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Bram Stoker’s
DRACULA
Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
CHELSEA HOUSE
PUBLISHERS
Haights Cross Communications Company
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<
©2003 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of
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Introduction © 2003 by Harold Bloom.
No part of this publication may be

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dracula / edited with an introduction by Harold Bloom,

p. cm — (Modern critical interpretations)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7910-7048-4
1. Stoker, Bram, 1847-1912. Dracula. 2. Horror tales,
English— History and criticism. 3 Dracula, Count (Fictitious

.
character) 4. Vampires in literature. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Series.

PR6037.T617 D78228 2002
82 3 ’.8 — dc2
2002009418
Contributing editor: Jesse Zuba
Cover design by Terry Mallon
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula 3
Phyllis A. Roth
Dracula : The Unseen Face in the Mirror 15

Carol A. Senf
‘Different from Writing’: Dracula in 1897 27

Geoffrey Wall
“KissMe with Those Red Lips”:

Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula 39
Christopher Craft
A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula 7

John Allen Stevenson
‘Terrors of the night’: Dracula and ‘degeneration’

in the late nineteenth century 93
Daniel Pick
Purity and Danger: Dracula the ,

Urban Gothic,
and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis 111
Kathleen L. Spencer
Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and its Media 141

Jennifer Wicke
VI CONTENTS
The Rhetoric of Reform in Stoker’s Dracula :
Depravity, Decline, and the Fin-de-Siecle “Residuum”

Laura Sagolla Croley
Dracula A Vampire of Our

: Own 191
Nina Auerbach
Chronology 229
Contributors 231
Bibliography 233
Acknowledgments 237
Index 239
Editor’s Note
My Introduction meditates upon sexuality and violence, both

preternatural and human, in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Phyllis A. Roth, in a psychoanalytical reading, regards Dracula as yet
one more version of the Oedipal fantasy, while Carol A. Senf conflates
Dracula and his human male opponents so that any opposition between good
and evil vanishes from the tale.
In a Marxist interpretation, Geoffrey Wall gives us a Dracula that
secretly “discourses” on the family, sexuality, race and empire, after which
Christopher Craft finds a secret or repressed “homoerotic union” that binds
together Count Dracula’s hunters and destroyers.
John Allen Stevenson views Dracula as a “meditation upon
foreignness,” and so as a racist book, while Daniel Pick, in another kind of
Freudian reading, historicizes the novel in the Age of Charcot, Nordau, and
Lombroso, forerunners of Freud.
The late-Victorian/Edwardian fantastic is invoked as historical
context by Kathleen L. Spencer, after which Jennifer Wicke focuses upon
Dracula in terms of technology and consumption, so that her version of the
book might be entitled Dracula Typewriter.
Laura Sagolla Croley offers us a Dracula in which the threat of
vampirism “stands in for the late-century threat of the Lumpenproletariat,”
while Nina Auerbach concludes this cavalcade of our academy with a
feminist reading, in which women scholars at last may possess a vampire of
their own.
vii
*
Introduction
Iêreading the original Dracula on the verge of turning seventy-two is a
curious and charming experience. Though the tale is rather clumsily

organized, and quite without any eloquence in expressive style, it is decidedly
not a Period Piece. Or, if it is, then we are Bram Stoker’s era, after one
still in
hundred and five years. By this, I do not mean that our cinematic and
popular novel versions of vampirism greatly resemble his. Ours are distinctly
more vulgar, gory, and pathologically disturbed, and no better visualized or

phrased than Stoker’s. No, Stoker is our contemporary because his union of
sexuality and violence is endemic among us.
I myself long have believed that in some sense all movies are vampire
films, so that those explicitly vampiric merely expose all the implications of
the medium. Our relation to those enlarged, colored representations upon
the screen has something in it of Count Dracula’s potential for enjoying his
victims. Attending a stage drama, you are aware that you and the players
ultimately share the one reality, but projections upon a screen release you
from some of the inhibitions of a common humanity. How many movie
actresses and actors are raped or vamped, in fantasy, every day everywhere!
As an archaic reader, I differ from all the essayists assembled in this
volume, who employ lenses made available by psychoanalysis, Marxism,
Foucault’s historicism, feminism, deconstruction, queer theory, and the
other fashions now prevalent in our institutions of higher learning. These
essays are the best of what is now available, and doubtless they will help
many seeking approaches to Dracula.

Stoker has a fascinated horror of all sexuality, perhaps because of the
frustrations of his own marriage. He lived until 1912, fifteen years beyond
From How to Read and Why. ©2000 by Harold Bloom.
1
2 INTRODUCTION
the publication of his one successful book, but evidently suffered terribly
from the effects of syphillis, which I think hover in the undersong of Dracula.
Are we to think of Dracula as an exemplification of the violence of
sexuality, or rather of the sexuality of violence? The more than
difference is
verbal, though any distinction disappears in our vampire movies and Anne
Rice’s potboilers. Bram Stoker is unhealthy enough, though positively
restrained in comparison to our entertainments.
Dracula such as
,
it is, owes a great deal to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818) and to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde (1886). Poor Stoker cannot sustain comparison with either, as both of
them thought clearly and wrote superbly. What Dracula takes from them is
lessons in the intrusion of the uncanny into the everyday. Mrs. Shelley and
the superb Stevenson can terrify the reader very subtly; Stoker is hopelessly
crude in his assaults, and yet effective enough.
Stoker’s Count Dracula in some respects could be Rohmer’s Fu
Manchu; the two villains have varying culinary tastes, but the same power-
drive, and one is no more deftly characterized than the other. As for the
female protagonists, Stoker hasn’t a clue as to how to distinguish inwardly
between the feckless Lucy and the fortunate Mina. That leaves Van Helsing,
as a kind of monster of righteousness, and Jonathan Harker, slow to learn but
fierce once instructed, and the amiably violent “band of brothers” who
decimate Dracula’s gypsies, with a savage gusto both exemplary and a touch
disconcerting. I answer my former question by hazarding that the true
subject of Stoker’s tale is the sexuality of violence. Compared to that, the
murderous sexuality of Dracula and his three red-lipped huri dwindles into
relative ineffectuality.
Dracula is far more interesting for itsupon us than it can be

influence
in itself, given Stoker’s inferior gifts as a writer. like some of Poe’s
Rather
dreadfully stylized stories, Dracula verges upon myth because it has
contaminated our nightmares. Stoker inaugurates our sordid dilemma, by
suggesting that there are two choices only: become a vampire, or transform
yourself into a sublimely violent murderer of vampires.
PHYLLIS A. ROTH
Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker's Dracula
C ...
V^riticism of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, though not extensive, yet not
insubstantial, points primarily in a single direction: the few articles published
perceive Dracula as the consistent success it has been because, in the words
of Royce MacGillwray, “Such a myth lives not merely because it has been
'skillfully marketed by entrepreneurs [primarily the movie industry] but
because it expresses something that large numbers of readers feel to be true
about their own lives .” 1 In other words, Dracula successfully manages a
fantasy which is congruent with a fundamental fantasy shared by many
others. Several of the interpretations of Dracula either explicitly or implicitly
indicate that this “core fantasy
”2
derives from the Oedipus complex —indeed,
Maurice Richardson calls Dracula “a quite blatant demonstration of the
Oedipus complex ... a kind of incestuous, necrophilous, oral-anal-sadistic all-
in wrestling match”^ and this reading would seem to be valid.

Nevertheless, the Oedipus complex and the critics’ use of it does not go
far enough in explaining the novel: in explaining what I see to be the primary
focus of the fantasy content and in explaining what allows Stoker and,
vicariously, his readers, to act out what are essentially threatening, even
horrifying wishes which must engage the most polarized of ambivalences. I
propose, in the following, to summarize the interpretations to date, to

indicate the pre-Oedipal focus of the fantasies, specifically the child’s relation
From Literature and Psychology 27, no. 3 (1977): 113-121. © 1977 by Morton Kaplan.
v'
3
4 PHYLLIS A. ROTH
with and hostility toward the mother, and to indicate how the novel’s
fantasies are managed in such a way as to transform horror into pleasure.
Moreover, I would emphasize that for both the Victorians and twentieth
century readers, much of the novel’s great appeal derives from its hostility
toward female sexuality. In “Fictional Convention and Sex in Dracula”

Carrol Fry observes that the female vampires are equivalent to the fallen
women of eighteenth and nineteenth century fiction. 4
The facile and stereotypical dichtomy between the dark woman and
the fair, the fallen and the idealized, is obvious in Dracula. Indeed, among the
more gratuitous passages in the novel are those in which the “New Woman”
who is sexually aggressive is verbally assaulted. Mina Harker remarks that
such a woman, whom she holds in contempt, “will do the proposing
herself.” 5 Additionally, we must compare Van Helsing’s hope “that there are
good women still left to make life happy” (207) with Mina’s assertion that
“the world seems full of good men —even if there are monsters in it” (250).
A remarkable contrast! 6
Perhaps nowhere is the dichotomy of sensual and sexless woman more
dramatic than it is in Dracula and nowhere is the suddenly sexual woman
more violently and self-righteously persecuted than in Stoker’s “thriller.”
The equation of vampirism with sexuality is well established in the
criticism. Richardson refers to Freud’s observation that “morbid dread
always signifies repressed sexual wishes.” 7 We must agree that Dracula is
permeated by “morbid dread.” However, another tone interrupts the dread

of impending doom throughout the novel; that note is one of lustful
anticipation, certainly anticipation of catching and destroying forever the

master vampire, Count Dracula, but additionally, lustful anticipation of a
consummation one can only describe as sexual. One thinks, for example, of
the candle’s “sperm” which “dropped in white patches” on Lucy’s coffin as
Van Helsing opens it for the first time (220). Together the critics have
enumerated the most striking instances of this tone and its attendant
imagery, but to recall: first, the scene in which Jonathan Harker searches the
Castle Dracula, in a state of fascinated and morbid dread, for proof of his
host’s nature. Harker meets with three vampire women (whose relation to
Dracula is incestuous 8 ) whose appeal is described almost pornographically:
All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against
the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about
them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time
deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they
would kiss me with those red lips.
Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stocker’s Dracula 5
The three debate who has the right to feast on Jonathan first, but they
conclude, “He is young and strong; there are kisses for us all” (47). While
this discussion takes place, Jonathan is “in an agony of delightful
anticipation” (48). At the very end of the novel, Van Helsing falls prey to the
same attempted seduction by, and the same ambivalence toward, the three
vampires.
Tvo more scenes of relatively explicit and uninhibited sexuality mark
the novel about one-half, then two-thirds, through. First the scene in which
Lucy Westenra is laid to her final rest by her fiance, Arthur Holmwood, later
Lord Godaiming, which is worth quoting from at length:
Arthur placed the point [of the stake] over the heart, and as I
looked I could see its dint in the white flesh. Then he struck with
all his might.
The thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-

curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook
and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white
teeth champed together till the lips were cut, and the mouth was
smeared with a crimson foam. But Arthur never faltered. He
looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell,
driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the

blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it
(241).
Such a description needs no comment here, though we will return to it in

another context. Finally, the scene which Joseph Bierman has described quite
correctly as a “primal scene in oral terms,” 9 the scene in which Dracula slits
open his breast and forces Mina Harker to drink his blood:
With his left hand he held both Mrs. Harker’s hands, keeping
them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped
her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom.
Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream
trickled down the man’s bare chest which was shown by his torn-
open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to
a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to
drink (313).
Two major points are to be made here, in addition to marking the

clearly errotic nature of the descriptions. These are, in the main, the only
6 PHYLLIS A. ROTH
sexual scenes and descriptions in the novel; and, not only are the scenes
heterosexual ,
10 they are incestuous, especially when taken together, as we
shall see.
To consider the first point, only relations with vampires are sexualized
in this novel; indeed, a deliberate attempt is made to make sexuality seem
unthinkable in “normal relations” between the sexes. All the close
relationships, including those suitors and Mina
between Lucy and her three
and her husband, are spiritualized beyond Only when Lucy credibility.
becomes a vampire is she allowed to be “voluptuous,” yet she must have been
so long before, judging from her effect on men and from Mina’s descriptions
of her. (Mina, herself, never suffers the fate of voluptuousness before or after
being bitten, for reasons which will become apparent later.) Clearly, then,
vampirism is associated not only with death, immortality and orality; it is
1
equivalent to sexuality .
Moreover, in psychoanalytic terms, the vampirism is a disguise for
greatly desired and equally strongly feared fantasies. These fantasies, as
stated have encouraged critics to point to the Oedipus complex at the center
of the novel. Dracula, for example, is seen, as the “father-figure of huge

potency.” 12 Royce MacGillwray remarks that:
Dracula even aspires to be, in a sense, the father of the band that
is pursuing him. Because he intends, as he tells them, to turn
them all into vampires, he will be their creator and therefore
“father.” 13
The major focus of the novel, in this analysis, is the battle of the sons against
the father to release the desired woman, the mother, she whom it is felt
originally belonged to the son till the father seduced her away. Richardson
comments:
the set-up reminds one rather of the primal horde as pictured

somewhat fantastically perhaps by Freud in Totem and Taboo with ,
the brothers banding together against the father who has tried to
keep all the females to himself 14 .
The Oedipal rivalry is not, however, merely a matter of the Van Helsing
group, in which, as Richardson says, “Van Helsing represents the good father
figure ,” 15 pitted against the Big Daddy, Dracula. Rather, from the novel’s
beginning, a marked rivalry among the men is evident. This rivalry is
defended against by the constant, almost obsessive, assertion of the value of

friendship and agape among members of the Van Helsing group. Specifically,
the defense of overcompensation is employed, most often by Van Helsing in
his assertions of esteem for Dr. Seward and his friends. The others, too,
repeat expressions of mutual affection ad nauseum: they clearly protest too
much. Perhaps this is most obviously symbolized, and unintentionally
exposed, by the blood transfusions from Arthur, Seward, Quincey Morris,
and Van Helsing to Lucy Westenra. The great friendship among rivals for
Lucy’s hand lacks credibility and is especially strained when Van Helsing
makes it clear that the transfusions (merely the reverse of the vampire’s
blood-letting) are in their nature sexual; others have recognized, too, that
Van Helsing’s warning to Seward not to tell Arthur that anyone else has given
Lucy blood, indicates the sexual nature of the operation 16 Furthermore, .
Arthur himself feels that, as a result of having given Lucy his blood, they are
in effect married. Thus, the friendships of the novel mask a deep-seated
rivalry and hostility.
Dracula does then appear to enact the Oedipal rivalry among sons and
between the son and the father for the affections of the mother. The fantasy
of parricide and its acting out is obviously satisfying. According to Holland,
such a threatening wish-fulfillment can be rewarding when properly
defended against or associated with other pleasurable fantasies. Among the
other fantasies are those of life after death, the triumph of “good over evil,”
mere man over super-human forces, and the rational West over the
mysterious East .
1
Most likely not frightening and certainly intellectualized,
these simplistic abstractions provide a diversion from more threatening
material and assure the fantast that God’s in his heaven: all’s right with the
world. On the surface, this is the moral of the end of the novel: Dracula is
safely reduced to ashes, Mina is cleansed, the “boys” are triumphant. Were
this all the theme of interest the novel presented, however, it would be
neither so popular with Victorians and their successors nor worthy of
scholarly concern.
Up to now my discussion has been taken from the point of view of
reader identification with those who are doing battle against the evil in this
world, against Count Dracula. On the surface of it, this is where one’s
sympathies lie in reading the novel and it is this level of analysis which has
been explored by previous critics. However, what is far more significant in
the interrelation of fantasy and defense is the duplication of characters and
structure which betrays an identification with Dracula and a fantasy of
matricide underlying the more obvious parricidal wishes.

As observed, the split between the sexual vampire family and the
asexual Van Helsing group is not at all clear-cut: Jonathan, Van Helsing,
Seward and Holmwood are all overwhelmingly attracted to the vampires, to
sexuality. Fearing this, they employ two defenses, projection 18 and denial: it
8 PHYLLIS A. ROTH
is not we who want the vampires, it is they who want us (to eat us, to seduce
us, to kill us). Despite the projections, we should recall that almost all the on-
stage killing is done by the “good guys”: that of Lucy, the vampire women,
and Dracula. The projection of the wish to kill onto the vampires wears
thinnest perhaps when Dr. Seward, contemplating the condition of Lucy,
asserts that “had she then to be killed I could have done it with savage
delight” (236). Even earlier, when Dr. Seward is rejected by Lucy, he longs
for a cause with which to distract himself from the pain of rejection: “Oh,
Lucy, Lucy, I cannot be angry with you.... If I only could have as strong a
cause as my poor mad friend there [significantly, he refers to Renfield] —

good, unselfish cause to make me work —that would be indeed happiness”
(84). Seward’s wish is immediately fulfilled by Lucy’s vampirism and the
subsequent need to destroy her. Obviously, the acting out of such murderous
impulses is threatening: in addition to the defenses mentioned above, the use
of religion not only to exorcise the evil but to justify the murders is striking.
In other words, Christianity is on our side, we must be right. In this

connection, it is helpful to mention Wasson’s observation 19 of the
significance of the name “Lord Godaiming” (the point is repeated).
Additional justification is provided by the murdered themselves: the peace
into which they subside is to he read as a thank you note. Correlated with the
religious defense is one described by Freud in Totem and Taboo in which the
violator of the taboo can avert disaster by Lady MacBeth-like compulsive
rituals and renunciations. 20 The repeated use of the Host, the complicated
ritual of the slaying of the vampires, and the ostensible, though not
necessarily conscious, renunciation of sexuality are the penance paid by those
in Dracula who violate the taboos against incest and the murder of parents.
Since we now see that Dracula acts out the repressed fantasies of the
others, since those others wish to do what he can do, we have no difficulty in
recognizing an identification with the aggressor on the part of characters and
reader alike. It is important, then, to see what it is that Dracula is after.
The novel tells of two major episodes, the seduction of Lucy and of
Mina, to which the experience of Harker at Castle Dracula provides a
preface, a hero, one whose narrative encloses the others and with whom,
therefore, one might readily identify. This, however, is a defense against the
central identification of the novel with Dracula and his attacks on the
women. It is relevant in this context to observe how spontaneous and
ultimately trivial Dracula’s interest in Harker is. When Harker arrives at
Castle Dracula, his host makes a lunge for him, but only after Harker has cut
his finge^ and is bleeding. Dracula manages to control himself and we hear
no more about his interest in Harker’s blood until the scene with the vampire
women when he says, “This man belongs to me!” (49) and, again a little later,
“have patience. Tonight is mine. To-morrow night is yours!” (61) After this
we hear no more of Dracula’s interest in Jonathan; indeed, when Dracula
arrives in England, he never again goes after Jonathan. For his part, Jonathan
appears far more concerned about the vampire women than about Dracula
they are more horrible and fascinating to him. Indeed, Harker is relieved to
be saved from the women by Dracula. Moreover, the novel focusses on the
Lucy and Mina episodes from which, at first, the Jonathan episodes may
seem disconnected; actually, they are not, but we can only see why after we
understand what is going on in the rest of the novel.
In accepting the notion of identification with the aggressor in Dracula ,
as I believe we must, what we accept is an understanding of the reader’s

identification with the aggressor’s victimization of women. Dracula’s desire is
for the destruction of Lucy and Mina and what this means is obvious when
we recall that his attacks on these two closest of friends seem incredibly
coincidental on the narraitve level. Only on a deeper level is there no
coincidence at all: the level on which one recognizes that Lucy and Mina are
essentially the same figure: the mother. Dracula is, in fact, the same story told
twice with different outcomes. In the former, the mother is more desirable,
more sexual, more threatening and must be destroyed. And the physical
descriptions of Lucy reflect this greater ambivalence: early in the story, when
Lucy is not yet completely vampirized, Dr. Seward describes her hair “in its
usual sunny ripples;; (180); later, when the men watch her return to her
tomb, Lucy is described as “a dark-haired woman” (235). The conventional
fair/dark split, symbolic of respective moral casts, seems to be unconscious
here, reflecting the ambivalence aroused by the sexualized female. Not only
is Lucy the more sexualized figure, she is the more rejecting figure, rejecting
two of the three “sons” in the novel. This section of the book ends with her
destruction, not by Dracula but by the man whom she was to marry. The
novel could not end here, though; the story had to be told again to assuage
the anxiety occasioned by matricide. This time, the mother is much less
sexually threatening and is ultimately saved. Moreover, Mina is never

described physically and is the opposite of rejecting: all the men become her
sons, symbolized by the naming of her actual son after them all. What
remains constant is the attempt to destroy the mother. What changes is the
way the fantasies are managed. To speak of the novel in terms of the child’s
ambivalence toward the mother is not just to speak psychoanalytically. We
need only recall that Luch, as “bloofer lady,” as well as the other vampire
women, prey on children. In the case of Lucy, the children are as attracted to
her as threatened by her.
I have already described the evidence that the Van Helsing men
themselves desire to do away with Lucy. Perhaps the story needed to be
10 PHYLLIS A. ROTH
retold because the desire was too close to the surface to be satisfying;
certainly the reader would not be sadsifed had the novel ended with Arthur's
murder of Lucy. What is perhaps not so clear is that the desire to destroy
Mina is equally strong. Let us look first at the defenses against this desire. I
have alreadv mentioned the great professions of affection for Mina made by
most of the male characters. Mina indeed acts and is treated as both the saint
•and the mother (ironically, this is particularly clear when she comforts Arthur
for the loss of Lucy). She is all good, all pure, all true. When, however, she
5
is seduced away from the straight and narrow by Dracula, she is “unclean.'
tainted and stained with a mark on her forehead immediately occasioned by
Van Helsing’s touching her forehead with the Host. Van Helsing’s hostility
toward Mina is further revealed when he cruelly reminds her of her
“intercourse” with Dracula: “‘Do you forget,’ he said, with actually a smile,
‘that last night he banqueted heavily and will sleep late?’” (328) This hostility
is so obvious that the other men are shocked. Nevertheless, the “sons,”
moreover, and the reader as well, identify with Dracula’s attack on Mina:
indeed, the men cause it, as indicated by the events w hich transpire w hen all
the characters are at Seward’s hopsital -asylum. The members of the

brotherhood go out at night to seek out Dracula’s lairs, and they leave Mina
undefended at the hospital. They claim that this insures her safety; in fact, it
insures the reverse. Furthermore, this is the real purpose in leaving Mina out
of the plans and in the hospital. They have clear indications in Renfields
warnings of w hat is to happen to her and they all, especially her husband,
observe that she is not well and seems to be getting w eaker. That they could
rationalize these signs aw ay w hile looking
T
for and finding them everywhere
else further indicates that they are avoiding seeing what they want to ignore;
in other w ords, they w ant Dracula to get her. This is not to deny that they
also want to save Mina; it is simply to claim that the ambivalence tow ard the
mother is fully realized in the novel.
We can now- return to that ambivalence and, I believe, with the

understanding of the significance of the mother figure, comprehend the
precise perspective of the novel. Several critics have correctly emphasized the
regression to both orality and anality21 in Dracula. Certainly, the sexuality is
perceived in oral terms. The primal scene already discussed makes abundantly
clear that intercourse is perceived in terms of nursing. As C. F. Bentley sees it
Stoker is describing a symbolic act of enforced fellation, where

blood is again a substitute for semen, and where a chaste female
suffers a violation that is essentially sexual. Of particular interest
in the ... passage is the striking image of “a child forcing a kitten’s
nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink,” suggesting an
element of regressive infantilism in the vampire superstition. 22
The scene referred to is, in several senses, the climax of the novel; it is the
most explicit view of the act of vampirism and is, therefore, all the more
significant as an expression of the nature of sexual intercourse as the novel
depicts it. In it, the woman is doing the sucking. Bierman comments that
“The reader by this point in the novel has become used to Dracula doing the
sucking, but not to Dracula being sucked and specifically at the breast.” 23
While it is true that the reader may most often think of Dracula as the active
partner, the fact is that the scenes of vampire sexuality are described from the
male perspective, with the females as the active assailants. 24 Only the acts of
phallic aggression, the killings, involve the males in active roles. Dracula,
then, dramatizes the child’s view of intercourse insofar as it is seen as a
wounding and a killing. But the primary preoccupation, as attested to by the
primal scene, is with the role of the female in the act. Thus, it is not
surprising that the central anxiety of the novel is the fear of the devouring
woman and, in documenting this, we will find that all the pieces of the novel
fall into place, most especially the Jonathan Harker prologue.
As mentioned, Harker’s desire and primary anxiety is not with Dracula
but with the female vampires. In his initial and aborted seduction by them,
he describes his ambivalence. Interestingly, Harker seeks out this episode by
violating the Count’s (father’s) induction to remain in his room; “let me warn
you with all seriousness, that should you leave these rooms you will not by
any chance go to sleep in any other part of the castle” (42). This, of course,
is what Harker promptly does. When Dracula breaks in and discovers
Harker with the vampire women, he acts like both a jealous husband and an
irate father: “His eyes were positively blazing. The red light in them was
lurid ... ‘How dare you touch him, any of you?”’ (48-49). Jonathan’s role as
child here is reinforced by the fact that, when Dracula takes him away from
the women, he gives them a child as substitute. But most interesting is
Jonathan’s perspective as he awaits, in a state of erotic arousal, the embraces

of the vampire women, especially the fair one: “The other was fair as fair can
be, with great wavy masses of golden hair and eyes like pale sapphires. I
seemed somehow to know her face and to know it in connection with some
dreamy fear, but I could not recollect at the moment how or where” (47). As
far as we know, Jonathan never recollects, but we should be able to
understand that the face is that of the mother (almost archetypally
presented), she whom he desires yet fears, the temptress-seductress, Medusa.
Moreover, this golden girl reappears in the early description of Lucy.
At the end of the following chapter, Jonathan exclaims, “I am alone in
the castle with those awful women. Faugh! Mina is a woman, and there is
nought in common.” Clearly, however, there is. Mina at the breast of Count
Dracula is identical to the vampire women whose desire is to draw out of the
male the fluid necessary for life. That this is viewed as an act of castration is
12 PHYLLIS A. ROTH
clear from Jonathan’s conclusion: “At least God’s mercy is better than that of
these monsters, and the precipice is steep and high. At its foot a man may
sleep — ,
as a man. Good-bye, all! Mina!” (4; emphasis mine).
The threatening Oedipal fantasy, the regression to a primary oral
obsession, the attraction and destruction of the vampires of Dracula are, then,
interrelated and interdependent. What they spell out is a fusion of the
memory of nursing at the mother’s breast with a primal scene fantasy which
results in the conviction that the sexually desirable woman will annihilate if
she is not first destroyed. The fantasy of incest and matricide evokes the
mythic image of the vagina dentata evident in so many folk tales 25 in which
themouth and the vagina are identified with one another by the primitive
mind and pose the threat of castration to all men until the teeth are extracted
by the hero. The conclusion of Dracula the “salvation” of Mina, ,
is equivalent
to such an “extraction”: Mina will not remain the vagina dentata to threaten
them all.
Central to the structure and unconscious theme of Dracula is, then,

primarily the desire to destroy the threatening mother, she who threatens by
being desirable. Otto Rank best explains why it is Dracula whom the novel
seems to portray as the threat when he says, in a study which is pertinent to
ours:
through the displacement of anxiety on to the father, the

renunciation of the mother, necessary for the sake of life is
assured. For this feared father prevents the return to the mother
and thereby the releasing of the much more painful primary
anxiety, which is related to the mother’s genitals as the place of
birth and later transferred to objects taking the place of the
genitals [such as the mouth]. 26
Finally, the novel has it both ways: Dracula is destroyed 27 and Van Helsing
saved; Lucy is destroyed and Mina saved. The novel ends on a rather ironic
note, given our understanding here, as Harker concludes with a quote from
the good father, Van Helsing:
“We want no proofs; we ask none to believe us! This boy will
some day know what a brave and gallant woman his mother is.
Already he knows her sweetness and loving care; later on he will
understand how some men so loved her, that they did dare so
much for her sake” (416).
Notes
“
1. Royce MacGillwray, Dracula : Bram Stoker’s Spoiled Masterpiece,”
Queen's Quarterly ,
LXXIX, 518.
2. See Norman N. Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (New
York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1975).
3. Maurice Richardson, “The Psychoanalysis of Ghost Stories,”
Twentieth Century ,
CLXVI (December 1959), 427.
4. Victorian Newsletter XLII. ,
5. Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York: Dell, 1974), 103-104. All

subsequent references will be to this edition and will appear parenthetically.
While it is not my concern in this paper to deal biographically with
6.
Dracula the Harry Ludlam biography (a book which is admittedly anti-

,
psychological in orientation despite its provocative title, A Biography of

Dracula : The Life Story of Bram Stoker) includes some comments
suggestive
about Bram Stoker’s relationship with his mother. Ludlam remarks an
ambivalence toward women on the part of Charlotte Stoker who, on the one
hand, decried the situation of poor Irish girls in the workhouse which was
“the very hot-bed of vice’” and advocated respectability through emigration
for the girls and, on the other, “declared often that she ‘did not care
tuppence’ for her daughters.” Too, Charlotte told her son Irish folk tales of
banshee horrors and a true story of “the horrors she had suffered as a child
in Sligo during the great cholera outbreak that claimed many thousands of
victims in Ireland alone, and which provoked the most dreadful cruelties”
(New York: The Fireside Press, 1962, p. 14). I cannot help but wonder how
old Stoker was when his mother discussed these matters with him. Certainly,
theymade a vivid impression, for later, Charlotte wrote her story down and
Bram based his own “The Invisible Giant” on his mother’s tale of the cholera
epidemic in Sligo.
7. Richardson, p. 419.
8. C. F. Bentley, “The Monster in the Bedroom: Sexual Symbolism in
Bram Stoker’s Dracula ,” Literature and Psychology XXII, , 1 (1972), 29.
u
9. Joseph S. Bierman, Dracula: Prolonged Childhood Illness and the
Oral Triad,” American Image XXIX, 194. ,
10. Bebtketm o, 27,
11. See Tsvetan Todorov, The Fantastic ,

trans, Richard Howard
(Cleveland: Case Western Reserve, 1973), pp. 136-39.
13. MacGillwray, p. 522.
14 PHYLLIS A. ROTH
14. Richardson, p. 428. The Oedipal fantasy of the destruction of the

father is reinforced by a number of additional, and actually gratuitous,
paternal deaths in the novel. See also MacGillwray, p. 523.
16. See, for instance, Richardson, p. 427.
17. Richard Wasson, “The Politics of Dracula f j English Literature in
Translation IX, pp. 24-27.

,
18. Freud, Totem and Taboo ,

trans. James Strachey in The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XIII (1913- ,
1914) (London: Hogarth press, 1962), 60-63.

19. Wasson, p. 26.
20. Freud, pp. 37ff.

21. Bentley, pp. 29-30; MacGillwray, p. 522.
22. Bentley, p. 30.
23. Bierman, p. 194. Bierman’s analysis is concerned to demonstrate
u
that Dracula mirrors Stoker’s early childhood....,” and is a highly speculative
but fascinating study. The emphasis is on Stoker’s rivalry with his brothers
but it provides, albeit indirectly, further evidence of hostility toward the

rejecting mother.
24. Ludlam cites one of the actors in the original stage production of
Dracida as indicating that the adaptation was so successful that “Disturbances

in the circle or stalls as people felt faint and had to be taken out were not
uncommon —and they were perfectly genuine, not a publicity stunt.
Strangely enough, they were generally men’” (Ludlam, 1. 165).
25. See, for instance, Wolfgang Lederer, M.D., The Fear of Women
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1968), especially the chapter
entitled, “A Snapping of Teeth.”
26. Otto Rank, The Trauma of Birth (New York: Harper & Row, 1973),
p. 73.
_
27. When discussing this paper with a class, two of my students argued
that Dracula is not, in fact, destroyed at the novel’s conclusion. They
maintained that his last look is one of triumph and that his heart is not staked
but pierced by a mere bowie knife. Their suggestion that, at least, the men
do not follow the elaborate procedures to insure the destruction of Dracula
that they religiously observe with regard to that of the women, is certainly of
value here, whether one agrees that Dracula still stalks the land. My thanks
to Lucinda Donnelly and Barbara Kotacka for these observations.
CAROL A. SENF
Dracula: The Unseen Face in the Mirror
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Julius Caesar, I, ii, 134-35
ublished in 1896, Dracula is an immensely popular novel which has never

been out of print, has been translated into at least a dozen languages, and has
been the subject of more films than any other novel. Only recently, however,
have students of literature begun to take it seriously, partially because of the
burgeoning interest in popular culture and partially because Dracula is a work
which raises a number of troubling questions about ourselves and our
society. 1 Despite this growing interest in Bram Stoker’s best-known novel,
the majority of literary critics read Dracula as a popular myth about the
opposition of Good and Evil without bothering to address more specifically
literary matters such as style, characterization, and method of narration. This
article, on the other hand, focuses on Stoker’s narrative technique in general
and specifically on his choice of unreliable narrators. As a result, my reading
of Dracula is a departure from most standard interpretations in that it
revolves, not around the conquest of Evil by Good, but on the similarities
between the two.

More familiar with the numerous film interpretations than with
Stoker’s novel, most modern readers are likely to be surprised by Dracula and
From The Journal of Narrative Technique 9, no. 3 Fall (1979): 160-170. © 1979 by The Journal of
Narrative Technique.
15
16 CAROL A. SENF
its intensely topical themes; and both the setting and the method of narration
which Stoker chose contribute to this sense of immediacy. Instead of taking
place in a remote Transylvanian castle or a timeless and dreamlike
“anywhere,” most of the action occurs in nineteenth-century London.
Furthermore, Stoker de-emphasizes the novel’s mythic qualities by telling
the story through a series of journal extracts, personal letters, and newspaper
clippings —the very written record of everyday life. The narrative technique
resembles a vast jigsaw puzzle of isolated and frequently trivial facts; and it is
only when the novel is more than half over that the central characters piece
these fragments together and, having concluded the Dracula is a threat to
themselves and their society, band together to destroy him.

On the surface, the novel appears to be a mythic re-enactment of the
opposition between Good and Evil because the narrators attribute their
pursuit and ultimate defeat of Dracula to a high moral purpose. However,
although his method of narration doesn’t enable him to comment directly on
his characters’ failures in judgment or lack of self-knowledge, Stoker
provides several clues to their unreliability and encourages the reader to see
the frequent discrepancies between their professed beliefs and their actions.
The first clue is an anonymous preface (unfortunately omitted in many
modern editions) which gives the reader a distinct warning:
How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made

manifest in the reading of them. All needless matters have been
eliminated, so that a history almost at variance with the
possibilities of later-day belief may stand forth as simple fact.
There is throughout no statement of past things wherein 1
memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly
contemporary, given from the standpoints and within the range of
knowledge of those who made them?
Writers of Victorian popular fiction frequently rely on the convention of the

anonymous editor to introduce their tales and to provide additional
comments throughout the text; and Stoker uses this convention to stress the
subjective nature of the story which his narrators relate. The narrators
themselves occasionally question the validity of their perceptions, but Stoker
provides numerous additional clues to their unreliability. For example, at the
conclusion, Jonathan Harker questions their interpretation of the events:
We were stuck with the fact, that in all the mass of material of
which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic
document; nothing hut a mass of typewriting, except the later
Dracula: The Unseen Face in the Mirror 17
notebooks of Mina and Seward and myself, and Van Helsing’s

memorandum. We could hardly ask any one, even did we wish to,
3
to accept these as proofs of so wild a story .
The conclusion reinforces the subjective nature of their tale and casts doubts
on everything that had preceded; however, because Stoker does not use an
obvious framing device like Conrad in Heart of Darkness or James in The Turn
of the Screw or employ an intrusive editor as Haggard does in She and because
all the narrators come to similar conclusions about the nature of their
opponent, the reader is likely to forget that these documents are subjective
records, interpretations which are “given within the range of knowledge of
those who made them.”
While Stoker’s choice of narrative technique does not permit him to
comment directly on his characters, he suggests that they are particularly ill-
equipped to judge the extraordinary events with which they are faced. The
three central narrators are perfectly ordinary nineteenth-century
Englishmen: the young lawyer Jonathan Harker, his wife Mina, and a
youthful psychiatrist Dr. John Seward. Other characters who sometimes

function as narrators include Dr. Van Helsing, Seward’s former teacher;
Quincy Morris, an American adventurer; Arthur Holmwood, a young
English nobleman; and Lucy Westenra, Holmwood’s fiancee. With the
exception of Dr. Van Helsing, all the central characters are youthful and
inexperienced —two dimensional characters whose only distinguishing
characteristics are their names and their professions; and by maintaining a
constancy of style throughout and emphasizing the beliefs which they hold
in common, Stoker further diminishes any individualizing traits 4 . The
narrators appear to speak with one voice; and Stoker suggests that their
opinions are perfectly acceptable so long as they remain within their limited
fields of expertise. The problem, however, is that these perfectly ordinary
people are confronted with the extraordinary character of Dracula.
Although Stoker did model Dracula on the historical Vlad V of
3
Wallachia and the East European superstition of the vampire ,
he adds a
number of humanizing touches to make Dracula appear noble and

vulnerable as well as demonic and threatening; and it becomes difficult to
determine whether he is a hideous bloodsucker whose touch breeds death or

a lonely and silent figure who is hunted and persecuted .
6 The difficulty in
interpreting Dracula’s character is compounded by the narrative technique,

for the reader quickly recognizes that Dracula is never seen objectively and
never permitted to speak for himself while his actions are recorded by people
who have determined to destroy him and who, moreover, repeatedly
question the sanity of their quest.
18 CAROL A. SENF
The question of sanity, which is so important in Dracula, provides

another clue to the narrators’ unreliability. More than half the novel takes
place in or near Dr. Seward’s London mental institution; and several of the
characters are shown to be emotionally unstable: Renfield, one of Dr.
Seward’s patients, is an incarcerated madman who believes that he can
achieve immortality by drinking the blood of insects and other small

creatures; Jonathan Harker suffers a nervous breakdown after he escapes
from Dracula’s castle; and Lucy Westenra exhibits signs of schizophrenia,
being a model of sweetness and conformity while she is awake but becoming
sexually aggressive and demanding during her sleepwalking periods. More
introspective than most of the other narrators, Dr. Seward occasionally refers
to the questionable sanity of their mission, his diary entries mentioning his
fears that they will all wake up in straitjackets. Furthermore, his entries on
Renfield ’s condition indicate that he recognizes the narrow margin which
separates sanity from insanity: “It is wonderful, however, what intellectual
recuperative power lunatics have, for within a few minutes he stood up quite
calmly and looked about him” (p. 133).
However, even if the reader chooses to ignore the question of the

narrators’ sanity, it is important to understand their reasons for wishing to
destroy Dracula. They accuse him of murdering the crew of the Demeter ,
7
of
killing Lucy Westenra and transforming her into a vampire, and of trying to
do the same thing to Mina Harker. However, the log found on the dead body
of the Demeter’s captain, which makes only a few ambiguous allusions to a
fiend or monster, is hysterical and inconclusive. Recording this “evidence,”
Mina’s journal asserts that the verdict of the inquest was openended: “There
is no evidence to adduce; and whether or not the man [the ship’s captain]
committed the murders there is now none to say” (p. 100). Lucy’s death
might just as easily be attributed to the blood transfusions (still a dangerous
procedure at the time Stoker wrote Dracula) to which Dr. Van Helsing
subjects her; and Mina acknowledges her complicity in the affair with
Dracula by admitting that she did not want to prevent his advances. Finally,
even if Dracula is responsible for all the Evil of which he is accused, he is
tried, convicted, and sentenced by men (including two lawyers) who give him
no opportunity to explain his actions and who repeatedly violate the laws
which they profess to be defending: they avoid an inquest of Lucy’s death,
break into her tomb and desecrate her body, break into Dracula’s houses,
frequently resort to bribery and coercion to avoid legal involvement, and
openly admit that they are responsible for the deaths of five alleged vampires.
While it can be argued that Dracula is a fantasy and therefore not subject to
the laws of verisimilitude, Stoker uses the flimsiness of such “evidence” to
focus on the contrast between the narrators’ rigorous moral arguments and
their all-too-pragmatic methods.
In fact, Stoker reveals that what condemns Dracula are the English
characters’ subjective responses to his character and to the way of life which
he represents. The reader is introduced to Dracula by Jonathan Harker’s
journal. His first realization that Dracula is different from himself occurs
when he looks into the mirror and discovers that Dracula casts no reflection:
This time there could be' no error, for the man was close to me,
and I could see him over my shoulder. But there was no reflection
of him in the mirror! The whole room behind me was displayed;
but there was no sign of a man in it, except myself. This was
startling, and, coming on the top of so many strange things, was
beginning to increase that vague sense of uneasiness which I
always have when the Count is near.
(p. 34)
The fact that vampires cast no reflection is part of the iconography of the
vampire in East European folklore, but Stoker translates the superstitious
belief that creatures without souls have no reflection into a metaphor by

which he can illustrate his characters’ lack of moral vision. Harker’s inability
to “see” Dracula is a manifestation of moral blindness which reveals his
insensitivity to others and (as will become evident later) his inability to
perceive certain traits within himself. 8

Even before Harker begins to suspect that Dracula is a being totally
is troubled by everything that Dracula
unlike himself, Stoker reveals that he
represents. While journeying from London to Transylvania, Harker muses
on the quaint customs which he encounters; and he notes in his journal that
he must question his host about them. Stoker uses Harker’s perplexity to
establish his character as a very parochial Englishman whose apparent
curiosity is not a desire for understanding, but a need to have his
preconceptions confirmed. However, instead of finding someone like himself
at the end of his journey, a person who can provide a rational explanation for
these examples of non-English behavior, Harker discovers a ruined castle,
itself a memento of bygone ages, and a man who, reminding him that
Transylvania is not England, prides himself on being an integral part of his
nation’s heroic past:
... the Szekleys —and the Dracula as their heart’s blood, their
brains and their swords —can boast a record that mushroom
growths like the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach.
The warlike days are over. Blood is too precious a thing in these
days of dishonourable peace; and the glories of the great races are
as a tale that is told. (p. 39)
20 CAROL A. SENF
To Harker, Dracula initially appears to be an anachronism —an embodiment

of the feudal past —rather than an innately evil being; and his journal entries
at the beginning merely reproduce Dracula’s pride and rugged individualism:
Here I am noble; I am boyar; the common people know me, and

I am master. But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one; men
know him not —and to know not is to care not for.... I have been
so long master that I would be master still —or at least that none
other should be master of me.
(p. 28)
It is only when Harker realizes that he is assisting to take this anachronism

to England that he becomes frightened.
Harker’s later response indicates that he fears a kind of reverse
imperialism, the threat of the primitive trying to colonize the civilized world,
while the reader sees in his response a profound resemblance between
Harker and Dracula:
This was the being I was helping to transfer to London, where

perhaps for centuries to come he might ... satiate his lust for
blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons

to batten on the helpless. The very thought drove me mad. A
terrible desire came upon me to rid the world of such a monster.
There was no weapon at hand, but I seized a shovel which
lethal
the workmen had been using to fill the cases, and lifting it high,
struck, with the edge downward, at the hateful face.
1
(pp. 62-63)
This scene reinforces Harker’s earlier inability to see Dracula in the mirror.
Taken out of context, it would be difficult to distinguish the man from the
monster. Behavior generally attributed to the vampire —the habit of
attacking a sleeping victim, violence, and irrational behavior— revealed is to
be the behavior of the civilized Englishman also. The sole difference is that
Stoker’s narrative technique does not permit the reader to enter Dracula’s
thoughts as he stands over his victims. The reversal of roles here is important
because it establishes the subjective nature of the narrators’ beliefs, suggests
their lack of self-knowledge, and serves to focus on the similarities between
the narrators and their opponent. Later in the novel, Mina Harker provides
the following analysis of Dracula which ironically also describes the single-
mindedness of his pursuers:
The Count is a criminal and of criminal type.... and qua criminal

he is of imperfectly formed mind. Thus, in a difficulty he has to
seek resource in habit.... Then, as he is criminal he is selfish; and
as his intellect is small and his action is based on selfishness, he
confines himself to one purpose.
(p. 378)
Both Mina and Jonathan can justify their pursuit of Dracula by labeling him
a murderer; and Mina adds intellectual frailty to his alleged sins. However,
the narrators show themselves to be equally bound by habit and equally
incapable of evaluating situations which are beyond their limited spheres of
expertise. In fact, Stoker implies that the only difference between Dracula
and his opponents is the narrators’ ability to state individual desire in terms
of what they believe is a common good. For example, the above scene shows
that Harker can justify his violent attack on Dracula because he pictures
himself as the protector of helpless millions; and the narrators insist on the
duty to defend the innocents.
The necessity of protecting the innocent is called into question,
however, when Dr. Van Helsing informs the other characters about the
vampire’s nature. While most of his discussion concerns the vampire’s
susceptibility to garlic, silver bullets, and religious artifacts, Van Helsing also
admits that the vampire cannot enter a dwelling unless he is first invited by
one of the inhabitants. In other words, a vampire cannot influence a human
being without that person’s consent. Dracula’s behavior confirms that he is
an internal, not an external, threat. Although perfectly capable of using

superior strength when he must defend himself, he usually employs
seduction, relying on the others’ desires to emulate his freedom from
external constraints: Renfield’s desire for immortality, Lucy’s wish to escape
woman, and the desires of all the
the repressive existence of an upper-class
characters to overcome the on them by their religion and
restraints placed
their law. As the spokesman for civilization, Van Helsing appears to
understand that the others might be tempted by their desires to become like
Dracula and he warns them against the temptation:
But to fail here, is not mere life or death. It is that we become as
him; that we henceforward become foul things of the night like

him —without heart or conscience, preying on the bodies and the
souls of those we love best.
(p. 265)
22 CAROL A. SENF
/
Becoming like Dracula, they too would be laws unto themselves —primitive
[and] irrational —with nothing to justify their actions except the force of their
desires. No longer would they need to rationalize their “preying on the
bodies and souls of their loved ones” by concealing their lust for power under
the rubric of religion, their love of violence under the names of imperialism
and progress, their sexual desires within an elaborate courtship ritual.
The narrators attribute their hatred of Dracula to a variety of causes.

