour, and gender constructs, which are especially interesting within a Victorian-viewed narrative. One can look toward both the physical act of vampiric intercourse—the penetrative action of drinking blood—and the nature of transformative gender—the heteronormative codes of conduct regarding the positions, roles, and social taboos associated with gender power. Dracula prepares and cooks all of Harker’s meals for him. He makes up his room. He is Harker’s client, but he is also his cook, maid, and man-servant. And later, his protector and sexual conqueror. But roles frequently reverse within the narrative, as does the relationship between Dracula and Harker. One becomes a sadomasochistic master, the other a submissive, feminized servant. Harker also becomes the physical victim of the vampire women, who possess strength and unnatural power his natural or traditional masculinity cannot overcome. It is an “other,” Dracula, who must rescue him from being further sexually assaulted and possibly killed.

Dracula can be many things to many people, and no behaviour he demonstrates embarrasses or humiliates him. That form of confidence unquestionably transcends gender stereotypes and the need to conform to any society’s norms, be it Eastern European or British. Dracula, as the “other,” is beyond man’s parochial, inflexible social structures. The monster figure, in this case, the vampire, is the ultimate vehicle for freedom of expression without consequences. Dracula is a fiercely intelligent being with a potent sexuality, but there is no overt mention of his erotic power within the text. Yet, Stoker makes the reader very much aware of it. This is Victorian Literature, where socially conservative norms and laws beget subtext and coded language for safer artistic expression. There are hints at sadomasochism, sexual anality and orality, and other vices abound with Dracula and the Vampire Brides’ enigmatic, transgressive behaviour. Dracula is beguiling, but he reeks of sexual depravity that is quite animalistic. He bears the mark of what has been termed “graveyard eroticism,” which is looking at love and death through the lens of desire and gender.

It’s interesting to note that none of the heteronormative male figures in the novel, such as Dr. Van Helsing and Dr. Sewerd, the more academically astute of the British male characters, have little to say about the sexual motivations of anyone, especially concerning Dracula’s predatory behaviour is perhaps indicative of Stoker’s own subconscious protecting him from being too conspicuous in his writing. Remember—innuendo and subversive text won’t likely get you labelled a deviant and a prison sentence. Maybe he was cognizant of it. Writing provocatively by “queering between the lines” is security. Stoker was a closeted homosexual. (You may agree or not, but upon much research into his life, this is my stance.) I like to think he consciously sought artistic safety and self-expression within the skin of the monstrous, questioning societal fear of “otherness,” the homosexual male, and forbidden homoerotic desires. Is this an attempt to engage with and possibly dismantle queer loathing and make a social commentary on his repressive times? I believe so, yes.

Dracula was published in 1897, around the time male-male desire/sexual behaviour was clinically classified as “homosexual.” In the age of Stoker’s novel, though it’s still applicable in contemporary times, the literary monster that is the vampire is the monster that is the homosexual; both are mutually interchangeable in the culture of religious dogmatism and bigotry. Similar to the modernity of queer people reclaiming historically derogative language, Stoker, in his time, sought a way to overcome taboos, oppression, and repression through the sexual fluidity, feral sensuality and unbridled passion of the monster figure. And Dracula is the quintessential monster: powerful, unpredictable, uncontrollable, and dangerously exotically erotic. Dracula embodies masculine desire and unbending manliness while concurrently subverting stereotypical “male power” through the actions of transformative sexuality and gender play. 

In the nineteenth century, Gothic Literature was an important tool used by writers who we, as modern readers, would classify as “othered” or suppressed, like women, homosexuals, and bisexuals, to explore and reveal, to varying degrees, their sublimated desires. Gothic, as a genre, transcended the superficial amusements of telling a story of horror to scare and delight; it was a tool that facilitated for many stifled creatives an avenue to explore self-identity, gender politics, and the desire to engage in “othered” or subversive experiences, usually of a sexual nature. This is what Stoker’s vampire tale did for him. Besides being a fascinating, engaging story of horror and intrigue, Dracula also explores a man’s subconscious need to be “seen.” It is Stoker’s desire to experience authenticity regarding his sexual identity within the boundaries of the safety that fiction provides.

Reading through a queer lens, one doesn’t have to dig too deep beneath the surface of Dracula to reveal Stoker’s subverted desire to provide a creative avenue to explore not just homosocial intimacy but a homoerotic desire that threatened the normative class structure and the authority of patriarchy— or heterosexual male power.