Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Dracula, Bram Stoker - Alan P. Johnson (essay date 1984)

Alan P. Johnson (essay date 1984)

SOURCE: Johnson, Alan P. “‘Dual Life’: The Status of Women in Stoker's Dracula.” In Sexuality and Victorian Literature, edited by Don Richard Cox, pp. 20-39. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984.

[In the following essay, Johnson explores the depiction of women in Dracula, contending that the novel “presents an incisive and sympathetic analysis of the frustration felt by women in late-nineteenth-century Britain.”]

Leonard Wolf has described exactly the theme in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) which seems to account for the novel's widespread and persistent appeal: “energy without grace, power without responsibility.”¹ “Dracula is considerably more,” Wolf points out, “than a sexual danger. Stoker insists on his brooding, primordial animality—he is antirational, childlike, instinctual,” and, “in Christian terms he is a creature cut off from...

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