#dracula as gay allegory
fun fact for you all: bram stoker started writing dracula just weeks after oscar wilde’s conviction…….we really are in it now
Dracula! And Oscar Wilde! YES! *drops papers everywhere*
I’ll just casually drop this here–it’s a long (and good) read, but essentially, the author argues that:
- Stoker wrote Dracula as a direct reaction to the Wilde trials
- Many of Dracula’s characteristics actually echo Wilde as described to the trials, and Dracula’s lifestyle resembles an exaggerated version of precautions to hide homosexuality
- Stoker is basically the pro-closeted 1890s alternative to Wilde’s flamboyancy, and that comes out in how he portrays Dracula and Jonathan Harker
- Like if you look deeper into Stoker’s letters to Whitman, he’s practically obsessed with feeling “naturally secretive” and “reticent”
- (Also he and Wilde had some weird personal rivalry going on, since Stoker married Wilde’s definitely-not-straight ex-fiancee, though later they were friendly…there’s a lot to unpack here)
- So, arguably, Dracula was Stoker’s way of apologizing for his silence during Wilde’s trials.
Some highlights:
Wilde’s trial had such a profound effect on Stoker precisely because it fed Stoker’s pre-existing obsession with secrecy, making Stoker retrospectively exaggerate the secrecy in his own writings on male love.
It is difficult, Stoker admits, to speak openly about “so private a matter” as desire. In carefully calibrated language, Stoker asks forgiveness from those who might see that his silence is a sin-to those few nameless souls who know his secret affinity with Wilde.
Since Dracula is a dreamlike projection of Wilde’s traumatic trial, Stoker elaborated and distorted the evidence that the prosecutor used to convict Wilde. In particular, the conditions of secrecy necessary for nineteenth-century homosexual life–nocturnal visits, shrouded windows, no servants–become ominous emblems of Count Dracula’s evil.
Dracula…represents not so much Oscar Wilde as the complex of fears, desires, secrecies, repressions, and punishments that Wilde’s name evoked in 1895. Dracula is Wilde-as-threat, a complex cultural construction not to be confused with the historical individual Oscar Wilde.
tl;dr:
- Stoker is actually too repressed to function
- Oscar Wilde (especially his trials) absolutely influenced Stoker
- Dracula gay
If anyone wants to read a very well-written and surprisingly entertaining account on pretty much everything and everyone Stoker was influenced by, ESPECIALLY his connection with Wilde and Whitman, do yourself a favour and read “Something in the Blood” by David J. Skal. It’s the most thorough recent account on everything that made Dracula and the onlly one that doesn’t shy away from all the points in the above post (Also, it won the Stoker award, which is basically the Pulitzer for horror(-related) literature - There’s a joke in there somewhere, but my brain’s too tired to craft it rn
