Symbolism Of Blood In Dracula

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Abraham “Bram” Stoker was born the third child of seven children to Abraham Stoker and feminist Mathilda Blake Thornley on November 8th, 1847. Stoker was of Irish descent and lived in a coastal suburb right off of the coast of Dublin Ireland. It is here that he attended the Church of Ireland where he was a member of the Clontarf parish church. This way of life continued until at the age of seven when Bram started school and made the outstanding discovery that he was an invalid. After his recovery he became a healthy young man excelling as an athlete at Trinity College in Dublin. It was from here that he graduated with honors in mathematics. He was auditor of the College Historical Society and president of the University Philosophical Society,…show more content…
Its first mention, in Chapter III, comes when the count tells Harker that “blood is too precious a thing in these days of dishonorable peace; and the -glories of the great races are as a tale that is told.” The count proudly recounts his family history, relating blood to one’s ancestry—to the “great races” that have, in Dracula’s view, withered. The count foretells the coming of a war between lineages: between the East and the West, the ancient and the modern, and the evil and the good. Later, the depictions of Dracula and his minions feeding on blood suggest the exchange of bodily fluids associated with sexual intercourse: Lucy is “drained” to the point of nearly passing out after the count penetrates her. The vampires’ drinking of blood echoes the Christian rite of Communion, but in a perverted sense. Rather than gain eternal spiritual life by consuming wine that has been blessed to symbolize Christ’s blood, Dracula drinks actual human blood in order to extend his physical—but quite soulless—life. The importance of blood in Christian mythology elevates the battle between Van Helsing’s warriors and the count to the significance of a holy war or crusade. The three beautiful vampires Harker encounters in Dracula’s castle are both his dream and his nightmare—indeed, they embody both the dream and the nightmare of the Victorian male imagination in general. The sisters represent what the Victorian ideal stipulates women should not be—voluptuous and sexually aggressive—thus making their beauty both a promise of sexual fulfillment and a curse. These women offer Harker more sexual gratification in two paragraphs than his fiancée Mina does during the course of the entire novel. However, this sexual proficiency threatens to undermine the foundations of a male-dominated society by compromising men’s ability to reason and maintain control. For this reason, the

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