Flesh and Blood: The Complexities of Sexuality in Stoker’s Dracula

This lecture explores the symbolic complexity of blood in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, where it signifies food, disease, and marriage, entwining life and death in unsettling ways. Blood becomes a vehicle of degeneration, transmitting lust and corruption as vampirism reproduces itself through creating new vampires. The novel evokes associations of perverse sexuality—unconventional acts that negate procreation and instead lead to destruction of life, marriage, and moral order. Stoker further subverts natural and religious structures by casting Dracula as the “father and furtherer of new order of beings, whose road must lead through Death, not Life” (p. 303). In doing so, the text destabilizes Judeo-Christian belief in a single divine Creator, exposing how vampirism rewrites sexuality, reproduction, and faith itself.