Harker’s journal introduces a being whose way of life is antithetical to
theirs — a warlord, a representative of the feudal past and the leader of a
primitive cult who he fears will attempt to establish a vampire colony in
England. Mina Harker views him as a criminal and as the murderer of her
best friend; and Van Helsing sees him as a moral threat, a kind of Anti-
Christ. Yet, in spite of the narrators’ moral and political language, Stoker
reveals that Dracula is primarily a sexual threat, a missionary of desire whose
only true kingdom will be the human body. Although he flaunts his
independence of social restraints and proclaims himself a master over all he
sees, Dracula adheres more closely to English law than his opponents in
every area except his sexual behavior. (In fact, Dracula admits to Harker that
he invited him to Transylvania so he could learn the subtle nuances of
English law and business.) Neither a thief, rapist, nor an overtly political
threat, Dracula is dangerous because he expresses his contempt for authority

in the most individualistic of ways —through his sexuality. In fact, his thirst
for blood and the manner in which he satisfies this thirst can be interpreted
as sexual desire which fails to observe any of society’s attempts to control it
prohibitions against polygamy, promiscuity, and homosexuality. 9

Furthermore, Stoker suggests that it is generally through sexuality that the
vampire gains control over human beings. Van Helsing recognizes this
temptation when he prevents Arthur from kissing Lucy right before her
death; and even the staid and morally upright Harker momentarily succombs
to the sensuality of the three vampire -women in Dracula’s castle:
I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me

with those red lips. It is not good to note this down, lest some day
it should meet Mina’s eyes and cause her pain; but it is the truth.
(p. 47)
For one brief moment, Harker does appear to recognize the truth about
sexual desire; it is totally irrational and has nothing to do with monogamy,
love, or even respect for the beloved. It is Dracula, however, who clearly
articulates the characters’ most intense fears of sexuality: “Your girls that you
all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be
Dracula : The Unseen Face in the Mirror 23
mine —my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to
feed” (p. 340). Implicit in Dracula’s warning is the similarity between

vampire and opponents. Despite rare moments of comprehension, however,
the narrators generally choose to ignore this similarity; and their lack of self-
knowledge permits them to hunt down and kill not only Dracula and the
three women in his castle, but their friend Lucy Westenra as well.
The scene in which Arthur drives the stake through Lucy’s body while
the other men watch thoughtfully is filled with a violent sexuality which
again connects vampire and opponents:
But Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his

untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the
mercybearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart
welled and spurted up around it. His face was set, and high duty
seemed to shine through it; the sight of it gave us courage so that
our voices seemed to ring through the vault.... There in the
coffin lay no longer the foul Thing that we had dreaded and
grown to hate that the work of her destruction was yielded as a
privilege to the one best entitled to it, but Lucy as we had seen
her in life, with her face of unequalled sweetness and purity.
(p. 241)
Despite Seward’s elevated moral language, the scene resembles nothing so

much as the combined group rape and murder of an unconscious woman;
and this kind of violent attack on a helpless victim is precisely the kind of
behavior which condemns Dracula in the narrators’ eyes. Moreover, Lucy is
not the only woman to be subjected to this violence. At the conclusion, in a
scene which is only slightly Van Helsing destroys the three

less explicit, Dr.
women in Dracula’s castle. Again Dr. Van Helsing admits that he is
fascinated by the beautiful visages of the “wanton Un-Dead” but he never
acknowledges that his violent attack is simply a role reversal or that he
becomes the vampire as he stands over their unconscious bodies.
By the conclusion of the novel, all the characters who have been
accused of expressing individual desire have been appropriately punished:
Dracula, Lucy Westenra, and the three vampire-women have been killed;
and even Mina Harker is ostracized for her momentary indiscretion. All that
remains after the primitive, the passionate, and the individualistic qualities
that were associated with the vampire have been destroyed is a small group
of wealthy men who return after a period of one year to the site of their
victory over the vampire. The surviving characters remain unchanged by the
events in their lives and never come to the realization that their commitment
24 CAROL A. SENF
to social values merely masks their violence and their sexuality; and the only
significant difference in their condition is the birth of the Harkers’ son who
is appropriately named for all the men who had participated in the conquest
of Dracula. Individual sexual desire has apparently been so absolutely effaced

that the narrators see this child as the result of their social union rather than
the product of a sexual union between one man and one woman.
The narrators insist that they are agents of God and are able to ignore
their similarity to the vampire because their commitment to social values
such as monogamy, proper English behavior, and the will of the majority
enables them to conceal their violence and their sexual desires from each
other and even from themselves. Stoker, however, reveals that these
characteristics are merely masked by social convention. Instead of being
eliminated, violence and sexuality emerge in particularly perverted forms.
Recently uncovered evidence suggests that Bram Stoker may have had
very personal reasons for his preoccupation with repression and sexuality. In
his biography of his great-uncle, Daniel Farson explains that, while the cause
of Stoker’s death is usually given as exhaustion, Stoker actually died of
tertiary syphillis, exhaustion being one of the final stages of that disease.
Farson also adds that Stoker’s problematic relationship with his wife may
have been responsible:
When his wife’s frigidity drove him to other women, probably

prostitutes among them, Bram’s writing showed signs of guilt and
sexual frustration.... He probably caught syphilis around the turn
of the century, possibly as early as the year of Dracula, 1896. (It
usually takes ten to fifteen years before it kills.) By 1897 it seems

that he had been celibate for more than twenty years, as far as
Florence [his wife] was concerned. 10
Poignantly aware from his own experience that the face of the vampire is the
hidden side of the human character, Stoker creates unreliable narrators to
tell a tale, not of the overcoming of Evil by Good, but of the similarities
between the two. Dracula reveals the unseen face in the mirror; and Stoker’s
message is similar to the passage from Julius Caesar which prefaces this article
and might be paraphrased in the following manner: “The fault, dear reader,
is not in our external enemies, but in ourselves.”
Notes
1. Recent full-length studies of Dracula include the following books:
Radu Florescu and Raymond T. McNally, In Search of Dracula (New York:
New York Graphic Society, 1972); Gabriel Ronay, The Truth About Dracula
(New York: Stein and Day, 1972); and Leonard Wolf, A Dream of Dracula: In
Search of the Living Dead (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972).
2. Leonard Wolf, The Annotated Dracula (New York: Clarkson N.
Potter, Inc., 1975), my italics.
3. Bram Stoker, Dracula (1896; rpt. New York: Dell Publishing Co.,
1971), p. 416. All future references will be to this edition and will be included
within the text.
4. Stephanie Demetrakopoulos addresses another facet of this

similarity by showing that male and female sexual roles are frequently
reversed in Dracula. Her article, “Feminism, Sex Role Exchanges, and Other
Subliminal Fantasies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula ,” is included in Frontiers: A
Journal of Women Studies 2 (1977), pp. 104-113.
,
5. Stoker could have learned of Vlad from a number of sources. Ronay

adds in a footnote that “The Millenary of Honfoglalas, the Hungarian
invasion of their present-day territory, was being celebrated with great pomp
and circumstance in 1896 —the year when Stoker was writing Dracula ”
(p.
56). Another possible source is cited by G. Nandris, “A Philological Analysis

of Dracula and Rumanian Placenames and Masculine Personal Names in
-a/ea,” Slavonic and East European Review 37 (1959), , p. 371:
The Rumanian historian I. Bogdan, who published a monograph

in 1 896 on the prince of Wallachia, Vlad V, nicknamed Tsepesh
(The Impaler), and who edited in it two German and four
Russian versions of the Dracula legend....
6. Royce MacGillivray explains how Stoker altered the Dracula story:
In real life Dracula was known for his horrifying cruelty, but
Stoker, who wanted a monster that his readers could both
shudder at and identify with, omits all mention of the dark side of
his reputation and emphasizes his greatness as a warrior chieftain.
“ Dracula , Bram Stoker’s Spoiled Masterpiece,” Queen's Quarterly, 79
(1972), p. 520.
7. It is significant that Dracula —who is portrayed as a sexual threat
comes to England on a ship named for the Greek goddess of fertility.
Furthermore, he returns to his homeland on the Czarina Catherine ;

and
Stoker probably expected his readers to know the stories of Catherine’s
legendary sexual appetite.
8. Wolf comments on this characteristic in the preface to The Annotated
Dracula :
26 CAROL A. SENF
Here, then, is the figure that Bram Stoker created — a figure who
confronts us with primordial mysteries: death, blood, and love,
and how they are bound together. Finally, Stoker’s achievement is
this: he makes us understand in our own experience why the

vampire is said to be invisible in the mirror. He is there, but we
fail to recognize him since our own faces get in the way.
9. A number of critics have commented on the pervasive sexuality in

Dracula. C. F. Bendey, “The Monster in the Bedroom,” Literature and
Psychology 22 (1972), p. 28:
,
What is rejected or repressed on a conscious level appears in a
covert and perverted form through the novel, the apparatus of the
vampire superstition described in almost obsessional detail in
Dracula providing the means for a symbolic presentation of

human sexual relationships.
Maurice Richardson, “The Psychoanalysis of Ghost Stories,” The Twentieth

Century 166 (1959),
, p. 429 describes Dracula as “a vast polymorph perverse
bisexual oral-anal-genital sadomasochistic timeless orgy.” In A Dream of
Dracula ,
Wolf refers to the sexuality of Dracula:
His kiss permits all unions: men and women; men and men;
women and women; fathers and daughters; mothers and sons.
Moreover, his is an easy love that evades the usual failures of the
flesh. It is the triumph of passivity, unembarrassihg, sensuous,
throbbing, violent, and cruel.
(p. 303)
Joseph S. Bierman, “Dracula: Prolonged Childhood Illness and the Oral

Triad,” American Imago 29 (1972), pp. 186-98. ,
Bierman studies Stoker’s life
and concludes that much of Dracula can be attributed to Stoker’s repressed

death wishes toward his brothers and toward his employer Henry Irving.
10. Daniel Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram
Stoker (London: Michael Joseph, 1975), p. 234.
GEOFFREY WALL
'Different From Writing Dracula In 189 7
F or the aristocracy had asserted the specificity of its body; but

form of and
it was in the blood in terms of ancestral antiquity
,
prestigious alliances ... The ‘blood’ of the bourgeoisie was its sex.
And this is not just a play on words; many of the themes proper
to the caste behaviour of the nobility re-emerge in the nineteenth
century bourgeoisie, but in the guise of biological, medical or
eugenic notions; the concern for genealogy turned into a
preoccupation with heredity. 1
Published in 1897, the year designated by Lenin as the zenith of imperialism,

Bram Stoker’s Dracula repeats the themes of an ideological crisis, the crisis of
the bourgeois family. But read symptomatically, against the grain of its
manifest argument for sexual repression, this text allows us to recover not
only the content of that crisis, but the forms of its representation in
discourses on the family, sexuality, race and empire. Dracula repeats this
imaginary biology of the 1890s, all those ‘scientific’ phantasies which took
wing in the ideological twilight of an economy which was ‘becoming
parasitic rather than competitive ... living off the remains of world
2
monopoly.’
Dracula is, persistently, an anxious text. Innocently, unironically, it
contemplates its materials and methods, fascinated by the evident
From Literature and History 10, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 15-23. © 1984 by Thames Polytechnic.
27
28 GEOFFREY WALL
contradiction between the archaic stuff of its narrative and the contemporary
techniques which allow that narrative to emerge. It is a folklore whose
improvisations and immediacies have been eroded and reified by being
passed through all the most modern means of communication: ‘We were
struck with the fact that, in all the mass of material of which the record is
composed, there is hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of

typewriting’ (3 3 2). 3 This final type-written archive includes transcriptions of
diverse other kinds of text: a journal written in shorthand, a psychiatric case-
history recorded phonographically, telegrames, a polyglot dictionary, title-
deeds, a railway timetable, a ship’s log translated from the Russian, a

newspaper article, the inscription on a tombstone, phonetic renderings of
dialect speech, and ‘a workman’s dogeared notebook which had
hieroglyphical entries in thick half-obliterated pencil.’ (231) All these
materials have been scrupulously compiled so that ‘a history almost at
variance with the possibilities of latter-day belief may stand forth as simple
fact’ (Preface). On the one hand, we are left with the dust into which Dracula
himself crumbles, on the other ‘nothing but a mass of typewriting’: on the
one hand the spectral desire which invades the bedrooms of the imperial
metropolis, on the other hand, its banally material residues, that ‘mass of
typewriting’, empty nets oi language which try to capture the history of that
desire.
That general anxiety is elaborated as a psychological theme: it afflicts
each individual narrator in the activity of their writing. Dracula taking over ,
the multiple subjectivities of the epistolary novel, gives a psychopathological

twist to this theme of writing. The writers recognise in their writing a
compulsive, obsessional effort to transcribe the uncanny, to establish
indications of reality. ‘I must,’ confides Jonathan Harker to himself, ‘keep
writing at every chance, for I dare not stop to think. All, big and little, must
go down; perhaps at the end the little things may teach us most.’ (257) Or, ‘I
am anxious, and it soothes me to express myself here; it is like whispering to

oneself and listening at the same time. And there is also something about the
shorthand symbols which makes it different from writing.’ (74)
The narrative movement of Dracula is towards a social synthesis of
these private writings, towards a knowledge which can only be constituted as
the relation between diverging phantasies. For there are two distinct
moments in the process of the narrative. In the first moment, a self
duplication, ‘like whispering to oneself and listening at the same time’, a self-
displacement effected by4 ‘something in the shorthand symbols’, a passage
from the terrible fluidity of phantasy to the soothing fixity of text. In the
second moment, the valorising circulation of what is written, the gift of that
text: most conspicuously, the supplementary ritual at the marriage of
Jonathan Harker, when he appoints his new wife as the keeper of his
memories, the repository of the journal he kept during his visit to Dracula’s
— ‘He had hand over the notebook, and he
castle his said to me very
solemnly:
—“the secret here and do not want know
is I to it. I want to take
up my life here with our marriage ... Here is the book. Take it and keep it,
read it if you will but never let me know ...” I took the book ... and wrapped
it up in white paper, and tied it with a little bit of pale blue ribbon which was
round my neck, and sealed it over the knot with sealing wax and for my seal
I used my wedding-ring.’ (104)
It is the wife, Mina, with her ‘man’s brain’ and her ‘woman’s heart’, who
is the agent of this process of the circulation of the text. She is the rewriter,
the transcriber, the secretary who arranges all the documents in
chronological order and composes the case (legal and medical) of Dracula.
She acquires an enormous structural importance as the-woman-who-writes.
But she also serves to articulate the contradictions posed by the feminism of
the 1890s. Before her marriage she has been a school-teacher, but now she
will dedicate her cultural skills to the service of the masculine realm of
socially productive thought. ‘When we are married,’ she confides to her
friend, ‘I shall be able to be useful to Jonathan, and if I can stenograph well
enough I can take down what he wants to say in this way and write it out for
him on the typewriter.’ (57) Mina represents a certain historical transition.
She is dimly aware of the contemporary7 debates on women and marriage, but
resolutely traditional in her conception of the duties of a wife and the virtues
of subordination. References to the ‘New Woman’ significantly precede
Dracula’s first attack ‘I believe we should have shocked
on her friend Lucy:
the New Woman with our appetites.’ (90) The appetites in question are
innocent, their object is merely an afternoon tea. But they recall Lucy’s
protest at the prospect of monogamous marriage: ‘Why can’t they let a girl
marry three men, or as many as want her ...? But this is heresy and I must not
say it.’ (62) Mina, seeing her friend asleep, briefly imagines herself as a man,
as her suitor: ‘If Mr Holmwood fell in love with her seeing her only in the
drawing room, I wonder what he would say if he saw her now?’ (91) But this
phantasy is then safely projected onto the New Women, rejected as a self-
evidently unnatural masculine identification: the New Women writers
‘...
will some day start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see
each other asleep before proposing or accepting. But I suppose the New
Woman won’t condescend in future to accept; she will do the proposing
herself. And a nice job she will make of it too!’ (91) AlS we shall see later, Lucy
as a vampire, as an openly desiring woman, is offered as an awful example of
what will happen if female sexuality is allowed to escape from its lawful
subordination within the conjugal family. Mina’s writing, in the same gesture
30 GEOFFREY WALL
of confinement, will be used only to repeat the words of others: ‘I shall do

what I see lady journalists do: interviewing and writing descriptions and
trying to remember conversations. I am told that, with a little practice, one
can remember all that goes on or that one hears said during a day.’ (57)
But Mina’s discursive position is not so simple as either she or others
would have it. Her masculine qualities have to be suppressed if masculine

discourses are to keep their sovreignty. If we examine the various
articulations of gender and discourse in Dracula, there emerges a typology
which is intriguingly close to that in Breuer and Freud’s Studies in Hysteria
(1895). Indeed, it is Van Helsing, the ‘brain-scientist’, the hypnotist, the

reader of Charcot, who proposes the rule that’ ... good women tell all their
lives, and by day and by hour and by minute, such things that angels can read;
and we men who wish to know have in us something of angel’s eyes.’ (167)
The slide in this sentence, from voice to text to image, from woman’s voice
to man’s eye (though the gaze is ideally ungendered, that of an angel),
exemplifies a regression imposed by the men upon the women. The more
resolute women can, however, escape this process. Lucy’s ‘crime’, for
instance, is to have resisted the masculine-medical gaze of one of her suitors.
She writes to Mina, ‘I can fancy what a wonderful power he must have over
his patients. He has a cunous habit of looking one straight in the face, as if
trying to read one’s thoughts. He tries this on very much with me, but I
flatter myself that he has got a very tough nut to crack. I know that from my
glass. Do you ever try to read your own face? I do ...’ (58) Mina, subject to
Dracula’s power, and warning the men that she will try to deceive them, can
be positioned as a ‘good woman’ by the ‘angel eyes’ of her husband: ‘God saw
the look that she turned on me as she spoke, and if there be indeed a
Recording Angel that look is noted to her everlasting honour.’ (228)
Good women tell all their lives ... first axiom of patriarchal ideology,
motto of psychoanalysis. But Dracula reaches beyond this simple prescription
in its investigation of masculine and feminine. There are so many other
patterns of discourse and gender which Women, for example, will
deviate.
talk to other women behind the backs of men. The early exchange of letters
between Mina and Lucy is under the sign of phantasy and the pleasure
principle: ‘...we can talk together freely and build our castles in the air.’ (57)
It is shaped to a specifically feminine idiom of the erotic and the confidential:
‘...we have told all our secrets to each other since we were children ... I wish
I were with you dear, sitting by the fire, undressing, as we used to sit; and I
would try to tell you what I feel. I do not know how I am writing this even
to you. I am afraid to stop or I should tear up the letter ...’ (59) This feminine
discourse does not produce knowledge until it has been relayed, submitted to
the masculine, deciphered by it. Otherwise it remains enigmatic, shadowy,
uncanny. Lucy, for example, on the night of her death, is in bed with her
mother when Dracula breaks into the bedroom, hei aided by ‘the head of a
great gaunt grey wolf in the aperture of the broken windowpane’. (134)
When the pre-Oedipal domain of mother and daughter is invaded by the
mother dies
phallus the from the shock, returning, briefly metamorphosed, a
modern Philomel: ‘... the sound of the nightingale seemed like the voice of
my dead mother returned to comfort me.’ (135)
But this division within discourse, whereby the feminine must be
readdressed, completed put into circulation, this division is repeated on the
other side. The masculine must relapse and regress, must find again the
Mother in order to find its lost feelings. Lucy’s mourning lover, Lord
Godaiming, the very type of aristocratic manhood, ‘breaks down’ to a
woman, to Lucy’s friend Mina. She observes. ‘... there is something in a
woman’s nature that makes a man free to break down before her and express
his feelings on the tender or emotional side without feeling it derogatory to
his manhood ... We women have something of the mother in us ...’ (204-5)
The masculine pattern of intimacy involves ‘yarns by the campfire’ (64), but
also an asexual physical contact: ‘that time,’ as Van Helsing puts it. ‘you suck
from my wound so swiftly the poison of the gangrene.’ (110) Any display of
intense feeling between men is diagnosed as hysterical, as feminine: ‘... then
he cried till he laughed again: and cried and laughed together just as a woman
does. I tried to be stern with him, just as one is with a woman under the
circumstances ...’ (158) This is contrasted with the behaviour of the
exemplary Texan who ‘bore himself through it like a moral Viking,’ (158)
Empires, evidently, are founded on a certain masculinity: ‘If America can go
on breeding men like that, she will be a power in the world indeed,’ (158)
Mina, the woman who writes, with her man’s brain and her woman’s
heart, is deliberately excluded, at a crucial moment, from the counsels of the
five men who are allied against Dracula: ‘... now that her work is done, and
that it is due to her energy and brains and foresight that the whole story is
put together in such a way that every point tells, she may well feel that her
part is finished, and that she can henceforth leave the rest to us.’ (220) The
men have formed themselves into a ‘sort of board or committee’ (210) for the
‘serious work’ (212) of destroying that sexuality, aristocratic and perverse,
which has insinuated itself into the bourgeois family, fastening adulterously
upon its women. ‘The girls that you all love,’ taunts Dracula, ‘are mine
already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine ...’. (271) But it
is precisely by excluding Mina from the man’s work of science that the men
condemn her to the enclosed world of phantasy and desire. Left alone, while
they are out hunting Dracula, she becomes his victim at the moment when
she is resolving to become, precisely, the good woman who tells all her life:
32 GEOFFREY WALL
‘I still keep my journal as usual. Then if he [her husband] has feared of my

trust I shall show it to him, with every thought of my heart put down for his
dear eyes to read,’ (228) This section of the text enacts, as it were, a fable of
repression, a repression that follows the line of sexual difference and the
social relations that are constructed upon it. That which is excluded, the
woman and her desire, returns, embodied in the secret language of the
hysterical symptom, or in the theatricality of the perversion. Mina, like the
hysterics treated by Breuer and Freud in the 1880s, ‘forms conclusions of her
own ... but she will not or she cannot give them utterance ... in some
mysterious way Mrs Harker’s tongue is tied’. (284) And, like Anna O., Mina
proposes the form of her treatment, hypnosis, the talking cure. This secret
language released from the hysterical body is both speech and writing: ‘The
answer came dreamily, but with intention. I have heard her using the same
tonewhen reading her short-hand notes.’ (275)
The desire which is transcribed in the conjugal journal, or confided,
between women, undressing by the fireside, regulated, ordered and put to
work within the conjugal family, deciphered under hypnosis, codified under
the masculine and the feminine, this desire is never to be arrested or fixed by
its conscious representations. There is, in Dracula, that ‘other scene’, that
theatre of the Imaginary where is enacted, corporeally, all that has been
banished from the conversations in the drawing room, from the ‘small world
of happiness’. 5 These erotic tableaux scenes of sexual discovery, follow the
,
codes of a specific theatricality which is not that of Freud’s classical Athens,

but that of the Victorian theatre, the theatre in which Bram Stoker himself
worked for thirty years as secretary to Henry Irving. It was a theatre of
spectacle, of melodrama, of clear moral symbolism, a lavish ethical-
sentimental picture-book; it was a theatre, in Stoker’s own definition, ‘whose
mechanism of exploiting thoughts is by means of the human body’. 5 The
bodies in question, those of Stoker and Irving, spectator and actor, both
underwent a profound, reciprocal, erotic crisis in their first encounter. Irving
was reciting a poem to a student audience in a Dublin hotel drawing room
after dinner. Stoker recalls, in his memoir of Irving, that at the end of the
recitation, ‘after a few seconds of stony silence, I burst out into something
like a violent fit of hysterics ... so profound was the sense of his dominance
...I was as men go a strong man, physically immensely strong ... I was no
hysterical subject ... no weak individual yielding to a superior emotional force
... my capacity for receptive emotion was something akin in forcefulness to
his power of creating it’. The obvious psychobiographical relation between
Irving and Dracula, between Stoker and Harker, is — it seems to me —of less
interest than that theatricalisation of the sexual which informs the text. The
‘scientific, sceptical, matter-of-fact nineteenth century’ (212) equips its
world-historical representatives, three Englishmen, a Texan and a
Dutchman, its present, its future and its past, equips them with phonograph,
typewriter and railway timetable in the struggle to defend woman, family and
empire against the archaic remnant of a feudal aristocracy. They enter that
‘other scene’ to find themselves at a performance in Henry Irving’s Lyceum.
Mina, for example, looking for the sleepwalking Lucy on the cliffs of Whitby,
relishes the excellence of the lighting:
There was a bright full moon, with heavy black driving clouds,
which threw the whole scene into a fleeting diorama of light and
shade as they sailed across ... as the edge of a narrow band of light
... moved across, the church and the churchyard gradually
became visible ... there on our favourite seat, the silver light of
the moon struck a half-reclining figure, snowy white. The
coming of the cloud was too quick for me to see much, for
shadow shut down on light almost immediately ... something
dark stood behind the seat where the white figure shone, and bent
over it ... something raised a head, and from where I was I could
see a white face and gleaming red eyes. (92)
Or, more intimately, more elaborately, the scene disclosed when the men
break into Mina’s bedroom:
The moonlight was so bright that through the thick yellow blind
the room was light enough to see. On the bed beside the window
lay the form of Jonathan Harker, his face flushed and breathing
heavily as though in a stupor. Kneeling on the near edge of the
wife. By her
bed facing outwards was the white clad figure of his
side stood a tall, thin man dad
With his left hand he
in black ...
held both Mrs Harker’s hands, keeping them away with her arms
at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck,
forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was
smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s
bare breast which was shown by his torn-open dress.The attitude
of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s
nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink. (249)
What, we might ask, is being enacted in this scene? What anxious phantasy
has been given body on this brightly-lit marriage bed? To answer such a
question, we need to look at the forms of the family, the social relations
34 GEOFFREY WALL
which Dracula proposes. Dracula himself offers the pleasures of perversion in
place of the repressions of hysteria. He is the predatory libertine who will
conquer the world by means of an Unholy Family of which he is the

incestuous father. He propogates by a sterile metamorphosis, fastening upon
the already living, bestowing his grotesque immortality, an eternity of
sadistic pleasures emancipated from the imperatives of biology. Dracula’s
theft of blood defiles the patrimony, disrupts the ordered exchange of
women, property and names, dissolves the serene continuity of the imperial
Anglo-Saxon race. His object of attack is London itself, the metropolis from
which capital sets sail on its world voyages; there, in Jonathan Harker’s
words, ‘for centuries to come he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate
his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons
to batten on the helpless.’ (54) A Transylvanian Empire to supplant the
British. Dracula, it is important to add, is a richly detailed historical type, the
representative of the archaic neo-feudal social formations of Eastern Europe

which had survived well into the ‘scientific, sceptical, matter-of-fact
nineteenth century’. ‘Here,’ he boasts to Harker, ‘I am noble; I am boyar: the
common people know me and I am master’. (23) In the psychic geography of

the continent, this Transylvania is Europe’s unconscious:
There are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our

own Ordnance Survey ... one of the wildest and least- known
portions of Europe. (23)
... every known superstition in the world is gathered into the

horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort
of imaginative whirlpool. (4)
there are deep caverns and fissures that reach none know whither
( 211 )
... every speck of dust that whirls in the wind a devouring monster
in embryo. (311)
Horseshoe, whirlpool, cavern, fissure, every speck of dust, a monster in

embryo: as well as the historical-political threat of a counter-empire, Dracula
carries a biological phantasy, a masculine nightmare of femininity, of the
female body, out of control, ingesting and spawning indiscriminately,
violating the territories of the body, the home and the state. It is Lucy, on the
eve of her marriage, whose heretically polygamous wish
— ‘Why can’t they let
a girl marry three men?’ (62) — initiates this process, this dissolution of the
body politic, which ends only with the birth, on the last page, of Mina’s son,
the son whose ‘bundle of names links all our little band of men together’.
(332) Between these two moments, reproduction and circulation of every
kind is under threat. All secrecies, all privacies, all territories and rules for
contact between bodies are unravelling. Much masculine ingenuity is
devoted to the creation of sealed and impregnable spaces, where what is in
stays in, where what is out stays out. Bedrooms with charmed windows,
asylums with locked doors, coffins with lids screwed down, graves properly
inhabited and accurately inscribed, diaries tied in blue ribbon: all in vain.
Windows are broken, locks are picked, lunatics escape, coffins open,
tombstones tell lies and graves are empty, women walk in their sleep and talk
under hypnosis, men have wickedly voluptuous dreams and hysterical

attacks, blood is sucked from the neck and transfused from the veins in the
arm. ‘And so,’ laments Van Helsing, ‘the circle goes on ever- widening.’ (193)
The centre of this circle ever-widening is, explicitly, female sexuality. Lucy,
in her vampire incarnation, exemplifies that ‘sweetness turned to
adamantine, heartless cruelty, purity to voluptuous wantonness’ (189)
... the eyes seemed to throw out sparks of hell-fire, her brows
were wrinkled as though the folds of flesh were the coils of
Medusa’s snakes, and the lovely blood-stained mouth grew to an
open square. (190)
Recalling Freud’s interpretation of the Medusa, 6 it comes as no surprise that

Lucy’s punishment-salvation is to be effected by means of a monstruous
phallus:
a round wooden stake some two and a half or three inches thick
and about three feet long ... one end hardened in the fire and
sharpened to a fine point. (193)
to be wielded by her cheated lover. ‘Brave lad!’ says Van Helsing, paternally.
‘A moment’s courage and it is done.’ (194) This ritual penetration is enacted
on the day after the cancelled wedding:
He struck with all his might. The Thing in the coffin writhed;
and a hideous blood-curdling screech came from the opened red
lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild
contortions; the sharp white teeth clamped together until the lips
were cut and the mouth was smeared with crimson foam. But
Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his
36 GEOFFREY WALL
untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the
mercy-bearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart
welled and spurted up round it. (194)
To conclude, a fragment of masculine conversation:
Then we had supper upstairs in our shirtsleeves (at the moment I

am writing in a somewhat more advanced neglige), and then
came a lengthy medical conversation on moral insanity and
nervous diseases and strange case-histories —your friend Bertha
Pappenheim also cropped up —and then we became rather
personal and very intimate and he told me a number of things
about his wife and children and asked me to repeat what he had
said only ‘after you are married to Martha’. And then I opened up
and said: This same Martha ... is in reality a sweet Cordelia, and
we are already on terms of the closest intimacy and can say
anything to each other. Whereupon he said he too always calls his
wife by that name because she is incapable of displaying affection
to others, even including her own father. 7
Two doctors talking, professionally, speculatively, with all the intimacy and
informality of being in shirt-sleeves after supper. Their conversation is that
of colleagues, but also that of not-quite-equals, senior and junior, the
married and the merely engaged. But professional secrets lead to family
secrets, to the danger that these secrets may continue to circulate beyond the
closed circle of the medical conversation. They may, through the networks
of love and friendship, reach the ears of the patient in question.
The two doctors are Freud and Joseph Breuer, co-authors of the Studies
on Hysteria (1895), an investigation of femininity and the family written from
within the same ideological moment as Dracula. This account of their
conversation is part of one of the many letters that Freud wrote to Martha
Bernays during the four years of their engagement. Martha’s friend Bertha
Pappenheim, the subject of the ‘strange case-history’, will be known to
posterity as Anna O., the first case of hysteria to be made intelligible. Read
alongside that case-history, Freud’s letter to Martha exhibits, in its
protestations of intimacy and its actual reticence, that same division, those
same articulations of gender and discourse that we have found in Dracula. We
know that Freud and Breuer had discussed the details of Anna O. —Bertha
Pappenheim —repeatedly; 8 that Breuer, about this time, had confided
despairingly to Freud that Anna-Bertha was ‘quite unhinged’, wishing that
‘she would die and so be released from her suffering’; 9 that Breuer had ‘fled
the house in a cold sweet’ 10 when faced with Anna-Bertha’s phantom

pregnancy at his hands.
None of this emerges in the letter to Martha. Instead, in place of the

‘unhinged’ Bertha, we meet the figure of ‘sweet Cordelia’, potent fiction of
feminine virtue, one who commands herself to ‘love, and be silent’. This
Cordelia is summoned to fill the place of those three real women, Bertha
Pappenheim, Frau Breuer, Martha Bernays: ‘incapable of displaying affection
to others’, a punctual conjugal desire, cleansed of anxieties, jealousies,
hysteria.
Notes
1. M. Foucault, Histoire de la sexualite: la volonte de savoir (Paris, 1976)

pp. 164-5. my translation.
2. E.J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (London, 1968) p. 192
3. Page reference to Dracula incorporated into the text refer to L. Woolf
(ed.), The Annotated Dracula (London, 1976).
4. E.L. Freud (ed.), Letters of Sigmund Freud (London, 1970)
p.45.
10.
5. B. Stoker, ‘The Censorship of Fiction’ in The Nineteenth Century
(London, Sept. 1908) p.481.
6. S. Freud, The Complete Psychological Works Vol. 18, pp.273-4.
7. Letters of Sigmund Freud p.56. ,
8. E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (ed. Trilling & Marcus)
London, 1964 p. 204.
9. Ibid, p.204.
Ibid, p.203.
$
CHRISTOPHER CRAFT
“Kiss Me with Those Red Lips”:

Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula
VV hen Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu observed in Carmilla (1872) that “the

vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence resembling
the passion of love” and that vampiric pleasure is heightened “by the gradual
approaches of an artful courtship,” he identified clearly the analogy between
monstrosity and sexual desire that would prove, under a subsequent Freudian
stimulus, paradigmatic for future readings of vampirism. 1 Modern critical
accounts of Dracula for instance, almost universally agree that vampirism

,
both expresses and distorts an originally sexual energy. That distortion, the
representation of desire under the defensive mask of monstrosity, betrays the
fundamental psychological ambivalence identified by Franco Moretti when
he writes that “vampirism is an excellent example of the identity of desire and
fear.” 2 This interfusion of sexual desire and the fear that the moment of
erotic fulfillment may occasion the erasure of the conventional and integral
self informs both the central action in Dracula and the surcharged emotion
of the characters about to be kissed by “those red lips.” 3 So powerful an
ambivalence, generating both errant erotic impulses and compensatory
anxieties, demands a strict, indeed an almost schematic formal management
of narrative material. In Dracula Stoker borrows from Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde a narrative
strategy characterized by a predictable, if variable, triple rhythm. Each of
From Representations 8 (Fall 1984): 107-133. © 1984 by the Regents of the University of
California.
39
$
40 CHRISTOPHER CRAFT
these texts first invites or admits a monster, then entertains and is entertained
by monstrosity for some extended duration, until in its closing pages it expels
or repudiates the monster and all the disruption that he/she/it brings. 4
Obviously enough, the first element in this triple rhythm corresponds
formally to the text’s beginning or generative moment, to its need to produce
the monster, while the third element corresponds to the text’s terminal
moment, to its need both to destroy the monster it has previously admitted
and to end the narrative that houses the monster. Interposed between these
antithetical gestures of admission and expulsion is the gothic novel’s
prolonged middle, 5 during which the text affords its ambivalence a degree of
play intended to produce a pleasurable, indeed a thrilling anxiety. Within its
extended middle, the gothic novel entertains its resident demon — is, indeed,
entertained by it —and the monster, now ascendent in its strength, seems for
a time potent enough to invert the “natural” order and overwhelm the
comforting closure of the text. That threat, of course, is contained and finally
nullified by the narrative requirement that the monster be repudiated and the
world of normal relations restored; thus, the gesture of expulsion,
compensating for the original irruption of the monstrous, brings the play of
monstrosity to its predictable close. This narrative rhythm, whose tripartite
cycle of admission-entertamment-expulsion enacts sequentially an essentially

simultaneous psychological equivocation, provides aesthetic management of
the fundamental ambivalence that motivates these texts and our reading of
them.
While such isomorphism of narrative method obviously implies
affinities and among these different texts, it does not argue
similarities
identity of meaning. However similar Frankenstein, Dr. Jkkyll and Mr. Hyde,
and Dracula may be, differences nevertheless obtain, and these differences
bear the impress of authorial, historical, and institutional pressures. This
essay therefore offers not a reading of monstrosity in general, but rather an
account of Bram Stoker’s particular articulation of the vampire metaphor in
Dracula a book whose fundamental anxiety, an equivocation about the
relationship between desire and gender, repeats, with a monstrous difference,
a pivotal anxiety of late Victorian culture. Jonathan Harker, whose diary
opens the novel, provides Dracula's most precise articulation of this anxiety.
About to be kissed by the “weird sisters” (64), the incestuous vampiric

daughters who share Castle Dracula with the Count, a supine Harker thrills
to a double passion:
All three had brilliant white teeth, that shone like pearls against
the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about

them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some
Kiss Me with Those Red Lips 41
deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they

would kiss me with those red lips. (51; emphasis added)
Immobilized by the competing imperatives of “wicked desire” and “deadly

fear,” Harker awaits an erotic fulfillment that entails both the dissolution of
the boundaries of the self and the thorough .subversion of conventional

Victorian gender codes, whicfrconstrained the mobility of sexual desire and
varieties of genital behavior by according to the more active male the right
and responsibility of vigorous appetite, while requiring the more passive
female to “suffer and be still.” John Ruskin, concisely formulating Victorian
conventions of sexual difference, provides us with a useful synopsis: “The
man’s power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the
creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and
invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest. ...” Woman,
predictably enough, bears a different burden: “She must be enduringly,
incorruptibly, good; instinctively, infallibly wise —wise, not for self-
development, but for self-renunciation ... wise, not with the narrowness of
insolent and loveless pride, but with the passionate gentleness of an infinitely
variable, because infinitely applicable, modesty of service — the true
changefulness of woman.” 6 Stoker, whose vampiric women exercise a far
more dangerous “changefulness” than Ruskin imagines, anxiously inverts
this conventional pattern, as virile Jonathan Harker enjoys a “feminine”
passivity and awaits a delicious penetration from a woman whose demonism
is figured as the power to penetrate. A swooning desire for an overwhelming
penetration and an intense aversion to the demonic potency empowered to
gratify that desire compose the fundamental motivating action and emotion
in Dracula.
This ambivalence, always excited by the imminence of the vampiric

kiss, finds its most sensational representation in the image of the Vampire
Mouth, the central and recurring image of the novel: “There was a deliberate
voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive ... I could see in the
moonlight the moisture shining on the red tongue as it lapped the white
sharp teeth” (52). That is Harker describing one of the three vampire women
at Castle Dracula. Here is Dr. Seward’s description of the Count: “His eyes
flamed red with devilish passion; the great nostrils of the white aquiline nose
opened wide and quivered at the edges; and the white sharp teeth, behind the
full lips of the blood-dripping mouth, champed together like those of a wild
beast” (336). As the primary site of erotic experience in Dracula this ,
mouth
equivocates, giving the lie to the easy separation of the masculine and the
feminine. Luring at first with an inviting orifice, a promise of red softness,
but delivering instead a piercing bone, the vampire mouth fuses and confuses
t
what Dracula’s civilized nemesis, Van Helsing and his Crew of Light, 7 works
so hard to separate —the gender-based categories of the penetrating and the
receptive, or, to use Van Helsing’s language, the complementary categories
of “brave men” and “good women.” With its soft flesh barred by hard bone,
its mouth compels opposites and contrasts into a
red crossed by white, this
frightening unity, and it asks some disturbing questions. Are we male or are
we female? Do we have penetrators or orifices? And if both, what does that
mean? And what about our bodily fluids, the red and the white? What are the
relations between blood and semen, milk and blood? Furthermore, this
mouth, bespeaking the subversion of the stable and lucid distinctions of

gender, is mouth of all vampires, male and female.
the
Yet we must remember that the vampire mouth is first of all Dracula’s
mouth, and that all subsequent versions of it (in Dracula all vampires other
than the Count are female) 8 merely repeat as diminished simulacra the desire
of the Great Original, that “father or furtherer of a new order of beings”
(360). Dracula himself, calling his children “my jackals to do my bidding
when I want to feed,” identifies the systematic creation of female surrogates
who enact his will and desire (365). This should remind us that the novel’s
opening anxiety, its first articulation of the vampiric threat, derives from
Dracula’s hovering interest in Jonathan Harker; the sexual threat that this
novel first evokes, manipulates, sustains, but never finally represents is that
Dracula will seduce, penetrate, drain another male. The suspense and power
of Dracula’s opening section, of that phase of the narrative which we have
called the invitation to monstrosity, proceeds precisely from this unfulfilled
sexual ambition. Dracula’s desire to fuse with a male, most explicitly evoked
when Harker cuts himself shaving, subtly and dangerously suffuses this text.
Always postponed and never directly enacted, this desire finds evasive
fulfillment in an important series of heterosexual displacements.
Dracula’s ungratified desire to vamp Harker is fulfilled instead by his
three vampiric daughters, whose anatomical femininity permits, because it
masks, the silently interdicted homoerotic embrace between Harker and the
Count. Here, in a displacement typical both of this text and the gender-
anxious culture from which it arose, an implicitly homoerotic desire achieves
representation as a monstrous heterosexuality, as a demonic inversion of
normal gender relations. Dracula’s daughters offer Harker a feminine form
but a masculine penetration:
Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range
of my mouth and chin and seemed to fasten on my throat.... I
could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the
supersensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of the two
sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in

a langorous ecstasy and waited —waited with a beating heart. (52)
This moment, constituting the text’s most direct and explicit representation
of a male’s desire to be penetrated, is governed by a double deflection: first,
the agent of penetration is nominally and anatomically (from the mouth

down, anyway) female; and second, this dangerous moment, fusing the
maximum of desire and the maximum of anxiety, is poised precisely at the
brink of penetration. Here the “two sharp teeth,” just “touching” and
“pausing” there, stop short of the transgression which would unsex Harker
and toward which this text constantly aspires and then retreats: the actual
penetration of the male.

