Dracula's Role In The Gothic Novel

The story of the vampire in the gothic novel is one that began centuries ago. Nowadays, the meaning of the word ‘gothic’ is commonly misconstrued. The word originally pertained to a Germanic tribe called the Goths, centuries later it came to describe novels such as ‘Frankenstein’ (1818) , ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ (1886), ‘Carmilla’ (1872) and ‘Dracula’(1897). The gothic novel is recognised to have begun in England in the late 1700s with heavy focus on setting to show a decaying world, with the characters following similar roles in each novel. The protagonist is almost always isolated and the antagonist is always solely evil in its actions. These classic gothic novels have inspired countless stories and on screen adaptions …show more content…
The most notorious of vampire characters is of course Dracula himself. Written by Irish author Bram Stoker in 1897, Dracula unknowingly became the most well-known vampire in history having 272 on screen appearances alone making the vampire the most filmed character. Due to various visual depictions of Count Dracula it is almost impossible to create your own image of him while reading without being deeply influenced, this being noted by Christopher Frayling in his preface for Dracula, mentioning “Bela Lugosi in Dracula or Christopher Lee in The Horror of Dracula or Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker’s Dracula”. The novel itself discusses themes of sexuality and foreignness, thought to be unfavourable topics by the Victorian public to whom it was released, yet Victorians enjoyed the novel. Although Dracula is the main influence for many vampire and horror stories, it may be surprising for some to discover that Stoker was influenced by another Irish author, Sheridan Le Fanu. Le Fanu wrote ‘Carmilla’ in 1872, predating the popular Dracula by twenty-five years. After reading both novels the influence can be seen quite clearly through both vampire