Victorian society Essays

Victorian society Essays Victorian society Essay Victorian society Essay In the figure of Dracula, Stoker created an image of otherness. Dracula is physically other, the dark, unconscious, the sexuality that Victorian England denied. He is also culturally other: a revenant from the ages of superstition. More significantly, he is socially other: the embodiment of all the social forces that lurked just beneath the frontiers of Victorian middle-class consciousness, everything that was socially other to the Victorian bourgeoisie. He represents all dark, foreign (i. e. non-English) races; all dark, foreign (i. e.non-bourgeois) classes; and (paradoxically) the dark, exotic aristocracy, which, though moribund, might suddenly resurge. It is otherness itself, all that bourgeois society has repudiated, that Dracula represents the psychically repressed and the socially oppressed. This is reminiscent of Kipps as he represses the shrill neigh of the pony, which represents his bestial instincts, and the screaming child who represents an age of innocence which has been lost, to preserve his business-like lawyer exterior, which ultimately returns to haunt him. The intrinsically fantastical nature of the gothic novel has always allowed it to be far more graphic in its exploration of the darker realms of the human psyche. The frequent allusions to sexuality and innuendo that were so commonplace in the gothic were very titilating, yet abstract enough to be tolerated in prudish societies of the past. The transition from a child to a sexualised adult is a gothic convention, and the genre has dared to be different by reversing typical gender roles, sometimes casting the female in the ascendancy. In contrast to other genres, sexual relations are often portrayed as corrupt and depraved in the gothic, with insinuations of paedophilia, fairly blatant homo-eroticism, for example in Dracula, rapaciousness and even incest. The gothic often explores the darker nature of human sexuality, and conveys the unspeakable and taboo aspects of sexual relationships, which perhaps explains its popularity in the sexually oppressive Victorian society.