Dracula. In the short span of a century the name itself has become an enduring byword for the dark underbelly of the spirit world, for the romance and glamor of mankind’s darkest impulses, of the bestial intimacy and the erotic opulence of drinking another’s blood. 
When I came to Bram Stoker’s meticulously crafted masterpiece, I expected the kind of camp glee that characterizes so much of contemporary vampire pop-culture. I expected late October, early November. What I expected was lots of stage makeup and fake fangs. 
What I did not expect was an epistolary novel, which opened in London in the first few days of May. 
In the enigmatic figure of Count Dracula, Stoker has created a persona who embodies a trifecta of key societal concerns: the fear of otherness, especially foreigners, the unconstrained complexities of sexuality, and the seemingly ceaseless spiritual wrestling between the draws of modernity and the pull of antiquity. 
Stoker&#8217;s narrative format comprising diary entries, letters, and journal excerpts serves  as a compelling reflection of the late Victorian society&#8217;s growing fascination with psychoanalysis, surveillance, and the meticulous documentation of the self. In doing so, Dracula becomes not just a gripping tale but a vessel for readers to engage in a psychoanalytic dissection of the text. The characters, in their unguarded moments, unwittingly unveil their innermost thoughts, fears, and desires, encouraging the reader to undertake a psychoanalytic exploration of the narrative. Moreover, the novel acts (as all great literature does) as a mirror, reflecting the anxieties of an era rife with dread of the unknown, born from the rapid march of scientific and technological advancements that rendered the certainties of the past obsolete.
Count Dracula is the embodiment of these fears, irresistible as death itself. Rooted in Eastern European folklore, Dracula would have represented for Western European and American readers, the dark imagination of otherness; the Count is an emblem of the inscrutable, the uncontrollable, the enigmatic.The life-taking vampiric kiss becomes the ultimate act of transgression, both social and moral. But this is precisely what  makes it so erotic, and so endlessly fascinating.  Dracula&#8217;s bite is nothing less than our most forbidden desires lurking in the dark recesses of the human imagination, alluring and horrifying us with the dark treasures they seem to promise. Looked at rather grandly, the novel becomes a kind of treatise on sexual awakening emerging in the late Victorian period. It cannot be argued, no matter one what level of analysis you prefer to greet it, that Bram Stoker&#8217;s Dracula has a achieved a permanent hold on our the more macabre elements of our imagination. 
-Allen Guy Wilcox