Degeneracy In Dracula Essay

While the beginning of the 18th century marked the beginning of an interest in the ruins of the past, the 19th century witnessed changes in thought and practice concerning decay that impacted the sphere of existence. The idea of degeneracy became an essential concept in many fictional narratives due to an aspiration to diagnose reality in its potential for irrationalism, impulsiveness and violence. The arising social unrest occupied a special place in a set of anxieties designated from the concept of degeneracy, attentive to the physical and moral setbacks that befall literature and a society existing in a constant threat of regression. These modern anxieties found fruitful soil in literary works that address monstrous characters. One such example is Dracula, written by Anglo-Irish novelist Bram Stoker. The supernatural Count Dracula, a vampire, covets female victims who he can sully with his degenerative blood, turning them into monstrous characters that …show more content…
This heteronormativity, where men held a social role hierarchically superior to women, was vastly morally accepted. More recent writings on the Gothic suggest that it functions as a genre of social realism, that it “maps a plot of domestic victimization.” (Heller 2) Indeed, novels written during the Victorian era typically presented women as existing only within the private sphere, whereas men existed in the public sphere. When women become more public, their submission to the institution of marriage and heteronormative behavior becomes threatened. Marriage, an element that promotes and protects the ideal feminine virtues, is made especially precarious before the emergence of the New Woman — a term coined by writer Sarah Grand to demarcate women who undermined traditional representations of