This moment is interrupted, this penetration denied. Harker ’s pause at
the end of the paragraph (“waited —waited with a beating heart”), which
seems to anticipate an imminent piercing, in fact anticipates not the
completion but the interruption of the scene of penetration. Dracula himself
breaks into the room, drives thewomen away from Harker, and admonishes
them:“How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him
when I had forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me” (53).
Dracula’s intercession here has two obvious effects: by interrupting the scene
of penetration, it suspends and disperses throughout the text the desire
maximized at the brink of penetration, and it repeats the threat of a more
direct libidinous embrace between Dracula and Harker. Dracula’s taunt,
“This man belongs to me,” is suggestive enough, but at no point subsequent
to this moment does Dracula kiss Harker, preferring instead to pump him for
his knowledge of English law, custom, and language. Dracula, soon
departing for England, leaves Harker to the weird sisters, whose final
penetration of him, implied but never represented, occurs in the dark

interspace to which Harker’s journal gives no access.
Hereafter Dracula will never represent so directly a male’s desire to be

penetrated; once in England Dracula, observing a decorous heterosexuality,
vamps only women, in particular Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker. The
novel, nonetheless, does not dismiss homoerotic desire and threat; rather it
simply continues to diffuse and displace it. Late in the text, the Count
himself announces a deflected homoeroticism when he admonishes the Crew
of Light thus: “My revenge is just begun! I spread it over the centuries, and
time is on my side. Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through
them you and others shall yet be mine Here Dracula
...” (365; italics added).
specifies the process of substitution by which “the girls that you all love”
mediate and displace a more direct communion among males. Van Helsing,
who provides for Lucy transfusions designed to counteract the dangerous
»
influence of the Count, confirms Dracula’s declaration of surrogation; he

knows that once the transfusions begin, Dracula drains from Lucy’s veins not
her blood, but rather blood transferred from the veins of the Crew of Light:
“even we four who gave our strength to Lucy it also is all to him [57V]” (244).
Here, emphatically, is another instance of the heterosexual displacement of a
desire mobile enough to elude the boundaries of gender. Everywhere in this
text such desire seeks a strangely deflected heterosexual distribution; only

through women may men touch.
The representation of sexuality in Dracula ,
then, registers a powerful
ambivalence in its identification of desire and fear. The text releases a
sexuality so mobile and polymorphic that Dracula may be best represented

as bat or wolf or floating dust; yet this effort to elude the restrictions upon
desire encoded in traditional conceptions of gender then constrains that
desire through a series of heterosexual displacements. Desire’s excursive
mobility is always filtered in Dracula through the mask of a monstrous or
demonic heterosexuality. Indeed, Dracula’s mission in England is the
creation of a race of monstrous women, feminine demons equipped with
masculine devices. This monstrous heterosexuality is apotropaic for two
reasons: first, because it masks and deflects the anxiety consequent to a more
direct representation of same sex eroticism; and second, because in
imagining a sexually aggressive woman as a demonic penetrator, as a usurper
of a prerogative belonging “naturally” to the other gender, it justifies, as we
shall see later, a violent expulsion of this deformed femininity.
In its particular formulation of erotic ambivalence, in its contrary need
both to liberate and constrain a desire indifferent to the prescriptions of
gender by figuring such desire as monstrous heterosexilality, Dracula may
seem at first idiosyncratic, anomalous, merely neurotic. This is not the case.
Dracula presents a characteristic, if hyperbolic, instance of Victorian anxiety

over the potential fluidity of gender roles 9 and this text’s defensiveness
,
toward the mobile sexuality it nonetheless wants to evoke parallels

remarkably other late Victorian accounts of same sex eroticism, of desire in
which the “sexual instincts” were said to be, in the words of John Addington
Symonds, “improperly correlated to [the] sexual organs .” 10 During the last
decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, English
writers produced their first sustained discourse about the variability of sexual
desire, with a special emphasis upon male homoerotic love, which had
already received indirect and evasive endorsement from Tennyson in “In
Memoriam” and from Whitman in the “Calamus” poems. The preferred
taxonomic label under which these writers categorized and examined such
sexual desire was not, as we might anticipate, “homosexuality” but rather
“sexual inversion,” a classificatory term involving a complex negotiation
between socially encoded gender norms and a sexual mobility that would
seem at first unconstrained by those norms. Central polemical texts
contributing to this discourse include Symonds’s A Problem in Greek Ethics
(1883), and his A Problem in Modern Ethics (1891); Havelock Ellis’s Sexual
Inversion originally written in collaboration with Symonds, published and
suppressed in England in 1897, and later to be included as volume 2 of Ellis’s
Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1901); and Edward Carpenter’s Homogenic Love
(1894) and his The Intermediate Sex (1908). Admittedly polemical and
apologetic, these texts argued, with considerable circumspection, for the
cultural acceptance of desire and behavior hitherto categorized as sin,
explained under the imprecise religious term “sodomy,” 11 and repudiated as

“the crime inter Christianos non nominandumM 2 Such texts, urbanely arguing
an extremist position, represent a culture’s first attempt to admit the
inadmissible, to give the unnamable a local habitation and a name, and as
Michel Foucalt has argued, to put sex into discourse. 13
“Those who read these lines will hardly doubt what passion it is that I
am hinting at,” wrote Symonds in the introduction to A Problem in Modern

Ethics, a book whose subtitle An Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual
Inversion, Addressed Especially to Medical Psychologists and Jurists —provides the
OED Supplement with its earliest citation (1896) for “inversion” in the sexual
sense. Symonds’s coy gesture, his hint half-guessed, has the force of a
necessary circumlocution. Symonds, Ellis, and Carpenter struggled to

devise, and then to revise, a descriptive language untarnished by the anal
implications, by suggestions of that “circle of extensive corruption,” 14 that so
terrified and fascinated late Victorian culture. Symonds “can hardly find a
name that will not seem to soil” his text “because the accomplished languages
of Europe in the nineteenth century provide no term for this persistant
feature of human psychology without importing some implication of disgust,
disgrace, vituperation.” This need to supple a new term, to invent an
adequate taxonomic language, produced more obscurity than clarity. A
terminological muddle ensued, the new names of the unnameable were
legion: “homosexuality,” “sexual inversion,” “intermediate sex,” “homogenic
love,” and “uranism” all coexisted and completed for terminological priority.
Until the second or third decade of this century, when the word
“homosexuality,” probably because of its medical heritage, took the
terminological crown, “sexual inversion” — as word, metaphor, taxonomic
category —provided the basic tool with which late Victorians investigated,
and constituted, their problematic desire. Symonds, more responsible than

any other writer for the establishment of “inversion” as Victorian England’s
preferred term for same sex eroticism, considered it a “convenient phrase”
“which does not prejudice the matter under consideration.” Going further,
i
he naively claimed that “inversion” provided a “neutral nomenclature” with

which “the investigator has good reason to be satisfied.” 15
Symonds’s claim of terminological neutrality ignores the way in which
conventional beliefs and assumptions about gender inhabit both the label
“inversion” and the metaphor behind it. The exact history of the word
remains obscure (the OED Supplement defines sexual inversion tautologically
as “the inversion of the sex instincts” and provides two perfunctory citations)
but it seems to have been employed first in English in an anonymous medical
review of 1871; Symonds later adopted it to translate the account of
homoerotic desire offered by Karl Ulrichs, an “inverted” Hanoverian legal
official who wrote in the 1860s in Germany “a series of polemical, analytical,

theoretical, and apologetic pamphlets” endorsing same sex eroticism. 16 As
Ellis explains it, Ulrichs “regarded uranism, or homosexual love, as a
congenital abnormality by which a female soul had become united with a
male body —anima muliebris in corpore virili inclusa .” 17 The explanation for
this improper correlation of anatomy and desire is, according to Symonds’s
synopsis of Ulrichs in Modem Ethics ,
“to be found in physiology, in that
obscure department of natural science which deals with the evolution of
sex.” 18 Nature’s attempt to differentiate “the indeterminate ground-stuff’ of
the foetus —to produce, tf at is, not merely the “male and female organs of
procreation” but also the “corresponding male and female appetites” — falls
short of complete success: “Nature fails to complete her work regularly and
in every instance. Having succeeded in differentiating a male with full-
formed sexual organs from the undecided foetus, she does not always effect
the proper differentiation of that portion of the physical being in which
resides the sexual appetite. There remains a female soul in a male body.”
Since it holds nature responsible for the “imperfection in the process of
development,” this explanation of homoerotic desire has obvious polemical
utility; in relieving the individual of moral responsibility for his or her
anomalous development, it argues first for the decriminalization and then for
the medicalization of inversion. According to this account, same sex
eroticism, although statistically deviant or abnormal, cannot then be called
unnatural. Inverts or urnings or homosexuals are therefore “abnormal, but
natural, beings”; they constitute the class of “the naturally abnormal.”
Symonds, writing to Carpenter, makes his point succinctly: “The first thing
is to force people to see that the passions in question have their justification
in nature.” 19
As an extended psychosexual analogy to the more palpable reality of
physical hermaphroditism. Ulrichs ’s explanation of homoerotic desire

provided the English polemicists with the basic components for their
metaphor of inversion, which never relinquished the idea of a misalignment
between inside and outside, between desire and the body, between the
hidden truth of sex and the false sign of anatomical gender. (“Inversion,”
derived from the Latin verb vertere “to turn,” means literally to turn
,
in, and
the OED cites the following meaning from pathology: “to turn outside in or
inside out.”) This argument’s intrinsic doubleness — its insistence of the
simultaneous inscription within the individual of two genders, one
anatomical and one not, 6ne visible and one not —represents an
accommodation between contrary impulses of liberation and constraint, as
conventional gender norms are subtilized and manipulated but never fully
escaped. What this account of same sex eroticism cannot imagine is that
sexual attraction between members of the same gender may be a reasonable
and natural articulation of a desire whose excursiveness is simply indifferent
to the distinctions of gender, that desire may not be gendered intrinsically as
the body is, and that desire seeks its objects according to a complicated set of
conventions that are culturally and institutionally determined. So radical a
reconstitution of notions of desire would probably have been intolerable
even to an advanced reading public because it would threaten the moral
priority of the heterosexual norm, as the following sentence from Ellis
suggests: “It must also be pointed out that the argument for acquired or
suggested inversion logically involves the assertion that normal sexuality is
also acquired or suggested.” 20 Unable or unwilling to deconstruct the

heterosexual norm, English accounts of sexual inversion instead repeat it;
desire remains, despite appearances, essentially and irrevocably heterosexual.

A male’s desire for another male, for instance, is from the beginning assumed
to be a feminine desire referable not to the gender of the body ( corpore virili)
but rather to another invisible sexual self composed of the opposite gender
anima muliebris). Desire, according to this explanation, is always already
constituted under the regime of gender — want male cannot not be
to a a
feminine desire, and vice versa —and the body, having become an unreliable
signifier, ceases to represent adequately the invisible truth of desire, which
itself never deviates from respectable heterosexuality. Thus the confusion
that threatens conventional definitions of gender when confronted by same
sex eroticism becomes merely illusory. The body, quite simply, is mistaken.
Significantly, this displaced repetition of heterosexual gender norms
contains within it the undeveloped germ of a radical redefinition of Victorian
conventions of feminine desire. The interposition of a feminine soul between
erotically associated males inevitably entails a certain feminization of desire,
since the very site and source of desire for males is assumed to be feminine
( anima muliebris). Implicit in this argument is the submerged
acknowledgment of the sexually independent woman, whose erotic
empowerment refutes the conventional assumption of feminine passivity.
Nonetheless, this nascent redefinition of notions of feminine desire

remained largely unfulfilled. Symonds and Ellis did not escape their culture’s
phallocentrism, and their texts predictably reflect this bias. Symonds, whose
sexual and aesthetic interests pivoted around the “pure & noble faculty of
understanding & expressing manly perfection.” 21 seems to have been largely
unconcerned with feminine sexuality; his seventy-page A Problem in Greek
Ethics for instance, offers only a
,
two-page “parenthetical investigation” of
lesbianism. Ellis, like Freud, certainly acknowledged sexual desire in women,
but nevertheless accorded to masculine heterosexual desire an ontological
and practical priority: “The female responds to the stimulation of the male
at the right moment just as the tree responds to the stimulation of the
warmest days in spring.” 22 (Neither did English law want to recognize the
sexually self-motivated woman. The Labouchere Amendment to the
Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, the statute under which Oscar
Wilde was convicted of “gross indecency,” simply ignored the possibility of
erotic behavior between women.) In all of this we may see an anxious defense
against recognition of an independent and active feminine sexuality. A
submerged fear of the feminization of desire precluded these polemicists
from fully developing their own argumentative assumption of an already

sexualized feminine soul.
Sexual inversion, then, understands homoerotic desire as misplaced
heterosexuality and configures its understanding of such desire according to
what George Chauncey has called “the heterosexual paradigm,” an analytical
model requiring that all love repeat the dyadic structure
(masculine/feminine, husband/wife, active/passive) embodied in the
heterosexual norm. 23 Desire between anatomical males requires the
interposition of an invisible femininity, just as desire between anatomical
females requires the mediation of a hidden masculinity. This insistent
ideology of heterosexual mediation and its corollary anxiety about
independent feminine sexuality return us to Dracula, where all desire,
however, mobile, is fixed within a heterosexual mask, where a mobile and

hungering woman is represented as a monstrous usurper of masculine
function, and where, as we shall see in detail, all erotic contacts between
males, whether directly libidinal or thoroughly sublimated, are fulfilled
through a mediating female, through the surrogation of the other, “correct,”
gender. Sexual inversion and Stoker’s account of vampirism, then, are
symmetrical metaphors sharing a fundamental ambivalence. Both discourses,
aroused by a desire that wants to elude or flaunt the conventional
prescriptions of gender, constrain that desire by constituting it according to
the heterosexual paradigm that leaves conventional gender codes intact. The
difference between the two discourses lies in the particular articulation of
Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’ 49
that paradigm. Sexual inversion, especially as argued by Symonds and Ellis,
represents an urbane and civilized accommodation of the contrary impulses

of liberation and constraint. Stoker’s vampirism, altogether more hysterical
and hyperbolic, imagines mobile desire as monstrosity and then devises a
violent correction of that desire; in Dracula the vampiric abrogation of
gender codes inspires a defensive reinscription of the stabilizing distinctions
of gender. The site of that ambivalent interplay of desire and its correction,
of mobility and fixity, is the text’s prolonged middle, to which we now turn.
Engendering Gender
Our strong game will be to play our masculine against her feminine.
—Stoker, The Lair of the White Worm

The portion of the gothic novel that I have called the prolonged
middle, during which the text allows the monster a certain dangerous play,
corresponds in Dracula to the duration beginning with the Count’s arrival in
England and ending with his flight back home; this extended middle
constitutes the novel’s prolonged moment of equivocation, as it entertains,
elaborates, and explores the very anxieties it must later expel in the formulaic
resolution of the plot. The action within this section of Dracula consists,
simply enough, in an extended battle between two evidently masculine
forces, one identifiably good and the other identifiably evil, for the allegiance
of a woman (two women actually —Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker nee
Murray). 24 This competition between alternative potencies has the apparent
simplicity of a black and white opposition. Dracula ravages and impoverishes
these women, Van Helsing’s Crew of Light restores and “saves” them. As
Dracula conducts his serial assaults upon Lucy, Van Helsing, in a pretty
counterpoint of penetration, responds with a series of defensive transfusions;

the blood that Dracula takes out Van Helsing then puts back. Dracula,
isolated and disdainful of community, works alone; Van Helsing enters this
little English community, immediately assumes authority, and then works

through surrogates to cement communal bonds. As critics have noted, this
pattern of opposition distills readily into a competition between antithetical
fathers. “The vampire Count, centuries old,” Maurice Richardson wrote

twenty- five years ago, “is a father figure of huge potency” who competes with
Van Helsing, “the good father figure .” 25 The theme of alternate paternities
is, in short, simple, evident, unavoidable.
This oscillation between vampiric transgression and medical correction
exercises the text’s ambivalence toward those fundamental dualisms — life and
death, spirit and flesh, male and female —which have served traditionally to
»
constrain and delimit the excursions of desire. As doctor, lawyer, and

sometimes priest (“The Host. I brought it from Amsterdam. I have an
indulgence.”), Van Helsing stands as the protector of the patriarchal
institutions he so emphatically represents and ’
as the guarantor of the
traditional dualisms his religion and profession promote and authorize .
26 His
largest purpose is to reinscribe the dualities that Dracula would muddle and
confuse. Dualities require demarcations, inexorable and ineradicable lines of
separation, but Dracula, as a border being who abrogates demarcations,
makes such distinctions impossible. He is nosferatu ,
neither dead nor alive but
somehow both, mobile frequenter of the grave and boudoir, easeful
communicant of exclusive realms, and as such as he toys with the separation
of the living and the dead, a distinction critical to physician, lawyer, and
priest alike. His mobility and metaphoric power deride the distinction
between spirit and flesh, another of Van Helsing’s sanctified dualisms. Potent
enough to ignore death’s terminus, Dracula has a spirit’s freedom and
mobility, but that mobility is chained to the most mechanical of appetites: he
and his children rise and fall for a drink and for nothing else, for nothing else
matters. This conor inter-fusion of spirit and appetite, of eternity and

sequence, produces a madness of activity and a mania of unceasing desire.
Dracula lives an eternity of sexual repetition, a lurid wedding of desire and
satisfaction that parodies both.
But the traditional dualism most vigorously defended by Van Helsing

and most subtly subverted by Dracula is, of course, sexual: the division of
being into gender, either male or female. Indeed, as we have seen, the
vampiric kiss excites a sexuality so mobile, so insistent, that it threatens to
overwhelm the distinctions of gender, and the exuberant energy with which
Van Helsing and the Crew of Light counter Dracula’s influence represents
the text’s anxious defense against the very desire it also seeks to liberate. In
counterposing Dracula and Van Helsing, Stoker’s text simultaneously
threatens and protects the line of demarcation that insures the intelligible
division of being into gender. This ambivalent need to invite the vampiric
kiss and then to repudiate it defines exactly the dynamic of the battle that
constitutes the prolonged middle of this text. The field of this battle, of this
equivocal competition for the right to define the possible relations between
desire and gender, is the infinitely penetrable body of a somnolent woman.
This interposition of a woman between Dracula and Van Helsing should not
surprise us; in England, as in Castle Dracula, a violent wrestle between males
is mediated through a feminine form.
The Crew of Light’s conscious conception of women is, predictably
enough, idealized —the stuff of dreams. Van Helsing’s concise description of
Mina may serve as a representative example: “She is one of God’s women
Kiss Me with Those Red Lips' 51
fashioned by His own hand to show us men and other women that there is a
heaven we can enter, and that its light can be here on earth” (226). The
impossible idealism of this conception of women deflects attention from the
complex and complicitous interaction within this sentence of gender,
authority, and representation. Here Van Helsing’s exegesis of God’s natural
text reifies Mina into a stable sign or symbol (“one of God’s women”)
performing a fixed and comfortable function within a masculine sign system.
Having received from Van Helsing’s exegesis her divine impress, Mina
signifies both a masculine artistic intention (“fashioned by His own hand”)
and a definite didactic purpose (“to show us men and other women” how to
enter heaven), each of which constitutes an enormous constraint upon the
significative possibilities of the sign or symbol that Mina here becomes. Van
Helsing’s reading of Mina, like a dozen other instances in which his
interpretation of the sacred determines and delimits the range of activity
permitted to women, encodes woman with a “natural” meaning composed
according to the textual imperatives of anxious males. Precisely this
complicity between masculine anxiety, divine textual authority, and a fixed
conception of femininity —which may seem benign enough in the passage
above — will soon be used to justify the destruction of Lucy Westenra, who,
having been successfully vamped by Dracula, requires a corrective
penetration. To Arthur’s anxious importunity “Tell me what I am to do.” Van
Helsing answers: “Take this stake in your left hand, ready to place the point
over the heart, and the hammer in your right. Then when we begin our
prayer for the dead — I shall read him; I have here the book, and the others
shall follow — strike in God’s name
Here four males (Van Helsing,
...” (259).
Seward, Holmwood, and Quincey Morris) communally read a masculine text
(Van Helsing’s mangled English even permits Stoker the unidiomatic
pronominalization of the genderless text: “I shall read him”). 27 in order to
justify the fatal correction of Lucy’s dangerous wandering, her insolent
disregard for the sexual and semiotic constraint encoded in Van Helsing’s
exegesis of “God’s women.”
The process by which women are construed as signs determined by the
interpretive imperatives of authorizing males had been brilliantly identified
some fifty years before the publication of Dracula by John Stuart Mill in The
Subjection of Women. “What is now called the nature of women,” Mill writes,
“is an extremely artificial thing —the result of forced repression in some
directions, unnatural stimulation in others.” 28 Mill’s sentence, deftly
identifying “the nature of women” as an “artificial” construct formed (and
deformed) by “repression” and “unnatural stimulation,” quietly unties the
lacings that bind something called “woman” to something else called
“nature.” Mill further suggests that a correct reading of gender becomes
i
almost impossible, since the natural difference between male and female is
subject to cultural interpretation: “ ... I deny that anyone knows, or can know,
the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their
present relation to one another.” Mill’s agnosticism regarding “the nature of
the sexes” suggests the societal and institutional quality of all definitions of
the natural, definitions which ultimately conspire to produce “the imaginary
and conventional character of women.” 29 This last phrase, like the whole of
Mill’s essay, understands and criticizes the authoritarian nexus that arises
when a deflected or transformed desire (“imaginary”), empowered by a
gender-biased societal agreement (“conventional”), imposes itself upon a
person in order to create a “character.” “Character” of course functions in at
least three senses: who and what one “is,” the role one plays in society’s
supervening script, and the sign or letter that is intelligible only within the
constraints of a larger sign system. Van Helsing’s exegesis of “God’s women”
creates just such an imaginary and conventional character. Mina’s
body/character may indeed be feminine, but the signification it bears is
written and interpreted solely by males. As Susan Hardy Aiken has written,
such a symbolic system takes “for granted the role of women as passive
objects or signs to be manipulated in the grammar of privileged male

interchanges.
Yet exactly the passivity of this object and the ease of this manipulation
are at question in Dracula. Dracula, after all, kisses these women out of their
passivity and so endangers the stability of Van Helsing’s symbolic system.
Both the prescriptive intention of Van Helsing’s exegesis and the emphatic
methodology (hypodermic needle, stake, surgeon’s blade) he employs to
insure the durability of his interpretation of gender suggest the potential
unreliability of Mina as sign, an instability that provokes an anxiety we may
call fear of the mediatrix. If, as Van Helsing admits, God’s women provide
the essential mediation (“the light can be here on earth”) between the divine
but distant patriarch and his earthly sons, then God’s intention may be
distorted by its potentially changeable vehicle. If woman-as-signifier
wanders, then Van Helsing’s whole cosmology, with its founding dualisms
and supporting texts, collapses. In short, Van Helsing’s interpretation of
Mina, because endangered by the proleptic fear that his mediatrix might
destabilize and wander, necessarily imposes an a priori constraint upon the
significative possibilities of the sign “Mina.” Such an authorial gesture,
intended to forestall the semiotic wandering that Dracula inspires, indirectly
acknowledges woman’s dangerous potential. Late in the text, while Dracula
is vamping Mina, Van Helsing will admit, very uneasily, that “Madam Mina,
our poor, dear Madam Mina is changing” (384). The potential for such a
change demonstrates what Nina Auerbach has called this woman’s
“mysterious amalgam of imprisonment and power.” 31
Dracula’s authorizing kiss, like that of a demonic Prince Charming,

triggers the release of this latent power and excites in these women a
sexuality so mobile, so aggressive, that it thoroughly disrupts Van Helsing’s
compartmental conception of gender. Kissed into a sudden sexuality,-* 2 Lucy
grows “voluptuous” (a word used to describe her only during the vampiric
process), her lips redden, and she kisses with a new interest. This
sexualization of Lucy, metamorphosing woman’s “sweetness” to
“adamantine, heartless cruelty, and [her] purity to voluptuous wantonness”
(25 2), terrifies her suitors because it entails a reversal or inversion of sexual
identity; Lucy, now toothed like the Count, usurps the function of
penetration that Van Helsing’s moralized taxonomy of gender reserves for
males. Dracula in thus figuring the sexualization of
,
woman as deformation,
parallels exactly some of the more extreme medical uses of the idea of
inversion. Late Victorian accounts of lesbianism, for instance, superscribed
conventional gender norms upon sexual relationships to which those norms
were anatomically irrelevant. Again the heterosexual norm proved
paradigmatic. The female “husband” in such a relationship was understood
to be dominant, appetitive, masculine, and “congenitally inverted”; the
female “wife” was understood to be quiescent, passive, only “latently”
homosexual, and, as Havelock Ellis argued, unmotivated by genital desire. 33
Extreme deployment of the heterosexual paradigm approached the

ridiculous, as George Chauncey explains:
The early medical case histories of lesbians thus predictably paid

enormous attention to their menstrual flow and the size of their
sexual organs. Several doctors emphasized that their lesbian
patients stopped menstruating at an early age, if they began at all,
or had unusually difficult and irregular periods. They also
inspected the woman’s sexual organs, often claiming that inverts

had unusually large clitorises, which they said the inverts used in
sexual intercourse as a man would his penis. 34
This rather pathetic hunt for the penis-in-absentia denotes a double anxiety:
first, that the penis shall not be erased, and if it is erased, that it shall be
reinscribed in a perverse simulacrum; and second, that all desire repeat, even
under the duress of deformity, the heterosexual norm that the metaphor of
inversion always assumes. Medical professionals had in fact no need to
pursue this fantasized amazon of the clitoris, this “unnatural” penetrator, so
vigorously, since Stoker, whose imagination was at least deft enough to
displace that dangerous simulacrum to an isomorphic orifice, had by the
1890s already invented her. His sexualized women are men too.
Stoker emphasizes the monstrosity implicit in such abrogation of

gender codes by inverting a favorite Victorian maternal function. His New

Lady Vampires feed at first only on small children, working their way up, one
assumes, a demonic pleasure thermometer until they may feed at last on full-
blooded males. Lucy’s dietary indiscretions evoke the deepest disgust from
the Crew of Light:
With a careless motion, she flung to the ground, callous as

a devil, the child that up to now she had clutched strenuously to
her breast, growling over it as a dog growls over a bone. The
child gave a sharp cry, and lay there moaning. There was a cold-
bloodedness in the act which wrung a groan from Arthur; when

she advanced to him with outstretched arms and a wanton smile,
he fell back and hid his face in his hands.
She still advanced, however, and with a langorous,

voluptuous grace, said:
“Come to me Arthur. Leave those others and come to me.

My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together.
Come, my husband, come!” (253-254)
Stoker here gives us a tableau mordant of gender inversion: the child Lucy
clutches “strenuously to her breast” is not being fed, but is being fed upon.
Furthermore, by requiring that the child be discarded that the husband may
be embraced, Stoker provides a little emblem of this novel’s anxious
protestation that appetite in a woman (“My arms are hungry for you”) is a
diabolic (“callous as a devil”) inversion of natural order, and of the novel’s

fantastic but futile hope that maternity and sexuality be divorced.
The aggressive mobility with which Lucy flaunts the encasements of
gender norms generates in the Crew of Light a terrific defensive activity, as
these men race to reinscribe, with a series of pointed instruments, the line of
demarcation which enables the definition of gender. To save Lucy from the
mobilization of desire, Van Helsing and Crew of Light counteract
the
Dracula’s subversive series of penetrations with a more conventional series of
their own, that sequence of transfusions intended to provide Lucy with the
“brave man’s blood” which “is the best thing on earth when a woman is in
trouble” (180). There are in fact four transfusions, which begin with Arthur,
who as Lucy’s accepted suitor has the right of first infusion, and include
Lucy’s other two suitors (Dr. Seward, Quincey Morris) and Van Helsing
himself. One of the established observations of Dracula criticism is that these
therapeutic penetrations represent displaced marital (and martial)
penetrations; indeed, the text is emphatic about this substitution of medical
for sexual penetration. After the first transfusion, Arthur feels as if he and
Lucy “had been really married and that she was his wife in the sight of God”
(209); and Van Helsing, after his donation, calls himself a “bigamist” and
Lucy “this so sweet maid ... a polyandrist” (211-212). These transfusions, in
semen here) 35 and constitute, in Nina
short, are sexual (blood substitutes for
Auerbach’s superb phrase, “the most convincing epithalamiums in the
novel.” 36
These transfusions represent the text’s first anxious reassertion of the
conventionally masculine prerogative of penetration; as Van Helsing tells
Arthur before the first transfusion. “You are a man and it is a man we want”
(148). Countering the dangerous mobility excited by Dracula’s kiss. Van
Helsing’s penetrations restore to Lucy both the stillness appropriate to his
sense of her gender and “the regular breathing of healthy sleep,” a necessary
correction of the loud “stertorous” breathing, the animal snorting, that the
Count inspires. This repetitive contest (penetration, withdrawal;
penetration, infusion), itself an image of Dracula!" s ambivalent need to evoke
and then to repudiate the fluid pleasures of vampiric appetite, continues to
be waged upon Lucy’s infinitely penetrable body until Van Helsing exhausts
his store of “brave men,” whose generous gifts of blood, however efficacious,
fail finally to save Lucy from the mobilization of desire.

But even the loss of this much blood does not finally enervate a
masculine energy as indefatigable as the Crew of Light’s, especially when it
stands in the service of a tradition of “good women whose lives and whose
truths may make good lesson [sic] for the children that are to be” (222). In
the name of those good women and future children (very much the same
children whose throats Lucy is now penetrating), Van Helsing will repeat,
with an added emphasis, his assertion that penetration is a masculine
prerogative. His logic of corrective penetration demands an escalation, as the
failure of the hypodermic needle necessitates the stake. A woman is better
still than mobile, better dead than sexual:
Arthur took the stake and the hammer, and when once his
mind was set on action his hands never trembled nor even
quivered. Van Helsing opened his missal and began to read, and
Quincey and I followed as well as we could. Arthur placed the
point over the heart, and as I looked I could see its dint in the
white flesh. Then he struck with all his might.
The Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-

curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook
and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white
teeth champed together till the lips were cut and the mouth was
looked like the figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and
fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst
i
the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it.
His face was set, and high duty seemed to shine through it; the
sight of it gave us courage, so that our voices seemed to ring
through the little vault.
And then the writhing and quivering of the body became

less, and the teeth ceased to champ, and the face to quiver. Finally
it lay still. The terrible task was over. (258-259)
Here is the novel’s real —and the woman’s only—climax, its most violent and
misogynistic moment, displaced roughly to the middle of the book, so that
the sexual threat may be repeated but its ultimate success denied: Dracula
will not win Mina, second in his series of English seductions. The murderous
phallicism of this passage clearly punishes Lucy for her transgression of Van
Helsing’s gender code, as she finally receives a penetration adequate to insure

her future quiescence. Violence against the sexual woman here is intense,
sensually imagined, ferocious in its detail. Note, for instance, the terrible
dimple, the “dint in the wdiite flesh,” that recalls Jonathan Harker’s swoon at
Castle Dracula (“I could feel ... the hard dents of the two sharp teeth, just
touching and pausing there”) and anticipates the technicolor consummation
of the next paragraph. That paragraph, masking murder as “high duty,”
completes Van Helsing’s penetrative therapy by “driving deeper and deeper
the mercy-bearing stake.” One might question a mercy this destructive, this
fatal, but Van Helsing’s actions, always sanctified by the patriarchal textual
tradition signified by “his missal,” manage to “restore Lucy to us as a holy
and not an unholy memory” (258). This enthusiastic correction of Lucy’s
monstrosity provides the Crew' of Light with a double reassurance: it
effectively exorcises the threat of a mobile and hungering feminine sexuality,
and it counters the homoeroticism latent in the vampiric threat by

reinscribing (upon Lucy’s chest) the line dividing the male who penetrates
and the woman w ho receives. By disciplining Lucy and restoring each gender
r
to its “proper” function. Van Helsing’s pacification program compensates for

the threat of gender indefinition implicit in the vampiric kiss.
The vigor and enormity of this penetration (Arthur driving the “round
w'ooden stake,” wrhich is “some two and a half or three inches thick and about
three feet long,” resembles “the figure of Thor”) do not bespeak merely
Stoker’s personal or idiosyncratic anxiety but suggest as w'ell a whole culture’s
uncertainty about the fluidity of gender roles. Consider, for instance, the
following passage from Ellis’s contemporaneous Studies in the Psychology of
Sex. Ellis, writing on “The Mechanism of Detumescence” (i.e., ejaculation),
employs a figure that Stoker w'ould have recognized as his own:
Detumescence is normally linked to tumescence. Tumescence is the

piling on of the fuel; detumescence is the leaping out of the devouring flame
whence is lighted the torch of life to be handed on from generation to
generation. The whole process is double yet single; it is exactly analogous to
that by which a pile is driven into the earth by the raising and the letting go
of a heavy weight which falls on the head of the pile. In tumescence the
organism is slowly wound up and force accumulated; in the act of
detumescence the accumulated force is let go and by its liberation the sperm-
bearing instrument is driven home .
37
Both Stoker and Ellis need to imagine so homely an occurrence as
penile penetration as an event of mythic, or at least seismographic,

proportions. Ellis’s pile driver, representing the powerful “sperm-bearing
instrument,” may dwarf even Stoker’s already outsized member, but both
serve a similar function: they channel and finally “liberate” a tremendous
“accumulated force” that itself represents a transor supra-natural intention.
Ellis, employing a Darwinian principle of interpretation to explain that
intention, reads woman’s body (much as we have seen Van Helsing do) as a
natural sign — or, perhaps better, as a sign of nature’s overriding reproductive
intention:
There can be little doubt that, as one or two writers have

already suggested, the hymen owes its development to the fact
that its influence is on the side of effective fertilization. It is an

obstacle to the impregnation of the young female by immature,
aged, or feeble males. The hymen is thus an anatomical expression of
that admiration offorce which marks the female in her choice of a mate.
So regarded, it is an interesting example of the intimate matter in

which sexual selection is really based on natural selection 38.
(italics added)
Here, as evolutionary teleology supplants divine etiology and as Darwin’s

texts assume the primacy Van Helsing would reserve for God’s, natural
selection, not God’s original intention, becomes the interpretive principle
governing nature’s text. As a sign or “anatomical expression” within that text,
the hymen signifies a woman’s presumably natural “admiration of force” and
her invitation to “the sperm-bearing instrument.” Woman’s body,
structurally hostile to “immature, aged, or feeble males,” simply begs for
“effective fertilization.” Lucy’s body, too, reassures the Crew of Light with
an anatomical expression of her admiration of force. Once fatally staked,
Lucy is restored to “the so sweet that was.” Dr. Seward describes the change:
$
There in the coffin lay Thing that we

no longer the foul
had so dreaded and grown to hate that the work of her
destruction was yielded to the one best entitled to it, but Lucy as
we had seen her in her life, with her face of unequalled sweetness
and purity.... One and all we felt that the holy calm that lay like
sunshine over the wasted face and form was only an earthly token
and symbol of the calm that was to reign for ever. (259)
This post-penetrative peace 39 denotes not merely the final immobilization of

Lucy’s body, but also the corresponding stabilization of the dangerous
signifier whose wandering had so threatened Van Helsing’s gender code.
Here a masculine interpretive community (“One and all we felt”) reasserts
the semiotic fixity that allows Lucy to function as the “earthly token and
symbol” of eternal beatitude, of the heaven we can enter. We may say that
this last penetration is doubly efficacious: in a single stroke both the sexual
and the textual needs of the Crew of Light find a sufficient satisfaction.
Despite its placement in the middle of the text, this scene, which
successfully pacifies Lucy and demonstrates so emphatically the efficacy of
the technology Van Helsing employs to correct vampirism, corresponds
formally to the scene of exp Jsion, which usually signals the end of the gothic
1
narrative. Here, of course, this scene signals not the end of the story but the
continuation of it, since Dracula will now repeat his assault on another
woman. Such displacement of the scene of expulsion requires explanation.
Obviously this displacement subserves the text’s anxiety about the direct
representation of eroticism between males: Stoker simply could not
represent so explicitly a violent phallic interchange between the Crew of
Light and Dracula. In a by now familiar heterosexual mediation, Lucy
receives the phallic correction that Dracula deserves. Indeed, the actual
expulsion of the Count at novel’s end is a disappointing anticlimax. Two
rather perfunctory knife strokes suffice to dispatch him, as Dracula simply
forgets the elaborate ritual of correction that vampirism previously required.
And the displacement of this scene performs at least two other functions:
first, by establishing early the ultimate efficacy of Van Helsing’s corrective
technology, it reassures everyone — Stoker, his characters, the reader —that
vampirism may indeed be vanquished, that its sexual threat, however
powerful and intriguing, may be expelled; and second, in doing so, in
establishing this reassurance, it permits the text to prolong and repeat its
flirtation with vampirism, its ambivalent petition of that sexual threat. In

short, the displacement of the scene of expulsion provides a heterosexual
locale for Van Helsing’s demonstration of compensatory phallicism, while it
also extends the duration of the text’s ambivalent play.

Kiss Me with Those Red Lips” 59
This extension of the text’s flirtation with monstrosity, during which

Mina is threatened by but not finally seduced into vampirism, includes the
novel’s only explicit scene of vampiric seduction. Important enough to be
twice presented, first by Seward as spectator and then by Mina as participant,
the scene occurs in the Harker bedroom, where Dracula seduces Mina while
“on the bed lay Jonathan Harker, his face flushed and breathing heavily as if
in a stupor.” The Crew of Light bursts into the room; the voice is Dr.
Seward’s:
With his left hand he held both Mrs. Harker’s hands, keeping
them away with her arms at full tension: his right hand gripped
her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom.
Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream
trickled down the man’s bare breast, which was shown by his
torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible
resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk
to compel it to drink. (3 3 6)
In this initiation scene Dracula compels Mina into the pleasure of vampiric
appetite and introduces her to a world where gender distinctions collapse,
where male and female bodily fluids intermingle terribly. For Mina’s
drinking is double here, both a “symbolic act of enforced fellation” 40 and a
lurid nursing. That this is a scene of enforced fellation is made even clearer
by Mina’s own description of the scene a few pages later; she adds the graphic
detail of the “spurt”:
With that he pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails
opened a vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out,
he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the
other seizedmy neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so
that I must either suffocate or swallow some of the — Oh, my
God, my God! What have I done? (343)
That “Oh, my God, my God!” is deftly placed: Mina’s verbal ejaculation

supplants the Count’s liquid one, leaving the fluid unnamed and encouraging
us to voice the substitution that the text —
implies this blood is semen too.
But this scene of fellation is thoroughly displaced. We are at the Count’s
breast, encouraged once again to substitute white for red, as blood becomes
milk: “the attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a
kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk.” Such fluidity of substitution and
displacement entails a confusion of Dracula’s sexual identity, or an
«
interfusion ofimasculine and feminine functions, as Dracula here becomes a

lurid mother offering not a breast but an open and bleeding wound. But if
the Count’s sexuality is double, then the open wound may be yet another
displacement (the reader of Dracula must be as mobile as the Count himself).
We are back in the genital region, this time a woman’s, and we have the
suggestion of a bleeding vagina. The image of red and voluptuous lips, with
their slow trickle of blood, has, of course, always harbored this potential.
We may read this scene, in which anatomical displacements and the
confluence of blood, milk, and semen forcefully erase the demarcation
separating the masculine and the feminine, as Dracula’s most explicit
representation of the anxieties excited by the vampiric kiss. Here Dracula

defines most clearly vampirism’s threat of gender indefinition. Significantly,
this scene is postponed until late in the text. Indeed, this is Dracula’s last
great moment, his final demonstration of dangerous potency; after this, he
will vamp no one. The novel, having presented most explicitly its deepest
anxiety, its fear of gender dissolution, now moves mechanically to repudiate
that fear. After a hundred rather tedious pages of pursuit and flight, Dracula
perfunctorily expels the Count. The world of “natural” gender relations is
happily restored, or at least seems to be.
A Final Dissolution
If my last sentence ends with an equivocation, it is because Dracula does

so as well; the reader should leave this novel with a troubled sense of the
difference between the forces of darkness and the forces of light. Of course
the plot of Dracula by granting ultimate victory to
,
Van Hefising and a dusty
death to the Count, emphatically ratifies the simplistic opposition of
competing conceptions of force and desire, but even a brief reflection upon
the details of the war of penetrations complicates this comforting schema. A
perverse mirroring occurs, as puncture for puncture the Doctor equals the
Count. Van Helsing’s doubled penetrations, first the morphine injection that
immobilizes the woman and then the infusion of masculine fluid, repeat
Dracula’s spatially doubled penetrations of Lucy’s neck. And that morphine
injection, which subdues the woman and improves her receptivity, curiously
imitates the Count’s strange hypnotic power; both men prefer to immobilize
a woman before risking a penetration .
41 Moreover, each penetration
announces through its displacement this same sense of danger. Dracula
enters at the neck, Van Helsing at the limb; each evades available orifices and
refuses to submit to the dangers of vaginal contact. The shared displacement
is telling: to make your own holes is an ultimate arrogance, an assertion of
penetrative prowess that nonetheless acknowledges, in the flight of its
evasion, the threatening power imagined to inhabit woman’s available

openings. Woman’s body readily accommodates masculine fear and desire,
whether directly libidinal or culturally refined. We may say that Van Helsing
and his tradition have polished teeth into hypodermic needles, a cultural
refinement that masks violation as healing. Van Helsing himself, calling his
medical instruments “the ghastly paraphernalia of our beneficial trade,”
employs an adjectival oxymoron (ghastly/beneficial) that itself glosses the
troubled relationship between paternalism and violence (146). The medical
profession licenses the power to penetrate, devises a delicate
instrumentation, and defines canons of procedure, while the religious
tradition, with its insistent idealization of women, encodes a restriction on
the mobility of desire (who penetrates whom) and then licenses a
tremendous punishment for the violation of the code.

