SOURCE: Weissman, Judith. “Dracula as a Victorian Novel.” Midwest Quarterly 18, no. 4 (July 1977): 392-405.

In the following essay, Weissman perceives Dracula as a Victorian novel, asserting that the novel “is an extreme version of the stereotypically Victorian attitudes toward sexual roles.”

The sexually straightforward and insatiable woman, a stock figure in much of English literature, virtually disappears from the novel after Fielding and Richardson—until she is resurrected by Bram Stoker in Dracula as a vampire. The vampire, an ancient figure of horror in folk tales, undoubtedly represents in any story some kind of sexual terror, some terror of being weakened and hurt by one's lover, but Dracula, a Victorian novel, a novel about marriage, embodies sexual terror in a very particular form. A man's vision of a noble band of men restoring a woman to purity and passivity, saving them from the horrors of vampirism, it is an...