#i haven't delved too deep in the gay bits (overt and undertones) of dracula but there are some great posts out there compiling them

[999-roses]

on “dracula  (the novel) is problematic”, “stop making dracula (the count) cute, he’s evil”, Victorian mores, and modern woes

dracula daily has really swept us up, huh? naturally we got anti’s with “discourse” such as “stop fetishizing Dracula, he’s evil and an abuser”, or “cancel the book, it disseminates caricatures of Othered identities and furthers xenophobia, homophobia, racism, antisemitism, orientalist tropes, etc”. 

Traditional face-value reading of Dracula gets you a “good triumphs over evil” story, but thinking about questions like “who gets to tell the story” “what are the values of the characters who get to be the narrators, who are they and what do they represent in Victorian society” “why is evil personified in this way”, and in the historical context of the novel, gives you a host of more interesting, nuanced and valuable takes. (This is the premise of this whole post. warning: large wall of text, you are as always completely free to not engage)

And it is such a tragedy that Dracula still gets read as a straight (sorry for the pun) good-triumphs-over-evil story today. Like it or not, we’re still seeing facets of Dracula [the Count] as semitic, as foreign, as queer, and as Other, subconsciously or not -- and those are on purpose because those Othered identities were feared or hated by Victorians. Like, I get objection to uwubification and silliness, it’s a familiar tool to make violators or abusers seem not so bad, or objection that most of the popular posts display little critical lens on the text (valid, but like is anyone going to bother to read my wall of text? lol), but I think it’s really great that there are fan retellings of the story thru the lens of the titular character who doesn’t even get his own POV in the novel with his name on it. And so many more retellings where the female characters have agency, and retellings where van Helsing chooses not to kill the Count. And that emphasizes even more the original story, where all of the female characters are passive while the ideal masculine pillars of Victorian society, personified in affluent Western European men who are lawyer-real estate agent-solicitor, nobility inheritor of land/title/wealth, wealthy Texan (no doubt benefitting from Jim Crow era in his homeland), insane asylum director, and doctor-scientist, collude to erase the foreign, Eastern, queer, sexual, deviant and monstrous Vampire from existence and mainly for the sake of a woman’s “life” or virtuosity, so she will not go down the same path as unvirtuous, defiled, predator of children, "undead” Lucy, who they decapitated as well (Rest in Peace).

And to the rally of “Dracula the character is utter evil, you’re not allowed to make him silly or likeable, stop fetishizing him, it’s like people humanizing and thirsting for Ted Bundy”: to the first part, maybe the point is to deconstruct the notion of who or what is evil, and who is calling the shots about labeling evil? which is NOT like humanizing a real life serial killer.

Vampires -- creatures who must be confined to the night because sexuality, queerness, and otherness are not allowed to come out during Victorian virtuous daylight -- are vilified (by daywalker “proper” Victorians) to the point of it being factual that they are evil and sinister and kill people. It’s not a far echo away from the arguments that Eugenicists, contemporaries of the author Bram Stoker, were making about the people they wanted to Other, control, and eventually get rid of.

(To summarize, Eugenicists wanted to improve society by preventing “undesirable” people from reproducing. The movement picked up in popularity  in the 1870s, a good 20 years before Dracula was published. Morons, imbeciles, weak etc were labels they put on the “undesirables” - not limited to: women who had sex out of wedlock “the promiscuous”, sexual deviants (from rapists to non-prudes to queers), colored people ranging from “savages” to Jews, disabled people, the debtor, the poor... sinners, all. The Eugenicists saw in these people the source of crime and societal ills, and sought to “humanely” remove them from the gene pool including using methods such as forced sterilization, instead of addressing their social or material conditions. To top it off, insane asylums were often places where many of “undesirables” (if they weren’t otherwise detained in jails or unlucky enough to not be born western european) were confined to and frequently the site where forced/involuntary sterilizations occurred. Later on in the 1900s, the Eugenics movement had an unsurprising thorough entanglement with the Nazis, and it’s clear to me that white supremacy has its roots in the same ideas as Eugenics. It’s unfortunately still relevant today, with right-wing media peddling the myth of the very much white supremacist “Great Replacement Theory” which runs parallel to xenophobic and anti-micegenation thinking.)

Maybe the identities that the privileged of a society deem unwanted or unsavory or disgusting to the point that it is wrapped up in a cape of all-encompassing evil, is just that - an exaggerated label, conflated true evils like rape or murder with deviancy or foreignness in one fell caste, to justify violence and destruction. And furthermore, the privileged classes of society use “science” and “rationality” like phrenology (racist skull profiling), actual profiling, law and order, social darwinism, and other caste frameworks aligned with the Eugenics movement to justify their condemnation on the Other, to give “evidence” of deformity or monstrosity. It is absolutely no coincidence that the gang who kill Dracula are the all the different sorts of person to support the Eugenics movement, particularly the “good” white immigrants ie the Texan and the Dutchman, as they would be deemed the “well-bred” benefactors that the movement considered “good breeding stock”, or “of good blood”.

