🦇😈 The Victorian antihero: Dracula as a critic to society

Stoker created a sort of super-vampire, mixing up all his features. He has many powers: he can control the weather, command animals like wolves, bats and rats and he can also turn himself into mist, rain or animals.
Dracula is a moral and physical monster, in fact he is described more as a true monster than as a romantic vampire.

His face was strong -a very strong aquiline-, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp with teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale and the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm tough thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor. Hitherto I had noticed the backs of his hands as they lay on his knees in the firelight, and they seemed rather white and fine; but seeing them now close to me, I could not but notice that they were rather coarse- broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were hairs in the centre of palm.»

The charm of the vampire is due to a big paradox because, even if he is not identified as a human being any longer, he represents the most extraordinary human being. He has been living for millennia, he assisted in the first person to the most important historical events, he has a memory of human impulses and affects he felt when he was alive. In conclusion, he knows the world and people that surround him.

The vampire is a living-dead, but he isn't a zombie at all, without memory, intelligence or feelings; a vampire is nothing more than an immortal being free from moral and social conventions.
Basically, the vampire represents all that we dreamt of being, at least once in life. So it is simple to recognize in the poem of the Irish Bram Stoker, first published in 1897, a subtle analysis of the Victorian society.

"Dracula", an epistolary novel destined to become one of the most popular horror novels of all the times, was actually a metaphor of repressions of an epoch when sex, sensuality, thoughtlessness and spontaneity were censored. Dracula is the perfect Victorian antihero, he is a personification of all the opposite qualities of the Victorian Age. He is a foreigner and a child of a superstitious culture that was in contrast with the rational spirit of the time. He is also a member of the decadent aristocracy that was totally disrespected by the new democratic middle class.
Feeding on blood has also the meaning of an ancient descent's “blood privilege” that guarantees the power. Dracula is the representant of a class that seems dead, but always threats to rise again to subvert the modernity.

But Dracula has a limit: he maintains aristocratic element and his power only in his Transylvanian environment, while when he is in front of the modernity (London) he is rejected and expelled. This ending isn't enough for the socialist Stoker: Dracula will die a few steps from salvation, out of his castle's walls. But are we so sure that he won't return?

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What do you think about this view on Dracula's character? Do you think I have too much imagination? 😉