Economic Panic: Reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Abstract

A late Victorian novel, Dracula bears some ethos of that period. Though Dracula is mainly a story about vampires, after a careful reading it is possible to argue that the economic panic of the Victorian 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 as well as at work. Capitalist compartmentalization produced haunting of psychic superstructure of the Victorian society