But it is all penetrative energy, whether re-fanged or refined, and it is
all libidinal; the two strategies of penetration are but different articulations
of the same primitive force. Dracula certainly problematizes, if it does not
quite erase, the line of separation signifying a meaningful difference between
Van Helsing and the Count. In other words, the text itself, in its imagistic
identification of Dracula and the Crew of Light, in its ambivalent propensity
to subvert its own fundamental differences, sympathizes with and finally
domesticates vampiric desire; the uncanny, as Freud brilliantly observed,

always comes home. Such textual irony, composed of simultaneous but
contrary impulses to establish and subvert the fundamental differences
between violence and culture, between desire and its sublimations, recalls
Freud’s late speculations on the troubled relationship between the id and the
superego (or ego ideal). In the two brief passages below, taken from his late
work The Ego and the Id, Freud complicates the differentiation between the
id and its unexpected effluent, the superego:
There are two paths by which the contents of the id can penetrate
into the ego. The one is direct, the other leads by way of the ego
ideal.
And:
From the point of view of instinctual control, of morality, it
may be said of the id that it is totally non-moral, of the ego that
it strives to be moral, and of the super-ego that it can be
supermoral and then become as cruel as only the id can be. 42
It is so easy to remember the id as a rising energy and the superego as a

suppressive one, that we forget Freud’s subtler argument. These passages,
i
eschewing as too facile the simple opposition of the id and superego, suggest
instead that the id and the superego are variant articulations of the same
primitive energy. We are already familiar with the “two paths by which the
contents of the id penetrate the ego.” “The one is direct,” as Dracula’s
penetrations are direct and unembarrassed, and the other, leading “by way of
the ego ideal,” recalls Van Helsing’s way of repression and sublimation. In
providing an indirect path for the “contents of the id” and in being “as cruel
as only the id can be,” the superego may be said to be, in the words of Leo
Bersani, “the id which has become its own mirror.” 43 This mutual reflectivity
of the id and superego, of course, constitutes one of vampirism’s most
disturbing features, as Jonathan Harker, standing before his shaving glass,
learns early in the novel: “This time there could be no error, for the man was
close to me, and I could see him over my shoulder. But there was no
reflection of him in the mirror! The whole room behind me was displayed;
but there was no sign of a man in it, except myself’ (37). The meaning of this
little visual allegory should be clear enough: Dracula need cast no reflection
because his presence, already established in Harker’s image, would be simply
redundant; the monster, indeed, is no one “except myself.” A dangerous
sameness waits behind difference: tooth, stake, and hypodermic needle, it
would seem, all share a point.

This blending or interfusion of fundamental differences would seem, in
one respect at least, to contradict the progress of my argument. We have,

after all, established that the Crew of Light’s penetrative strategy, subserving
Van Helsing’s ideology of gender and his heterosexual account of desire,
counters just such interfusions with emphatic inscriptions of sexual
difference. Nonetheless, this penetrative strategy, despite its purposive
heterosexuality, quietly erases its own fundamental differences, its own
explicit assumptions of gender and desire. It would seem at first that desire
for connection among males is both expressed in and constrained by a
traditional articulation of such fraternal affection, as represented in this text’s

blaring theme of heroic or chivalric male bonding. The obvious male
bonding in Dracula is precipitated by action — a good fight, a proud ethic, a
great victory. Dedicated to a falsely exalted conception of woman, men

combine fraternally to fulfill the collective “high duty” that motivates their
“great quest” (261).Van Helsing, always the ungrammatical exegete,
provides the apt analogy: “Thus we are ministers of God’s own wish.... He
have allowed us to redeem one soul already, and we go out as the old knights
of the Cross to redeem more” (381). Van Helsing’s chivalric analogy
establishes this fraternity within an impeccable lineage signifying both moral
rectitude and adherence to the limitation upon desire that this tradition
encodes and enforces.
Yet beneath this screen or mask of authorized fraternity a more

libidinal bonding occurs as male fluids find a protected pooling place in the
body of a woman. We return, for a last time, to those serial transfusions

which, while they pretend to serve and protect “good women,” actually
enable the otherwise inconceivable interfusion of the blood that is semen
too. Here displacement (a woman’s body) and sublimation (these are medical
penetrations) permit the unpermitted, just as in gang rape men share their
semen in a location displaced sufficiently to divert the anxiety excited by a
more direct union. Repeating its subversive suggestion that the refined moral
conceptions of Van Helsing’s Crew of Light express obliquely an excursive
libidinal energy, an energy much like the Count’s, Dracula again employs an
apparently rigorous heterosexuality to represent anxious desire for a less
conventional communion. The parallel here to Dracula’s taunt (“Your girls
that you all love are mine already; and through them you ... shall be mine”)
is inescapable; in each case Lucy, the woman in the middle, connects
libidinous males. Here, as in the Victorian metaphor of sexual inversion, an
interposed difference —an image of manipulable femininity—mediates and
deflects an otherwise unacceptable appetite for sameness. Men touching
women touch each other, and desire discovers itself to be more fluid than the
Crew of Light would consciously allow.
Indeed, so insistent is this text to establish this pattern of heterosexual
mediation that it repeats the pattern on its final page. Jonathan Harker,
writing in a postscript that compensates clearly for his assumption at Castle
Dracula of a “feminine” passivity, announces the text’s last efficacious
penetration:
Seven years ago we all went through the flames: and the
happiness of some of us since then is, we think, well worth the
pain we endured. It is an added joy to Mina and to me that our
boy’s birthday is the same day as that on which Quincey Morris
died. His mother holds, I know, the secret belief that some of our
brave friend’s spirit has passed into him. His bundle of names
links all our little band of men together; but we call him Quincey.
(449)
As offspring of Jonathan and Mina Harker, Little Quincey, whose

introduction so late in the narrative insures his emblematic function,
seemingly represents the restoration of “natural” order and especially the
rectification of conventional gender roles. His official genesis is, obviously
enough, heterosexual, but Stoker’s prose quietly suggests an alternative
paternity: “His bundle of names links all our little band of men together.”
t
This is the fantasy child of those sexualized transfusions, son of an illicit and
nearly invisible homosexual union. This suggestion, reinforced by the
preceding pun of “spirit,” constitutes this text’s last and subtlest articulation
of its “secret belief’ that “a brave man’s blood” may metamorphose into “our
brave friend’s spirit.” But the real curiosity here is the novel’s last-minute
displacement, its substitution of Mina, who ultimately refused sexualization
by Dracula, for Lucy, who was sexualized, vigorously penetrated, and
consequently destroyed. We may say that Little Quincey was luridly
conceived in the veins of Lucy Westenra and then deftly relocated to the
purer body of Mina Harker. Here, in the last of its many displacements,
Dracula insists, first, that successful filiation implies the expulsion of all
“monstrous” desire in women and, second, that all desire, however mobile
and omnivorous it may secretly be, must subject itself to the heterosexual
configuration that alone defined the Victorian sense of the normal. In this
regard, Stoker’s fable, however hyperbolic its anxieties, represents his age. As
we have seen, even polemicists of same sex eroticism like Symonds and Ellis
could not imagine such desire without repeating within their metaphor of
sexual inversion the basic structure of the heterosexual paradigm. Victorian
culture’s anxiety about desire’s potential indifference to the prescriptions of
gender produces everywhere a predictable repetition and a predictable
displacement: the heterosexual norm repeats itself in a mediating image of
femininity —the Count’s vampiric daughters, Ulrichs’s and Symonds’s anima
muliebris ,
Lucy Westenra penetrable body— that displaces
’s more direct a
communion among males. Desire, despite its propensity to wander, stays

home and retains an essentially heterosexual and familial definition. The
result in Dracula is a child whose conception is curiously ‘immaculate, yet
disturbingly lurid: child of his fathers’ violations. Little Quincey, fulfilling
Van Helsing’s prophecy of “the children that are to be,” may be the text’s
emblem of a restored natural order, but his paternity has its unofficial aspect
too. He is the unacknowledged son of the Crew of Light’s displaced
homoerotic union, and his name, linking the “little band of men together,”
quietly remembers that secret genesis.
Notes
1. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla, in The Best Ghost Stories ofj. S.
Le Fanu (New York, 1964), p. 337; this novella of lesbian vampirism, which
appeared first in Le Fanu’s In A Glass Darkly (1872), predates Dracula by
twenty-five years.
2. Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders (Thetford, 1983), p. 100.
3. Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York, 1979), p. 51. All further references
to Dracula appear within the essay in parentheses.
4. The paradigmatic instance of this triple rhythm is Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein a text that creates
,
— bit by bit, and stitch by stitch — its resident
demon, then equips that demon with a powerful Miltonic voice with which
to petition both its creator and the novel’s readers, and finally drives its
monster to polar isolation and suicide. Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
repeats the pattern: Henry Jekyll’s chemical invitation to Hyde corresponds
to the gesture of admission; the serial alternation of contrary personalities
constitutes the ambivalent play of the prolonged middle; and Jekyll’s suicide,
which expels both the monster and himself, corresponds to the gesture of
expulsion.
5. Readers of Tzvetan Todorov’s The Fantastic (Ithaca, 1975) will
recognize that my argument about the gothic text’s extended middle derives
in part from his idea that the essential condition of fantastic fiction is a
duration characterized by readerly suspension of certainty.
John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (New York, 1974), pp. 59-60.
6.
This group of crusaders includes Van Helsing himself. Dr. John

7.
Seward, Arthur Holmwood. Quincey Morris, and later Jonathan Harker; the
title Crew of Light is mine, but I have taken my cue from Stoker: Lucy, lux ,
light.
8. Renfield, whose “zoophagy” precedes Dracula’s arrival in England

and who is never vamped by Dracula, is no exception to this rule.
9. The complication of gender roles in Dracula has of course been
recognized in the criticism. See, for instance, Stephanie Demetrakopoulos,
“Feminism, Sex Role Exchanges, and Other Subliminal Fantasies in Bram
Stoker’s Dracula ,” Frontiers 2 (1977), pp. 104-113.
,
Demetrakopoulos writes:
“These two figures I have traced so far —the male as passive rape victim and
also as violator-brutalizer — reflect the polarized sex roles and the excessive
needs this polarizing engendered in Victorian culture. Goldfarb recounts the
brothels that catered to masochists, sadists, and homosexuals. The latter
aspect of sexuality obviously did not interest Stoker....” I agree with the first
sentence here and, as this essay should make clear, emphatically disagree with
the last.
10. John Addington Symonds, A Problem in Modern Ethics (London,

1906), p. 74.
1 1 . The semantic imprecision of the word “sodomy” is best explained
by John Boswell, Christianity Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (Chicago,
, ,
1980), pp. 91-1 16. “Sodomy,” notes Boswell, “has connoted in various times
and various places everything from ordinary heterosexual intercourse in an
atypical position to oral sexual contact with animals” (93).
i
12. This is the traditional Christian circumlocution by which sodomy

was both named and unnamed, both specified in speech and specified as
unspeakable. It is the phrase, according to Jeffrey Weeks, “with which Sir

Robert Peel forbore to mention sodomy in Parliament,” quoted in Weeks,
Coming Out (London, 1977), p. 14.

13. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York, 1980). My
argument agrees with Foucault’s assertion that “the techniques of power

exercised over sex have not obeyed a principle of rigorous selection, but
rather one of dissemination and implantation of polymorphous sexualities”
(12). Presumably members of the same gender have been copulating
together for uncounted centuries, but the invert and homosexual were not
invented until the ninteenth century.
14. I cite this phrase, spoken by Mr. Justice Wills to Oscar Wilde
immediately after the latter’s conviction under the Labouchere Amendment
to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, as an oblique reference to the
orifice that so threatened the homophobic Victorian imagination; that Wide
was never accused of anal intercourse (only oral copulation and mutual
masturbation were charged against him) seems to me to confirm, rather than
to undermine this interpretation of the phrase. Wills’s entire sentence reads:
“And that you, Wilde, have been the centre of a circle of extensive corruption
of the most hideous kind among young men, it is equally impossible to
doubt”; quoted in H. Montgomery Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (New
York, 1962), p. 272. The Labouchere Amendment, sometimes called die
blackmailer’s charter, punished “any act of gross indecency” between males,
whether in public or private, with two years’ imprisonment and hard labor.
Symonds, Ellis, and Carpenter argued strenuously for the repeal of this law.
15. Symonds, A Problem in Modem Ethics, p. 3.
16. Ibid., p. 84. To my knowledge, the earliest English instance of

“inversion” in this specific sense is the phrase “Inverted Sexual Proclivity”
from The Journal of Mental Science (October, 1871), where it is used
anonymously to translate Carl Westphal’s neologism die contrare
Sexualempfindung, the term that would dominate German discourse on same
gender eroticism. I have not yet been able to date precisely Symonds’s first
use of “inversion.”
17. Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion, volume 2 of Studies in the Psychology
of Sex (Philadelphia, 1906), p. 1.
18. This and the two subsequent quotations are from Symonds’s
Modem Ethics, pp. 86, 90, and 85 respectively.
19. Symonds’s letter to Carpenter, December 29, 1893, in The Letters of
John Addington Symonds, volume 3, eds. H. M. Shueller and R. L. Peters
(Detroit, 1969), p. 799; also quoted in Weeks, p. 54.
20. Ellis, Sexual Inversion, p. 182.
21. Symonds in Letters, volume 2, p. 169.
22. Ellis, quoted in Weeks, p. 92.
23. George Chauncey, Jr., “From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality:

Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Deviance,”
Salamagundi 58-59 (1982), pp. 114-146.
24. This bifurcation of woman is one of the text’s most evident features,
as critics of Dracula have been quick to notice. See Phyllis Roth, “Suddenly
Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula ,” Literature and Psychology, 27
(1977), p. 117, and her full-length study Bram Stoker (Boston, 1982). Roth,
in an argument that emphasizes the pre-Oedipal element in Dracula makes
a similar point: “... one recognizes that Lucy and Mina are essentially the
same figure: the Mother. Dracula is, in fact, the same story told twice with
different outcomes.” Perhaps the most extensive thematic analysis of this
“
split in Stoker’s representation of women is Carol A. Senf’s Dracula Stoker’s
Response to the New Woman,” Victorian Studies, 26 (1982), pp. 33-39, which
sees this split as Stoker’s “ambivalent reaction to a topical phenomenon —the
New Woman.”
25. Maurice Richardson, “The Psychoanalysis of Ghost Stories,” The
Twentieth Century 166 (1959), p. 427-428.
26. On this point see Demetrakopoulos, p. 104.
27. In this instance at least Van Helsing has an excuse for his
ungrammatical usage; in Dutch, Van Helsing’s native tongue, the noun bijbel
(Bible) is masculine.
28. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women in Essays on Sex Equality,
ed. Alice Rossi (Chicago, 1970), p. 148.
29. Ibid, p. 187.

30. Susan Hardy Aiken, “Scripture and Poetic Discourse in The
Subjection of Women? PMLA, 98 (1983), p. 354.
31. Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon, (Cambridge, 1982), p. 11.
32. Roth, “Suddenly Sexual Women,” p. 116.
33 . An adequate analysis of the ideological and political implications of

the terminological shift from “inversion” to “homosexuality” is simply
beyond the scope of this essay, is further complicated by a
and the problem
certain imprecision or fluidity in the employment by these writers of an
already unstable terminology. Ellis used the word “homosexuality” under
protest and Carpenter, citing the evident bastardy of any term compounded
of one Greek and one Latin root, preferred the word “homogenic.”
However, a provisional if oversimplified discrimination between “inversion”
and “homosexuality” may be useful: “true” sexual inversion, Ellis argued,
consists in “sexual instinct turned by inborn constitutional abnormality toward
*
persons of thQ same sex” ( Sexual Inversion ,

p. 1; italics added), whereas
homosexuality may refer to same sex eroticism generated by spurious,
circumstantial (faute de mieux), or intentionally perverse causality. The
pivotal issue here is will or choice: the “true” invert, whose “abnormality” is
biologically determined and therefore “natural,” does not choose his/her

desire but is instead chosen by it; the latent or spurious homosexual, on the
other hand, does indeed choose a sexual object of the same gender. Such a
taxonomic distinction (or, perhaps better, confusion) represents a polemical
and political compromise that allows, potentially at least, for the
medicalization of congenital inversion and the criminalization of willful
homosexuality. I repeat the caution that my description here entails a
necessary oversimplification of a terminological muddle. For a more
complete and particular analysis see Chauncey, pp. 114-146; for the
applicability of such a taxonomy to lesbian relationships see Ellis, Sexual
Inversion pp. 131-141.
,
34. Chauncey, p. 132.
35. The symbolic interchangeability of blood and semen in vampirism

was identified as early as 1931 by Ernest Jones in On The Nightmare (London,
193 1), p. 119: “in the unconscious mind blood is commonly an equivalent for
semen....”
36. Auerbach, p. 22.
37. Havelock Ellis, Erotic Symbolism ,

volume 5 of Studies in the
Psychology of Sex (Philadelphia, 1906), p. 142.

38. Ibid., 140.
39. Roth correctly reads Lucy’s countenance at this moment as “a thank

you note” for the corrective penetration; “Suddenly Sexual Women,” p. 116.
40. C. F. Bentley, “The Monster in the Bedroom: Sexual Symbolism in
Bram and Psychology 22 (1972), p. 30.

Stoker’s Dracula,” Literature ,
41. Stoker’s configuration of hypnotism and anaesthesia is not

idiosyncratic. Ellis, for instance, writing at exactly this time, conjoins
hypnosis and anaesthesia as almost identical phenomena and subsumes them
under a single taxonomic category: “We may use the term ‘hypnotic
phenomena’ as a convenient expression to include not merely the condition
of artificially-produced sleep, or hypnotism in the narrow sense of the term,
but all those groups of psychic phenomena which are characterized by a
decreased control of the higher nervous centres, and increased activity of the
lower centres.” The quality that determines membership in this
“convenient” taxonomy is, to put matters baldly, ap elvis pumped up by the
“increased activity of the lower centres.” Ellis, in an earlier footnote, explains
the antithetical relationship between the “higher” and “lower” centers: The
persons best adapted to propagate the race are those with the large pelves,
Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’ 69
and as the pelvis is the seat of the great centres of sexual emotion the
development of the pelvis and its nervous and vascular supply involves the
greater heightening of the sexual emotions. At the same time the greater
activity of the cerebral centres enables them to subordinate and utilise to
their own ends the increasingly active sexual emotions, so that reproduction
is checked and the balance to some extent restored.” The pelvic superiority
of women, necessitated by art evolutionary imperative (better babies with
bigger heads require broader pelves), implies a corresponding danger —an
engorged and hypersensitive sexuality that must be actively “checked” by the
“activity of the cerebral centres” so that “balance” may be “to some extent
restored.” Hypnotism and anaesthesia threaten exactly this delicate balance,
and especially so in women because “the lower centres in women are more
rebellious to control than those of men, and more readily brought into
action.” Anaesthesiology, it would seem, is not without its attendant dangers:
“Thus chloroform, ether, nitrous oxide, cocaine, and possibly other
anaesthetics, possess the property of exciting the sexual emotions. Women
are especially liable to these erotic hallucinations during anaesthesia, and it
has sometimes been almost impossible to convince them that their subjective
sensations have had no objective cause. Those who have to administer
anaesthetics are well aware of the risks they may thus incur.” Ellis’s besieged
physician, like Stoker’s master monster and his monster master, stands here
as a male whose empowerment anxiously reflects a prior endangerment.
What if this woman’s lower centers should take the opportunity —to use
another of Ellis’s
—
phrases “of indulging in an orgy”? Dracula’s kiss, Van
Helsing’s needle and stake, and Ellis’s “higher centres” all seek to modify,
constrain, and control the articulation of feminine desire (But, it might be
counter-argued, Dracula comes precisely to excite such an orgy, not to
constrain one. Yes, but with an important qualification: Dracula’s kiss,
because it authorizes only repetitions of itself, clearly articulates the destiny

of feminine desire; Lucy will only do what Dracula has done before.)
Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman (New York, 1904), pp. 299, 73, 3 16, and 313
respectively. I have used the fourth edition; the first edition appeared in
England in 1895.
42. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (New York, 1960), pp. 44-45.
43. Leo Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley, 1977), p. 92.
$
JOHN ALLEN STEVENSON
A Vampire in the Mirror:

The Sexuality 0/ Dracula
ear the end of Dracula, as the band of vampire hunters is tracking the
count to his Carpathian Mina Harker implores her husband to kill her if
lair,
her partial transformation into a vampire should become complete. Her

demand for this “euthanasia” (the phrase is Dr. Seward’s [340]) is itself
extraordinary, but equally interesting is the way she defines her position and
the duty of the men around her: “Think, dear, that there have been times
when brave men have killed their wives and womenkind, to keep them from
falling into the hands of the enemy.... It is men’s duty towards those whom
they love, in such times of sore trial!” (336). Why is this “duty” incumbent
on “brave men”? Why are “wives and womenkind” a treasure better
destroyed than lost to the “enemy”? In the context of Bram Stoker’s novel, it
is evident that the mercy implied by such euthanasia is not salvation from the
loathsome embraces of a lewd foreigner. It is too late for that. Mina, after all,
has already been the object of Dracula’s attention. The problem is one of
loyalty: the danger is not that she will be captured but that she will go
willingly. She makes this clear: “this time, if it ever come, may come quickly
... and ... you must lose no time in using your opportunity. At such a time, I
myself might be —nay! if the time ever comes, shall he —leagued with your
enemy against you” (337). Kill me, she says, before I can betray you.
That Dracula concerns competition between men for women can
hardly be questioned —passages like these can be multiplied almost
From PMLA 103, no. 2 (March 1988): 139-149. © 1988 by The Modern Language Association
of America.
72 JOHN ALLEN STEVENSON
indefinitely. But what is the nature of that competition? Certainly, a number

of readers have agreed on one interpretation. As they would have it, the
horror we feel in contemplating Dracula is that his actions, when stripped of
displacement and disguise, are fundamentally incestuous and that Stoker’s
novel is finally a rather transparent version of the “primal horde” theory
Freud advanced —only about fifteen years after publication of the novel — in
Totem and Taboo T According to this interpretation (as one adherent has it,
“almost a donnee of Dracula criticism” [Twitched, Living Dead 135]), the

count, undeniably long in the tooth, attempts to hoard all the available
women, leaving the younger generation, his “sons,” no recourse but to rise
up and kill the wicked “father,” thus freeing the Thewomen for themselves.
novel does concern how one old man (“centuries-old,” he tells us) struggles
with four young men (and another old, but good, man, Dr. Van Helsing) for
the bodies and souls of two young women. But to call that strife intrafamilial
(Twitched, Dreadful Pleasures 139) or to say that ad the characters, including
Dracula, are linked “as members of one family” (Richardson 428) seems to
be more of a tribute to the authority psychoanalysis enjoys among literary
critics than it is an illuminating description of Stoker’s narrative.

I would like to rethink the way sexual competition works in Dracula
from the perspective of that frequent antagonist of psychoanalysis,
anthropology. Nowhere is the gulf between these universalizing disciplines
greater, perhaps, than it is on the subject that obsesses them both, incest. 2 A
good deal of recent anthropological work argues that, as one prominent
scholar puts it, “human beings [do] not want to commit incest ad that much”
(Fox, Red Lamp 7). My intention in this essay is to apply this anti-incestuous
model of human desire to Dracula in the place of the more customary
Freudian model. As Mina’s remarks above indicate, the novel insistently
indeed, obsessively — defines the vampire not as a monstrous father but as a
foreigner, as someone who threatens and terrifies precisely because he is an

outsider. In other words, it may be fruitful to reconsider Stoker’s compelling
and frequently retold story in terms of inter racial sexual competition rather
than as intrafamilial strife. Dracula’s pursuit of Lucy and Mina is motivated,
not by the incestuous greed at the heart of Freud’s scenario, but by an
omnivorous appetite for difference, for novelty. His crime is not the
hoarding of incest but a sexual theft, a sin we can term excessive exogamy.
Although the old count has women of his own, he is exclusively interested in
the women who belong to someone else. This reconsideration can yield a
fresh appreciation of the appeal of Stoker’s story and can suggest ways in
which the novel embodies a quite powerful imagining of the nature of

cultural and racial difference.
Before explaining how Dracula represents this kind of exogamous

threat, I want to review briefly some basic anthropological ideas about

marriage customs, particularly as they relate to the incest taboo. 3 While not,
as was once imagined, an absolute universal of human behavior, the taboo is
very common, and various benefits — genetic diversity, family peace, social
stability, the existence of society itself —have been ascribed to it. More
relevant to Dracula than the origin of the taboo, 'however, is the so-called rule
of exogamy that is one result. Sex and marriage, of course, are not the same
thing, but since sex is typically a part of the marital relation, the taboo’s
injunction against sex within the family means that people must “marry out.”
Anthropology has devoted considerable energy to discovering the
remarkable and often arbitrary rules humanity has established to govern just
which women are “inside” the family and hence forbidden and which are
“outside” and therefore available. But the word exogamy is also somewhat
misleading, because most cultures place significant limitations on how far out
a mate may be sought. As Robin Fox says, “Of course, [exogamy] had to have
some boundaries.... Groups speaking the same language and being alike in
other ways might well exchange wives among themselves —but the
connubium stopped at the boundaries of the language, territory, or colour, or
whatever marked ‘us’ off from ‘them’” (Kinship 78). The exchange of women
that is the essence of exogamy has its limits. If most cultures have forbidden
marriage within the family, they have also wanted to maintain the integrity
of the group. Group is, admittedly, a vague term, an inherently cultural
construct encompassing all manner of classifications: tribe, caste, class, race,
religion, nation, and so on. But its vagueness does not diminish the
importance of the distinction Fox speaks of, that boundary between “us” and
“them,” however artificially that line might be drawn. And according to these
lights, marriage, or even a sexual relation, that crosses that boundary ceases
to be a social act that simultaneously denies incest and affirms the group and
becomes instead a threat, what I earlier called excessive exogamy. This was
the problem worrying the Deuteronomist when he cautioned the Jews that
intermarriage would “turn away thy sons ... that they may serve other gods”
(7.3), and thiswas the kind of exogamy the great pioneer of the anthropology
of marriage, Edward Westermarck, was thinking about when he coined the
memorable phrase “social adultery” (2:51). Here, then, is the real horror of
Dracula, for he is the ultimate social adulterer, whose purpose is nothing if it
is not to turn good Englishwomen like Lucy and Mina away from their own
kind and customs. Mina’s fear, we recall, is that she “ shall be ... leagued with
your enemy against you.”
What sort of enemy, foreigner, stranger is Count Dracula? I have
claimed that interracial sexual competition is fundamental to the energies
that motivate this novel, but in what way are vampires another “race”? As a
/
rigorous scientific concept, race enjoys little credence today, despite the
many attempts —particularly as part of the nineteenth-century zeal for
classification — to elevate it to a science involving physical criteria like jaws,
cheekbones, cranial capacities, and so on. It is,- however, a convenient
metaphor to describe the undeniable human tendency to separate “us” from
“them.” An idea like race helps us grapple with human otherness the fact —
that we do not all look alike or believe alike or act alike. Dracula is, above all,
strange to those he encounters —strange in his habits, strange in his

appearance, strange in his physiology. At one point, Van Helsing calls him
“the other” (297), and the competition for women in the novel reflects a
conflict between groups that define themselves as foreign to each other. My

use of the term interracial then, ,
is a way to speak of what happens when any
two groups set themselves at odds on the basis of what they see as differences
in their fundamental identity, be that “racial,” ethnic, tribal, religious,
national, or whatever. 4
The problem of interracial competition would have probably had an
especial resonance in 1897, the year Dracula appeared. For several decades,
Great Britain had been engaged in an unprecedented program of colonial
expansion: four and one quarter million square miles were added to the
empire in the last thirty years of the century alone (Seaman 332). British
imperialism, of course, was not new, nor was suspicion of foreigners a novelty
in a country where, as one eighteenth-century wit put it, “Before they learn
there is a God to be worshipped, they learn there are Frenchmen to be
detested” (qtd. in Porter 21). Yet the late nineteenth century saw the rise of
that great vulgarization of evolution (and powerful racist rationalization),
social Darwinism, and heard Disraeli say, “All is race; there is no other truth”
on the
1,
(qtd. in Faber 59). Dracula s insistence terror and necessity of racial

struggle in an imperialist context (the count, after all, has invaded England
and plans to take it over) must reflect that historical frame. My emphasis in
this essay, however, is on Stoker’s novel as a representation of fears that are
more universal than a specific focus on the Victorian background would
allow. Westermarck’s comment about exogamy as social adultery is indeed
contemporary with Dracula (his History of Human Marriage was first
published in 1891), but the anthropologist was expressing nothing not on the
mind of the Deuteronomist millennia before. And the difficulty facing the
men who fight the vampire is not unlike that expressed by Roderigo to
Brabantio, in lines first spoken at a much earlier time in British imperial
history: Desdemona, he says, has made “a gross revolt, / Tying her duty,
beauty, wit, and fortunes / In an extravagant and wheeling stranger ...”
(1.1.131-33). Let us look more specifically, then, at this stranger, Count

Dracula.
First, appearances. Dracula is described repeatedly, always in the same

way, with the same peculiar features emphasized. Take Mina’s first sight of
him:
I knew him at once from the description of the others. The waxen
face; the high aquiline nose, on which the light fell in a thin,
white line; the parted red lips, with the sharp white teeth showing
between; and the red eyes that I had seemed to see in the sunset
on the windows of St. Mary’s Church at Whitby. I knew, too, the

red scar on his forehead where Jonathan had struck him.
(292-93)
Dracula is remarkable looking for his nose, for the color of his lips and eyes
and skin, for the shape of his teeth, for the mark on his forehead; elsewhere,
we learn also that he has a strange smell (257). Color, in fact, which is
commonly used in attempts at racial classification, is a key element in

Stoker’s creation of Dracula’s foreignness. Here, and throughout the novel,
the emphasis is on redness and whiteness. In a brief description, each color
is mentioned three times (I count “waxen” as white), and the combination of
the two colors is one of the count’s most distinguishing racial features. That
it is racial, and not personal, becomes clear when we note how Stoker
consistently uses a combination of red and white to indicate either incipient
or completed vampirism. The women Harker encounters at Castle Dracula,
while one is blond and two are dark, are all primarily red and white (“All
three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their
voluptuous lips” [46]). More significant, Lucy and Mina take on this
coloration as Dracula works his will on them. There is first of all the
reiterated image of red blood on a white night-gown (103, 288), a signature
that Dracula leaves behind after one of his visits (and a traditional emblem of
defloration). Even more striking is the scar left when Van Helsing, in a futile
attempt at inoculation, presses the host into Mina’s forehead to protect Mina
against renewed attack. Harker calls it the “red scar on my poor darling’s
white forehead” (32 1). The scar, a concentration of red and white that closely
resembles the mark on Dracula’s own forehead (cf. esp. 312), thus becomes a
kind of caste mark, a sign of membership in a homogeneous group —and a
group that is foreign to the men to whom Mina supposedly belongs.

The scar shared by Dracula and Mina, one of the richest details in the
novel, has a significance even beyond its function as a caste mark. After all,
the wounds are not self-inflicted but given by members of the group of
vampire hunters (Dracula’s by Harker, Mina’s by Van Helsing), so that they
represent an attempt by the nonvampires to “mark off’ the vampires —much
as God puts a tnark on Cain, the original type of an alien breed. But the caste
mark is also a kind of venereal scar, not only because it results from the
count’s seduction of Mina but also because the echo of Hamlet’s accusation
against Gertrude is far too strong to be accidental: “Such an act / That blurs
the grace and blush of modesty, / Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose /
From the fair forehead of an innocent love, / And sets a blister there ...”
(3 .4.41-45).
5
The scar is thus a sign of defilement (seeing it, Mina cries out,
“Unclean! Unclean!” [302]), of sexual possession by the outsider. Finally, it is
curious to think of a scar on Dracula at all. He is remarkably protean, able to

change his form (he leaves the shipwreck at Whitby as a dog) or even involve
himself in rising mist. Why should he allow this disfigurement to remain?
John Freccero, discussing the scar Dante describes on the purgatorial form
of Manfred, insists that a mark like this on a supernatural being must be seen,
not as literal and physical, but as a text, as something meant especially to be
read. In that sense, the scars on the vampires serve a dense semiotic function,
marking Dracula and Mina (potentially, anyway) as simultaneously
untouchable, defiled, and damned —above all, different.
Red and white are, of course, the colors we associate with the typically
“English” complexion, and I want to emphasize that vampire coloration is
something different; at the same time, however, the coincidence of

coloration is meaningful. On the one hand, a “rosy” English complexion is
created by the perception of red through white —blood coursing beneath pale
skin. The vampire inverts this order. He or she displays red on white, as with
the scars or the effect of ruby lips against waxen skin. The result is rather like
a mortician’s makeup — a parody of what we expect and, as with a corpse, an
effect that finally signals difference and not similarity. That is, the vampire
has no rosy glow but presents what looks like dead flesh stained with blood
(or drained flesh indicating the food it requires) — a grotesque inversion of
good health. On the other hand, the vampire and his English competitors
may have more in common than they wish to acknowledge. As we explore
vampire sexuality, we will encounter a series of traits that initially assert
themselves as foreign or strange but that are revealed as inversions (as in the
coloration example), parodies, exaggerations, or even literalizations. Thus,
the perception of otherness can be an accurate response to difference and, at
the same time, an act that conceals or represses deeper connections.
The allies against the count are not described in comparable detail, and
their descriptions tend to be moral rather than physical. Three of their
qualities recur almost formulaically ,
God
good brave and strong. “Oh, thank
,
for good, brave men!” says Mina, and Van Helsing insists later, “You men are
brave and strong” (316, 332). Good is also often attached to the women in
their unvamped condition: “there are good women left still to make life
happy” (190). The distinction between the moral excellence of the insiders
and the physical peculiarity of the foreigner underlines the outsider’s
inherent danger. As Mina puts it, “[T]he world seems full of good men
even if there are monsters in it” (230). The familiar is the image of the good,
while foreignness merges with monstrosity.
But looks are only one way to construct our images of the foreign, and,
as we might expect, Dracula’s' habits are as bizarre as his appearance. The
introductory section of the novel —Harker’s diary account of his journey to
Transylvania and of his stay at Castle Dracula — gradually reveals Dracula’s
distinctive customs, moving from the merely odd to the unequivocally
horrifying. So, we learn early that Dracula lacks servants, that he is
nocturnal, that he likes to eat alone, and that he despises mirrors, and only
later do we watch him crawl down walls head first, feed small children to his
women, and sleep in his coffin. All Dracula’s peculiarities, however, reflect
fundamental differences in the most basic human activities that signal group
identity. Dracula is strange to Harker —and to us—because of what food he
eats and how he obtains and prepares it, because of where and when he
sleeps, because of his burial customs. To Harker as to so many, what is
foreign is monstrous, even if it is only a matter of table manners.

In the structure of group identity, the regulation of sexuality has an
especially privileged place, and Dracula is most fundamentally concerned with
both distinguishing the differences between the way vampire “monsters” and
“good, brave men” reproduce and identifying the threat those differences
pose to Van Helsing and the other men. Our introduction to Dracula in the
novel’s first six chapters —what Christopher Craft calls the “admission” to
monstrosity (108) — establishes the count’s foreignness; after that, the novel
primarily shows us Dracula’s attempts to reproduce and the struggle of the
band of young men under Van Helsing to stop him. The tale horrifies because
the vampire’s manner of reproduction appears radically different and because
it requires the women who already belong to these men.
Although the vampire reproduces differently, the ironic thing about
vampire sexuality is that, for all its overt peculiarity, it is in many ways very
like human sexuality, but human sexuality in which the psychological or
metaphoric becomes physical or literal. It initially looks strange but quite
often presents a distorted image of human tendencies and behavior. What is
frightening about Dracula, then, is that his sexuality is simultaneously

different and a parodic mirror. This seeming paradox probably reflects the full
complexity of the way one group responds to the sexual customs of another.
We note first the remarkable economy at the heart of the vampire’s
survival instinct. Like human beings, Dracula has the need for self-
preservation, which asserts itself in the drive to preserve both the life of the
individual and the life of the species. The difference, of course, is that the
vampire can satisfy the two needs simultaneously — the same action,
vamping, answers the need for nourishment and procreation. But that
equation of eating and sexual intercourse literalized by the vampire is a
connection we
make metaphorically and one that, as Levi-Strauss is fond
all
of pointing out, a number of primitive tribes acknowledge by making the

same verb do service for both actions (Raw and Cooked 269, Savage Mind 105).
Dracula says he needs new women so that he can “feed” (312), but we know
that is not all he means.
While the physiology of vampire sexuality literalizes a connection
between sex and eating that, for human beings, operates metaphorically, the
expression of that sexuality grotesquely exaggerates the typical human
pattern of incest avoidance and exogamy. The vampire’s “marriage” laws are
first suggested when Harker is almost seduced by the three vampire women
he encounters at Castle Dracula. Critical opinion about these women differs
considerably, betraying how badly vampire sexuality has been
misunderstood. The problem arises in part because the text does not
explicitly define the women’s relation to Dracula —who are they? Both Craft
and Maurice Richardson call them Dracula’s “daughters” (110, 427); Carol
Frye terms them “wives” (21); Leonard Wolf the count’s “beautiful brides”
(249); and C. F. Bentley says that “they are either Dracula’s daughters or his
sisters” but insists that an “incestuous” relation existed between them in the
past (29). The difficulty here is a false either/or: these women must either be
kin or be wives. What these readers ignore is the possibility that Dracula’s
relation to these women has, quite simply, changed, that they have occupied
both roles —not simultaneously, as in incest, but sequentially, because of the
way vampire reproduction works.
A speech Dracula makes to Mina late in the novel clarifies his relation
to the women at the castle: “And you, their best beloved one, are now to me,
flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful wine-press
for a while; and shall be later on my companion and helper” (293). According
to the count’s description, he and Mina are like husband and wife (he uses the
“flesh of my flesh” from Genesis and the marriage ceremony), but through
the very fact of their union, they are also becoming “kin.” Thus, because of
the vampire’s incest taboo, she can be his “wine-press” only for a “while,” and
in time, when her transformation from “good” Englishwoman to vampire is
complete, she will become a daughterly “companion and helper.” The

vampire women at the castle have undergone a similar change. When one of
them reproaches Dracula with the accusation, “You yourself never loved; you
never love!” he can answer, “Yes, I too can love; you yourselves can tell it
from the past. Is it not so?” (47).

