Economic Crises and Identifying Issues: A Study of Dracula and Nosferatu

• Main Authors: Kao, Li-win, 高麗雯
• Other Authors: Lio, Ping-hui
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2000
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/03726707853076320484

碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 外國語文學系 === 88 === Bram Stocker’s Dracula is the best known literary work of the vampire myth. Not only has the book been reprinted many times, there are also numerous dramatic and cinematic adaptations which draw public attention and arouse academic interests. However, one can hardly attribute Dracula’s success to a conventional sense of literary strength. Dracula’s greatest power, instead, lies in the way in which it mirrors the bourgeoisie’s fear of the troublesome issues such as mysticism, the New Woman, and colonialism. In the novel, theses controversial social problems are represented as evil power embodied by vampirism, which threatens to undermine the stability of the society and to contaminate the Western civilization. By reasserting the arbitrary dominant ideology of good overcomes evil, man overpowers woman, west defeats east, Victorian bourgeois readers can control their fear and secure the status quo. Conversely, Dracula’s cinematic adaptation Nosferatu is a work representing the pervasive fear in the post-war Germany yet offers no resolution at all. The devilish vampire Nosferatu is depicted as an unstoppable tyrant like the foreboding of Hitler in real life. Both Dracula and Nosferatu deploy vampirism as metaphors for their social crisis respectively. So far academia has managed to research in the aspects of phychoanalysis, feminism and colonialism, but none of them goes beyond the cultural analysis of superstructure. No one has ever researched on what is beneath the superstructure, i.e. the base. I propose that Marx’s idea of the social crisis pinpoints the cause of these phenomena and offers us a greater picture. The vampirism in Dracula and Nosferatu are different social crises disguised as monsters and these crises result from an economic factor─the mode of production.