Stoker's "Dracula" can be seen as a sort of Victorian male "Harlequin" novel, filled with adventure, intrigue, and damsels in distress. And much like the Harlequin type novels for women today, Stoker's novel has an underlying theme of dangerous sexuality, the forbidden fruit. Many of Stoker's passages actually read as erotica:

The girl went on her knees, and bent over me,

simply gloating. There was a deliberate

voluptuousness which was both thrilling and

repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually

licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the

moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips

and on the red tongue... Lower and lower went her

head as the lips went below the range of my mouth

and chin and seemed to fasten on my throat.... I could

feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super

sensitive skin of my throat...I closed my eyes in

languorous ecstasy and waited, waited with beating

"She still advanced, however, and with a

when struck, which rang through the brains even

Stoker portrays the victims of the vampires as hypnotized and transfixed. They are not savagely raped or murdered, they are sexually seduced, and become willing participates, unable to resist their own sexual desires. Stoker uses the word, voluptuous several times throughout the novel to describe the vixens. When Lucy is transformed, her purity has turned to "voluptuous wantonness" (Stoker Ch.16 pp). Stoker even includes a passage of how her lips were crimson and the blood trickled down and "stained the purity" of her death robe (Stoker Ch.16 pp). Then again he writes an image that is extremely uncharacteristic of Victorian women and again uses the word voluptuous:

Bram Stoker's novel, "Dracula" is as much erotica as it is adventure. It also represents the Victorian culture regarding sexuality and women's roles in life and society. Similar to "Peyton Place" some fifty years later, "Dracula" was surely a novel kept from the hands of children and the virtuous.

of us who heard the words addressed to another"

to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1097
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)