Censorship In Dracula

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Recommended: Literature of the victorian age essay

Victorian Angst The Victorian Era lasted most of the 19th century with Queen Victoria’s reign over Great Britain. During this period there was an ideology of “the modest and dutiful woman” and the “courteous man” that was sought after. Any kind of indecent or unseemly behavior was looked down upon as the people of the Victorian era were a proper people who did not act like savages. Now this perspective of crude content created a lot of censorship. Today, we are less modest with the invention of the internet, but the high society thing to do was to be prudent. Writers of that time had to be a little creative to slip salacious content into their works secretly to keep their works from being rejected from society and censorship. Bram Stoker, …show more content…

Bram Stoker uses to Mina to create a very innocent character that is violated to invoke emotion in the reader. To further this emotion, she begins to regret something that was out of her mortal control. “Unclean!”(Stoker 313). The very idea that she has been violated disgusts her down to her very bone. The men of the story seem to want to save Mina more than they ever did Lucy. This could be due to the fact that she is very innocent and they do not want Dracula to go there or because they wanted to avenge Lucy and save Mina. All of this caused because of violation. Sigrid Anderson Cordell, author of the article Sex, Terror, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Coppola’s Reinvention of Film History, analyzes a film that is based on Dracula. “Likewise, he associates Dracula’s desire for Mina with the use of film to put female sexuality on public display” (Cordell 2). This supports Stoker’s symbolism for sexuality as public display further violation in a large way. Stoker uses Mina to appall the reader when he violates Mina. Joan Acocella perfectly describes this in her article, “In the Blood”. “A terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink” (Acocella 1). There is not much of a difference between the reactions to Dracula forcing Mina to suck Jonathan’s blood and if he had instead violated her sexually..The fact that these two actions are interchangeable, clearly supports the point that the whole time the world thought Dracula was about vampires(which it still partly is), it was really talking about

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