Abstract
This presentation vies to explore, briefly, and within the context of the literary gothic tradition, what the significance of the drinking of blood might be in Bram Stoker's Dracula. It is my understanding that such an act carries meaning which pertains to its object, the blood, as well as to the one who drinks, the vampire.
The blood is the life, and as such it tends to animate and define the characters who are the vessels of this exotic elixir, as though the very act of being carries weight within itself, giving blood the significance of identity. Cursed by the blood, bound by the blood, all characters seem transfixed by their own desires and relations and these I too wish to explore, as the connections extend far beyond the social spectrum, and exist too within the blood.
Their blood and their passions enmesh them, link them, in a contemplation on the balance between virtue and perversion - both a very great necessity and burden.