Contemporary Horror: Reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the Age of Coronavirus

Abstract

More than one hundred years have passed since the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the novel is still a fertile ground for contemporary multidimensional studies. Critics and commentators on the text have found many allegorical implications. For instance, some have read the novel from the perspective of landowners’ exploitation of poor farmers in feudal times, finding a similarity between the vampire, who feasts on the blood of helpless victims, and the aristocrats, who feed on the vitality of underprivileged farmers. Colonial critics read the novel as an allegory of colonisation since the colonisers, like Dracula in Stoker’s novel, profit from their imperial domination of the colonised. Feminist critics read the text as an overt criticism of the emerging ‘New Woman’, who becomes an easy target to the vampire’s bloodsucking advances and is consequently afflicted by the curse of his undead, vampiric existence. This study aims at reading the novel in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic, taking into consideration the vampire’s infectious nature, the horror that the epidemic triggers, the primitive methods used in treatment, the difficulty to make the public believe in the existence of the virus, the role of the medical community in both the text and contemporary real life.