Social Sciences & Humanities Open· 2026Q1
The Kierkegaardian ethical deficiency of the community in Stoker's Dracula
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- 2026year
Short summary
This paper argues Bram Stoker's Dracula allegorizes late-Victorian England's ethical failings not just through vampirism, but via the 'Crew of Light,' whose herd mentality reflects societal hypocrisy and inconsistency.
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Key points
- The paper reinterprets Dracula's allegory, focusing on the 'Crew of Light' to expose Victorian England's ethical inconsistencies.
- It utilizes Søren Kierkegaard's four-stage dialectic of community, specifically the concept of herd mentality.
- The analysis highlights the existential antagonism between the Crew's conformity and Dracula's subjective agency.
- The novel is shown to dramatize the dissonance between Kierkegaard's individual-in-community dialectic and societal leveling.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Deviating from the conventional view that Dracula's vampirism is the narrative center through which Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) allegorizes the main concerns and anxieties of late-Victorian England, this paper argues that it is also through the Crew of Light that the novel dramatizes the implicit violence, ethical inconsistency, and hypocrite fracturing England then. Relying on Søren Kierkegaard's philosophical four-dialectic diagnosis of community, identified in Two Ages (1978), the paper explicates how the herd mentality of the community stimulates the existential antagonism between the Crew's societal leveling and the Count's subjective agency and unwavering tendency to stand out of the crowd. The paper eventually concludes that Dracula dramatizes the dissonance between the Kierkegaardian dialectic of the individual in community and the remaining three dialectics. This viewpoint contributes to related literature by identifying the philosophical milieu of Dracula 's gothic realism and by setting a framework for further research about the allegorical gravitas of the Gothic in different contexts.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Social Sciences & Humanities Open, 2026 · DOI ↗
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Field: Cultural Studies
Cultural StudiesSocial Sciences