In Dracula, wild animals, such as bats and wolves, are used to symbolize insatiable appetites for evil. The bat seeps into the subconscious, while the more blatant wolf inspires instant terror, but both are destructive.
Blood in Bram Stoker's Dracula symbolizes at least three different concepts: an essential life force for humans and vampires, the antithesis of the blood of Christ (a Christian religious symbol), and sexual desire, intercourse, and reproduction.
In Dracula by Bram Stoker, the wolves and the bats are symbolic of animalistic instincts that drive Count Dracula and the other vampires to fulfill their base desires without conscience.
This imagery includes references to and descriptions of the crucifix, blood, sacred wafer, and holy circle that are used to eventually kill vampires. Because Dracula is a story of good and evil with religious undertones, Bram Stoker uses imagery to help the reader feel more connected to the story and the characters.
Second, Lucy, Mina, and Jonathan see bats near them pretty often. Here, bats represent Dracula himself and they symbolize the vampire's desire for blood. There are species of bats in the real world that are called “vampire bats” and they actually need the blood of animals to survive.
The crucifix, a cross with Christ on it, has long been used in history and fiction in the hope of warding off evil. In Dracula, the crucifix serves as a means of keeping the vampire at bay.
Rats feature heavily in Bram Stoker's Dracula: `Rats, rats, rats! Hundreds, thousands, millions of them, and every one a life', as well as two pieces of his short fiction: 'The Judge's House' (1891) and 'The Burial of Rats' (1914). Stoker used rats as symbols of hauntings, the dispossessed and decaying nature.
It represented not only a physical barrier to the undead but also a spiritual weapon wielded by the forces of good against darkness and malevolence. The act of driving a stake through the heart of a vampire was seen as a symbolic purification, a way to release the soul of the victim from the torment of eternal undeath.
Dracula can change form at will, able to grow and become small, his featured forms in the novel being that of a bat, a wolf, a large dog and a fog or mist.
In fact, the novel depicts blood and semen as interchangeable fluids since Dracula attacks his victims in an attempt to gain his victim's “vital fluid” (Stevenson 144-146). After the death of Lucy, Arthur “feels that, as a result of having given her his blood, they are in effect married” (Roth 415).
Dracula, published in 1897, evokes these yellowback novels. Though covered in cloth, the famously yellow color of its binding materials and the red lettering of its cover design suggest connections with the yellowback that bring into view its generic resemblance and the advertising potential of its association.
But blood also contains a reference to sexual desire and sexual violence, as the flushing of cheeks, or "ruddiness," was considered a sign of sexual arousal in Victorian times, and Dracula's stealing of women's blood in the night is a thinly-veiled indicator of his desire to "take" from them, to "pollute" them in a ...
Bram Stoker wrote Lucy as a representation of the New Woman movement and its status in society. Her overt desire to explore sexual morality and status in society directly relates to the New Woman movement.
Just as the vampires repellance by the sun, moving water, holy symbols, et cetera, these things are usually for a serious metaphysical reason. Garlic is the flavoring of the poor. Garlic is strong, cheap, and common. The vampire hates garlic for it represents what is lost to him.
The novel's religious analogy is obvious: in the most basic of his many perversions of Catholic lore, Count Dracula is the figurative anti-Christ who promises eternal life through the ingestion not of sacramental wine representing the blood of Christ, but of actual human blood.
Mina is seen by Van Helsing and the other men fighting Dracula as an example of Victorian morality. Van Helsing himself describes Mina as being chaste, nurturing, and having an emphatic heart.
After Dracula's box is finally loaded onto a wagon by Romani men, the hunters converge and attack it. After routing the Romani, Harker decapitates Dracula as Quincey stabs him in the heart. Dracula crumbles to dust, freeing Mina from her vampiric curse. Quincey is mortally wounded in the fight against the Romani.
Wolves appear throughout the novel, beginning with Jonathan's journey to Castle Dracula. Wolves symbolize the predatory nature of the vampires. They are feared in the wild, and are willing to attack people in villages if hunger—and a lack of prey—forces them from the woods.
Coffins, blood, dark cloaks, fangs, wolves, rats. Other things that are associated with vampires are stakes, silver bullets, crucifixes, holy water, sacred wafer, but those aren't indicative of vampires themselves.
For example, the character of Count Dracula represents the fears and anxieties of Victorian society, such as the fear of foreign influences, the fear of loss of morality, and the fear of the spread of disease.
Moffat and Gatiss settle on this answer: Dracula is frightened of death and the Cross confronts him with a man, Jesus, who was willing to die. They reject superstition and tradition in favour of something far neater, more relatable and very in fashion. Draccy has a psychological hang-up.
Interesting fact about the “dracula medallion“: it's actually based on the real medal awarded to Count Victor von Dracula during the Vampire Wars of the 14th century.
