Economic Panic: Reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Abstract

Alate Victorian novel,Draculabears some ethos of that period. Though Draculais mainly a story about vampires, after a careful reading it is possible to argue that theeconomic panic of theVictorian society is embodied in Stoker’s text. The Victorian society is presented as in a continuous battle with the foreign investments and the shifting of the power of economy from their hand i.e. the proletariat to the invaders like Dracula i.e. bourgeois. The Victorian society is shown struggling in the face of Capitalism. With the rise of capitalism and the concomitant demise of the household as the center of the economy, the subject became fragmented and compartmentalized, a self haunted at home aswell as at work. Capitalist compartmentalization produced haunting of psychic superstructure of the Victorian society.