[ID: Nine images of vintage style red and gold heart-shaped brooches with intricate metal designs. Four brooches have large red heart middles and a thick golden border, one of which has an inscription that reads “Be my Valentine” on it. Two brooches have a large golden arrow piercing the middle. Two brooches are detailed with small red and white gemstones. One brooch is decorated with differently shaped red gemstones and red swirl designs. /.End ID]
Stoker wrote Dracula as a direct reactionto the Wilde trials
Many of Dracula’s characteristics actually echo Wilde as described to the trials, and Dracula’s lifestyle resembles an exaggerated version of precautions to hide homosexuality
Stoker is basically the pro-closeted 1890s alternative to Wilde’s flamboyancy, and that comes out in how he portrays Dracula and Jonathan Harker
Like if you look deeper into Stoker’s letters to Whitman, he’s practically obsessed with feeling “naturally secretive” and “reticent”
(Also he and Wilde had some weird personal rivalry going on, since Stoker married Wilde’s definitely-not-straight ex-fiancee, though later they were friendly…there’s a lot to unpack here)
So, arguably, Dracula was Stoker’s way of apologizing for his silence during Wilde’s trials.
Some highlights:
Wilde’s trial had such a profound effect on Stoker precisely
because it fed Stoker’s pre-existing obsession with secrecy, making
Stoker retrospectively exaggerate the secrecy in his own writings on male
love.
It is difficult, Stoker admits, to speak openly about “so private a matter”
as desire. In carefully calibrated language, Stoker asks forgiveness from
those who might see that his silence is a sin-to those few nameless souls
who know his secret affinity with Wilde.
Since Dracula is a dreamlike projection of
Wilde’s traumatic trial, Stoker elaborated and distorted the evidence that
the prosecutor used to convict Wilde. In particular, the conditions of
secrecy necessary for nineteenth-century homosexual life–nocturnal
visits, shrouded windows, no servants–become ominous emblems of
Count Dracula’s evil.
Dracula…represents not so
much Oscar Wilde as the complex of fears, desires, secrecies, repressions, and punishments that Wilde’s name evoked in 1895. Dracula is
Wilde-as-threat, a complex cultural construction not to be confused with
the historical individual Oscar Wilde.
tl;dr:
Stoker is actually too repressed to function
Oscar Wilde (especially his trials) absolutely influenced Stoker
Dracula gay
Classic vampire lit really was just about exorcising one’s complicated feelings about one’s ex boyfriend huh?
