Analyzing Bram Stoker's 'Monster Culture'

The Other In “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen describes how particular monsters are symbols of the culture that they arise from. He also provides seven examples explaining to his readers what a “monster” is. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, director Francis Ford Coppola disguises his character, Dracula, as a cultural problem. In his fourth thesis, The Monster Dwells at the Gate of Difference, Cohen explains that the monster is set apart from the culture that it was created in. Compared to the citizens within a certain culture, the monster has aspects outside “the norm”. According to Cohen, these nonstandard norms “tend to be cultural, political, racial, economic[al], [or] sexual” (16). Thesis IV is applicable to the presentation of monstrosity in the film Dracula because Dracula takes the role as an outcast to society. One of the factors that makes Dracula an outcast is that he is foreign. In his fourth thesis Cohen writes that “the monster is difference made flesh” (15). In both the film and the book, the audience can tell that Dracula is different because he lives in a huge spooky, gothic, Transylvanian castle. In the film, Johnathan Harker travels to Transylvania on a business trip to conclude a real-estate …show more content…
Johnathan describes Dracula as having a very intense face with a thin nose, wide forehead, sharp white teeth expanded over his lips, pointed ears, long skinny fingers and a paleness to his body (Stoker 113-14). Using extraordinary imagery, Stoker is able to demonstrate Dracula’s features of the Otherness to his readers. Stoker also allows Dracula to have the ability to shapeshift in order to lure in the innocent women with his sex appeal or to scare away the mighty men with his monstrous appearance of the bat-like creature. This is considered as Otherness because a regular English man or woman would not be able to perform this