Dracula’s relation to his women changes in this way because of another
economy in vampire sexuality. Not only do vampires combine feeding with

reproduction, they collapse the distinction between sexual partners and
offspring. “Wives,” that is, become daughters in an extraordinarily
condensed procedure in which penetration, intercourse, conception,
gestation, and parturition represent, not discrete stages, but one
undifferentiated action. 6 Dracula re-creates in his own image the being that
he is simultaneously ravishing. But the transformation, once complete, is
irreversible —Dracula makes it clear that once Mina becomes his daughter,
his“companion and helper,” she can never again be his “wine-press.” 7 We

confront here one large inadequacy of the Totem and Taboo reading. In the
primal horde, as female offspring mature, they fall under the sexual sway of
their fathers — daughters become wives. In Dracula ,
this role transformation
is reversed and is accompanied, moreover, by a powerful incest taboo that
seems to preclude Dracula’s further sexual interest in his onetime partners.
In fact, unlike the greedy patriarch of the horde, Dracula encourages his
women to seek other men. He tells the female vampires at his castle that,
when Harker’s usefulness to him is over, they can have their way with the
Englishman: “Well, now I promise you that when I am done with him you
shall kiss him at your will” (47).
The inevitable question arises for vampires as well as for human beings:
why is there an incest taboo? The answer, however, is not that incest
avoidance has been ingrained in the vampire’s conscience, if such a thing
should exist; instead, vampires appear incapable of committing this particular
crime, since they face a physical barrier to incest, not just a psychological
one —another dramatic instance of vampire literalization. Such a barrier is an
example of the many physical changes that mark the transformation into a
vampire, as we learn on the day that Lucy dies to her old identity as
Englishwoman and is reborn as one of Dracula’s own kind. (Vampire victims,

it seems, always die in childbirth.) Van Helsing and Seward examine her neck
and discover, to their horror, that the punctures in her throat “had absolutely
disappeared” (167). Dracula could not commit incest even if he wanted to; he
has no orifice to penetrate.
With the exaggeration of human tendencies characteristic of vampire
sexuality, the vampire’s incest taboo creates its own iron rule of exogamy. Just
as there is a physical obstacle to vampire incest, so the vampire’s need to
marry out is not a matter of custom or of a long-term evolutionary benefit
but an immediate and urgent biological necessity. Westermarck approvingly
quotes another nineteenth-century anthropologist, who speaks of “mankind’s
instinctive hankering after foreign women” (2: 165). For Dracula, though,
the need for “foreign women” no mere hankering. Rather, because his
is
sexual partner is also his food, the vampire must marry out or die. 8 A world
without foreign women would represent not only sterility but famine.
The vampire as a sexual being is thus strangely familiar —he avoids

incest and he seeks sexual partners outside his family. But that sexuality is also
a parody of human sexuality, a literalization that makes him seem very odd:
he cannot commit incest, he must marry out. And that necessity, in turn,
creates his primary danger. Since „ all vampires are kin, they cannot
simultaneously seek likeness (i.e., marry within the confines of the group)
and avoid incest, as human beings do. Dracula thus cannot respect group or
racial boundaries with regard to women; his particular physiology demands
instead that he take “foreign women” away from the men they already belong
to, a theft that continues his own kind. Moreover, his physically insistent
need to steal threatens the existence of the group on which he preys. As he
tells Van Helsing and his allies, “Your girls that you all love are mine already;
and through them you and others shall yet be mine” (312). Dracula is thus
doubly frightening —he is the foreigner whose very strangeness renders him
monstrous, and, more dangerous, he is an imperialist whose invasion seeks a
specifically sexual conquest; he is a man who will take other men’s women
away and make them his own. 9
And Dracula will make “foreign women” his own in a radical way. He
does not simply kidnap or alter cultural allegiances; his sexual union with
women like Lucy and Mina physically deracinates them and re-creates them
as members of his own kind. 10 This point will be clearer if we look at Stoker’s
manipulation of the novel’s central image, that of blood. Blood means many
things in Dracula ;
it is food, it is semen, it is a rather ghastly parody of the
Eucharist, the blood of Christ that guarantees life eternal. But its meaning
also depends on the way humanity has made blood a crucial metaphor for
what it thinks of as racial identity. Blood is the essente that somehow
determines all those other features —physical and cultural —that distinguish
one race from another. And this connection of blood and race explains most
fully that fascinating sequence when each of the good, brave men in turn
gives Lucy a transfusion. Ostensibly, they are replacing what the count has
removed, so that she will not perish from loss of blood. But Dracula’s action
is not feeding, nor is it only a combination of feeding and copulation. The
men are desperate to transfuse their blood into Lucy because they
understand that sexual intercourse with a vampire deracinates. Dracula’s
threat is not miscegenation, the mixing of blood; instead, he gives his
partners a new racial identity. And he can do this because the source of their
original identity, their blood, has been taken away. In only one more of the
remarkable literalizations that give this novel mythic power, the answer to
the kind of genocide that the vampire threatens is to reinfuse Lucy with the
“right” blood, “young and strong ... and so pure” (131), as Van Helsing says.
Such deracination is one effect of the economy we observed above, that
of the vampire’s sexual partners becoming his offspring. But what I have been
calling the racial element needs emphasis here; not only do wives become
daughters but brides who were originally foreign to Dracula become pure
vampires. This is what the Deuteronomist understood: the problem with
mixed marriages is that they produce new loyalties, not confused ones. As
Mina says, “I ... shall be ... leagued with your enemy against you.” And why?
Because, with her own blood removed, she will be like Dracula, and it is that
loss of women’s loyalty that the good, brave men cannot abide. As Van
Helsing explains it to Mina: “He have infect you in such a wise, that ... in
time, death ... shall make you like to him. This must not be! We have sworn
together that it must not. Thus are we ministers of God’s own wish: that the
world ... will not be given over to monsters ...” (325). The desperation these
men feel about the threat from Dracula is suggested, perhaps, by the multiple
transfusions they give Lucy. Van Helsing recognizes that these transfusions
are sexual and that they imply a kind of promiscuity in Lucy; as he puts it in
his distinctively incompetent English: “Ho, ho! then this so sweet maid is a
polyandrist, and me, with my poor wife dead to me, but alive by Church’s
law, though no wits, all gone —even I, who am faithful husband to this now-
no-wife, am bigamist” (182). Lucy’s promiscuity —her “polyandry,” as the
propriety of the —
Dutchman would have it is forgivable, because finally her
loyalty to her own kind is more vital than her absolute chastity. Clearly, it is
more important that the group maintain its hold over her than that any one
man has exclusive rights. In the face of such anxiety, too, there is always the
option we began with, euthanasia, the killing by brave men of their women,
to keep them from falling into the hands of the enemy.
In the light of all this, it is very hard to see as “incestuous” the
competition for women that constitutes the primary action of the novel.
Dracula does touch on primal fears and urges, but they are not the horror or
allure of incest. Stoker’s perdurable myth reflects the ancient fear that “they”
will take away “our” women, and Dracula is at his most horrifying not when
he drinks blood or travels in the form of a bat but when he, a man of palpable
foreignness, can say, “Your girls that you all love are mine.” An old black ram,
he says, is tupping your white ewe. Richardson is right to find the count a
figure of “huge potency” (427), but Dracula’s power is not that of the father,
as Richardson suggests, but that of the “extravagant stranger,” or, in Van

Helsing’s words, “the other.” But such power raises a new set of questions.
The men are anxious about losing their women, but what of the women
themselves? How do they respond to Dracula’s frightful glamour? What is
this novel’s attitude toward women?

Stoker’s description of the first women we see in Dracula the vampire
,
women at the castle, strongly emphasizes their overt sexuality. The word
voluptuous is* repeated — they have “voluptuous lips” and a “deliberate

voluptuousness” in their approach to Harker (46). And he, in turn, is quickly
aroused by their seductive appeal, as he feels “a wicked, burning desire that
they would kiss me with those red lips” (46). They project themselves as
sexualized beings and have power to inspire a sexual response in others. The
pattern is exactly repeated when Lucy’s transformation into a vampire is
complete. Shortly after Van Helsing and Seward note the disappearance of
the wounds in her neck, the young doctor reports that she speaks in a “soft,
voluptuous voice, such as I had never heard from her lips” (167); and when
the whole band confronts the undead Lucy outside her tomb, “we recognised
the features of Lucy Westenra. Lucy Westenra, but yet how changed. The
sweetness was turned to ... cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness”
(217). Within the next three paragraphs, we hear that she has a “voluptuous
smile” and a “wanton smile” and that she speaks with “a languorous,
voluptuous grace.” As is typical when Stoker discusses the characteristics of
a group, his vocabulary shrinks, and he resorts to formulas good brave and,
, ,
for vampire females, voluptuous. And when the posse of racial purity hammers
the stake through Lucy’s heart, that merciful penetration which undoes the
undead, the transformation is a return to her former state of desexualization:
the “foul Thing” with its “* oluptuous mouth” and its “carnal and unspiritual
appearance” disappears, replaced with “Lucy as we had seen her in her life,
with her face of unequalled sweetness and purity” (220-22).

There are several ways to interpret the novel’s attitude toward the
sexuality these female vampires project. The first —developed by a number
of critics — is that Stoker is expressing what have usually been regarded as
typical Victorian attitudes about female sexuality. According to these readers,
the violence against women in Dracula ,
most vividly rendered in the staking
of Lucy, reflects a hostility toward female sexuality felt by the culture at large.
Women should not be “wanton” or “voluptuous”; they should be “pure” and

“spiritual.” So, Phyllis Roth contends that “much of the novel’s great appeal
derives from its hostility to female sexuality” (“Suddenly Sexual” 1 13), Judith
Weissman insists that Dracula “is an extreme version of the stereotypically
Victorian attitudes toward sexual roles” (392), and Gail Griffin argues that,
among other things, Dracula represents “a subliminal voice in our heros,
whispering that, at heart, these girls ... are potential vampires, that their
angels are, in fact, whores” (463). Very recently, Bram Dijkstra has renewed
the charge, calling the book a “central document in the late nineteenth-
century war on woman” (3 41).
11
Undoubtedly, Dracula exhibits hostility toward female sexuality.
Women who are “pure” are not only good, they are recognizable as members
of the group — after the staking, Lucy again looks like “we had seen her in her
life.” By contrast, “voluptuous” women are monsters, loathsome creatures fit
only for destruction. What interests me, however, is not the possibility that
Dracula is yet another misogynist text but the way in which the novel
incorporates its women into its consideration of foreignness. A
portrayal of
careful look at thewomen in Dracula reveals that the primary fear is a fear of
the foreign and that women become terrifying insofar as they are associated
with the kind of strangeness vampires represent. Lucy and those women at
Castle Dracula are, as Van Helsing puts it, “like him,” members of that “new
order of beings” that the count wishes to “father” (308). Two issues are
important in this regard. First, there is the bisexuality of female vampires

(and males, too), a consideration that complicates any attempt to generalize
about the place of gender in this novel. Second, the women here do not
transform themselves. The count is the indispensable catalyst for their
alteration into sexual beings, a catalytic role that exposes again Dracula s
' deep
anxieties about excessive exogamy. I would like to look briefly at both these
issues before concluding.
A famous psychoanalytic comment on vampirism occurs in Ernest

Jones’s On the Nightmare :
The explanation of these fantasies is surely not hard. A nightly

visit from a beautiful or frightful being, who first exhausts the
sleeper with passionate embraces and then withdraws from him a
vital fluid; all this can point only to a natural and common
process, namely to nocturnal emissions.... In the unconscious
mind blood is commonly an equivalent for semen.
(119)
Dracula does indeed make blood and semen interchangeable fluids, 12 and this
equivalence may offer another clue why the combination of red and white is
the vampire’s distinct coloration. But the striking omission from Jones’s
rather condescendingcomment is that, in Stoker’s novel, the “vital fluid” is
being withdrawn from women, that the nightly visitor is a man. Vampirism
may have something to do with nocturnal emissions, but surely it is
important that in Dracula women have all the wet dreams. Clearly, in the
vampire world traditional sexual roles are terribly confused. Dracula
penetrates, but he receives the “vital fluid”; after Lucy becomes a vampire,
she acts as a “penetrator” (and becomes sexually aggressive), but she now
receives fluid from those she attacks. Nowhere is this confusion greater than
at the moment the brave band interrupts Dracula’s attack on Mina:

With ..# his right hand [he] gripped her by the back of the neck,
forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was
smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s
bare breast which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude
of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s
nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink.
(288)
As many have remarked, there is a powerful image of fellatio here (and there
is also an exchange of fluids —
a point not made clear in the description of
Dracula’s attack on Lucy); but in this scene Dracula, in a breathtaking
transformation, is a mother as well, engaged in an act that has a “terrible
resemblance” to breast-feeding. What is going on? Fellatio? Lactation? It
seems that the vampire is sexually capable of everything.

Like Tiresias, the vampire has looked at sex from both sides, and that
fact is significant for several reasons. First, it makes it difficult to say, simply,
that the novel is hostile to female sexuality, when the nature of the “female”
has itself been made problematic; it is more accurate to say that the primary
fear is of vampire sexuality, a phenomenon in which “our” gender roles

interpenetrate in a complicated way. Female vampires are not angels turned
into whores but human women who have become something very strange,
beings in whom traditional distinctions between male and female have been
lost and traditional roles confusingly mixed. Moreover, we encounter again
here the central paradox of Dracula's representation of the foreign. For the
bisexuality of the vampire is not only monstrously strange, it is also a very
human impulse —an impulse that, once more, the vampire has made
astonishingly literal. As we have seen throughout this essay, the sexuality of
vampires —here their bisexuality — is both strange and familiar, both an overt
peculiarity to be seen and dreaded and a reflection to be repressed.
If female vampires are powerfully bisexual, they are also creatures who
have been profoundly changed. The pure and spiritual become voluptuous,
the passive become aggressive, and so on. As Van Helsing says, “Madame
Mina, our poor dear Madame Mina, is changing” (328). The novel makes it
clear that these changes do not come from within — Dracula brings them
about as part of that complex process of deracinative reproduction discussed
above. In other words, the erotic energy of the female vampires is somehow
the count’s creation. And that, in turn, suggests another way in which he is
terrifying to the band of good, brave men. What if the problem is not that
women Lucy and Mina have become sexual but that their sexuality has
like
been releasedin the wrong way, by a foreigner, a foreigner who has achieved
what the men fear they may be unable to accomplish? 13 That is, the anxiety
of Van Helsing and his band may be partly a fear of aggressive or demanding
women, but it may also be a fear of superior sexual potency in the
competition. The boy next door may be no match for an extravagant

stranger.
The fear of excessive exogamy, so much a part of the terror that
Dracula inspires, is thus both a racial and a sexual problem. As I suggested
earlier, Dracula is a sexual imperialist, one who longs to be “the father or
furtherer of a new order of beings” (308). And he can beget this race only on
the bodies of other men’s women, imperiling the racial integrity of the West.
The fear he inspires, however, is also personal, for his is not merely an
imperialism that takes women, it is especially an imperialism of seduction
if he initially approaches these women through violence, in the end they are
converts, “leagued with your enemy against you.” Dracula threatens to
destroy both the “good” men’s race and their masculinity, to destroy them as
a group and emasculate them as individuals. No wonder they are so desperate

to stop him.
Dracula emerges, then, as a remarkable meditation on foreignness, in at
least two ways. The surface of the tale is a memorable myth of interracial
sexual competition, a struggle between men who wish to retain their control
over women defined as members of their group and a powerful and attractive
foreigner, who wishes to make the women his own. This battle, finally, is
between two kinds of desire. The desire of the good, brave men is a force that
must be called conservative, for it is an urge to protect possessions, to insist
on the integrity of racial boundaries, to maintain unmixed the blood of their

group. Hence, we see their xenophobic insistence that “the world”
meaning their world and their women —“not be given over to monsters.”
Dracula’s desire is the antithesis of such conservatism: what the count has
once possessed is useless to him in his continuing struggle for survival. His
constantly renewed desire for difference may be “monstrous” in terms of the
marriage practices of most cultures, but it is hardly the monstrosity of incest.
The threat Dracula represents is not the desire of the father to hoard his own
women; it is an urgent need to take, to violate boundaries, a desire that must
incorporate foreign blood for the very survival of his kind. For the vampire,
the blood he needs, both for sex and for food, always belongs to somebody
else.
Dracula thus uncovers for us the kind of mind that sees excessive
exogamy as a particularly terrifying threat. Such thinking is common in
human experience: we tend to divide ourselves into groups and to fret about
sexual contact across group lines. At the same time, such fears must have
been acute in late nineteenth-century Britain, plump with imperial gain, but
given perhaps to the bad dream that Dracula embodies: what if “they” should
try to colonize us ? 14 Dracula is interesting, however, as something more than

a representation of the xenophobic mind, in either its Victorian or its
aboriginal avatar —fascinating as that representation is. For xenophobia

requires, first of all, a concept of what is foreign,* and the remarkable thing
about Stoker’s novel is the way it is able to undermine that very conception
of the “foreign” on which so much of its narrative energy depends. That is,
Dracula both exemplifies what Hannah Arendt terms “race-thinking” (158)
and calls such thinking radically into question. Again and again Stoker
depicts vampire sexuality as a curiously doubled phenomenon —always
overtly bizarre, but also somehow familiar. 15 Such a paradox possibly is
inherent in the enterprise by which foreignness, that ancient need to separate

“us” from “them,” is constructed in the human imagination. As Dracula
represents that process, it is a simultaneous movement, in which differences
are perceived and reified, while likenesses are repressed and denied. The
refusal of some recognition may thus always be a part of the perception of
foreignness — even (or maybe especially) the extreme foreignness of
monstrosity.
Vampires, we all know, cast no reflection. Virtually the first frightening
oddity that Harker notices at Castle Dracula is that “there was no reflection
of [the count] in the mirro? ” (34). In the light of this discussion, that missing
image presents a striking metaphor. The vampire, “the other,” “the
monster” — everything that Dracula represents, and represents so
powerfully— depends on our refusal to see the ways in which he is also a
mirror. After all, it is Harker who can see nothing in the glass. When we say
that the vampire is absent from the mirror, perhaps what we are saying is that
we are afraid to see a reflection —however uneasy and strafrge —of ourselves.
Notes
1 . The first critic to insist on between Dracula and Totem and

a parallel
Taboo was Maurice Richardson. In his wake have come James TwitchelPs The
Living Dead (134-35), Dreadful Pleasures (99-104, 137), and Forbidden
Partners (69-70), and Phyllis Roth’s “Suddenly Sexual Women” (115) and
Pram Stoker (114). Richard Astle also brings up the theory but notes that
there are two “fathers” in Stoker’s novel, Dracula and Van Helsing, a “wish-
fulfillment” situation that enables the “sons” simultaneously to kill and obey
the father (98-99).
2. For a valuable discussion of the differences between anthropology
and psychoanalysis, see W. Arens (40-43 esp.). In The Red Lamp of Incest,
Robin Fox attempts to reconcile recent anthropological and biological work

on incest with Totem and Taboo. The result has been controversial, and in any
event I am not sure Freud would recognize his theories in their rehabilitated
form. The approach I use in this essay does not imply that I believe
anthropology to be “right,” psychoanalysis “wrong.” I do want to substitute
one model of human behavior for another (and models are what I believe
both approaches are) and see what happens.
3. The discussion that follows is much indebted to Arens and to the two
volumes by Fox, all three of which provide good summaries of the vast
anthropological literature on these subjects. Also, while I am aware that
Levi-Strauss’s theories have been much debated in the anthropological
community and that they are not, perhaps, entirely original, I must
acknowledge that I could not have arrived at the ideas developed in this essay
without his powerfully expressed notion of the interrelation between an
incest taboo and the exchange of women among allied men.
The existence of an incest taboo does not contradict the idea that
humans have an instinctive aversion to committing incest. See Arens 14.
4. Pierre Van den Berghe provides a useful summary of the history and
current status of attempts at racial classifications (ch. 1). A dictionary

(American Heritage ) definition of race suggests the range of essentially
metaphoric meanings attached to the word. Those definitions include “a
distinct group [defined by] genetically transmitted physical characteristics”;
“a group united” on the basis of history, geography, or nationality; and “a

genealogical line.” As a “race,” vampires partake of all these meanings.
5. Stoker would have known Hamlet intimately, having been associated
for many years with the actor Henry Irving and having long served as
manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London. In fact, a review Stoker wrote
of Irving’s performance as Hamlet first brought the two together, and
Stoker’s management of the Lyceum began with a ninety-eight-night run of
Hamlet. See Daniel Farson 17, 56.
There is a further biographical consideration here if it is true, as Farson
argues, that Stoker died of syphilis. Farson claims that in view of the typical
progression of the disease Stoker might have caught the infection at about
the time he wrote Dracula (233-35).
6. For this reason, there is no such thing as birth control for vampires,
except coitus interruptus, whose efficacy seems uncertain. The good men
certainly interrupt Dracula’s last attack on Mina, but her salvation from
rebirth as a vampire seems more a function of Dracula’s death than the result
of the interruption. The impossibility of separating sexuality from
reproduction in Dracula inverts the pattern in the other great nineteenth-
century monster novel, Frankenstein which ,
insists on that separation. In a
sense, these novels anticipate the contemporary debate between Catholic

conservatives and technological interventionists on the issue of reproduction.
Dracula, with its crucifixes, its use of the host as a kind of disinfectant, and
especially its literalization of certain Catholic preoccupations about sex,
emerges as an oddly Catholic novel, with vampires representing a fantasy of

sexual orthodoxy. Neither of the biographies I consulted had anything to say
on the subject of the novelist’s religion, but Stoker was Irish.
7. Again, there is a deliciously gossipy biographical sidelight here.
According to Farson, who is Stoker’s great-nephew, family gossip maintains

that Stoker’s wife ceased to have sexual relations with her husband after the
birth of their one child in 1879 (2 14). Of course, it is impossible to know how
far to trust such evidence, but the parallel is worth noting.
8. Here we see an exaggerated and literalized version of the
sociobiological argument that outbreeding is genetically useful for humanity.
See Arens 22.
9. It is him apart from other
Dracula’s status as an invader that sets
supernatural beings. Most of the terror ghosts create is bound up with the
belief that dead people haunt the places they knew in life: houses are
normally haunted by former residents, or at least by someone who had a
significant relation to the olace. Dracula, however, must leave his old home
to do his dreadful work. This supernatural imperialism suggests again that

the fear Dracula creates is linked to his strangeness, to his remote origins. In
a sense, Dracula is a demonic version of Abraham, who also must leave his
old home and go to another place to begin his new race.
10. A powerful expression of this mentality dominates John Ford’s

great western The Searchers (1956). At one point, John Wayne and an army
doctor are looking over a group of women, all of them very blond, recently
rescued from long captivity (the chief who has been holding them is named,
interestingly, “Scar”). The women are behaving strangely, and the doctor
remarks, “It’s hard to believe they’re white.” Wayne’s reply tersely reveals his
character’s belief in sexual deracination: “They’re not white —anymore.
They’re Comanche.”
11. There is, however, another school of thought that finds at least
glimmers of real sympathy for women in Dracula. Nina Auerbach sees in

Lucy and Mina a “self-transforming power surging beneath apparent
victimization,” observing that “we are struck by the kinds of power that
[Stoker] grant[s]” to his women (34, 17). Stephanie Demetrakapoulous
insists that the novel expresses hidden desires in Victorian culture,

particularly women’s desire to be sexually alive, and Alan Johnson says that
the count “symbolizes” these women’s “inner rebelliousness,” which the
novel portrays as “justified” (21). Carol Senf suggests that Stoker’s
“treatment of women ... does not stem from his hatred of women in general
but ... from his ambivalent reaction to a topical phenomenon —the New
Woman” (34).
12. It seems inevitable that, at some point soon, the phenomenon of

AIDS and the vampire myth will converge. In fact, we may already be seeing
a “vampirization” of high-risk groups for the disease. One heterosexual was
quoted in the New York Times Magazine as saying, “[Avoiding sex with
members of high-risk groups] is, in a way, a tyranny, a part of the inexorable
return to conservatism. It’s so antithetical to intermingling.... People are

saying you should sleep only with your own kind” (Davis 35).
13. Some important recent historical work suggests that the standard
view of Victorian attitudes toward female sexuality is seriously flawed. Both
Peter Gay and Carl Degler argue that there was no monolithic suppression
or denial of women’s erotic potential in the era and that a notorious figure
like Dr. William Acton (who thought “normal” women had no sexual
feelings) should not be viewed as a spokesperson for the age.
14. Jerome Buckley’s comment is interesting in this regard: “All
through the nineties there lay behind the cult of empire a half-hushed
uneasiness, a sense of social decline, a foreboding of death ...” (228).
15. Such doubleness calls to mind Freud’s analysis of the “uncanny,” in
which the heimlich and the unheimlich converge. For Freud, however, the
“uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known
of old and long familiar” (“‘Uncanny’” 220). My understanding of Dracula
here depends on the poles of the strange and familiar remaining
simultaneously present. Freud’s “leads back to” suggests the priority Freud
assigns to the family romance even in the realm of the literature of fright. In
insisting on concealed points of similarity between vampires and human
beings, I have not been led “back to” an incestuous reading of the novel.
Rather, I mean to show how foreignness is perhaps an inevitably
compromised perception.
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Arens, W. The Original Sin: Incest and Its Meaning. New York: Oxford UP,
1986.
Astle, Richard. “Dracula as Totemic Monster: Lacan, Freud, Oedipus, and
History.” Sub-stance IS (1980): 98-105.
Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of Victorian Myth.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.
Bentley, C. F. “The Monster in the Bedroom: Sexual Symbolism in Bram

Stoker’s Dracula .” Literature and Psychology 22 (1972): 27-32.
Buckley, Jerome. The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture. New York:
Vintage, 1964.
Craft, Christopher. “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion
in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Representations 8 (1984): 107-33.
Davis, Peter. “Exploring the Kingdom of AIDS.” New York Times Magazine
31 May 1987: 32-35.
Degler, Carl. “What Ought to Be and What Was: Women’s Sexuality in the
Nineteenth Century.” American Historical Review 79 (1974): 1467-90.

Demetrakapoulous, Stephanie. “Feminism, Sex-Role Exchanges, and Other
Subliminal Fantasies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Frontiers 2 (1977):
104-13.
Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture.
New York: Oxford UP, 1986.
Faber, Richard. The Vision and the Need: Late Victorian Imperialist Aims.
London: Faber, 1966.
Farson, Daniel. The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker.
London: Joseph, 1975.
Ford, John, dir. The Searchers. Warner Brothers, 1956.
Fox, Robin. Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective.
Harmonds worth: Penguin, 1967.

The Red Lamp of Incest. New York: Dutton, 1980.
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Freccero, John. “Manfred’s Wounds and the Poetics of the Purgatorio.”

Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye. Ed. Eleanor
Cook et al. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1983. 69-82. 1
Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. Vol. 13.
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. “The ‘Uncanny.’” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological

Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. Vol. 17. London:
Hogarth, 1955. 218-52. 24 vols. 1953-74.
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Griffin, Gail. “‘Your Girls That You All Love Are Mine’: Dracula and the
Victorian Male Sexual Imagination.” International Journal of Women's
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Johnson, Man P “‘Dual Life’: The Status of Women in Stoker’s Dracula .”
Sexuality and Victorian Literature. Ed. Don Richard Cox. Knoxville: U

of Tennessee P, 1984. 20-39.
Jones, Ernest. On the Nightmare. New York: Liveright, 1951.

Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon,
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. The Raw and the Cooked. New York: Harper, 1975.
. The Savage Mind. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966.
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Richardson, Maurice. “The Psychoanalysis of Ghost Stories.” Twentieth
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. “Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Literature and
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“
Senf, Carol A. Dracula Stoker’s Response to the New Woman.” Victorian
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Stoker, Bram. 1897. Dracula. New York: Signet, 1965.
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DANIEL PICK
1 ’
‘Terrors of the night’: Dracula and degeneration
in the late nineteenth century
‘It is nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance.’ ( Dracula , p. 36) 1
TX his essay seeks to address Dracula historically
crucial discursive contexts. Bram Stoker’s text

and to suggest some of its
was published in 1897, the
very year after the term ‘psychoanalysis’ is said to have been coined. 2
Nevertheless, Dracula inhabits, like many other late nineteenth-century
fictions, a world of representation which now seems insistently and
tantalisingly pre-Freudian. 3 The adjacent dates —signalling for Stoker as for
Freud a critical, albeit relatively late, ‘career launch’ into fame —mask the
enduring separation between their languages on fantasy and demons, as
between their respective interpretations of dreams. They were not at all, as
one commentator has recendy claimed, ‘telling the same story’. 4
Part of the novel’s task was to represent, externalise and kill off a
distinct constellation of contemporary fears. Corruption and degeneration,
the reader discovers, are identifiable, foreign and superable; but the text also
recognises a certain sense of failure —an element of horror is always left over,
uncontained by the terms of the story as by the intrepid party who stalked
the Count: an English aristocrat, a brave American hunter, two doctors, a
lawyer and his devoted, dutiful (but endangered) wife. The vampire is
allowed no direct voice or expression, but nor is any other figure given full
From Critical Quarterly 30, no. 4 (Winter 1988): 71-87. © by Manchester University Press.
93
94 DANIEL PICK
narrative mastery. The novel refuses to provide a synthesis, proceeding

instead through a series of separate diaries,, reports and letters. It seeks to
deal with a number of contemporary social debates, but reaches in the face
of them a kind of paralysis, as though the narrative never came to represent
the danger it hints. There are points where the description seems frozen at
the threshold between Victorian evolutionism and psychoanalysis:
... I saw around us a ring of wolves, with white teeth and lolling
red tongues, with long, sinewy limbs and shaggy hair. They were
a hundred times more terrible in the grim silence which held
them than even when they howled. For myself, I felt a sort of
paralysis of fear. It is only when a man feels himself face to face
with such horrors that he can understand their true import.
(p. 13)
Although Professor Van Helsing is famed for his ‘absolutely open mind’
(p. 112), the novel chronically reverts to closed, cautionary tale, warning of
the perils of a wandering consciousness or body, the potentially fatal risks of
entering mysterious new places and knowledges: Trance/Trans/Transylvania.
But the narrative is itself prone to carelessness, wandering off the point or
hinting too much. As Montague Summers observed in his early study of the
vampire (1928): ‘If we review Dracula from a purely literary point of
approach it must be acknowledged that there is much careless writing....’ 5

The text is careless in some respects but painstaking in its insistence on the
inadequacy of nineteenth-century materialism and determinism. Dracula
thirsts to cross the threshold into a new conception of subjectivity and
science, say psychoanalytic, towards which, simultaneously, it seems to be
remarkably resistant. We are shown how the doctors in the novel kept
coming up against an impasse, rejecting any organic explanation of Lucy
Westenra’s illness, but reluctant to follow through to any alternative
explanation: ‘... but as there must be a cause somewhere, I have come to the
conclusion that it must be something mental’ (p. Ill); ‘I have made careful
examination but there is no functional cause’ (p. 114).
known nothing of one another at the time
Stoker and Freud could have
of Dracula. Even in 1913 Freud made no mention of this horror story when
he discussed vampires in Totem and Taboo. 6 By then the tale was something of
a cause celebre —nine English editions had already appeared as well as a
considerable subsidiary literature. 7 But perhaps Freud’s omission is
unsurprising. The context of his brief observations on the vampire was
strictly anthropological, nothing to do with the popular novel.
Although Freud said nothing about Dracula, he did discuss a book
‘Terrors of the night’ 95
published the year Rudolf Kleinpaul’s Die Lebendigen und die Toten in
after,
und Sage (1898), which had included a useful account of

Volksglauben, Religion
the vampire myth. Indeed according to this authority, as recounted by Freud,

once upon a time 'all of the dead were vampires, all of them had a grudge
against the living and sought to injure them and rob them of their lives’ (p.
59). In the course of history, so the argument continued, the perceived

malignity of the dead diminished and narrowed, frequently restricted to
those with a particular right to feel resentment, for instance, murdered
people, or ‘brides who had died with their desires unsatisfied’ (ibid).
Kleinpaul described various tribes in which the dead were cast as

murderously threatening creatures. They lusted to bring the living within
their fold: ‘The living did not feel safe from the attacks of the dead till there
was a sheet of water between them. That is why men liked to bury the dead
on islands or on the farther side of rivers; and that, in turn, is the origin of
such phrases as ‘Here and in die Beyond’ (ibid).
In reading the various recent studies on tribal taboos around death,

Freud had been struck by the frequency with which the dead were imbued
with evil ‘We know that the dead are
designs and a will to ‘infect’ the living.
powerful rulers; but we may perhaps be surprised when we learn that they are
treated as enemies. The taboo upon the dead is —
if I may revert to the simile
—
of infection especially virulent among most primitive peoples (p. 51). In
many tribes, for instance in Polynesia, Melanesia and Africa, those who had
had a close relationship or intimate dealings with the dead were seen to have
been themselves morally touched and contaminated by death. They became
anathema for the community. Thus there were villages in the Philippine
Islands where:
a widow may not leave her hut for seven or eight days after the
death; and even then she may only go out at an hour when she is
not likely to meet anybody, for whoever looks upon her dies a
sudden death. To prevent this fatal catastrophe, the widow knocks

with a wooden peg on the trees as she goes along, thus warning
people of her dangerous proximity; and the very trees on which
she knocks soon die. (p. 53)
Evidence from Frazer and others was given to show that widowers too
were subject to restrictions of contact with other members of the
community; restrictions which were in fact barriers to temptation. The taboos
operated to prevent the fulfilment of the bereaved’s desire to find a substitute
partner: ‘Substitutive satisfactions of such a kind run counter to the sense of
mourning and they would inevitably kindle the ghost’s wrath’ (p. 54). The
96 DANIEL PICK
wrathful dead themselves were often unnameable: indeed anything which

might evoke and hence invoke the dead had to be prevented, ‘[f]or they [e.g.
the Tuaregs of the Sahara] make no disguise of the fact that they are afraid of
the presence or of the return of the dead person’s ghost; and they perform a
great number of ceremonies to keep him at a distance or drive him off (p.
57).
Freud linked such myths and taboos to the guilt, remorse, pain and
hate experienced by the bereaved, remarking that these folk tales and taboos
had to be reversed. In fact the tale inverted the relation of subject and
predicate: it was not the demons that produced guilt, but the other way
round.Demons and spirits, Freud argued, were ‘only projections of man’s
own emotional impulses’ (p. 92). He noted the unconscious desire to protect
the ‘innocence’ of the mourner, to project the evil wishes on to the dead, as
though thereby, despite the impossibility, to free the living of ambivalence.
Ghosts, vampires, demons, spirits functioned at once to punish and

exonerate the living, threatening and reprieving at the same moment. The
trouble with the dead, it seemed, was that they would not stay dead and
buried, least of all in the memories of the living. Like blood-sucking
vampires, they haunted the memory of the bereaved and drained them of
their vitality.
Freud’s own concern here was at the juncture of psychoanalysis and
anthropology, not social history. The aim, after all, was not specifically the
analysis of recent culture, but the pursuit of the ‘primitive’ as royal road to
the understanding of the origin of more widely shared terrors, totems and
projections. In Totem and Taboo there is no exploration of the significance of
the renewed late nineteenth-century interest in the uncanrty, the immaterial,

the supernatural and the beyond; yet that interest was to be found repeatedly
and variedly in fiction, anthropology, psychology and criminology, as well as
at the Society for Psychical Research of which Freud became a
corresponding member. 8 The Society was founded in 1882 with a
commitment to the ‘open-minded’ investigation of the occult, ghosts,

haunted houses, possession and trances. It connected with a much wider
European intellectual reappraisal of positivism and naturalism which
crystallised in the 1890s. Van Helsing would no doubt have been an ideal
member; after all he constantly doubted his senses and questioned his
rationalist assumptions, always striving to see beyond ‘our scientific, sceptical

matter-of-fact nineteenth century’ (Dracula, p. 238).
To try to read Dracula historically, rather than anthropologically or trans-

historically, involves, initially, a certain capacity of resistance on the part of
the reader. For it is tempting to ‘fall prey’ to the mythological, folkloristic
connotations of the vampire story and declare the novel merely a new twist
to an old tale, the reiteration of antique taboos on death. The cinema often
contributes to this collapse of history, by eliding the differences between
Dracula and Frankenstein, placing them together in much the same castle, the
same period, as if there were one undifferentiated ‘gothic’ nineteenth

century, homogenous from beginning to end. To say that Stoker’s best-seller
was very much a Victorian, oY indeed more specifically a late nineteenth-
century text may even appear perverse. It was, after all, only the latest in a
long history of literary representations of the vampire which itself ran back
into a vast range of myths. In 1819 Polidori’s The Vampyre had appeared
(under the name of Byron) and made just this point; the ‘superstition’, we are
told, was very general in the East and had spread into Europe through
Hungary, Poland, Austria and Lorraine. 9 Or as a subsequent account put it:
‘Assyria knew the vampire long ago and he lurked amid the primaeval forests
of Mexico before Cortes came.’ 10
Any specific representation of the vampire, it could then be argued,
fades into a longer history which in turn dissolves into timeless myth. Some
things, we are reminded in Dracula are historically recalcitrant,
,
unamenable
to ‘modern’ transformation: ‘... the old centuries had, and have powers of
their own which mere “modernity” cannot kill’ (p. 36). Perhaps one could
seek in Proppian fashion to pare away the idiosyncracies of Stoker’s tale in
order to locate across the centuries the basic shared form of vampire
narratives, the essential morphological elements into which, apparently, any
tale might be decomposed. 11 Thus a recent study of the vampire from the
nineteenth century through to contemporary cinema has insisted that despite
the ‘unique achievement’ of each classic of the genre, ‘[a] close extended look
... will allow us to see the shape and the particular significance of the entire
series ...’. 12
What is offered in that particular approach to the vampire is
certainly a useful compendium of examples, but Dracula as such is largely

displaced from the later nineteenth century; there is indeed only the briefest
consideration of any of the wider historical questions and debates at the time
of its writing.
Dracula, however, has many contemporary references and resonances
not even to be found in one of its most immediate ‘sources’, Le Fanu’s
Carmilla (1872). 13 Above all, whilst Le Fanu’s tale had been securely located
in Styria, Stoker’s novel brings Dracula to London, articulating a vision of
the bio-medical degeneration of the race in general and the metropolitan
population in particular. Although versions of such a theory had found
expression in specialist journals and treatises since the 1850s, it had only
become a major issue of social debate and political speculation in the 1880s
and 1890s. 14 The network of Dracula's images and terrors can be read in the
98 DANIEL PICK
context of a multitude of other contemporary representations: from

government inquiries to popular pamphlets, statistical surveys, laboratory
experiments, political programmes and philosophical investigations. The
ambiguities of representation in the novel were in part bound up with
contradictions in that wider discourse of degeneration throughout the
period: the process of pathological decay, it seemed, was at once precisely
contained (there were certain identifiable degenerate categories of being who
eventually became sterile) and ubiquitous, affecting whole populations. The
reassuring function of the novel —displacing perceived social and political
dangers on to the horror story of a foreign Count finally staked through the
heart —was undermined by the simultaneous suggestion of an invisible and
remorseless morbid accumulation within, distorting the name and the body
of the West (Lucy Westenra), transmitting unknown poisons from blood to
blood.
The novel, excruciatingly, says nothing of the sexual fantasies and fears
it articulates so graphically as vampire attack and blood pollution. The text
resists the ‘temptation’ of spelling out any notion of sexuality, for which,
indeed, it lacks any developed terms of description: resistance, frustration,
failure of insight are crucial ‘themes’ in Stoker’s story, and it is as if the
narrative itself takes a certain delight in resistance, deafness to the very words
on the page, despite its own admonition: ‘[Van Helsing to Seward] You do
not let your eyes see nor your ears hear ...’ (p. 191). Harker proposes to his
future wife a union of ignorance: ‘Are you willing, Wilhelmina, to share my
ignorance? Here is the book. Take it and keep it, read it if you will, but never
let me know ...’ (p. 104). Yet denial provides no defence against Dracula. To
be asleep or merely careless is to risk the vampire’s bite, and the fall into
hypnotic fascination.
Orthodox medicine itself is shown to be in much the state of a
sleepwalker, semi-consciously stumbling along well-worn routes, unable to
cross conceptual frontiers and understand the condition of its patients: Dr
Seward [of his patient Renfield] ‘... I do not follow his thought’; ‘I wish I
could get some clue to the cause’; ‘I wish I could fathom his mind’ (pp. 107,
1 16). Renfield constantly escapes the doctor’s grasp: he slips all too easily out
of his cell and of any existing psychiatric schema. Seward never does get to
the ‘heart’ of the ‘mystery’, never succeeds in becoming ‘master of the facts
of his hallucination’ (p. 60), persisting too single-mindedly in his materialist

research on the brain. Only very slowly does he come to sense that his
patient’s condition is bound up with Dracula and some wider contemporary
perversion of the evolutionary ‘struggle for survival’ which has blurred the
question of ‘fitness’ and ‘unfitness’: ‘My homicidal maniac is of a peculiar
kind. I shall have to invent a new classification for him, and call him a
zoophagous (life-eating) maniac; what he desires is to absorb as many lives as
he can, and has laid himself out to achieve

cumulative way’ (pp. 70-1). it in a
Seward’s ‘obtuse’ reluctance to make any unconventional diagnosis about

Lucy Westernra finally exasperates even his mentor, Van Helsing: ‘Do you
mean to tell me, friend John, that you have no suspicion as to what poor Lucy
died of; not after all the hints given, not only by events, but by me?’ (p. 191).
The subjects of hysteria and hypnotism, which for a long time in the
nineteenth century had been pushed out to the fringes and beyond of
orthodoxy and respectability, had lately been returned to the medical centre-
stage, at least in Paris, and could no longer be dismissed as mere occult
practice or superstition by the modern doctor: ‘[Van Helsing] I suppose now
that you do not believe in corporeal transference. No? Nor in

materialisation. No? Nor in astral bodies. No? Nor in the reading of
thought. No? Nor in hypnotism? — ’
‘[Seward] Yes’ I said. ‘Charcot has
proved that pretty well’ (p. 191).
But the medical audience ‘lured’ from abroad by Charcot’s famous
Tuesday demonstrations at the Salpetriere was frequently appalled to learn
of the presence of another theatre of hysteria where quacks, charlatans and
music-hall actors entertained large crowds. The individual could,
supposedly, be seduced or induced to commit terrible crimes. Crowds and
mobs could be whipped up into anarchic frenzies by the hypnotic potential
of ‘morbid, excitable leaders’. 15 This is the period indeed that sees the
reappearance of great hypnotists: Charcot and Donato, stage-name of a
former Belgian naval officer, D’Hont, who causes sensation and scandal as he
tours the European theatres, provoking furious debate on the very legality of
the public sepctacle of magnetism and hypnotism. 16 The ‘hypnotic menace’

becomes a matter of forensic investigation and grave public concern
famous cases and trials underscore the possibility of subliminal manipulation,
of innocent women induced to commit hideous crimes, even ‘murder under
hypnosis’ 17 — at the same time that it is a terrain of new artistic and medical
exploration towards the unconscious.
Of how much Stoker, a man of the theatre who was later to express a
particular interest in the question of imposture (and Donato was unmasked

on stage for his tricks), 18 knew of this directly we cannot be sure, but echoes
of the criminal trials, public performances and dubious private consultations

will have reached him. Certainly Dracula too is cast as a form of hypnotist
on the stage of Europe, part fake, part genius: ‘[Harker] I felt myself
struggling to awake some call of my instincts ... I was becoming hypnotised’
(p. 44). ‘[Mina Murray] I was bewildered, and strangely enough, I did not
want to hinder him’ (p. 287). The novel sets up a contest of hypnotic powers:
the good scientist and the evil vampire compete for the loyalty of the
100 DANIEL PICK
wavering hysterical women, for whom there is always only one step from
‘horrid flirt’ (p. 58) to the ‘nightmare’ of a demonic possessed sexuality: ‘She
seemed like a nightmare of Lucy as she lay there; the pointed teeth, the
bloodstained voluptuous mouth —which it made one shudder to see —the
whole carnal and unspiritual appearance, seeming like a devilish mockery of
Lucy’s sweet purity’ (p. 214).
Everyone, it appears in the novel, is obliged to doubt not only their
own descent but their own health and mental order or else to fall into mere
self-delusion. Thus Mina Murray is forced to ‘suppose I was hysterical (p. ...’
184). Lord Godaiming ‘grew quite hysterical’ (p. 230); even Van Helsing, the
—
seemingly secure centre of reason and wisdom ‘one of the most advanced
of the
scientists ‘both
day’,theory and in —enigmaticallyin practice’ (p. 1 12)
collapses at one point into a ‘disturbed’ and disturbing condition. Seward

records how in the face of Lucy’s death, Van Hesling became hysterical: ‘...
he gave way to a regular fit of hysterics ... He laughed till he cried and I had
to draw the blinds lest anyone should see us and misjudge ...’ (p. 174).
Strange perturbations are repeatedly described, and not simply in relation to
the external figure of Dracula, casting doubt on whether anyone can be, as
Lucy Westenra considers Seward, ‘absolutely imperturbable’ (p. 55). Indeed,

thwarted in love, the docto~ is forced to rely on drugs to put him to sleep (p.
101). It is increasingly unclear what could constitute a protection from illness
and vice in the novel; whether for instance ‘good breeding’ means anything;
for who could be better bred than Count Dracula himself? Amidst the
‘whirlpool of races’ (p. 28) which made up European history, the Count was
descended from a noble line of ‘survivors’: ‘for in our veins flows the blood
of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship’ (p. 28).
The novel is in one sense committed to the contradistinction of vice
and virtue, purity and corruption, human and vampire; but it tacitly
questions the possibility of such sharp separations, in this like so many
medical-psychiatrists of the period convinced that no complete dividing line
lay between sanity and insanity but rather a vast and shadowy borderland:
‘[Van Helsing] For it is not the least of its terrors that this evil thing is rooted
deep in all good Darwin too, it should be remembered, had
...’ (p. 241).
already dealt his ‘blow’ to ‘human narcissism’ (as Freud was later to view it)
by warning that there was no absolute evolutionary separation from the
world of the animals, no escape from the stigma of that descent. Behind even
the most imperiously ‘contemptuous’ human smile, one usually caught the
glint of a set of once ferocious teeth:
He who rejects with scorn the belief that his own canines, and
their occasional great development in other men, are due to our
early progenitors having been provided with these formidable

weapons, will probably reveal by sneering the line of his descent.
For though he no longer intends, nor has the power, to use these
teeth as weapons, he will unconsciously retract his ‘snarling
muscles’ ... —so as to expose them ready for action, like a dog
prepared to fight. 19
Stoker’s text was paralysed at a threshold of uncertainty, at the turning point

between a psychiatric positivism (which the novel derided) and the glimpsed
possibility of a new exploration of the unconscious. The rejection of
conventional science in the novel was conceived to involve not so much a
leap into the future as a return to an earlier knowledge: Van Helsing stoically
accepts and manipulates folklore, amalgamating it with the latest evidence

from the laboratory and the clinic. He is repeatedly forced to point out the
power of the irrational and the inexplicable, the fact that there were more
wonders in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in nineteenth-century
naturalist philosophy. Nevertheless he finally explains to the other
protagonists that the fearful enigma of the vampire has to be approached not
through a popular physiognomy but through the insights of a craniometry
currently being developed in modern criminal anthropology:
—
The criminal always works at one crime that is the true criminal
who seems predestinate to crime, and who will of none other.
This criminal has not full man-brain. He is clever and cunning
and resourceful; but he be not of manstature as to brain. He be of
child-brain in much. Now this criminal of ours is predesinate to
crime also; he too have child-brain ... The Count is a criminal and
of criminal type. Nordau and Lombroso would so classify him,
and qua criminal he is of imperfectly formed mind. (pp. 341-2)
Stoker’s novel refers to Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso, to a whole

realm of investigation into degeneration and atavism, which itself wavered
between a taxonomy of visible stigmata and the horror of invisible maladies,
between the desired image of a specific, identifiable criminal type (marked
out by ancestry) and the wider representation of a society in crisis, threatened
by waves of degenerate blood and moral contagion. 20 Like Lombroso and
the earlier important French theorist of degeneration, Benedict- Augustin
Morel, 21 Jonathan Harker journeys from specific images of deformity (goitre
in particular: ‘Here and there we passed Cszeks [sic] and Slovaks, all in
picturesque attire, but I noticed that goitre was painfully prevalent’ (p. 7),
towards the citadel of full-blown degeneracy. From early work on cretinism

