Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Dracula, Bram Stoker - Clive Leatherdale (essay date 1985)

Clive Leatherdale (essay date 1985)

SOURCE: Leatherdale, Clive. “Social and Political Commentary.” In Dracula: The Novel & The Legend, A Study of Bram Stoker's Gothic Masterpiece, pp. 206-22. Willingborough, Northamptonshire, England: The Aquarian Press, 1985.

[In the following essay, Leatherdale considers Dracula as a valuable piece of social and political commentary, maintaining that the novel mirrors “the ideological strains and tensions that afflicted the Britain of Stoker's middle years.”]

From the bourgeois point of view, Dracula is … a manic individualist; from his own point of view … he is the bearer of the promise of true union, union which transcends death. From the bourgeois point of view, Dracula stands for sexual perversion and sadism; but we also know that what his victims experience at the moment of consummation is joy, unhealthy perhaps but of a power unknown in conventional...

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