True, Dracula is a fin-de-siècle novel and deals with the turbulent paradigmatic shift from the Victorian to the modern, and Stoker, by creating the lecherous vampire and his band as the doppelgängers of the sexually sterile and morally pretentious bourgeois types (who are, in fact, inclined to lascivious joys), reveals the moral hypocrisy and sexual duplicity of his time. Yet, it has hardly ever been taken as offering an alternative Weltanschauung in place of the decaying Victorian ethos.
![vampire bites willing victim vampire bites willing victim](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/a_Ote8MA9IM/hqdefault.jpg)
![vampire bites willing victim vampire bites willing victim](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/v7xXfrir5qE/hqdefault.jpg)
The text has also been seen as “reinforc readers’ suspicions that the authorities (including people, institutions and disciplines) they trust are ineffectual” (Senf 76). Hence, it has been analysed as a work “breaking taboos, read as an expression of specifically late Victorian concerns” (Punter and Byron 231). The work, however, has usually been taken by the critics of Gothic literature as “a paradigmatic Gothic text” (Brewster 488) representing the social, psychological, and sexual traumas of the late-nineteenth century. The vampire from the so-called dark ages has become a symbol standing for the uncontrollable powers acting on us and also for all the discarded, uncanny phenomena in human nature and history. Much has been said about Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), the out-of-tradition exemplar of the Gothic which, perhaps, has had a more pervasive effect on our understanding of life and death, gender roles and identity, and sex and perversity than any other work of the genre.