102 DANIEL PICK
and goitre, 3 medico-psychiatric theory had emerged in which the

degenerate was cast as a kind of social vampire who corrupted the nation and
desired, in Lombroso’s words, ‘not only to extinguish life in the victim, but
to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh and drink its blood ’. 22
The possible identification of the delinquent and the degenerate

through physiognomy were part of the problematic of many late nineteenth-
century novels as of criminal anthropology itself in the period. The idea that
different categories of delinquent possessed specific traits and that a new
science might chart precisely the features of the ‘born criminal’ aroused vast
interest and enthusiasm, but also growing criticism and ridicule. By the
1 890s, the cruder versions of Lombrosian and other degenerationist schema
(the simian eyebrows, handle-shaped ears and so on) were being challenged
and even satirised by dissenting experts in medical lecture courses and at
international congresses of criminal anthropology 23 . New biological determinist

arguments emerged, concentrating not on the face of the criminal, but on the
supposedly obscure anomalies of the blood, internal organs, nervous system and
brain.
Dracula is full of aspiring physiognomists, seeking to probe

demeanours, features and expressions: ‘[Harker] Doctor, you don’t know
what it is to doubt everything, even yourself. No you don’t; you couldn’t with
eyebrows like yours.’ ‘[Van Helsing] seemed pleased, and laughed as he said:
“So! You are a physiognomist’” (p. Lucy points out to Mina how
188).
Seward ‘tries to read your thoughts’, and then asks ‘[d]o you ever try to read
your own face? I do, and I can tell you it is not a bad study ...’ (p. 55). Good
and evil are sometimes written in the features, sometimes erased by them.
Distance and perspective alter the nature of what is seen. Thus the ‘women
looked pretty, except when you got near them ...’ (p. 3). Physiognomy is seen
to be an enigmatic and potentially counter-productive study; the face is at
once a camouflage and a symptom. Dracula after all can change his form at
will, and even when in human shape his appearance seems to mislead. Thus
the Count’s hands, for instance look initially to be ‘rather white and fine’, but
on closer inspection, ‘they were rather coarse —broad with squat fingers ...
[and] hairs in the centre of the palm’ (p. 18). ‘The marked physiognomy’ of
his face is described in meticulous detail:
... high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils;
with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the
temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very
massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that
seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could
see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-
looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over

the whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality
lips,
in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale and at the
tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong, and the
cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of
extraordinary pallor, (pp. 17-18)
Dracula picked up a wider debate on the physiognomy of the ‘born

criminal’ and the nature of the recidivist (a figure who had increasingly
dominated European debate on law and order in the last quarter of the
century); 24 it might even be said to be parasitic like ,

its own villain, feeding
off a social moral panic about the reproduction of degeneration, the
poisoning of good bodies and races by bad blood, the vitiation of healthy
procreation. The novel provided a metaphor for current political and sexual
political discourses on morality and society, representing the price of selfish
pursuits and criminal depravity. The family and the nation, it seemed to
many, were beleagured by syphilitics, alcoholics, cretins, the insane, the
feeble-minded, prostitutes and a perceived ‘alien invasion’ of Jews from the

East who, in the view of many alarmists, were feeding off and ‘poisoning’ the
blood of the Londoner. 25 Significantly, it was an unscrupulous Jew who aided
and abetted Dracula’s flight from his hunters: ‘We found Hildescheim in his
office, a Hebrew of rather the Adelphi type, with a nose like a sheep, and a
fez. His arguments were pointed with specie —we doing the punctuation
and with a little bargaining he told us what he knew’ (p. 349).
The parasite might be called a key-word of the period; it cropped up at
decisive moments in a multitude of social and political discussions. In ‘The

science of the future: a forecast’, in Civilization: Its Cause and Cure (1889), for
instance, Edward Carpenter had argued that primitive tribes might be more
barbarous than the civilised but they were healthier and biologically
stronger. Their society was ‘not divided into classes which prey upon each
other; nor consumed by parasites. There is more true social unity’. 26 Or
is it
take the American Eugene Talbot’s Degeneracy. Its Signs Causes and Results ,
(1898) which summed up advances in current European criminological

research with the view that the essence of crime was to be found in
‘parasitology’:
The essential factor of crime is its parasitic nature. Parasites, in a
general way, may be divided into those which live on their host,
without any tendency to injure his well-being (like the dermodex
in the skin follicules); those which live more or less at his expense,
but do not tend to destroy him; and finally those which are
104 DANIEL PICK
destructive of the well-being of man and lack proper recognition

of individual rights which constitute the essential foundation of
society. 27
The image of the parasite and the blood-sucker informed late

nineteenth-century eugenics and the biological theory of degeneration. The
parasite argued Edwin Ray Lankester, famous zoologist and curator at the
British Museum, in his important ‘revisionist’ work, Degeneration a Chapter ,
inDarwinism (1880) demonstrated the possibility of a successful evolutionary

adaptation to the environment which constituted nevertheless degeneration,
the return from the heterogeneous to the homogeneous, the complex to the
simple. 28 Darwin it seemed to many had been too optimistic, had suggested,
despite his relative caution in extrapolating from the biological to the
political, that evolution and progress were tied together. He had thought too
little about who and what might best survive in an arguably noxious and
degenerate environment — late nineteenth-century London, for instance. 29
Dracula descended on that London, thus descending in a sense into the
much wider social debate of the 1880s and 1890s about the morbidity and
degeneracy of the average inhabitant of the metropolis. The city dweller, it
seemed, had become a monstrous physical travesty. One of the vexed

questions of the debate in degenerationist medical psychiatry was whether
such stunted creatures tended eventually towards sterility and self-extinction
or, on the contrary, towards a dreadful fecundity, which defied death,
spawning offspring to infinity; like the undead in Dracula who ‘cannot die,
but must go on age after age adding new victims and multiplying the evils of
the world’ (p. 214). As the evil Count gloats, the bad blood he disseminates
will spread ever further, constantly finding new carriers: ‘My revenge is just
begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side’ (p. 306). Early in
the novel, Dracula amazes Harker by his perfect command of the English
language and his familiarity with the layout of London. The Count explains
that he had mastered this knowledge because he longed to ‘go through the
crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and
rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death ...’ (p. 20). As he warns
his guest/prisoner, ‘you dwellers of the city cannot enter into the feelings of
the hunter’ (p. 18). When Harker finally realises what ‘sharing’ London’s life
and death actually means, he is utterly appalled by the vision of a future
vampire-ridden city; ‘... perhaps for centuries to come, he might amongst its
teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever
widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless’ (p. 51).
The theory of degeneration seemed to raise difficult moral questions

about the relation between the victim and the agent. The degenerates had
‘Terrors of the night 105
inherited an affliction, which they then risked visiting upon the next
generation. The potential carriers had a duty to protect themselves (for the
good of society) from a process of morbidity which, like Dracula, had many
forms and disguises. As a French expert, Dr Legrain, was to put it in 1889:
‘Le degenere apparait alors comme une vaste synthese, un conglomerat
d’etats morbides differents, au milieu desquels il est oblige de se frayer une
voie, en conservant tres difficilement son equilibre. Ses delires sont
multiples, polymorphes, proteiformes’. 30
Stoker’s story continually hinted at a whole set of questions about
‘polymorphous perversity’, fantasy, desire and will, which could only be
characterised very obliquely as the ‘strange and uncanny’ (p. 14) or the ‘living
ring of terror’ (p. 13). Incarcerated in the castle, Harker declares: ‘... I am
either being deceived, like a baby, by my own fears, or else I am in desperate
straits ...’ (p. 27). But Harker in fact is shown to succumb to sexual fantasies
without being bitten; it is seemingly his own thoughts which place him in
desperate danger. Whilst kept prisoner, he wanders beyond the bounds of his
permitted space, unable to heed Dracula’s warning: ‘Let me advise you, my
dear —
young friend nay, let me warn you with all seriousness, that should you
leave these rooms you will not by any chance go to sleep in any other part of
the castle. It is old, and has many memories, and there are bad dreams for
those who sleep unwisely’ (p. 33).
It is with good reason that the novel’s characters fear sleep: ‘[Lucy] I
tried to go to sleep, but could not. Then there came to me the old fear of
sleep, and I determined to keep awake’ (p. 142). When Harker falls asleep in
the wrong room, he awake ‘uneasily’ to find three young women before him,
a prisoner to his own ‘wicked, burning desire’ (p. 37), captivated by a
‘thrilling’ and ‘repulsive’ scene:
I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly
under the lashes. The fair girl went on her knees and bent over
me, fairly gloating. There was voluptuousness which
a deliberate
was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she
actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the
moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red
tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went
her head as the went below the range of my mouth and chin
lips
and seemed about to fasten on my throat ... I could feel the soft,
shivering touch of the lips on the super-sensitive skin of my
throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and
pausing there. I closed my eyes in a langourous ecstasy and
waited —waited with beating heart, (p. 38)
106 DANIEL PICK
At this decisive moment, the Count reappears with a fury beyond ‘the
demons of the pit (p. 38), to reclaim the young man as his own: ‘This man
belongs to me!’: ‘[y]es I too can love •••’ (p- 39). Dracula protected Harker
from himself. As the young lawyer had earlier admitted, ‘of all the foul things
that lurk in this hateful place the Count is the least dreadful to me ...’ (p. 36).
Stoker’s novel, for all its ‘mythological’ and folkloristic insistence, must
be read in relation to a whole set of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century concerns, images and problems. The novel in part explored and was
in part imprisoned by its own situation: that powerful felt moment of interim
(‘this dreadful thrall of night and gloom and fear’, p. 45), on the verge of the
new century, in a kind of corridor between different forms of knowledge and
understanding. The novel at once sensationalised the horrors of
degeneration and charted reassuringly the process of their confinement and
containment. The terrors and the contradictions were never quite banished,
despite the deeply consoling, conservative representation of cheerful beer-
swilling, cap-doffing London labourers, Jonathan Harker’s dramatic upward
social mobility (he rises ‘from clerk to master in a few years’, p. 158), and
Mina Harker’s restoration as subservient, faithful wife and mother.
By 1905, something had changed in Stoker’s work; the vision of
paralysis had shifted, as though he could now represent the nineteenth
century as a long period of dark superstition which had given way to
twentieth-century clarity and enlightenment. Perhaps the new tone owed
something to certain recent events. In the immediately preceding years the
theory of the degeneration of the Londoner in particular and the race in
general had been used to explain the reverses of the Boer War, but had been
subjected to serious cross-examination and some devastating criticism in the
much publicised inter-departmental government report of 1904. 31 The
wilder claims of the existence of a huge, stunted degenerate urban population
had been discounted: the process of ‘deterioration’, the inquiry concluded,
was confined to certain slum Moreover something, it seemed, was

areas.
being done about alien immigration-— the Royal Commission had been
completed in 1903 and a new Act was passed in 1905. 32
Where Dracula had turned on the vision of degeneration and
corruption, Stoker’s new novel, entitled The Man (1905),
33 was a kind of
‘positive eugenic’ homily, the saga of the struggle to get good stock together,
in order to achieve female beauty, pride and self-reliance (p. 3) and male
strength, intelligence, bravery and determination (p. 4). Although petrified
in an interminable, hackneyed romance, the text uttered prosaically and

routinely the words ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality’, for as we are reminded, ‘sex is sex all
through. It is not, like whiskers or a wedding-ring, a garnishment of

maturity’ (p. 19). The very perception of sex and childhood had changed, it
was suggested, from an ill-informed past where the infant was treated by
adults as a kind of neuter object without feelings ‘the baby was “it” to a
—
man’ (p. 18) —and, one might add, the representation of fear, desire and
subjectivity had shifted in Stoker’s own writing from the earlier novel where
the vampire had constituted an ambiguous, threatening third person: ‘I saw
It—Him’; ‘He— It!’ ( [Dracula p. 85);
,
‘It — like a* man’ (p. 84).
The coincidence of timing was again striking: 1905 was the year of
Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality M Stoker no doubt knew little
or nothing of this, but he too charted masculinity, feminity and their

discontents, through the destiny of the daughter of Stephen Norman, who
has been brought up as a ‘tom boy’ and indeed christened Stephen herself, at
the instigation of her dying mother (‘let her be indeed our son! Call her by
the name we both love!’, p. 16), in order to console the father for his bitter
disappointment at the gender of his child.
In The Man women are still shown to be constantly in danger not only
from ‘a certain [male] resentment’ (p. 20) but also from themselves. Stephen’s
very physiognomy, we are told, suggests the prospect of ‘some trouble which
might shadow her whole after life’ (p. 3); moreover her description is
strangely reminiscent of the female vampires in the earlier text; she too has
a trace of Eastern blood and a seductive mouth ‘the voluptuous curves of the
full, crimson lips’ (p. 3), albeit no sharp, deadly teeth. The total effect is
declared to be ‘admirable’, emblematic of a fine lineage: ‘In her the various

elements of her race seemed to have cropped out’ (p. 3). She has a ‘wide, fine
forehead’, ‘black eyes’, ‘raven eyebrows’, ‘acquiline nose’, a face which

‘marked the high descent from Saxon through Norman’. The dangers are all
internal, there are no monsters: the only ‘wolf’ in the story is not ‘the wicked
wolf that for half a day had paralysed London’ ( Dracula ,
p. 140), but in fact
her saviour: Harold An Wolf. The crisis stems from Stephen’s wilfulness and
forwardness: she comes close to disaster in usurping the male role and
proposing marriage to a worthless man only to be rejected and humiliated.
A hint of the new story had certainly been there in Dracula when Mina
Murray speaks scathingly of the ‘New Woman’ writers who ‘will some day
start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep
before proposing or accepting’ and even speculates that ‘the New Woman
won’t condescend in future to accept; she will do the proposing herself’ (p.
89), but in The Man ,

a certain style of indirectness and displacement has
gone, as though the author is insisting that the veil of the vampire can now
be seen through, leaving in place of the Count’s castle and its surrounding
wolves, only the occasional necessary sexual euphemism where total
frankness still remained out of the question. We are presented with knock-
about adventure, patriotism, long descriptions of the true qualities of fine
108 DANIEL PICK
men and women amongst the superior races, and various ‘matter of fact’
comments on the distance still to be traversed to dispel all remaining sexual

mystery: ‘Perhaps some day, when Science has grappled successfully with the
unseen, the mysteries of sex will be open to men (p. 103). Through
hundreds of pages, the protagonists .battle with those enduring mysteries of
sexuality, caught up in a drama of profound misunderstanding, a personal
‘trial’ culminating in shipwreck and temporary blindness. Before their final
union, the hero and the heroine are to be overwhelmed by emotional

frustration, remorse and the most painful confusions of identity.
Thus in 1905 Dracula was banished and replaced with a melodrama of
psychological suffering, neurosis, cruelty and redemption, full of ‘longings
and outpourings of heart and soul and mind’ (p. 104). Of course, vampires
have returned in innumerable guises in cinema, theatre and writing since
then. But at that moment for Stoker, there were no psychotic, ‘undead’
blood-sucking creatures needed. For the lovely, impetuous Stephen and the
lovesick Harold there were only long and lonely private mental torments
‘the tortures and terrors of the night’ (p. 104).
Notes
1. Bram Stoker, Dracula, A Tale [1897]. The World’s Classics (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1983).
2. See Peter Gay, Freud, A Life for our Time (London, J.M. Dent &
Sons), p. 103.
3. For a related discussion on this point which has 'already appeared in
Critical Quarterly, see Stephen Heath, ‘Psychopathia sexualis: Stevenson’s
strange case’, XXVIII (spring-summer 1986), pp. 93-108.

4. Gregory A. Waller, The Living and the Undead. From Stoker's Dracula
to Romero's Dawn of the Dead (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois

Press, 1986), p. 66.
5. Montague Summers, The Vampire His Kith and Kin (London: Kegan
:
Paul, 1928), p. 334.

Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo [1913], The Standard Edition of the
6.
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth, 1955), 24

vols., vol. XIII. Note that Ernest Jones followed Freud in his disregard of
Dracula. There is no mention of Stoker’s novel in Jones’s chapter on ‘The

Vampire’ in On the Nightmare (London: Hogarth, 1931).
7. The ninth edition was published in London in 1912; c.f. Summers,
op. cit., ch. 5, pp. 271-340, ‘The Vampire in Literature’.
8. See the list of members, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research,
XXV (1911).
9. ‘The vampyre: a tale by Lord Byron’, The New Monthly Magazine

and Universal Register, II (January-June 1819), pp. 195-206, p. 195.
10. Summers, op. cit., p. ix.
See V. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale [1928] (Austin and London:

1 1 .
University of Texas Press, 1968, p. 96.

12. Waller, op. cit., p. 6.
13. J. Sheridan Le Farm, Carmilla In a Glass Darkly (London: R.

,
Bentley & Son, 1872), 3 vols., vol. III.
14. See Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the

Relationship Between Classes [1971] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984).
15. See for instance Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd. A Study of the Popular
Mind, trans. from the French (London: T. F. Unwin, 1896). For a general
survey, see Robert A. Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology. Gustave Le Bon and
the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic, (London and Beverley Hills:
Sage, 1975); and Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors. Visions of the Crowd in
Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven and London: Yale University

Press, 1981).
16. See for instance Clara Gallini, La sonnamhula meravigliosa.
Magnetismo e ipnotismo nelVottocento italiano (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1983).
17. See Ruth Harris, ‘Murder under hypnosis in the case of Gabrielle
Bompard: psychiatry in the courtroom in belle epoque Paris’, in The Anatomy
ofMadness. Essays in the History of Psychiatry, ed. W. Bynum, R. Porter and M.
Shepherd (London: Tavistock, 1985), vol. II, ch. 10.
18. Bram Stoker, Famous Imposters (London: Sidgwick & Jackson,

1910).
19. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex
(London: John Murray, 1871), 2 vols., vol. I, p. 127.
20. See for instance Cesare Lombroso, Luomo delinquente (Milan:

Hoepli, 1876); Max Nordau, Degeneration [1892], translated from the 2nd
German edition (London: W. Heinemann, 1895); for various general
discussions, cf. Sander Gilman and J. Chamberlin eds., Degeneration. The
Dark Side of Progress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). With
regard to Lombroso, I have tried to analyse this contradiction or at least
double connotation further, in an essay in History Workshop Journal Issue 2
(spring 1986), pp. 60-86.

21. See Benedict- Augustin Morel, Traite des degenerescences physiques,
intellectuelles et morales de Vespece humaine (Paris: J. B. Bailliere, 1857).
22. Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man According to the Classification of

Cesare Lombroso Briefly Summarised by his Daughter, Gina Lombroso Femro
(New York and London: G. P. Putnam, 191 1), p. xv.
23 . See the heated exchanges on the work of Lombroso at the first,
second and third congresses of criminal anthropology; Actes du Premier

110 DANIEL PICK
Congres International <Tanthropologie criminelle Turin, 1886; Actes du Deuxieme

Congres ... ,
Paris 1889; Actes du Troisieme Congres ... ,
Brussels, 1893; note the
highly critical appendix on ‘degeneration’, Benjamin Ball, Legons sur les
Maladies Mentales, 2nd ed. (Paris: Asselin & Houzeau, 1890).

24. See Robert Nye, Crime Madness and ,
Politics in Modern France. The
Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1984); and L. Radzinowicz and R. Hood, ‘Incapacitating the habitual
criminal, the English experience’, Michigan Law Review LXXVIII , (1980), pp.
1305-89.
25. See for example the testimony of Arnold White to the Royal
Commission on Alien Immigration. Minutes of Royal Commission on Alien
Immigration [vol. II of the report] (1903), pp. 15-16; cf. David Feldman, ‘The
importance of being English: social policy, patriotism and politics in
response to Jewish immigration, 1885-1906’, in Between Neighbourhood and
Nation: Essays in the History of London, ed. Feldman and Stedman Jones
(London: Routledge, in press).
Edward Carpenter, Civilization: its Cause and Cure and Other Essays
26.
(London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1889), pp. 8-9.
27. Eugene S. Talbot, Degeneracy: its Causes, Signs and Results (London:
Walter Scott, 1898), p. 318; cf. Francis Gabon’s observation that there was
an absolute ‘contrariety of ideals between the beasts that prey and those they
prey upon, between those of the animals that have to work hard for their
food and the sedentary parasites that cling to their bodies and suck their
blood’ Essays in Eugenics (London: The Eugenics Education Society, 1909),
p. 36.
28. Edwin Ray Lankester, Degeneration. A Chapter in Darwinism

(London: Macmillan, 1880).
29. Cf. ‘Degeneration amongst Londoners’, The Lancet I (February
1885), p. 265.
30. M. Legrain, Heredite et alcoolisme. Etude psych ologique et clinique sur
les degeneres buveurs et les families d'ivrognes (Paris: O. Doin, 1889), p. 6.
31. The Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical

Deterioration (1904), Reports from Commissioners, Inspectors and Other Series,
vol. XXXII.
32. Report of the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration (1903); Aliens Act
(1905).
33. Bram Stoker, The Man (London: W. Heinemann, 1905).
34. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality [1905], The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London:
Hogarth, 1953), 24 vols., vol. VII.
KATHLEEN L. SPENCER
Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic ,
and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis
I believe that ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and

punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose
system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating
the difference between within and without, above and below, male
and female, with and against, that a semblance of order is created.
—Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger 1
The construction of categories defining what is appropriate sexual

behavior (“normal”/“abnormal”), or what constitutes the essential
gender being (“male”/“female”); or where we are placed along a
continuum of sexual possibilities (“heterosexual,” “homosexual,”
“paedophile,” “transvestite” or whatever); this endeavor is no neutral,
scientific discovery of what was already there. Social institutions
which embody these definitions (religion, the law, medicine, the
educational system, psychiatry, social welfare, even architecture) are

constitutive of the sexual lives of individuals. Struggles around sexuality
are therefore struggles over meanings

, ,
—over what is appropriate or not
appropriate —meanings which call on the resources of the body and
the flux of desire, but are not dictated by them.
—Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and its Discontents
(emphasis added ) 2
From ELH 59 (1992): 197-225. © 1992 by The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Ill
112 KATHLEEN L. SPENCER
Interpreting Dracula s
' sexual substrata has become something of a
cottage industry of late, so much so that one more reading of the text’s
unconscious may seem a bit pointless. Yet there is something curious going
on here: despite certain disagreements as to what kind of sexuality is present
in the novel, almost all readings presume a given sexuality that is repressed
and displaced throughout the text, which it is the critical task to uncover and
articulate. In other words, despite local disagreements, all of these readings
approach the text from a fairly orthodox version of depth psychology. ^ While
this focus has certainly been productive, there are other questions about the
text that cannot be answered by focusing on the unconscious sexuality of the
author, or a character, or even, as in Freudian/Marxist readings, on the class
system.
What I propose is a different kind of historical reading of Dracula to
supplement the previous approaches; my concern is less with Stoker’s

position as a representative late-Victorian man that with the novel as a
representative late-Victorian text. For Dracula is not an isolated
phenomenon, but is part of a literary/cultural discourse comprised not only
of other tales about vampires, but of other fantastic novels and stories that
also focus on sexual dynamics, whether covertly or overtly. 4 Whatever it is
that Dracula is saying about sex, then, it is saying not in isolation but as part
of a dialogue.
The first step in this broader historical explication of Stoker’s novel is
to identify its literary context: the “romance revival” of the 1880s and
1890s —more explicitly, that species of romance called “the fantastic.”
Having located the text generically, we can then clarify its cultural context
the late-Victorian world of imperialism and degenerady theories, purity

crusades and the New Woman, materialist medicine and its opponents
(continental psychology on the one hand, Spiritualism and assorted
occultisms on the other). To illuminate this social context I will read the
novel against models of cultures in crisis drawn from Rene Girard and
anthropologist Mary Douglas. Finally I will consider the relationship
between Dracula s genre,
' its historical context, and its popularity, to see what
light this analysis can shed on a larger question —why the fantastic as a genre
should have flourished so dramatically in this period of cultural
transformation.
I: THE FANTASTIC
Like “romance” itself “the fantastic” is a much-disputed term. While

some theorists use “fantasy” and “the fantastic” interchangeably, others see
them as referring to two quite different kinds of stories, and still others see
Dracula and Urban Gothic 113
the fantastic not as a genre at all but as an element that can appear in many
kinds of tales (as the term “gothic” can be applied either to a specific fictional
configuration common at the end of the eighteenth century, or to a literary
mode which can appear in works of any period).

The most famous definition of the term “fantastic” is Tzvetan
Todorov’s, but what seems to me the most functional, precise explanation of
the fantastic is that proposed by the Polish semiotician Andrzej Zgorzelski.
For Zgorzelski, the fantastic as a genre is signaled by “the breaching of the
internal laws which are initially assumed in the text to govern the fictional
world.” The opening of the text indicates that the fictive world is based on a
“mimetic world model,” a model that is violently breached by the entrance

of the fantastic element and changed into a different world, one in which the
fantastic element does not violate the laws of reality. A fantastic text, then,
u
builds its fictional world as a textual confrontation of two models of reality
Tvo elements are essential for the characteristic frisson of the fantastic:
first, the impossible event must genuinely be happening (not a dream, a
hallucination, a mistake, or a deliberate trick); and second, the tone of the

narrative emphasizes initial disbelief, and (usually) horror. The characters
react with fear and revulsion at encountering what is not only unexpected,
but unnatural according to the laws of the world they inhabit, and readers
usually respond with the same feelings, not only because we identify with the
characters, but because the world the characters initially inhabit is our own
world. Further, the narrative voice insistently emphasizes violation and
transgression, the logical contradiction between the impossibility of the
occurrence and its actuality. For example, when Dracula appears in Picadilly
at high noon, the characters react initially with disbelief and a kind of
horrified vertigo at discovering that the monstrous is real and walking the
streets of their ordinary modern city
Defined in this way, the fantastic as a genre is relatively modern. The
low mimetic (to use Northrop Frye’s familiar term) must be a well-
established fictional convention before we can conventionalize its violation,
a condition that does not obtain till the mid-eighteenth century. Before the
convention of realism became the norm — in the medieval quest narrative or
Renaissance romance, for example —the intrusion of the supernatural or

monstrous did not create an experience of the fantastic for either the
characters or the readers. A questing knight may be seriously dismayed to

discover a dragon or a magician in his path, but the mere existence of the
supernatural does not force him to rethink reality, because it does not violate
the laws of nature. For Prince Hamlet, seeing his father’s ghost is certainly
alarming; but it is the ghost’s message, not its presence, which so distresses
him. The serious question for Hamlet is not whether the ghost is real but
whether it is*“honest” —genuinely his father’s spirit or a demon sent to tempt

him to regicide.
Modern readers of these texts need not believe in the actual existence
of dragons or ghosts to recognize that the text treats these occurrences as
natural. The conventions of fictional realism do not apply, any more than
they apply to modern fantasy or science fiction, whose readers learn to
respond without astonishment to the presence of wizards or of faster-than-
light space vessels. But a wizard or faster-than-light ship introduced into a
textwhose opening pages signal a contemporary realistic setting would

produce reactions from the characters, the narrator, and the readers that
would signal the presence of the fantastic.
In light of this requirement, I would argue that the Gothic tales of the
late eighteenth century are the first fantastic fictions, Horace Walpole and
Anne Radcliffe among the first writers to experiment with the emotional
possibilities (for both characters and readers) of violating the laws of nature.
Since such violations are radically new, the earliest writers tend to soften the
effects a bit. In the first place, Gothic fictions are traditionally distanced
somewhat from the world of their audience, set back in time and “away” in
space — preferably in Spain or Italy during the Inquisition —making the
stories more plausible (tc an English audience) by the superstitiousness of
their settings, and at the same time lessening the intensity of the fear, for the
readers if not the characters. As another softening device, some of the early
Gothic writers, notably Radcliffe, tidy away the fantastic by giving us rational
explanations for the apparent supernatural events —though not till the end of
the novel, so we have plenty of time to experience the fantastic frisson first.
However, this tidying strategy was soon abandoned. While second-

generation Gothic writers like Monk Lewis and Charles Maturin still set
their novels in Inquisition Europe, they apparently felt less need to reassure
their readers at the end that the ordinary rational laws of reality governed the
world inside the text as well as outside.
But the fantastic that develops at the end of the nineteenth century
(exclusive of the ghost story, a popular but traditional form) is identifiably
different from the Gothic of one hundred years before. First and most
important, the new authors insist on the modernity of the setting —not on
the distance between the world of the text and the world of the reader, but
on their identity. A modern setting means, most profoundly, an urban setting,
as by the end of the nineteenth century well over half the population of the
British Isles lived in cities. To be modern also means that science is the
metaphor that rules human interactions with the universe, so the new
fantastic adopts the discourse of empiricism even to describe and manipulate
supernatural phenomena.
These characteristics of die modem fantastic, as distinct from the earlier
variety, suggest we need a new term to refer to it; and I would argue that “Urban
Gothic” is particularly appropriate for the new type, acknowledging the
eighteenth-century ancestry while identifying the major modifications that have
been made to adapt the fantastic to the needs of a new era.
The change from Gothic to Urban Gothic allows writers to call on the
powers of what Henry James, in a review of the sensation novels of Mary
Elizabeth Braddon, called “those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries
which are at our own doors.” As James observed, the innovation of bringing
the terror next door gave an entirely new direction to horror literature. The
new strategy
was fatal to the authority of Mrs. Radcliffe and her everlasting

castle in the Apennines. What are the Apennines to us, or we to
the Apennines? Instead of the terrors of “Udolpho”, we were
treated to the terrors of the cheerful country house and the busy
London lodgings. And there is no doubt that these were infinitely
more terrible.
In 1865, James was moderately scornful of the supernatural as a fictional

device, remarking in this same review that “a good ghost-story, to be half as
terrible as a good murder-story, must be connected at a hundred points with
the common objects of life.” 6 But twenty-five years later he himself found
uses for the supernatural by following his own advice and connecting it “at a
hundred points to the common objects of life” —and so did his “fellow” (if we
can so call them) romancers. In short, James, along with many of his
contemporaries, explored the Urban Gothic.
II: THE ROMANCE REVIVAL
But the Urban Gothic was only part, if a crucial part, of a larger literary
movement of the last two decades of the century: the romance revival.
“Romance” is another of those protean literary terms whose meaning varies
with the frame of reference, but in the context of the 1880s, the term has a
fairly stable meaning. The “romance revival” began as a reaction against the
“high realism” of the 1870s, which was, in its turn, a reaction against the
“sensation novels” of the 1860s. The theorists of high realism rejected the
sensation novel’s emphasis on plot, arguing that it demanded less of readers

than novels that required them to interpret the subtleties of human motives.
In addition, it was believed, too strong an emphasis on plot would interfere
with the “naturalness” of characters.
*
By the 18$0s, these novels of “character analysis” themselves came

under attack. First, being limited to and by “gross” reality, the novels (their
critics argued) were dull and trivial. Second, these novelists had chosen to
adopt the “heartless” methods of science (“vivisection” is a common
metaphor), treating their characters with no sympathy or decorum,
dissecting them in public. Then,, when “high realism” transposes into
naturalism, new grounds for rejection appear. For one thing, naturalist
novels persistently tried to introduce moral, middle-class readers to the kinds
of persons — prostitutes, criminals, beggars, and other “undeserving” or
unappealing poor people —whom they had no desire to meet. For another,
realism, especially when pushed to the extremes of naturalist determinism,
allowed no room for the higher workings of Providence, no room for the
reward of the virtuous and the punishment of the guilty. Finally, since
naturalism was identified in the minds of English readers with Zola, James,
and Howells, it became for some readers and critics a patriotic duty to resist
“foreign influences,” and to call for a healthy English fiction. 7
The result was a resurgence of interest in bold, high-stakes adventure,
larger-(and simpler)-than-life characters, exotic locales and incidents,

idealistic quests, world-class criminals, disguises and escapes, rescues and
disasters. Anthony Hope Haw Kins, author (as Anthony Hope) of one of the
best-known romances of the period, The Prisoner ofZenda (1893), exclaimed
that in romance,
Emotion must be taken at high pitch. It must be strong, simple,

confident; otherwise it lacks the quality needed for romance. ...
romance becomes an expression of some of the deepest instincts
of humanity.
It has no monopoly of this expression, but it is its privilege
to render it in a singularly clear, distinct, and pure form; it can
give to love an ideal object, to ambition a boundless field, to
courage a high occasion; and these great emotions, revelling in
their freedom, exhibit themselves in their glory. Thus in its most
worthy forms, in the hands of its masters, it can not only delight
men, but can touch them to the very heart. It shows them what
they would be if they could, if time and fate and circumstances
did not bind, what in a sense they all are, and what their acts
would show them to be if an opportunity offered. So they dream

and are happier, and at least none the worse for their dreams. 8
Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, H. Rider Haggard, Arthur

Conan Doyle, and (in his early works) H. G. Wells are the best-known
figures of this new movement, along with Arthur Machen, Algernon

Blackwood, and Andrew Lang, several of whom also wrote manifestos for the
critical journals in favor of romance. 9 In addition to these relatively familiar
names, a whole army of romancers, once popular but now practically unread
and in many cases entirely forgotten, produced large quantities of this fiction
to supply the new markets. 10
But if the revived romance of the 1880s takes its declared form from an
ancient tradition, the new romancers (like the authors of the Urban Gothic)
draw on contemporary interests for their characters, settings, and themes:
the exotic reaches of the empire — Africa, Egypt, India, Australia — as well as
such regions as China, the South Pacific, and South and Central America;
dead civilizations of the ancient past (Egyptian, Peruvian, Celtic,
Neanderthal), their tales enlivened by information culled from the newest
archaeological reports; lost races inside volcanoes, at the bottom of the sea,
in the polar regions, on other planets, in the future; the thrilling possibilities
of modern technology (electrically-induced immortality or eternal youth;

brain transplants; memory recordings; time travel); or the beliefs and rituals
of that other revival of the 1880s, the occult revival (Spiritualism,
Theosophy, the Society for Psychical Research, and the magicians of the
Order of the Golden Dawn). 11
Ill: PURITY AND DANGER
Thus not only the Urban Gothic but the romance revival as a whole
transforms a traditional literary genre by an infusion of modern perspectives.
But the Urban Gothic and the romance share another crucial characteristic
beyond their common reliance on contemporary adventure and exoticism: a
concern for purity, for the reduction of ambiguity and the preservation of
boundaries. Both attempt to reduce anxiety by stabilizing certain key
distinctions, which seemed, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, to
be eroding: between male and female, natural and unnatural, civilized and
degenerate, human and nonhuman. At issue, finally, underneath all these
distinctions, is the ground of individual identity, the ultimate distinction
between self and other.
Where once a complex web of traditional roles and relationships
grounded individual identity, in the new capitalist world of the cash-nexus,
Anthony Giddens observes, the bulwarks of identity were reduced essentially
to two: the arena of intimate relationships (that is, the family, personal and
highly sexualized), and the arena of “mass ritual,” of sporting events and
political ceremonies, especially the fervent impersonal group identity we call
nationalism. “In such conditions of social life,” writes Giddens, “the

ontological security of the individual in day-to-day life is more fragile than

in societies dominated by tradition and the meshings of kinship across space
and time.” 12
Instead of being broadly supported by a web of interlocking kinship
links, work groups, ceremonial societies, traditions, routines, and even the
continuities of place and seasonal cycle, identity for the ordinary middle-
class Briton now hung delicately on two slender threads at the extreme
margins of scale, the intimate and the national. So it is hardly surprising that
many people grew anxious to preserve the clarity and purity of the
distinctions that supported this system.
However, even at this time of their heightened significance, these very
distinctions came under attack. Darwinian evolutionary theory blurred the
boundaries between human and animal in not one but two ways: by the
famous argument that humans and apes had a common ancester, but also by
the implied hierarchy at the end of The Descent of Man which leads from the
ape-like ancestor through primitive peoples to civilized Europeans. The
imputed inferiority of the lower races, asGeorge Stocking points out,
“although still in the first instance cultural, was now in most cases at least
implicitly organic as well.” 15 Thus the boundary between human and ape
became a matter of scientific doctrine, but (as Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau
pointed out) an ambiguous one: what was actually a philosophic and political
debate was concealed under the language of science. Yet since “scientific”
language could not hope to stabilize a fundamentally unscientific boundary,
the issue continued unresolved.
Nor was this boundary a matter of abstract speculation for civilized
Europeans; for if humans could evolve, it was thought they could also devolve
or degenerate, both as nations and as individuals. At what point in a

downward slide did a human being cross over the line into animality?
Lombroso addressed this question with his new “science” of criminal
anthropology, which purported to demonstrate through elaborate
measurements and charts of facial angles that habitual criminals were
throwbacks to primitive ancestors, with more of the ape than the human
about them. Fear of such national “degeneracy” was further highlighted for
Britons by the Boer War of 1899-1902, first by the series of unprecedented
defeats handed the greatest army in the world by a handful of Dutch farmers,
and second by the recruiting campaign that discovered the physical
inadequacies of the men from London’s East-End slums, who were
alarmingly undersized, frail, and sickly. 14 Such concerns underlay the
tremendous public anxiety at the end of the century about the condition of
the British Empire and the warnings that, like its Roman predecessor, it
could fall, and for what were popularly perceived as the same reasons —moral
decadence leading to racial degeneration.
Draciila and Urban Gothic 119
Another crucial distinction under attack was that between male and
female. By all the superficial criteria of appearance, behavior, and legal status,
Victorian men and women must have seemed almost like two different,
though symbiotically related, species. It has been argued that never in
western society have gender roles been more rigid or more distinct
7
(at least
in the middle classes) than in the late nineteenth century Victorian science,
7
.
especially Victorian medicine, lent the weight of its prestige to the position
that the physical distinctions between women and men were absolute, and
absolutely determinate. In their very nature and essence, said the doctors,
women were unlike men; and this difference explained their limitations
physical, moral, and intellectual — and justified their legal and social
disabilities. 15
It was woman’s special nature that fitted her for the task she had been
assigned by Victorian society. In her guises of maiden, wife, and above all
mother, Woman (with a capital) had been appointed the guardian of moral
virtue; the home, Woman’s realm, became both a refuge from the hard
necessities of the utilitarian business world and the temple of a new religion
that served to supplement or substitute for the weakening Christian
orthodoxy —the religion of romantic love as the source of salvation, and of
the family as a haven for all the human warmth, grace and affection that had
been banished from the father’s daily life in the world. Woman, as the Angel
in the House, was to save Man from his own baser instincts and lead him
toward heaven.
Jenni Calder’s study of the Victorian home further clarifies the
significance of this domestic religion. While Victorians genuinely desired to
make the world a better place, Calder argues, the social problems facing
them were so massive and so intractable that they usually had to settle for
making the home, as the only part of the world responsive to their actions, a
better place instead. Thus “the angel in the house was at the root of
multitudes of Victorian assumptions and ideas, and Victorian rationalizations
and ideals.” 16
But this position did not go unchallenged. Throughout the century7 ,
women argued for reforms of marriage and divorce laws, and in particular for
the right of married women to own property in their own names. The kind
of resistance they faced is revealed most potently in the comments of Lord
St. Leonards, who argued against the passage of the Married Women’s
Property7 Bill of 1857 on the grounds that it would “place the whole marriage
law ... on a different footing and give a wife all the distinct rights of
citizenship,” an argument that indicates that for this distinguished jurist and
former Lord Chancellor the categories of “wife” and “citizen” were mutually
exclusive. 17 A few' men joined the fray on the distaff side, most notably John
Stuart Mill, w'ho argued against such logic in The Subjection of Women in 1869
and even tried to get women the vote, on the grounds that only if they could
vote for their representatives would Parliament take their needs seriously;
but considerable discussion produced little substantive action.
The debate grew even more heated in the last few decades of the
century when the New Woman arrived on the scene, wanting higher
education, striving to enter the learned professions, and ever more frequently
working outside the home for money (that is, middle-class women began to
do so, for of course lower-class women had long been so employed). And
some of the most radical New Women even argued that they were entitled
to the same freedom of sexual expression as men. In short, more and more
women insisted on leaving the house of which they had been appointed
angel, the house that, if a refuge for men, became for many middle-class
wives and daughters a more or less pleasant prison. But in the eyes of most
Victorian men, for women to deny their traditional role was to deny their
womanhood, to challenge the distinctions between women and men upon
which the family —and therefore society—depended.
Nor was the New Woman the only source of threat to gender
categories. Homosexuality was brought into the consciousness of a horrified
public, first by the Cleveland Street scandal in 1889, which revealed a
homosexual brothel catering to the upper classes (including the Prince of
Wales’s closest friend and, by rumor, the Prince’s eldest son as well). 18 More
dramatic still was the infamous Wilde trial in 1895, which made
“homosexuality” both as an ontological state and as a chosen lifestyle
available to ordinary middle-class imaginations for the first time. 19 To late
Victorians, if the New Woman’s desire to achieve higher status by

“becoming” a man was at least understandable, though outrageous, what
could be said about men who deliberately refused to be men? Such depravity
challenged not just the distinction between male and female but that between
natural and unnatural as well. 20
The debates about sex and sex roles in the nineteenth century, argues
Ludmilla jordanova, “hinged precisely on the ways in which sexual
boundaries might become blurred. It is as if the social order depended on
clarity with respect to certain distinctions whose symbolic meanings spread
far beyond their explicit context.” 21 In this perception she is quite right:
anthropologists tell us that social order depends precisely on the clarity of
such distinctions. But anthropologists can tell us more: they can help us see
the dynamics at work in late Victorian England in a larger social context
the context of a culture in crisis.
Mary Douglas’s work on pollution fears and witchcraft societies is
surprisingly appropriate here. 22 All cultures that explain evil as a product of

witchcraft —from certain African tribes to Salem Village in the seventeenth
century —share certain characteristics, she notes. Most importantly, there is

strong pressure on group members to conform, but the classification system

of the society is somehow ineffective in structuring reality: it is too narrow
and rigid to deal with the variety of actual experience, or it is inconsistent, or
has gaps, or is in competition with another system of classification that
weakens the effectiveness of both.

