“In Christopher Craft's reading (“"Kiss Me with those Red Lips": Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula', Representations”, 1984), Dracula troubles the boundaries between male and female, heterosexual and homosexual. The novel 'evokes, manipulates, sustains' the 'sexual threat' of male homosexual desire, male penetration of another male, but never shows this directly.
Talia Schaffer (“"A Wilde Desire Took Me": The Homoerotic History of Dracula”, 1994) reads the novel as Stoker's response to the trials of Oscar Wilde, with Dracula representing 'the complex of fears, desires, secrecies, repressions, and punishments' attached to Wilde's name in 1895. Dracula encompasses the monstrous Wilde depicted by his prosecutors, as well as Stoker's 'imaginative identification' with him. Barry McCrea (“Heterosexual Horror: Dracula, the Closet, and the Marriage-Plot”, 2012), like Schaffer, reads Dracula as being written from the closet, suggesting that the novel depicts heterosexual marriage as a gothic prison, making “a giddy, gruesome conjecture about what it might mean to be a well-married, lucky wife”.
— Lauren Owen, Sarah Elizabeth; “Dracula's Inky Shadows: The Vampire Gothic of Writing” (2017)
“He told me about you. [...] How you fell into his arms as a swooning lily of a woman.”
