The Victorian age is at once identified generally as a time of nostalgic perfection and rigid oppression. It is the age of change and social advances as well as the age of the strict social structure and a severe regard for the customs of the past. During the later period, science had been seen to bring about numerous significant changes in the way people lived their lives, not always to the betterment of society and often creating situations in which the future effects were largely unknown. At the same time, there remained numerous unanswered questions regarding the role of the body and the functions it underwent, particularly as these concepts pertained to women, also considered the mysterious sex through no fault of their own. However, in this time of great social upheaval, women, too, were beginning to question their allotted place in society as more and more opportunities opened for them in the urban cen
ters of the country, providing them with a means of supporting themselves and freeing themselves from the yoke of male domination. These positions were not the equal rights positions of modern times, so it was often difficult to determine whether one wanted to sacrifice freedom for comfort or comfort for freedom. Rarely was it possible to attain both? In reacting to and examining these various issues, numerous writers of the period opted to use analogies to explore the numerous possibilities. Bram Stoker, in his novel Dracula, uses the positive and negative concepts of blood to illustrate the various social positions taken during his time, including the positive and negative concepts of blood as a sign of life, a signal of sexual passion and release, and a symbol of the continuation of generations as well as the negative concepts of blood as a signifier of death, illness and the unknown and as a sign of evil.