In such a society, the universe is dualistic: what is inside is good, what
is outside is bad. The group boundary is therefore both a source of magical
danger and the main definer of rights: you are either a member or a stranger.
Evil is a foreign danger introduced by foreign agents in disguise, but abetted
by deviant members of the group who must be identified and expelled for
allowing the outside evil to infiltrate. Since not only the society itself but the
entire cosmos is endangered by the vile, irrational behavior of these human
agents of evil, a witchcraft society is preoccupied with rituals of cleansing, the
expulsion of spies or witches, and the redrawing of boundaries to mark the
pure (inside) and the evil (outside).
Though the late Victorians did not explicitly attribute evil to witches,
they manifested the same fears of pollution from outsiders, the same
suspicion of deviants as traitors, and the same exaggerated estimation of what
was at stake — in short, the same social dynamics as more traditional
witchcraft societies. The pressures on middle-class Victorians to conform
were intense (and too well known to need documentation), while the model
to which they were required to conform was losing its clarity. The old
consensus on the central distinctions of their society —on which distinctions
were indeed central, and on how those distinctions were to be defined and
maintained —was breaking down. In the last twenty years of the century, an
intense debate developed between those who sought to shore up the old
crumbling distinctions and those demanding change —nontraditional
women, homosexuals, socialists, some artists and intellectuals, a few
scientists, working-class men who had some education. One side
acquired
strove to widen or redefine cultural boundaries, to let some of the “outside”
in, while the other fought desperately to maintain the “purity” of the inside
by expelling as traitors those who breached the boundaries.
Douglas mentions one other key factor in a witchcraft society that the
Victorians also shared: the leadership of the group is precarious or under

dispute, and the roles within the group ambiguous or undefined. Because no
one person or faction has sufficient authority to stabilize the situation, the
struggle for leadership prompts what we might call “purity competitions”:

who is most vigilant at ferreting out enemies, especially those disguised
enemies lurking within the society itself? In other words, the struggle for
power and stability under these social conditions leads inevitably to
scapegoat rituals 23 .
The struggle for leadership of a divided and confused people also

/
characterized late Victorian society. For the Victorians, neither traditionalist

nor “rebel” forces could take complete command: the traditionalists had the
numbers and most of the worldly power, but the rebels tended to be educated
and articulate, many were influential, and all had ready access to a public
forum in the wide-open periodical market of the 1880s and ‘90s. As a result,
they could make their voices heard in disproportion to their numbers and
official positions. The battle produced numerous cries of “seize the witch!”
directed both at groups (Jews, Germans, Slavs, Orientals, birth control
advocates, promiscuous women, decadent French authors [especially Zola],

homosexuals) and at individuals —most spectacularly, though by no means
solely, Oscar Wilde.
And here is where we reconnect the social and the literary. The
romance, I would argue, and in particular the Urban Gothic, not only in its
characteristic subject matter but more importantly in its very form, is the
perfect literary reflection of the cultural crisis Britain experienced between
1880 and 1914. In such an atmosphere, the modern fantastic became a potent
vehicle for social drama — potent because the images of the fantastic are
always drawn from our dreams and nightmares. The fantastic as a genre is
based on violations of reality, which means it is fundamentally concerned

with defining reality; and the nature of reality is exactly the question at issue
in late-nineteenth-century England. Finally, since at the end of a fantastic
tale the violating element is characteristically expelled and the mimetic

world, the status quo, is reestablished, the fantastic proved ideal for
symbolically reaffirming the traditional model of reality.
As Northrop Frye told us long ago, the romance is traditionally a

psychomachia, a struggle between the forces of good and evil ‘in which evil is
defeated, and the modern romance (as Hope’s quotation suggests, with its
emphasis on clarity and purity and “great emotions in their glory”) retains
this pattern. The Urban Gothic extends the tradition in a peculiarly modern
way by defining the enemy as not only evil but unnatural: she/he/it has no
right to exist at all. In the very form of both the romance and the Urban
Gothic, then, we find repeated the contemporary drive to purify the inside
and expel the foreign pollution: at the heart of both lies the scapegoat ritual.
And this finally brings us to Dracula ,
a classic example of the
conservative fantastic: in the end Dracula is killed, the alien element expelled
and the ordinary world restored. But what exactly is being expelled? In
particular, how would Stoker’s original audience have read this novel? In the
cultural context of 1897, what threat did Dracula represent that needed so
desperately and at such cost to be driven out? How was the culture being
instructed to protect itself, and from what?
Another way to put the question is this: who is the scapegoat in Dracula ,
and to what end is that scapegoat sacrificed?

IV: RITUAL VICTIMS IN DRACULA
As Rene Girard tells us in Violence and the Sacred, what all sacrificial
victims have in common is that they must recognizably belong to the

community, but must at the same time be somehow marginal, incapable of
fully participating in the social —
bond slaves, criminals, the mad, the
deformed. They are enoligh of the community to substitute for it, but
between them and the community “a crucial social link is missing, so they
can be exposed to violence without fear of reprisal. Their death does not
automatically entail an act of vengeance.” As a result, sacrificing them will
end communal violence rather than prolonging it.

24
In Dracula ,
I argue, Lucy Westenra fills the category and the social
function of the surrogate victim who is sacrificed to restore a lost order. On
the surface, it would seemLucy belongs to the class Victorians would
that
find least sacrificeable rather than most —
a young, beautiful, virtuous girl
and that, in any case, she is a victim not of her own community but of a
monstrous outsider. However, we are given numerous indications that Lucy,
for all her sweetness, purity, and beauty, is a marginal figure. In the first
place, her social connections are alarmingly tenuous: her father is dead, and
she has no brothers or other family to protect her except her mother, who is
herself very weak both psychologically and physically (and in fact

predeceases her daughter). There is no one to protect Lucy from attack, or
to revenge her death at the hands of her own community.

More crucially, Lucy’s character is “flawed” in a way that makes her
fatally vulnerable to the vampire. She is a woman whose sexuality is under
very imperfect control. She is loved devotedly by three different young men,
which in itself is not a fault, but her reaction to this situation reveals a
problem. When she writes to Mina about her suitors, she can’t help gloating
about “THREE proposals in one day.” 25 Worse, although she says she is
greatly in love with Arthur, she also feels very badly about turning down
those two splendid fellows, John Seward and Quincey Morris, and bursts out,
“Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save
all this trouble?” Immediately afterward she admits that “this is heresy, and I
must not say it” (59); but even so, we sense that she means what she says: she
really would like to marry all of them.
And, according to the novel’s own semiotics, she gets her wish. At her
funeral Arthur declares that, because he has given Lucy his blood, he feels
that she is his true wife in the sight of God. Under the circumstances, his
friends naturally refrain from telling him about the transfusions Lucy had
received from her other two lovers and Dr. Van Helsing; but later, alone with
Seward, Van Helsing bursts out in uncontrollable laughter thinking of it.
True, as Seward observes, the thought is very comforting for Arthur. But if
Arthur is right in his belief, Van Helsing points out, what about the other
three donors? “Then this so sweet maid is a polyandrist” (176).
Nor is this desire to marry all three of her suitors the only sign of
Lucy’s suspect character. She is a sleepwalker, a habit 'traditionally associated
with sexual looseness. She is therefore doubly vulnerable to Dracula’s

approach; in the symbol-system of the novel, she has signaled her sexual
receptivity. It cannot be an accident that on the night of the storm, when
Dracula’s ship lands, Lucy indulges again in sleepwalking, leaving the house
dressed only in her nightgown. Considering the armor-like characteristics of
the ordinary Victorian woman’s daytime clothing —the heavily-boned
corsets, the immense weight of petticoats, the endless layers of cloth — Lucy
in her nightdress might as well be naked. Worse yet, she goes to the old
cemetery, alone, and to the grave of a suicide (the only spot of unsanctified
ground in the churchyard). The traditional equation of sexuality and death
could hardly be clearer, nor her invitation of Dracula more explicit.
What makes Lucy’s sexuality threatening to the community

sufficiently threatening that she becomes an appropriate surrogate victim
is that she will not limit herself to one man. While she does officially choose
one of her three suitors, her choice is insufficiently absolute to control the
competition among the three for her possession. Stoker downplays the
competition by making the men such good friends and such decent, self-
controlled characters that the threat of disorder is concealed, but nonetheless

that competition remains as a source of potential violence.
But in order to function as a surrogate victim who can purge the
community of its universal violence, something further is required: Lucy has
to take on the aspect of the monstrous. In one light, Lucy functions as the
monstrous double of Mina, the virtuous wife; seen another way, she functions
as her own monstrous double, for there are two aspects to her personality
whose separation becomes increasingly marked throughout her
transformation into a vampire. She is both the image of purity, sweetness,
and beauty —the traditional blond angel in the house —and the creature of
sexual appetites, the sleep-walker who accedes to violent penetration by the
vampire. Her Van Helsing, is that she yielded to
saving grace, according to
—
Dracula only during a trance that is, when her conscious personality was
—
not in command so her unconscious personality alone has become
vampiric. 26 During her last hours, she manifests both sides of her personality
in alternation, sometimes the sweet pure Lucy they all love, and sometimes
the wanton, voluptuous creature with cruel mouth and hard eyes. When she
is awake and thus “herself,” she clutches the garlic flowers to her; but in her
sleep, she thrusts away that protection, embracing her monstrous fate. Since
she dies in her sleep, her future as one of the Un-Dead is inescapable.
As a vampire she is even more beautiful than in life, but no longer the
Lucy they had known. “The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless
cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness.... Lucy’s eyes [have
become] unclean and full of hell-fire, instead of the pure, gentle orbs we
knew”; they blaze with “unholy light” and she is as “callous as a devil” (211).
Again and again, Seward uses the words, “wanton” and “voluptuous” to
describe Un-Dead Lucy’s ’smile, her tones “diabolically sweet” — until she is
thwarted, at which point she becomes overtly monstrous, her eyes throwing
out “sparks of hellfire,” the brows “wrinkled as though the folds of the flesh
were the coils of Medusa’s snakes” (212). These same images are repeated
when the four men, Dr. Van Helsing and Lucy’s three suitors, return the next
day to free Lucy’s soul, to save her by killing her. “She seemed like a
nightmare of Lucy as she lay there; the pointed teeth, the bloodstained,
voluptuous mouth —which it made one shudder to see —the whole carnal and
unspirited appearance, seeming like a devilish mockery of Lucy’s sweet
purity” (214).
But the rite of sacrifice, an act of terrible violence, restores both Lucy
and the community she had threatened. As Stoker describes it, the final
killing of Lucy is quite clearly both a religious act and a communal one. The
setting is a solitary tomb lit only by candles. Arthur drives the stake through
Lucy’s heart, as the one with the best right to so violate her offending body
and release the innocent soul, and he is supported in his work by the priestly
figure of Dr. Van Helsing and by his two closest friends, Lucy’s other lovers,
who read the prayer for the dead as he strikes home.
The thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, bloodcurdling

screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and
quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth
champed together till the lips were cut, and the mouth was
looked like a figure of T hor as his untrembling arm rose and fell,
driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the

blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it.
His face was set, and high duty seemed to shine through it; the
sight of it gave us courage so that our voices seemed to ring
through the little vault....
There, in the coffin lay no longer the foul Thing that we had so
dreaded and grown to hate that the work of her destruction was
yielded as a privilege to the one best entitled to it, but Lucy as we
had seen her in life, with her face of unequalled sweetness and
purity. (216) 22
In death Lucy becomes again the angel she had been in life; she also
becomes a bond between her three rivals, where in life she could only have
been a source of division. Despite their personal grief, it is for them an ideal
solution to the problem she represented. In sacrificing Lucy, the four men
purge not only their fear of female sexuality generally, of which she is the
monstrous expression, but also —and more importantly— their fear of their
own sexuality and their capacity for sexually-prompted violence against each
other.
The scene in the tomb exemplifies a key element of the sacrificial rite,
“the atmosphere of terror and hallucination that accompanies the primordial

religious experience.” 28 The violent hysteria, the decisive act of violence
perceived as religious experience, the succeeding calm and the atmosphere of
holy mystery covering the participants, all function to fuse the men into a
closed and harmonious community. Although Lucy is no longer available to
any of the men as a bulwark of his personal identity, her death serves to
reinforce their common bond, their dedication to each other and to a sense
of shared interest, thus bolstering that other pole of Victorian identity that
Giddens defines as nationalism.
But Lucy is not the only scapegoat Count Dracula himself

in the novel.
is also sacrificed for the common good. Like all sacrificial victims, he must be
both connected and marginal. His links to the community are literally blood
ties —the blood of Jonathan, Lucy, and Mina. Further, he resembles his
enemies in several important ways: he is (or was once) human, he is
European, he is extremely intelligent and has a most powerful will. But his
roots are in Eastern Europe — Slavic, Catholic, peasant, and superstitious

where England is Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, industrial, and rationalist.
Further, unlike Arthur, the bourgeois aristocrat, Dracula belongs to a much

older, more feudal sort of aristocracy, one that was was going out of favor in
England. 29 In fact, the most unmistakable sign of his allegiance to that older
pattern may be his sexuality, which partakes of the ancient droit du seigneur.
“Your girls that you all love are mine
he gloats (306), taunting his
already,”
opponents; and throughout the novel he lets his appetites run rampant,
voracious and (as Freud says of the child’s sexuality) polymorphously
perverse — a most appropriate phrase, since the narrative repeatedly
emphasizes Dracula’s “child brain” (335), as opposed to the adult brains of
his enemies. Even Mina has, we are told, a man's brain to go with her
woman’s heart (234).
But we know that civilized adult men control their appetites; his failure
to do so marks the crucial distinction between Dracula and his opponents: he
is degenerate “a criminal
,
and of criminal type” according to the theories of
Lombroso and Nordau, which means he has an “imperfectly formed mind”
30 Consequently he can only work on one project at a time, and in

(342).
emergencies must fall back on habit —which is why, closely pursued, he can
do nothing but flee to his castle, while his opponents are able to innovate
strategies for his defeat. As criminal and degenerate, Dracula is by definition
selfish, evil, solitary; despite his pride in his descent from Attila and in his
people’s valiant struggles against the Turk, as a vampire he has no true
“national” identity, no “community” to belong to. Even the three vampire
women at the castle who could conceivably function as a family for him, if
not a nation, do not appear to do By contrast the “band of brothers” is

so.
selfless, good, and unified into a community both by their shared sacrifice of
Lucy and their shared devotion to Mina. It is, as Van Helsing tells them, one
of their great advantages over Dracula —the “power of combination,” along
with the “sources of science” and “devotion in a cause” (238).
However, despite all these differences, the truth gradually emerges: the
Count represents precisely those dark secret drives that the men most fear in
themselves, which are most destructive to both poles of identity —the
intimate self of the family man, threatened by unrestrained sexual appetites,
and the communal self of the nation, undermined by violent internal
competition more than by external invasion. Representing a real aspect of his
enemies, but one that they consciously wish to reject, Dracula has both the
necessary connections to the community and the necessary separation from
it to fulfill the scapegoat’s purgative function.
And like Lucy’s sacrifice, the scene of Dracula’s death contains all the
elements of the primordial religious experience. The atmosphere is
terrifying and hallucinatory: the two parties desperately racing the sun, each
fighting for life —Dracula to reach his castle, the band of heroes to catch the
vampire before sunset restores his deadly power; the Count’s glaring eyes and
“horrible vindictive look” as he lies helpless in his coffin, and his triumphant
expression as he sees the sun setting and anticipates his revenge. Like the
earlier sacrifice, this act is communal: two of the young men together pry off
the lid of the coffin with their knives and strike simultaneously, one slashing
the Count’s throat, the other plunging a knife into his heart — all described in
words that intensify the terror of the moment (“sweep,” “flash,” “shriek,”
“shear,” “plunge” [377]).

“It was like a miracle,” cries Mina in relief; but, as the Count’s body
crumbles into dust before their eyes, she adds, “Even in that moment of final
dissolution, there was in the face a look of peace, such as I never could have
imagined might have rested there” (377). As at the moment of Lucy’s death,
the sacrificial victim is pictured as at peace, almost grateful to die for the
greater good of the community. And indeed, there may be a reason for both
Lucy’s and Dracula’s curious passivity at the moment of death. Mary Douglas
remarks in Purity and Danger that “if a person has no place in the social
system and is therefore a marginal being, all precaution against danger must
come from others. He Cannot help his abnormal situation.” But to say that
he cannot help his situation is to suggest that he would like to help it, that he
does not want to be a danger to others.
However we read this reaction, the atmosphere of the scene changes
dramatically at the moment of the vampire’s death: Castle Dracula is
suddenly seen standing out against the sunset sky as we have never seen it
before, every stone blazing in the light. The violence and horror is succeeded
by holy awe and peace, which is capped when Quincey Morris sees Mina’s
forehead now clear of its shameful scar, and vows with his last breath that this
outcome is worth dying for. It is the ultimate confirmation that the

community has been saved.
But it has been a near thing, and the cost high: Lucy is lost to them
(though her soul was saved), Quincey is dead, and both Jonathan and Mina
suffer severely before Dracula is defeated. Stoker’s novel, then, reveals two
complementary perspectives on Lucy and Dracula demonstrate
its subject. If
the terrifying powers of degeneracy, so threatening that they must at all costs
be expelled from the community and from life itself, Jonathan’s and Mina’s
experiences exemplify the difficulties and the rewards of resistance.
According to Victorian sexology, in Dracula’s castle Jonathan is a man
at risk: he is engaged to Mina, but they are not yet married, so that his sexual
fantasies are inflamed but not yet lawfully satisfied. Further, he is far from
home and isolated from other living human beings. For the Victorians,
solitude greatly increased sexual danger: the solitude of privacy allowed one
to indulge in masturbation, while the different solitude of anonymity left one
free to indulge in the kinds of sexual experiences one would, as member of a
family, have been ashamed to admit desiring. 31 Jonathan is both alone and
anonymous. Confronted with the three mysterious and beautiful women in
the moonlit room, he admits, “I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that
they would kiss me with those red lips” (37). The scene that follows, when
he very nearly (and disastrously) gets his wish, is recorded with incandescent
detail:
The girl went on her knees and bent over me, simply gloating.
There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling

and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her
lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture
shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the
white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips
went below the range of my mouth and seemed to fasten on my

throat.... I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the
super-sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp
teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in
languorous ecstasy and waited —waited with beating heart. (38)
The erotic charge of the scene is quite remarkable, as is Jonathan’s fascinated

passivity in surrendering to his sexual fantasies, even while admitting the
wickedness of what he desires. What we see and he does not, at this moment,
is that he is risking not the “little death” of orgasm, but the real thing.
Ironically, Jonathan is saved from the women not by his own virtue, but by
Count Dracula’s opportune arrival. However, he is rescued from the evils of
feminine sexuality only to be plunged into the horrors of homosexual
passions. “How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it?” Dracula
furiously asks his handmaids. “This man belongs to me!” The women
answer, with a laugh of “ribald coquetry,” “You yourself never loved; you
never love!” The Count looks at Jonathan’s face “attentively,” and says in a
soft whisper, “Yes, I too can love” (39). As Dracula approaches him, Jonathan
conveniently sinks into unconsciousness —into the same state in which Lucy
had yielded to the vampire’s blandishments. If we had had any doubts about
the equation of violence and sex in the novel, this scene would dispel them:
Dracula’s own language conflates erotic desire and feeding; the mouth both
kisses and consumes, the same organ gratifying two distinct hungers.
The encounter seems to “cure” Jonathan of his sexual desires (desires
he will later pay for in the brain fever which sends him to his wedding an
invalid). The text attributes his reaction to the fact that he now understands
who, or rather, what the fatally beautiful creatures are, and thus sees them
with horror rather than his earlier guilty fascination. “I am alone in the castle
with those awful women. Faugh! Mina is a woman, and there is nought in
common. They are devils of the Pit!” (53). His beloved, he insists, though a
woman, has nothing in common with these creatures. He means, of course,
that she does not have their evil capabilities —
but neither, we notice, does she
have their voluptuousness. He never records any erotic reaction to Mina at
all, let alone one of this feverish intensity. In fact, since their marriage begins
with her nursing him through his illness, Mina’s relationship to her husband
always seems more maternal than wifely. But in late-Victorian theory, that is
as it should be. Marriage is designed to tame the sexual impulses of husbands;

and as for wives, as Krafft-Ebing remarks, “Woman, if physically and
mentally normal, and properly educated, has but little sensual desire. If it
were otherwise, marriage and family life would be empty words.

Victorian sexual theory also helps us to understand the difference
between Lucy and Mina, to explain why Mina takes longer to succumb to the
vampire count* and why she is able to resist more effectively than her friend.
In the first place, while Lucy satisfies her own unconscious desires in yielding
to Dracula, Mina’s vulnerability results as much from the failures of others as
her own weakness. It is no action of Mina’s that allows the count access to
her bedroom, but Renfleld’s betrayal in giving his master the necessary
permission to enter the house. Further, her husband and her friends, who
should be protecting her, instead become so obsessed with the fight against
Dracula — a fight from which they deliberately, and with the best motives,
exclude her —that they leave her too much alone. Solitude is a danger to her
as it was to Jonathan; and while Mina has presumably had little personal
experience of sexual desire, she has, we must remember, read Jonathan’s
journal in the process of transcribing it. That means she has read his
description of his adventure with the three female vampires. Her own
husband, then, in another sort of betrayal, has exposed Mina to his sexual
fantasies.
Thus isolated and exposed, Mina’s experience of marital sex, such as it
has been, gives her no protection against the count’s powers of sexual
fascination. When she recognizes him in her bedroom, she is appalled but
paralyzed, unable to respond or cry out as he bares her throat to refresh
himself. Such paralysis is bad enough, but worse, to her bewilderment she
discovers that, “strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him. I suppose it
is a part of the horrible curse that such is [sic] ,

when his touch is on his
victim” (287). Dracula has drained not only her blood, but also her will to
resist. He is, in sexual terms, more seducer than rapist. For a modern reader,
this might lessen the crime, but for Victorians seduction would have been
infinitely worse. In Victorian theory, it is sexual desire rather than sexual
activity that is the true source of danger; and as Mina herself makes clear, she
experiences desire under Dracula’s attentions.
This explains why Mina’s forehead is scarred by the Host, why she
herself suffers such (to us disproportionate) agonies of guilt and self-
But once she is no longer
revulsion. isolated, once she is included in the
community of her husband and their friends, she is able to resist desire, to
exert her will against Dracula to help defeat him. Thus when he dies, the
shameful scar disappears from her forehead. With help, Mina has conquered
temptation and the dangers of degeneracy. It is this effort of will, the effort
to conquer her own sexual imagination, that makes her worthy of the
sacrifices —
of the others that makes her worthy, in the end, of salvation.
What, then, has been achieved? By the end of the novel Lucy is dead,
Quincey Morris is dead, Mina and Jonathan have both come close to death
or worse, to the death-in-life of the degeneracy which vampirism represents;
but they have, after all, repented and are now stronger than ever. Dracula has
been killed, and England and the world preserved. The fantastic element has
been expelled, and we return to the safe, ordinary reality of the opening.
In fact, the novel ends quite abruptly, barely a full page after Dracula’s
death. In a brief note we are told that Mina and Jonathan have a son, that
Seward and Gadalming are happily married (Lucy’s role filled by other
women), and that Van Helsing is now incorporated into the extended family.
We also learn that the story we have just been told is, despite its elaborate
detail and fundamentally documentary nature, unsupported by any original
documents —nothing exists but Mina’s typescript, which is hardly proof of
the remarkable narrative we have just read. Thus we, the fictive audience, are
left to accept or reject based purely on the internal evidence, and —since the
danger is safely past —need not react at all if we choose V
VI: DRACULA AND THE URBAN GOTHIC
But if comparatively little has happened in the world of the fictive

audience, in the world of the actual audience Stoker’s novel has accomplished
a good deal. With Dracula’s death, the “natural” superiority of Englishmen
over the “lesser” races has been once again convincingly portrayed. More
importantly, a number of profoundly disruptive elements have been
symbolically expelled from society and the crumbling boundaries between
certain key categories reaffirmed: between life and death, civilization and
degeneracy, human and non-human, desire and loathing — all of which
boundaries Dracula had blurred or violated. The even more fundamental
boundary between self and other, which Dracula’s ability to override his
victims’ willpower so terrifyingly challenges, is seen once again triumphant

in Mina’s recovered purity and self-control.
In Sexuality and Its Discontents, Jeffrey Weeks connects the development
of sociology with the simultaneous development of sexology. As these two
new disciplines struggled to define the “laws” of behavior in their respective
realms, he argues, a powerful interdependency sprang up between them. At
the same time as sexuality was being constituted as a key area of social
relations, where it helped to define personal identity, sex as what Freud
would soon call a “drive” came to be perceived as “a force outside, and set
against society,” as “part of the eternal battle of individual and society.” 34

Thus sex is paradoxically seen as both social and anti-social; it helps to define
individual identity while at the same time threatening the collective. No
wonder, then, that sex is such an explosive issue for the late Victorians, for
whom these two poles of identity had become so crucial and so fragile. (It
may also help to explain why sex is still an explosive issue for us, their
grandchildren, a hundred years later —apparently so different from them, but

/
living in a society which, like theirs, balances precariously on the same two
poles.)
The sex/society formulation, Weeks continues, “evokes and replays all
the other great distinctions which attempt to explain the boundaries of

animality and humanity” — like nature/culture, freedom/regulation —the
“two rival absolutes.” 35 As we have already seen, these are some of the central
categories at play in Dracula. The outcome of the novel suggests Stoker was
arguing that the solution to the late Victorian crisis lay in privileging society
over sex, that in order to preserve the nation it was necessary to sacrifice
some degree of personal freedom. That would explain the novel’s insistent
pattern of the many against the one, the community against the scapegoat; it
might also help explain the novel’s popularity at a time of imperialist fervor
concealing deep anxieties about the future of the empire.

And it is the generic conventions of the fantastic that have made this
resolution possible, by creating an imaginative way simultaneously to affirm
and deny the reality of chosen cultural elements. The fantastic allows writers
and readers to take those aspects of their own culture that are most
emotionally charged, most disruptive, and identify them as monstrous —that
is, as violations not just of human law but of the very nature of reality —so
that society can be symbolically purged of its pollution.
However, Dracula is not merely fantastic; it is an example of the Urban
Gothic, that modern version of the fantastic marked by its dependence on
empiricism and the discourse of science. The difference can be seen most
clearly by comparing Dracula to its immediate predecessor and reputed
inspiration, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871). Le Fanu’s story of a female
(and lesbian) vampire is, in fact, quite powerful and subtle, but the tale is set
in a remote country house7

in eighteenth-century Transylvania, whereas
Stoker goes out of his way repeatedly to emphasize the modernity of his
setting. For example (more or less at random): Van Helsing observes, “A year
ago which of us would have received [i.e., believed] such a possibility, in the
midst of our scientific, sceptical, matter-of-fact nineteenth century?” (266);
or again, in “this enlightened age, when men believe not even what they see,
the doubting of wise men would be [Dracula’s] greatest strength” (321). In

addition to such references, which could easily be multiplied, the band of
heroes relies readily and matter-of-factly on modern technology like blood
transfusions, typewriters, telegraphs, and Dr. Seward’s “phonograph diary”
(219).
But these are mere decorations on the surface of the text. More
important, the approach of the characters to their tasks in each tale shows the
same contrast. Carmilla is tracked to her lair and killed by reference to the
past —her own history, and the traditional religious knowledge of the
community, while Dracula is identified and defeated by painstaking
investigation of his present actions. Dr. Van Helsing’s knowledge of vampire
lore eventually becomes essential, but it is of no use until Dracula can be
conclusively identified as a vampire. Thus the most crucial event in Dracula
occurs when Mina types up all the documents of the case (Jonathan’s diary,
Seward’s records, her own 'correspondence with Lucy, newspaper clippings,
even telegrams) and assembles them in chronological order —the order in
which we read them. Only with chronology does narrative emerge; only then
does a collection of data turn into a hypothesis. And, as in science, hypothesis
is a necessary prelude to action. In other words, while Carmilla resembles a
traditional ghost story, Dracula is constructed like that other form which
comes into its own in the 1890s, the detective story. 36
The implications of this difference are crucial. The ghost story, like the
eighteenth-century Gothic to which it is closely related, usually finds its
methods in the shared knowledge of the community, whether this means

traditional religious approaches to the supernatural or the ancient remedies
of the folk. In either case, the necessary knowledge is both implicit and
communal. In the modern world, and therefore in the Urban Gothic, there
is no implicit knowledge: everything must be tested and proved. A method
for dealing with the supernatural must be created, drawing on the most
powerful and prestigious tools at their disposal: the methods of science,
shaped by a secular world view — paradoxically, the very world view that was
initially overthrown by the fantastic intrusion. 37
How are we to read this paradox, so central to the Urban Gothic? Is
the primary effect to invalidate the supernatural, seeing it as an alien intruder

in the modern world? Is it, on the contrary, to affirm the reality of the
supernatural in the very act of expelling it? Or is it to demonstrate the
efficacy of the scientific method in addressing any kind of crisis? I would

argue instead that the central appeal of fantastic literature is that, like the
violent scapegoat rituals it mimics, it allows its writers and readers

simultaneously to acknowledge and deny those aspects of themselves and
their world that they find most troubling — to see them both as part of the
community and as available for sacrifice.
Douglas observes that one of the sources of ritual pollution is “the
interplay of form and formlessness. Pollution dangers strike when form has
been attacked.” 38 Dracula is a perfect example of the “formless” attacking
form (he is, after all, a shape-changer); but at the same time, our cultural
experience of the novel suggests that, in creating his vampire count, Stoker
has given to formlessness itself a form of continuing potency.
/
* Notes
Some of the research for this essay was done during an NEH Summer
Seminar for College Teachers on “British Literature and Culture
1840-1900” given at Brown University in 1989. I am grateful to the NEH,
to the seminar’s directors, Profs. Roger Henkle (English) and L. Perry Curtis
(History), and to my colleagues in the seminar for their advice and support.
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis

1 .
of Concepts of Pollution
and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966), 4.
2. Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings Myths and
, ,
Modem Sexualities (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 178.

3. The most common positions are that Dracula is either about male
sexuality threatening passive female innocence, or about the need to control
rampant female sexuality. But it has also been argued that the novel is about
covert homoerotic desire displaced onto women, and even that all the sex in
the book is sadomasochistic. For a convenient collection of the best recent
criticism of Dracula see ,
Margaret L. Carter, The Vampire and the Critics (Ann
Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988). For some non-psychological readings of
Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian
the novel, see
Myth (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), and Elaine Showalter, Sexual
Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle (New York: Viking Penguin,
1990).
4. For example: Rosa Campbell Praed, Romance of Today Affinities: A
(1885); Rider Haggard, She (1887); Arthur Conan Doyle, The Parasite (1894);
Richard Marsh, The Beetle (1897); Somerset Maugham, The'Magician (1907);
Algernon Blackwood, “The Camp of the Dog” in John Silence ,
Physician
Extraordinaire (1908); Sax Rohmer, The Brood of the Witch-Queen (1918);

Jessie Kerruish, The Undying Monster (1922).
5. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary
Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975); Andrzej
Zgorzelski, “Is Science Fiction a Genre of Fantastic Literature?” Science-
Fiction Studies 6 (1979): 289 (emphasis in original). Todorov defines the
fantastic in relation to two other genres, the “uncanny” and the
“marvellous.” In a realistic world —
that is, a textual world modeled on the
world we inhabit —an event occurs that appears to violate the laws of this
world. The character who experiences this seemingly abnormal event (and,
more importantly, the reader of the text) must choose between two
explanations: either the event is a product of illusion, or imagination, or
deliberate deception — in which case the familiar laws remain intact (and the
text is an example of the uncanny); or else the event has genuinely occurred,
is a part of reality, in which case the laws must be modified to allow for the
existence of, say, ghosts or the Devil. In that case, the text belongs to the
category of the marvellous. If, on the other hand, it is impossible for
character or reader to decide whether or not the event is genuine, the text is,
by Todorov’s definition, fantastic. “The fantastic is that hesitation experienced

by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently
supernatural event” (25; emphasis added). The problem with Todorov’s
definition is that most commit themselves about the event;
texts do actually
thus very few texts that we normally think of as fantastic end up qualifying as
such by Todorov’s definition. For a more extended discussion of Zgorzelski’s
definition and its implications, see Kathleen L. Spencer, “Naturalizing the
Fantastic: Narrative Technique in the Novels of Charles Williams,”
Extrapolation 28 (1987): 62-74.
6. Henry James, “Miss Braddon,” The Nation 9 Nov. , 1865, 593-94;
reprinted in Notes and Reviews (Cambridge: Dunster House, 1921), 110. Jane
Austen makes a similar point in North anger Abbey, contrasting the imaginary
horrors in the Gothic novels her heroine is so fond of reading with the more
mundane but very real cruelties she finds practiced in her own modern,
ordinary England.
7. For a fuller discussion of this material, see George Kenneth Graham,
English Criticism of the Novel 1865-1900 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 51-109.
For a more traditional (that is, judgmental) treatment of the romance-
realism debate see Lionel Stevenson, The English Novel: A Panorama (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1960) and John Halperin, “The Theory of the Novel: A
Critical Introduction” in The Theory of the Novel: New Essays, ed. John
Halperin (London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974), 3-22. For the
patriotic argument for rejecting naturalism, see William C. Frierson, “The
English Controversy Over Realism in Fiction 1885-1895,” PMLA 43 (1928):
533-50.
8. Cited in Sir Charles Mallett, Anthony Hope and His Books (London:
Hutchinson, 1935), 114.
9. See, for example: R. L. Stevenson, “A Gossip on Romance,”
Longman's Magazine 1 (November 1882): 69-79; Stevenson, “A Humble
Remonstrance,” Longman's Magazine 5 (December 1884): 139-47; H. Rider
Haggard, “About Fiction,” Contemporary Review 51 (February 1887): 172-80;
Andrew Lang, “Realism and Romance,” Contemporary Review 52 (1887):
683-93; George Saintsbury, “The Present State of the Novel. I,” Fortnightly
Review, n.s., 48 (September 1887): 410-17; “The Present State of the
Novel.II,” Fortnightly Review, n.s., 49 (January 1888): 112-23; and Hall
Caine, “The New Watchwords of Fiction,” Contemporary Review 57 (April
1890): 479-88.
10. For* example, Marie Corelli, George Griffith, Guy Boothby,

William Le Queux, Sax Rohmer.
1 1 . For a fuller discussion of the late Victorian fascination with the far
reaches of empire, see Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature

and Imperialism, 1839-1914 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988).Though the
futuristic plot settings of some of these novels may make them sound very
much like science fiction, they do not as a rule qualify as such by any
reasonably rigorous criteria, not even the novels set on other planets. Their
generic affiliations are rather with the imaginary voyage and the utopia,
which are quite different traditions. For a survey of these texts and an
alternate view of their genre, see Darko Suvin, Victorian Science Fiction in the
UK: The Discourses of Knowledge and Power (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983). For a
brief description of the occult revival, see Kathleen L. Spencer, “The Urban
Gothic In British Fantastic Fiction 1880-1930” (Ph.D. diss., University of
California, Los Angeles, 1987), 3d— 98. For more detail, see John J. Cerullo,
The Secularization of the Soul: Psychical Research in Modern Britain
(Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1982); Frank Miller
Turner, Between Science and Religion (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974);
Alan Gauld, The Founders of Psychical Research (New York: Schocken Books,
1968); and Ellic Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History
of a Magical Order 1883-1923 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).
12. Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism,
Vol. I: Power, Property, and the State (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981),
194.
13. George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution Essays : in the
1
History ofAnthropology (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1 968), 121.

14. For a discussion of the East End and degeneracy, see Gareth
S teadman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationships Between Classes in
Victorian Society (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 149.
15. For discussions of this point, see (for example) Mary Poovey,
Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), and Elaine Showalter, The Female
Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture 1830-1980, 2nd ed. (New York:
Penguin, 1987). While the female role as constituted in theory was quite
rigid, in practice both working-class and aristocratic women experienced
some relaxation of its rigors, especially in economic and (therefore?) in sexual
activities: aristocrats, because of the traditional privileges of their class and

the sense that their lives are not bound by the same rules as everyone else;
and working-class women, because they were needed in the paid work force
by both their families and their employers.
16. Jenni Calder, The Victorian and Edwardian Home (London: Batsford,
1977), 132.
17. 3 Hansard, CXLV, 800. Quoted by Lee Holcombe, “Victorian
Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law,

1857-1882” in A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women ed. ,
Martha Vicinus (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1977), 12. Holcombe’s

article as a whole (3-28) is an illuminating and scholarly discussion of the
struggle of Victorian wives to reform property laws.

For detailed discussions of the Cleveland Street brothel, see H.
18.
Montgomery Hyde, The Cleveland Street Scandal (New York: Coward,

McCann, and Geoghagan, 1976), and Colin Simpson et al., The Cleveland
Street Affair (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976).
19. For a discussion of the way the Wilde trial helped turn
“homosexual” from an adjective describing certain kinds of behaviors into a
noun indicating a kind of person and the significance of this change for the
subsequent history of homosexuality, see Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and
Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (London: Longman, 1981). To
give one small example of the trial’s effect on the general cultural atmosphere
(beyond the terror it struck in the hearts of homosexuals): in the late 1880s
and early ’90s, there had been an explosion of novels treating sympathetically
such previously untouchable subjects as female sexuality, free love, and fallen
women. Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), for example, was
received not without controversy, certainly, but with a good bit of support for
Hardy’s sympathetic treatment of Tess. But Jude the Obscure published in ,
1896 after Wilde’s public disgrace, was greeted with such a firestorm of
disapproval that Hardy swore off writing fiction forever (for this argument,
see Eric Trudgill, Madonnas and Magdalenes: The Origins and Development of
Victorian Sexual Attitudes, [London: Heinemann, 1976]). Dracula published
in 1897, reached the public at the height of this antisexual hysteria; it should
not surprise us to find reflections of this mood in such a popular text
meaning both one that was addressed to a less sophisticated audience and one
that was very widely read at the time.
20. In this same decade, the “unnaturalness” of homosexuality was also

being challenged by Havelock Ellis, along with several prominent apologists
like Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds who in the 1890s
published books arguing that homosexuals were not “failed” or “unnatural”

men or women but were instead members of a third or “intermediate” sex
(Ellis, who was married to a lesbian, was the first to write sympathetically
about lesbianism). In the early editions of Psychopathia Sexualis, Richard von
Krafft-Ebing argued that all homosexual behavior was degenerate, but after
the turn of the century he softens this judgment, concluding that some
homosexuals indeed seemed to be “born” not “made,” — in his words,
“congenital.” See, for example, the lengthy discussion of “Homosexual
Feeling as an Abnormal Congenital Manifestation” (356-90). He explores
the available explanations of “sexual inversion” from the traditional “vice” to

the more “scientific” cause, excessive and/or early masturbation, and finally
concludes that in some cases an explanation based on physiological factors

something in the structure of the brain, something therefore not subject to
the will of the “invert” —rather than the old medico-moral explanation of
“willful indulgence in depravity,” is the only logical conclusion. He does not
altogether abandon degeneracy as an explanation even in these cases, arguing
that “In fact, in all cases of sexual inversion, a taint of a hereditary chamcter
may be established”; but he admits that “What causes produce this factor of
taint and its activity is a question which cannot be well answered by science
in its present stage” (370; emphasis added). By allowing for the possibility of
inherited tendencies to degeneracy, Krafft-Ebing simultaneously takes back

and lets stand his uneasy conclusion that some homosexuals do not seem to
be morally responsible for their sexual orientation. (Richard von Krafft-
Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: A Medico-Forensic Study ,
Latin trans. Harry E.
Wedeck [New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965]. This edition, with an
introduction by Ernest Van Den Haag, is described as “The first
unexpurgated edition, with the Latin texts translated into English for the
first time” by Dr. Wedeck, but does not specify who translated the German
parts of the text. I suspect thL edition is based on the translation of the 12 th
German edition by F. J. Rebman published in 1934 by the Physicians and
Surgeons Book Company, but cannot verify my suspicion at this time.)
21. Ludmilla Jordanova, “Natural Facts: An Historical Perspective on

Science and Reality” in Nature Culture and Gender, ed. Carol
, ,
MacCormack
and Marilyn Strathern (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), 44.
22. The following discussion is drawn primarily from Mary Douglas’s
Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Random House, 1972).
23. For other examples of modern “witchcraft” societies, consider Nazi
Germany and McCarthy-era America. Indeed, the current struggle between
social liberals and religious fundamentalists over issues like abortion and
pornography manifests many of the same dynamics.
Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred trans. Patrick Gregory
24. ,
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977), 13. Interestingly enough,

despite the fact that in many cultures women are not afforded full status, they
are seldom chosen as surrogate victims. Girard speculates that because a
married woman retains ties with her parents’ social group as well as her
husband’s, to sacrifice her would be to run the risk of one group or the other
interpreting the sacrifice as “an act of murder committing it to a reciprocal act
of revenge,” and so not ending the communal violence, but increasing it (13).
25. Bram Stoker, Dracula (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983), 59. All
further citations will be to this text. Showalter in Sexual Anarchy (note 3),
which I did not see until after this essay was submitted, makes the same
essential point about Lucy.
26. Simon Williams, analyzing Charles Nodier’s play, Vampire (1820),
part of the response to Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), finds a very similar
pattern. “Sexual desire is exhibited as supernatural possession that causes the
heroine to wander deliriously in caverns and shady places in search of her
demon lover. But once she returns to consciousness, she is totally unaware of
the dark forces that have briefly taken over her body” (“Theatre and
Degeneration: Subversion and Sexuality,” in Degeneration The Dark Side of :
Progress ,
ed. J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman [New York:
Columbia Univ. Press, 1985], 246). The terms “conscious” and
“unconscious” may seem anachronistic, but the English had casually
accepted the idea of an unconscious mind by the latter part of the nineteenth
century; the idea is expounded in a number of different places in the last two
decades. It was not the concept of the unconscious that made Freud so
shocking, but his notion of what kinds of material the unconscious
contained. As Nina Auerbach (note 3) points out, Stoker might well have
known of Freud by the time he wrote Dracula, since F. W. Myers had
presented a lecture to the Society for Psychical Research on Freud and
Breuer’s work with hysterics in 1893; and in the novel itself Dr. Seward
mentions Charcot, Freud’s teacher (22-23).
27. Most critics discuss this scene as symbolic of sexual intercourse and
orgasm, even going so far in one case as to liken it to the “painful deflowering
of a virgin, which Lucy still is” (C. F. Bentley, “The Monster in the Bedroom:
Sexual Symbolism in Bram Stoker’s Dracula ,” Literature and Psychology 22
[1972]: 31). While I recognize the elements of the scene that make it possible
to draw the parallel, what most strikes me in the description (and, I suspect,
most women readers) is the violence —which is, because of the religious
overtones of the scene, weirdly impersonal. Indeed, it is rather alarming to
me to think that this scene can be read so easily, and apparently without
qualms or qualifiers, as an image of sexual intercourse. What does such a
reading suggest about our culture’s confusion of sex and violence?

