Blood In Dracula Essay

The Blood in Dracula

It’s the vital life ingredient that pumps through the heart and circulates the body. When this precious fluid escapes the body life could cease. It’s connection to vampires is obvious and helps drive the horror. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, takes blood to a new level and makes this powerful symbol represent something more than anyone could imagine. From a mythical view blood if transfused or taken from one body to another could give a vampire more power and possibly make the vampire younger. In Stoker Dracula would go back to a more youthful handsome version of himself. The more literal real world connection could be through cannibalism where not only flesh is eaten but blood could be drank for survival. In science blood that is outside a body perhaps dipping from a mouth could represent disease. Stoker added a new element to blood and what it could symbolize. The novel aims at the Victorian male imagination at the time sexually and possible Stoker‘s fantasies. This was a time when women and their sexual lives in society were put into categories almost, labeled as either virgin, mother, or whore. If they were a whore they were looked down upon in society. Lucy a virgin, is drained of blood close to passing out and Mina all have sexual erotic images associated with them. That only made the novel more intense and terrifying because as a reader you know Dracula is doing something horrific and you should be frightened already. However, when it turns sexual you want to enjoy it and it plays with your mind and it actually makes the horror more intense. The transfusion of Lucy is a good example of this in how in one minute she seems lifeless, but after a transfusion of blood she is refreshed. When Lucy comes back she writes in her diary "Arthur feels very, very close to me" and she "feels his presence warm about me." It sounds like the transfusion of blood not only brought her back to life, but she describes it as if she had intercourse.

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