Does it not echo the “arguments” from right-wing circles we are hearing today, labeling gay/trans people and supportive parents as “molesters”, “predators”, “groomers”, “abusers” or otherwise “defilers” of children? What does it say when "righteous voices” in our society are calling folks going about their non-orthodox lives “monsters” but call young men, nay, children defending white supremacy using guns “heroes”?

In the novel, the Count does not get a point of view, he can’t see himself reflected in a mirror, and he doesn’t have a Voice. What we the reader know about Dracula comes from the other characters’ recorded letters, dairies, etc, we do not know what he might have said to us directly -- about himself, about his world, about how he sees the other characters. Let people humanize the Count! It is not on par with real life serial killers. Reading about monsters in the horror genre is not the same as reading about a subjective character, subjective in nature like the other characters in Dracula are offered POV spotlights as subjects and not objects (well, the female characters are barely above that “object” threshold lol). Monsters of literary horror are not supposed to be people like you or I. Particularly, unlike those who get cast as “real monsters”, the real life serial killers 1) actually factually killed real (not fictional) people 2) the likes of Ted Bundy predated on specifically young women and yes used his conventionally attractive mug to do evil 3) the fetishized serial killers tend to be white cishet men, and their fanbases tend to further the narrative that white cishet men get to have their side of the story, get to be humanized rather than monster-ified, which already happens in our society. They get to plea mental illness, self defense clauses, defend their actions as “just their nature as a redblooded man [to do evil things to anyone underneath them in the social totem pole]”, claim that their bigotry is rational (sometimes even “publishing” manifestos on their “rationality”), or otherwise get to tell their story, instead of getting shot on sight, publicly ridiculed, or silenced, as the “Othered” who might challenge real irl Monsters do.

Yea, I’m reaching for my pitchfork now, cuz Dracula is putting forth ideas I as a modern person condemn now! Hold your horses - Bram Stoker was close friends with Oscar Wilde. Stoker started writing Dracula a month after Wilde’s libel trial in which Wilde was very publicly outed from the closet, lost the case resulting in bankruptcy, and then tried and found guilty in another case for sodomy and gross indecency - basically, being a queer deviant. Scholars note that this event made Stoker decide to (further) closet his nonconventional identity, enshrouding that part of himself in darkness as much as possible. There’s wider evidence to Stoker’s closeted status (linked a book below I’m waiting for my local library to lend me a copy, there are also scholarly publications on the topic as well). Dracula was published while Wilde was still serving his sentence of two years’ hard labor. 

I tried to succinctly point the queer undercurrents (and very much internalized homophobia) in the book out to someone in a comment thread somewhere and was met with “>:( you’re saying that Stoker being a sad gay boy means racism and xenophobia etc is ok”. Thanks for jumping to conclusions, I was trying to make a point of being a terrified closeted man where your formerly close associate has been ripped out of the beneficia of high society specifically colors (and likely enhances the internalized homophobia in) the book produced by such an environment. Someone like that would be more sensitive to understanding the anxieties and phobias (not limited to homophobia) of their society, and would feel the need to understand how to blend in/uproot “evil’ in himself. In the book we can see this reflected in the triumph of Christian Victorian mores at the conclusion of Dracula. But I do not deny that Stoker absorbed the homophobic/xenophobic/antisemitic zeitgeist of his time. He absolutely did (that’s my verdict as a casual reader). It was like writing Dracula was a treatise to convince himself of the “right” path, literature as conversion therapy. Academics might have a different angle to this, how Stoker’s will to fit in with Victorian society, sexual repression ever heightened, shaped his worldview, and then distilled into Dracula. It’s clear to me that Stoker very much followed Eugenicist notions of his time, at the very least. He recognized he was queer and chose to only have one child (very rare for well-to-do Victorians), selecting himself out of the “gene pool” for fear of passing on his “bad blood”. 

As this piece of literature as a foundational staple to the horror genre, I think it is important to understand the Victorian environment (historically, culturally, socially) of its origin, which enriches all the derivative works and particularly the subversions we see today. (And indeed, there’s a whole ‘nother discussion about the lasting cultural impact of Count Dracula, like how despite how all the characters tell us that he is a monster and we should shun and fear him, he has such a draw, and still fascinates and even arouses us still.)

anyway, I recommend further wider discourse in threads like this (I linked this earlier, it includes a book recommendation), James Somerton’s youtube videos about horror and queerness, book summary/spotlight for Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, regarding more thorough background into Victorian mores and queerness of Bram Stoker, here’s a great post about antisemitism and Dracula, here’s a podcast regarding antisemitism and eugenics in Dracula... and, of course, other meta discussions about the horror genre and its place as a literary tool for transgressive topics