28. Girard (note 24), 161.
29. This popular disapproval of the aristocracy became particularly
apparent after the publication of Sir Francis Gabon’s Hereditary Genius in
1 869, which attacked both inherited wealth and the titled nobility.
30. For a detailed discussion of Dracula as Lombroso’s “criminal man,”
see Ernest Fontana, “Lombroso’s Criminal Man and Stoker’s Dracula ,” in
Carter (note 3), 159-66. For a more thorough examination of the place of
degeneracy theory in late Victorian thinking, see Chamberlin and Gilman
(note 26).
31. Douglas (note 1), 97. Richard Sennett and Michael Foucault,
“Sexuality and Solitude,” in Humanities in Review 1, ed. Sennett et al. (New
York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), 4.
32. Krafft-Ebing (note 20), 42. Not all Victorian doctors agreed with
this, but it does seem to have been a majority opinion, expressed
categorically, publically, and often. Poovey in Uneven Developments (note 15)
offers the clearest explanation of the thinking behind what now seems a
ludicrous position. Victorian doctors knew so little about female physiology,

she observes, that the only model they had for sexual response was the
familiar male tumescence/ejaculation sequence. Failing to find this sequence
in women, they concluded that women normally did not experience orgasm.
Of course, this does not explain Krafft-Ebing’s value judgment about the
incompatibility of female sexual desire with marriage and family life; that,
after all, is a matter of culture, not science. Nonetheless, Poovey’s

observation does give us a welcome alternative to the reductive explanation
of “sexism” as to how otherwise intelligent men could arrive at such absurd
conclusions.
33. This detail is characteristic of fantastic texts, that finally we are left
with just the testament itself, and no “external” proofs.
34. Weeks (note 2), 81.
35. Weeks, 97.

36. Rather than pointing to Carmilla ,
I think that Stoker’s most
important literary source is Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), or more likely
(since Stoker was a theatrical man) one of its many dramatic redactions.
Polidori’s text creates a modern fantastic effect, deriving its potency from the
device of bringing his nobleman/vampire into the city of London —seventy-
five years before Stoker does the same thing.
37. One way to distinguish between the traditional ghost story and the
Urban Gothic is that the ghost story, although genuinely fantastic, is much
closer in tone to the original Gothic. In addition, ghosts generally have quite
a limited repertory of objects, motives, and behaviors: to get revenge, to
make restitution, to finish an important task left incomplete at death, to warn
the living (generally family members or descendants), or to reenact endlessly
the crucial event of their lives (as in Yeats’ “Purgatory”). In the Urban
Gothic, the supernatural powers have a much broader scope for action.
38. Douglas (note 1), 104.
JENNIFER WICKE
Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and its Media
In the Introduction to the Grundrisse Marx asks, thinking about the relation
of Greek art to the present day: “What chance has Vulcan against Roberts &
Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the Credit-
Mobilier? All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of
nature ... it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them.
WEat becomes of Fama alongside Printing House Square ?” 1
The
incongruity —and mastery —of Dracula lies in its willingness to set the
Count Dracula squarely in the
mythological, Gothic, medieval mystery of
midst of Printing House Square. The Grundrisse is Marx’s complex
meditation on the intertwined fates of production, consumption and
distribution, prefaced by these worries about the place of the aesthetic in the
modern socioeconomic landscape. Within its novelistic form, Dracula too

could be said to pose and to enact the occultation of those three processes,
by its privileging of consumption, which subsumes the other two. This
engorgement is staged by the collision of ancient mythologies with
contemporary modes of production.
Miss Mina Murray writes to Miss Lucy Westenra about her current
preoccupations: “I have been working very hard lately, because I want to
keep up with Jonathan’s studies, and I have been practicing shorthand very
assiduously. When we are married I shall be able to be very useful to
From ELH 59 (1992): 467-493. © 1992 by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
141
142 JENNIFER WICKE
Jonathan, and if I can stenograph well enough I can take down what he wants
to say in this way and write it out for him on th$ typewriter, which I am also
practicing very hard. He and I sometimes write letters in shorthand, and he
is keeping a stenographic journal of his travels abroad .” 2 While such girlish
pursuits, if slavishly dutiful, scarcely seem ominous, it is Mina’s very prowess
with the typewriter that brings down Dracula on unsuspecting British necks,
even including her very own. In what follows I want to propose that as
radically different as the sexy act of vamping and such prosaic labor on the
typewriter appear, there are underlying ties between them that can ultimately
make sense of the oxymoron of vampiric typewriting. The argument will
turn attention to the technologies that underpin vampirism, making for the
dizzy contradictions of this book, and permitting it to be read as the first
great modern novel in British literature. In doing so, I will be concentrating
on the shabby, dusty corners of Dracula inspecting ,
its pockets for lint rather
than examining its more delicious excesses, and putting pressure on the
aspects of Dracula that have received less attention because they, like
practicing shorthand, don’t immediately seem as pleasurable. Dracula cannot

help but be a heady cocktail, even under inauspiciously stringent critical
circumstances, and part of what I hope to show in so pursuing its media are
its connections to the everyday life of typewriters, neon, advertisement and
neoimperialism we are still living today. To drain Dracula of some of its
obvious terrors may help to highlight the more banal terrors of modern life.
Franco Moretti bifurcates his stimulating analysis of Dracula : one

strand follows a Marxist allegorical path, examining the abstract fears
aroused by the specter of monopoly capital rising up in Britain’s free trade
society, and centering on Count Dracula as the metaphorid instantiation of
monopoly capital gone wild in its eerie global perambulations; his second
appraisal locates Dracula’s terror, rather unsurprisingly, in the realm of eros,
and advances the notion that the root fear vampirism expresses is the child’s
ambivalent relation to its mother, and the psychosexual repressions that
ambivalence exacts. Both vectors are vigorously and excellently argued, but
my concern here is with Moretti’s ultimate acknowledgment that these are
discrete analyses: “I do not propose here to reconstruct the many missing
links that might connect socio-economic structures and sexual-psychological
structures in a single conceptual chain. Nor can I say whether this
undertaking ... is really possible. I would merely like to explain the two
reasons that — in this specific case —persuaded me to use such different
methodologies Marxism and psychoanalysis thus converge in defining the
...
function of this literature: to take up within itself determinate fears in order

to present them in a form different from their real one ...” 3 These are two
disparate fears, then, with only overdetermination to account for their co-
presence. The theoretical split Moretti chooses to elide is just as fraught as
he describes it to be; I think it is possible, however, to find a way of

addressing this text without accepting such hermetically sealed
compartments of analysis. There can be more traffic across these divides; my
choice of Dracula rests on a desire to investigate the uncoupled chain of
materialist and psychosexual readings, because I see Dracula lodged at the site
of that difficulty, at a crux that marks the modernist divide for both theory
and literature. It is necessary to juggle several balls in the air at once, to force
a collision between these vocabularies. What causes Moretti’s economic and
sexual allegories to diverge so thoroughly, in my view, is the paradoxical
absence of the category of consumption; what I will work through here is the
uneasy status of consumption as it is poised between two seemingly
exclusionary vocabularies that nonetheless intersect (often invisibly)
precisely there.
In considering Dracula, I am turning the text to face forward into the
twentieth century, rather than assessing its status as Victorian mythography,
since what I want to give is a reading that opens up into a thesis about the
modernity we can then read off the wildly voluptuous, and even Medusan,
volte face thereby revealed. This is not to discount the probing and incisive
readings that do annex Dracula to its very real Victorian contexts, but rather
to shift the agenda in critical terms to the work that the text can do as a
liminal modernist artifact, an exemplary text that then lies hauntingly behind
the uncanny creations of modernism, at the borders of what is accepted as
“high modernism,” the high art tradition of its literature 4 . The vampirism
this text articulates is crucial to the dynamics of modernity, as well as to
giving a name to our current theoretical predicaments. Dracula is not a

coherent text; it refracts hysterical images of modernity. One could call it a
chaotic reaction-formation in advance of modernism, wildly taking on the

imprintings of mass culture.
To begin by eliminating all the suspense of my own theoretical
trajectory: the social force most analogous to Count Dracula’s as depicted in
the novel is none other than mass culture, the developing technologies of the
media in its many forms, as mass transport, tourism, photography and
lithography in image production, and mass-produced narrative. To take
seriously the status of mass culture in an incipiently mass cultural artifact is
to have a privileged vantage on the dislocations and transformations it
occasions, especially because Dracula has been so successful in hiding the

pervasiveness of the mass cultural within itself, foregrounding instead its
exotic otherness.
What has been little remarked about the structure of Dracula is
precisely how its narrative is ostensibly produced, its means of production. A
144 JENNIFER WICKE
narrative patchwork made up out of the combined journal entries, letters,
professional records and newspaper clippings, that the doughty band of

vampire hunters had separately written or collected, it is then collated and
typed by the industrious Mina, wife of the first vampire target and ultimately
a quasi-vampire herself. 5 The multiplicity of narrative viewpoints has been
well discussed, but the crucial fact is that all of these narrative pieces
eventually comprising the manuscript we are said to have in our hands
emanate from radically dissimilar and even state-of-the-art media forms.
Dracula draped in
,
all its feudalism and medieval gore, is textually completely
au courant. Nineteenth-century diaristic and epistolary effusion is invaded

by cutting edge technology, in a transformation of the generic materials of
the text into a motley fusion of speech and writing, recording and
transcribing, image and typography.
Dr. Seward, for example, the young alienist who operates the private
insane asylum so fortuitously located next to Count Dracula’s London
property, produces his voluminous journal not by writing it, but by recording
his own words on gramophone records, which then must be transcribed.
Since the gramophone is in 1897 an extremely recently invented device, even
Dr. Seward is confused by some of its properties; his worst realization is that
in order to find some impo tant gem of recorded insight, he will have to
listen to all the records again. 6 Never fear, since the incomparable Madame
Mina offers to transcribe all the cylinders to typewritten form after she has
listened to them, realizing their value as part of the puzzle of tracking the
vampire. “I put the forked metal to my ears and listened,” she writes. And
later, “that is a wonderful machine, but it is cruelly true ... No one must hear
them (his words) spoken ever again! I have copied out the words on my
typewriter.” Despite the apparent loss of “aura,” in Benjamin’s sense,
ostensibly found in the mechanical reproduction of Seward’s diary, what
Mina is struck by is the latent emotional power of the recorded voice, whose
spectacular emotion the typewriter can strip away. Her transcription of Dr.
Seward’s wax cylinders occurs mid-way in the text, when the search for
Dracula in London is begun in earnest. What that timing implies is that all
Dr. Seward’s previous entries, and there are many, are recordings, as it were,
voicings coded in the most up-to-date inscription, speaking to us from out of
the text. There is ample textual confusion swirling about this point, and
much inconsistency, since Dr. Seward’s diary includes abbreviations and
chemical formulas that do not have meaning “orally”; moreover, when the
machine is used by others, there is a vampiric exchange involved — a chapter
title tells us, “Dr. Seward’s Phonograph Diary, spoken by Van Helsing.” The
burden this mode of production puts on narration is expressed when Dr.
Seward reacts to hearing the burial service read over Mina, a prophylactic act
in case they have to kill her. “I — I cannot go on —words—and —v-voice— fail
m-me!” (352). Such doughty sentimentality cannot mask the fact that
Seward’s diary constitutes the immaterialization of a voice, a technologized
zone of the novel, inserted at a historical point where phonography was not
widespread, because still quite expensive, but indicative of things to come.
We are not dealing here with pure speech in opposition to writing, but
instead with speech already colonized, or vampirized, by mass mediation.
The other materials forming the narrative’s typed body are equally
mass-culturally produced. Jonathan Harker’s journal, which begins the novel
and recounts the fateful discovery of Count Dracula as a vampire, only to
have the memory of this insupportable revelation wiped out by a bout of
brain fever, is “actually” a document in stenographic form, later itself
uncoded by Mina’s act of typewriting. Stenography is a fortuitous code for

Jonathan, since Dracula, who seems to know everything else, does not take
shorthand, and doesn’t confiscate the journal, an act that would deprive us of
the first-hand frisson of narrative in progress. We as readers don’t see on the
page the little swirls and abbreviations we might expect from a manuscript in
shorthand, since that would keep us from reading; it would produce
cognitive dissonance for readers to be reminded that the terrifying narrative
his diary unfolds is meant to be inscribed in that elliptical, bureaucratized
form of writing known as shorthand. What, after all, is the stenographic
version of “kiss me with those red lips,” Jonathan’s hot inner monologue as
he lies swooning on the couch surrounded by his version of Dracula’s angels?

Shorthand may seem to fall innocently outside the sphere of mass cultural
media, but in fact it participates in one of the most thoroughgoing
transformations of cultural labor of the twentieth-century, the rationalization
(in Weber’s sense) of the procedures of bureaucracy and business, the
feminization of the clerical work force, the standardization of mass business
writing. The modern office is very far afield from Transylvania, the doomed
castle, and the ghastly doings Jonathan experiences there, but shorthand is
utterly material to the ramifications of vampirism. Vampirism springs up, or

takes command, at the behest of shorthand. Although the pages we open to
start our reading of the book look like any printed pages, there is a crucial
sense in which we are inducted into Count Dracula lore by the insinuation
of this invisible, or translated, stenography. This submerged writing is the
modern, or mass cultural, cryptogram; the linkage of this mode of
abbreviated writing with the consumption process is made apparent by our
willingness to invest these abbreviations with the fully-fleshed body of typed
and printed writing. Shorthand flows through us, as readers, to be
transubstantiated as modern, indeterminate, writing.
Jonathan has begun his journey to that foreboding place as a tourist of
146 JENNIFER WICKE
sorts; the impressions he jots down with most relish initially are the recipes
for strange foods he would like —
Mina to try the “national dishes,” as he calls
them: “(Mem., get recipe for Mina)” (1). He first tastes a chicken dish made
with red pepper that, insidiously enough, makes him thirsty; even the red
peppers are suspicious in a text with such a fixed color scheme of red and
white. Count Dracula, of course, has a national dish as well, only it is
comprised of the bodies not yet belonging to his nation, and Mina, who was
going to get the chance to whip up the national dish of the Carpathians, is to
become his food for thought. The local color Jonathan drinks in, as recipes
and customs and costumes, has the form of regularized tourism; Dracula’s
castle becomes an unwonted departure from the Transylvanian Baedeker.
This may be the point at which to broach the larger argument that will dog
the more local one I am making. I am trying to give a reading of the society
of consumption and its refraction in Dracula, but that society rests on, is
impossible without, the imperial economy. It is overly glib to talk about

commodity culture without this insistent awareness; what particularly draws
me to Dracula, and what makes it a modern text, is the embeddedness there
of consumption, gender, and empire. Jonathan’s travels are made not to a
specific British colonial or imperial possession, but to a place with a dense
history of conquest and appropriation. He is funneled into this history by
means of the accoutrements of modern travel and leisure; Jonathan, who is
on business, is nonetheless a tourist manque. In this instance too, Count
Dracula and his extraordinary logic of production are encountered through
the lens of mass cultural preoccupations and techniques.
Jonathan bears a gift of sorts for Dracula, a set of Kodak pictures of the
British house the latter is interested in purchasing, although Dracula in fact
has another motive for having brought the rather drab young law clerk so far
from England: he wants to borrow his speech, to learn English perfectly
from his captive, Harker Jonathan, as he occasionally slips in addressing him.

The presence of the Kodak camera in the midst of such goings on is
unexpected and yet far from accidental. Photography joins the list of new
cultural techniques or processes juxtaposed with the story of the medieval
aristocratic vampire, but the Kodak snapshot camera so many people were
wielding at the time is really also a celluloid analog of vampirism in action,
the extraction out of an essence in an act of consumption. For a time at the
turn of the century, “kodak” meant eye-witness proof; a testimony to the
accuracy of Joseph Conrad’s portrayal of circumstances in the Belgian Congo
was headed “A Kodak on the Congo.” The photographic evidence Jonathan
brings to Count Dracula is also a talismanic offering, a simulacrum of the
communion wafer Professor Van Helsing will put to Mina’s forehead with
such disastrously scarring results. In the latter case, the alembic
contamination of vampire blood produces the “image” of vampirism as a red
mark on white skin; photography makes its images in a similarly alchemical,
if less liturgical, fashion. Jonathan Harker and Count Dracula come into a
relation of exchange with one another through the mediation of the

photographic image; more than that, the untoward aspects of vampirism are
first signaled by the mention of the Kodak,' which precedes the Count’s
version of vampirism by several pages. Both the history of photography as a
domestic practice, as well as photography’s connection to ethnography and
travel, are summoned up textually by Jonathan’s kodaks. Even the subsequent
descriptions of what the Count looks like are altered by these initial
references to photography, since his frightful looks bear such resemblance to

the photographically cataloged “deviants” of Lombroso and others, and his
quaint alterity seems to cry out for immortalization by the National

Geographic (that is, photographic) touch. It is possible to speculate that if a
vampire’s image cannot be captured in a mirror, photographs of a vampire

might prove equally disappointing. That scary absence from the sphere of
the photographable shunts the anxiety back onto vampirism itself: vampirism
as a stand-in for the uncanny procedures of modern life.
The consumption of journalism’s anonymous textuality marks the

book’s dialectic with mass culture as well. Large sections of the putatively
typewritten manuscript derive from newspaper articles salvaged by the
haggard participants in this dark tale — a reader is asked to imagine either
that Mina’s transcript has redundantly retyped the newsprint, or that the
newspaper pieces are literally collated with those typewritten pages, a collage
or bricolage of versions of print. Mina, for example, preserves the newspaper
accounts of the shipwreck that, it later emerges, has brought Dracula to
Britain’s shores, there to wreak his havoc on Lucy Westenra, who has already
begun to go into an insomniac decline. These extensive mass-mediated
narrations are uncannily inserted amongst the other, purportedly “first-
hand” reports of Jonathan, Mina, Lucy, Dr. Seward and Professor Van
Helsing. Clearly there is a pragmatic narrative reason for this, since
otherwise the exposition of such events would be highly suspect — how would
Mina on her own have managed to gather the deceased ship captain’s log and
find out about the mysterious cargo of boxes of earth the tragic ship carried?
Beyond textual mechanics, however, lies the more intriguing fact that the
anonymously-authored newspaper reports are coextensive with, and equally
authoritative as, the other voices of the text. The text’s action absolutely
depends on the inclusion of mass-produced testimony; it absorbs these
extraneous pieces within itself just as Dracula assimilates the life-blood of his
victims. Even at the narrative level Dracula requires an immersion into mass-
cultural discourse; its singular voices, however technologically-assisted, are
148 JENNIFER W1CKE
in themselves hot sufficient to exorcise an event which is unfolding at the
level of collective consumption.

The transmogrification of the. narrative’s nominal events into mass
cultural shards reaches its height when the posthumous whereabouts of Lucy
Westenra, now a vampire in earnest, are revealed to the alert Professor Van
Helsing and Dr. Seward by her mass-cultural incarnation as the “bloofer
lady” of tabloid fame. Lucy has been preying on the lower-class children of
London in her role as un-dead, stalking them after dark in the large London
parks where they are left unaccountably alone. Her upper-middle class
beauty is so miraculous to these waifs that she has achieved legendary status
and a mass-cultural name. Without her tabloidizatdon the men would have
no chance to eliminate her with their ritualistic objects that can succeed in
exorcising her —neck-laces of doughy paste made up of communion
garlic,
wafers, stakes driven through the heart. As much as Lucy is taken up into the
pantheon of Dracula’s girls (“your girls that you love are mine”), she is also
become currency within mass culture, where she circulates in the mass blood
stream with a delicious thrill as the “bloofer lady.” Lucy becomes an object
of the mass press simultaneously with her assimilation into the vampiric fold;
the two phenomena are intertwined in the logic of this vampirism. LTnless
and until Lucy is commoditized out over an adoring, and titillated, public by
virtue of her exciting vampiric identity, she cannot be said to have
consummated that identity in the terms of the text. WTiile her vamping by
Count Dracula precedes her “bloofer lady” role and indeed causes it, the un-
dead Lucy is similarly vamped by the press, and vamps all those who come
under her thrall by just reading about her in the morning newspaper. Dracula
does not make distinctions among these consuming ontologies.
Other peculiar newspaper moments in the text include the Pall Mall
Gazette account of a zookeeper whose wolf has escaped. We as readers are
awâre that Dracula has taken over its body for a night of rampaging, but the
newspaper story is excitedly fixated on the raffish Cockney persona of the
zookeeper, and on including his diction in the piece about this strange
disappearance. Here as elsewhere the text pauses for a sustained entry into
mass cultural territory; in this case there is not even the excuse of plot
description, just the need to filter the vampiric through the mesh of a
mediated response. Inclusion of the newspaper story also keeps up the
pressure on the distinction between speech and wilting that so fissures the
text, because the point of the article seems as much to be transcribing the
loquacious dialect of the zookeeper as adding to anyone’s knowledge of the
habits of Dracula. The new spaper page serves as a theater for the staging of
class differences wdien its “standard” written English can erupt with the
quoted, vigorous orality of low'er-class modes of speech. Lucy breaks the
charmed circle of class by becoming a twilight apparition of interest to all
classes, as they read about her in the newspaper. The zookeeper perhaps
occupies so much textual space in Dracula because vampirization, or
consumption, originally seems to threaten class distinctions.
A final irony in a novel so deranged by the mass voice of journalism is
the fact that the band of fearless vampire killers manages to keep any notice
of vampirism out of the papers, reserving that for its own “truthful” pages;
the mass cultural forms skirt the knowledge of Dracula but never come to be
in possession of it— in my argument, because Dracula himself is an
articulation of, a figuration for, that same mass culture, as a consequence
supervening any of its individual media, which are shown to be limited in
scope unless taken together. Dracula ’s individual powers all have their
analogue in the field of the mass cultural; he comprises the techniques of
consumption.
Consider all the media technologies the novel so incessantly displays
and names: the telegraph that figures so largely in the communicative
strategies that allow the band to defeat Dracula is an equivalent to the
telepathic, telekinetic communication Dracula is able to have with Mina after
sealing her into his race with her enforced drinking of his blood. The
phonographic records Dr. Seward uses are the reproduction of a voice, of a
being, without any body needing to be present, just as Dracula can insinuate
himself as a voice into the heads of his followers, or call them from afar. The
Kodak camera captures an image and then allows it to be moved elsewhere,
freezing a moment of temporality and sending it across space, in a parallel to
Dracula’s insubstantiality and his vitiation of temporality. Like such images,
he continues to circulate even when separated from his source; in other
words, his blood can circulate and have its drastic effects even when he is not
bodily present. Dracula also vitiates space, of course, and in this shares the
very ubiquity of the mass media: advertising’s anticipation of its readers into
all the corners and matchbooks of their lives, the mass ceremonial of the
press, a daily bestseller that has no shelf life and must be consumed
immediately. Mass culture is protean, with the same horrific propensity to
mutate that also defines Dracula’s anarchic power, as he becomes a bat or a
white mist at will. Even the subway, the Underground used by Mina and Dr.
Seward in the novel, has its fearsome vampiric echoes, since like Dracula the
subway uses an underground place for transport across space, a subterranean
vault encrypted by modern transportation.
When Madame Mina, “pearl among women,” provides the typescript
that resolves the incommensurabilities of the assorted documents,
phonographic records and so on, she is able to do this because, as she tells
Dr. Seward with rightful pride, her typewriter has a function called
150 JENNIFER WICKE
“Manifold” that allows it to make multiple copies in threes. This function is

positively vampiric, even to the name it has been given, reverberating with
the multiplicity of men Dracula is, the manifold guises of the vampire, and
the copying procedure which itself produces vampires, each of which is in a
sense a replica of all the others. Here we step into the age of mechanical
reproduction with a vengeance, since the reproductive process that makes
vampires is so closely allied to the mechanical replication of culture. The
perverse reversals of human reproduction that vampirism entails, making a
crazy salad of gender roles and even of anatomical destiny, have been well
discussed, and assuredly impinge on the terrors of Dracula. The ties to
cultural reproduction and to cultural consumption need to be acknowledged

as well, to place the book in its genuine context of modernity. Because Mina
operates the manifold function her relation to Dracula is as close as it is later
perverse. Typewriting itself partakes of the vampiric, although paradoxically

in this text it can serve also as an instrument used to destroy it . 7
The gender division of labor in consumption strongly pervades the

representation of this mass cultural vampire and helps to situate Dracula
unmistakably as a figure for consumption. Dracula cannot enter your home
and molest you unless invited in; that same invitation is the one extended to
the mass cultural, in the sense that it is its seductive invasion of the home that
allows the domestic to become the site, the opening puncture wound, for all
the techniques of mass culture. Mass culture or consumption can be said to

transform culture from within the home, despite the obvious fact that many
of its cultural technologies are encountered elsewhere, in the department
store, on the billboard, in the nickelodeon parlor, at the newsstand or the
telegraph office. The book is obsessed with all these technological and
cultural modalities, with the newest of the new cultural phenomena, and yet
it is they that shatter the fixed and circumscribed world the novel seems
designed to protect through those very means, as the home is opened up to
the instabilities of authority and the pleasures that lie outside the family as a
unit of social reproduction. The same science, rationality and technologies of
social control relied on to defend against the encroachments of Dracula are
the source of the vampiric powers of the mass cultural with which Dracula,
in my reading, is allied. Homes are the most permeable membrane possible
for this transfusion, since by installing the middle-class and even the lower-
class woman in economic isolation there by the end of the nineteenth
century, a captive audience for the vampiric ministrations of commoditized
culture, consumption and so-called “leisure,” in the case of upper-class
women, is thereby created .

8 Women are the ones who ineluctably let
Dracula in.
It may seem that I accept the text’s ambivalence about mass cultural
transformation in connecting Dracula to it, but what I want to propose is a
very different spin on the notion of consumption —the need to see it as, as
Pierre Bourdieu calls it, “the production that is consumption.” These

changes are extraordinary and have powerful political effects; they are also,
as I have claimed, premised on a cannibalization of resources from invisible

places “elsewhere,” in global economic terms. The contradictions of
consumption run like fault lines through this text, and correspondingly in
our own contemporary theory. It should be underscored, however, that
consumption is always a labor — I don’t at all mean the work of shopping, but
a form of cultural labor, including the producing of meanings. 9 Because
Dracula focuses on the entry into mass culture, it becomes one of our primary
cultural expressions of that swooning relation and thus has needed to be
revived incessantly, in films, books, and other cultural forms. The vampiric
embrace is now a primary locus for our culture’s self-reflexive assessment of
its cultural being, since that being is fixed in the embrace of material
consumption.
In the madman Renfield, Dr. Seward’s star patient as an example of
“zoophagy,” we have a gloss on the psychic interiorizations of consumption.
He is of course finally shown to be a disciple of Dracula, his master, in a
theological partnership that runs roughshod over the psychoanalytic
diagnoses Dr. Seward has been trying to make. Renfield’s underlying sanity
seems to inhere in his acceptance of racial and class differences as a matter of
blood, his stalwartly hierarchical common sense, and in his staunch support
for imperialist projects. He praises the country of the Texan Quincey Morris:
“Mr. Morris, you should be proud of your great state. Its reception into the
Union was a precedent which may have far-reaching effects hereafter, when
the Pole and the Tropics may hold alliance to the Stars and Stripes. The
power of Treaty may yet prove a vast engine of enlargement, when the
Monroe doctrine takes its true place as a political fable” (257). Renfield
actually adheres to an imperialism that has the vastest engine of enlargement
in Dracula, but he is also able to admire a rival imperialism of great promise.
The imperial nexus is also tied to the mass cultural through Renfield. When
Mina Harker asks to meet this bizarre inmate, he agrees to converse with her,
and he speaks about his own desire to devour living things as if it were in the
remote past: “The doctor here will bear me out that on one occasion I tried
to kill him for the purpose of strengthening my vital powers by the

assimilation with my own body of his life through the medium of his blood
relying, of course, upon the Scriptural phrase, ‘For the blood is the life’”
(247). The monologue represents vampirism’s literal ization of
theological
Christian practices, so embedded that it will require equivalent literalizations
to supercede it. But Renfield goes on to reflect on a new cultural instance:
152 JENNIFER WICKE
“Though indeed, the vendor of a certain nostrum has vulgarised the truism
to the very point of contempt. Isn’t that true, Doctor?” (247) There was a
British blood tonic that had adopted this phrase in its advertisements in “real
life,” but what Renfield objects to is amusingly crazy: advertising’s
debasement of the religious signification when Dracula, the original blood
tonic man, is on his way to give the phrase his own supernally horrific
debasement. This denigration of the popularizing and secularizing rhetoric
of advertisement serves to underscore the conflation of Dracula with the
world of advertisement and mass media made by the text, even where
Renfield may make an invidious distinction. Advertisement itself, among
many other forms, was a powerful recasting of the religious vocabulary, its
translation into the promises of a salvational commodity culture; that

language was, in a manner of speaking, lying around loose in a secularizing
culture, and advertisement appropriated it for its own uses, as it recirculates
all evacuated social languages. 10 This may often look like a vulgarization,
when it is additionally a resurrection; the vampire enters into this circulatory
economy as well. Count Dracula’s more pointedly terrifying manifestation
covers over the lurking fears, as well as pleasures, found in the deflating of
spiritual rhetoric as it is recirculated as the currency of advertisement.
Renfield’s erratic “madness/’ his eating of live animals, is itself almost a pun
on the tremors of consumption. He is unvampirized in the literal sense, only
vampirized from afar, so at a double remove Renfield hypostatizes the
consumer, directed by invisible longings and compelled by ghostly
commands to absorb everything in sight. His is one cautionary tale of the
“phagous” nature of consumption.
Dracula’s own biorhythms are, paradoxically, ver^ much those of
everyday life under the altered conditions of the mass cultural; Dracula must
consume on a daily basis. The outlandishness of Dracula’s behavior is
simultaneously made quotidian, regularized, indeed, everyday, in the

extended sense that word is given by Henri Lefebvre. 11 It can be no accident
that the overwhelming trope of this novel is also the word for this new social
economy —consumption. Dracula drinks his victims dry, takes all their blood
and consumes it, rather than ingesting it. Ingesting or digesting these
sanguinary meals would imply a rather more stolid, alimentary process than
the one we witness. Van Helsing tactlessly reminds Mina that the previous
night Dracula “banqueted” on her, but this word too has some of the baroque
bravura of consumption.
The vampiric consumption of blood in Dracula is simultaneously and
complexly a sexual act, as commentators like Nina Auerbach, Christopher
Craft and John Stevenson have variously shown, and its process holds both
victim and perpetrator in a version of sexual thrall or ecstasy. I want to
comment on the sexual thrust of Dracula s dynamic, ' if you will, but first I
want to trace out the implications of seeing these exchanges also in

12
sumptuary terms .
Dracula takes blood, but he also gives something, that intangible but
quite ineluctable gift of vampirism, which enters invisibly into victims during
their act of expenditure. A model of the consumptive paradigm is enacted in

their bloody congress; something is interiorized in the giving over to
Dracula. Once the mass cultural makes its appearance it unleashes pleasure,
it transforms attention, it mobilizes energies outside the norms of authority.
I’m not giving this a utopian cast, simply remarking on the rearrangements
of the social and the psychic consumption exacts, nowhere more specifically
than in the realm of sexuality. The modern discourse of sexuality is indeed
based on consumption, as Foucault’s work has demonstrated, and recently
Lawrence Birkin’s book has annexed sexology to the epistemic shift of
consumption .
13 Dracula bears this out. The history of mass culture is at least
in part the history of regaining and reasserting control over sexuality; in
Dracula, this battle is still so new that the enemy is us.
The vampire yokes himself to the feminine because the mass cultural
creeps in on little female feet, invades the home and turns it inside out,
making it a palace of consumption. Dracula consumes but thereby turns his
victims into consumers; he sucks their blood and renders them momentarily
compliant and passive and then wild, powerful and voluptuous. What the text
can’t decide, nor can we, is how to determine which of these is likely, and
then, which of these is preferable. This may help us to understand why
Dracula, unlike, say, Jack the Ripper, feasts exclusively on British middle-
class women, when, it would seem, the rest of the population, female and
even male, is more readily available for his delectation. Lucy, for example,
directs her vampire attentions to children of the lower orders; there is some
evidence in the text that female vampires do tend to subsist on children,
unless particularly enticing erotic possibilities present themselves. In this
way the three vampire ladies of Dracula’s castle are thrown little children in
sacks, but hunger for Jonathan Harker when he is within their spectral
chambers; Lucy hunts the parks, but turns to her fiance Arthur when she
hopes to consummate her vampirism with an erotic meal. The connection
between mass culture and the feminine has been made since its beginnings,
and is arrestingly refigured in Dracula, since mass culture is appraised as
feminizing, passive, voluptuous, carnal and anti-imperial, in the case of Lucy,
and labor-intensive, productive and properly imperial where Mina is
involved.
Lucy and Mina have shown themselves to be appetitive even before the
attacks Dracula makes on them. The very day of Lucy’s vamping by Dracula,
154 JENNIFER WICKE
who as a secret stowaway on the ship that has wrecked against the coast has
just arrived at the seaside town of Whitby where the two are staying, the
women go out to share that very British meal of “tea,” a meal defined as a
beverage. Mina says: “I believe we should have shocked the New Women
with our appetites. Men are more tolerant, God bless them.” The tea that
they devour so sensually, in defiance of the putative austerity of the New
Women, is a foreshadowing of their exposure to vampiric lust, but also an
index of their placement in the chain of consumption. Another striking detail
of the text attests to the propriety and discipline of Mina, yet also hints at
unexplored depths of commodity desire. She rescues Lucy, although too late,
from her vamping by Dracula as she sits in a zombie state by the sea. Since
Lucy has walked out to meet Dracula in a somnambulant trance, she has
neglected to put on shoes, so Mina gives hers over to Lucy upon hastening
to her side. This leaves Mina with an awkward predicament: if she is seen by
any townspeople on the midnight trip back to the relative safety of bourgeois
girlhood’s boudoir, they will draw inferences from her lack of footgear. Mina
hits upon a startling trick, but one in keeping with her plucky pragmatism.
She daubs her feet with mud, so that no reflection of white foot or ankle
twinkling in the night can alert any sleepy voyeur who might be looking out
a window. So Mina makes the trip back with her feet coated in mud; that
expedient is a brilliant one, but also presents us subliminally with the image
of a Mina thoroughly earth-bound, enmired. The scandal occurs for the
reader’s eyes alone, so that Mina’s earthiness will be underscored even in her
hour of intense decorum. The text’s surface establishes the two women’s
purity and asexuality, yet slips in a glimpse of their susceptibility to
consumption — a consumption that also demarcates them favorably in
opposition to the New Women who eschew marriage and home. You’re
damned if you do, and damned if you don’t consume.
Lucy has given signs that she is not utterly passive prior to her
vampirization; she has been proposed to by three men on one day —by Dr.
Seward, the gallant Texan Quincey Morris, and by the Honorable Arthur
Holmwood, whom she does indeed accept. Yet in her letter to Mina
recounting all this she bursts out: “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men,
or as many as want her, and save all this trouble? But this is heresy, and I must
not say Lucy gets her wish, in one way: all of these men, with the
it” (62).
addition of Professor Van Helsing, will have to give her a blood transfusion,
thus becoming her husbands, as Van Helsing piquantly points out: “Ho, ho!
Then this so sweet maid is a polyandrist, and me, with my poor wife dead to
me, but alive by Church’s law, though no wits, all gone —even I, who am
faithful husband to this now-nonwife, am bigamist” (187). Lucy is so
metaphorized by the text, in contrast to Mina, typist extraordinaire, that the
wavering boundary of her sexual appetite has serious consequences. If one

considers her name, Luce, light and illumination, emanating out of the
West-enra, she is clearly an overdetermined being, more than a woman, a
civilizational cause. The sexual torque put on her vamping is indeed amazing,
but I would claim that must be considered beyond the level of the fear
this
of women’s sexuality and examined also as a vfcry particular convergence of

questions. Lucy stands in for the project of empire; it is her ineffable
whiteness that is so valuable an icon to her male protectors —these are men
who, as Quincey Morris points out, have served together in exotic places of
danger and violence, in some inexplicable blend of Indiana Jones-style

ethnographic adventure and military colonial exploits (65). Their devotion to
Lucy continues to unite them, and she becomes a kind of allegory of their
mutual project in taming the rest of the world. Mina does not have this
resonance, since she is resolutely plain and intelligent, and has not been
sought over by a trio of explorers; her sole proposal was from Jonathan
Harker, and he a home-bound lawyer. Lucy’s white westernness becomes
totemic in her vamping; the crepuscular universe she inhabits is a twilight of
the gods of Western hegemony. An advertisement for Pear’s soap of 1887,
showing the legend “Pear’s Soap is the Best” spelled out in shining white
against a glowering dark rock, as astonished natives fall in awe before the
handwriting on the wall, also reads, “The Formula of British Conquest,” and
in glossing its own trope, quotes the words of Phil Robinson, a war
correspondent to the London Daily Telegraph, as follows: “Even if our
invasion of the Soudan has done nothing else it has at any rate left the Arab
something to puzzle his fuzzy head over, for the legend Pear’s Soap is the
Best, inscribed in white characters on the rock which marks the farthest point
of our advance toward Berber, will tax all the wits of the Dervishes of the
Desert to translate.” 14 Lucy’s vampirization comments directly on the dark
side of that boast and its certainty, since even the joint ministrations of her
band of admirers are ineffective in staving off the return of the imperial
repressed. It would be far too reductive to read Dracula as a transposition of
the fear of a massive colonial uprising, a revenge taken on the imperial seat
by those so dominated, in the person of Count Dracula. To extirpate the
imperial context, however, makes even the sexuality of the text denatured,
decontextualized, since Lucy’s iconic presence has as much to do with
extended cultural preoccupations of the discourse of imperialism as it does
with the “anxiety” about women’s changing roles. These aspects can be made
to mesh, without reductive narrowing, through the complex of consumption,
a process equally invoked and implicated by imperial discourse and
psychosexual representation.
All the more shocking, then, when the living, female impetus for
156 JENNIFER WICKE
imperial energies succumbs to the lures of consumption. Van Helsing has to

convince the other men that their Miss Lucy .could indeed be doing such a
thing as biting children, and to do that he takes them to a park where they
watch her in action. This scene is renowned for its excesses; although Lucy
is out for children’s blood, she’s described as wantonly voluptuous, red-lipped
and voluptuous, extremely voluptuous —they’ve never seen her this way
before, flushed with desire and flaunting her sexual charms. She actually
offers Arthur a taste of the delights he has missed, since she was snatched
away on the eve of the wedding: “Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others
and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest
together” (223). Arthur has to be restrained, of course, and when they

prevent Lucy from getting into her tomb by the application of the
communion wafer weather-stripping, there is a hilarious pun as she is
compared to Medusa, the archetype of destructive female sexuality, giving
them a hideous grimace as if, Dr. Seward says, “looks could kill.” Medusa’s
“look” could turn men to stone; here it’s really Lucy’s looks her voluptuous
,
looks —her appearance, not her regard—that are so appalling and must be
expunged. It should not seem trivializing to suggest that at least some of the
fixation on carmine lips and cheeks is actually cosmetic —that Miss Lucy has
been made over cosmetically by the pleasures of these new feminine
products, the “paint” beginning to be available, if not worn by the middle-
class virgin — in her posthumous state. Her sexuality is indeed excessive per
se, but a large measure of its horror is yoked to its consumerist incarnadine
as well, as if Lucy had availed herself of the rouge pot and the rice powder in
dressing herself to kill. Such widely read “manuals” as Lily Langtry’s treatise
on the art of cosmetic use seem to have found their way into the lascivious
descriptions of Lucy’s unwonted sex appeal, and are consequently references
to an arena of choice for women, however dimly articulated. Note too that
the early Lucy of the text writes to Mina of her absence of interest in fashion,
which actually displeases Arthur at that innocent stage! (69) This strange
irony reverberates with Lucy’s love of fashionable slang.
That these men are on a sex hunt is borne out from the beginning,
when Van Helsing tells Lucy has become a vampire and then
Dr. Seward that
must take the enraged doctor to the cemetery to show him proof. Van
Helsing is holding a candle in order to light up the coffin to be able to drill
a hole in it; the text says that his “sperm” dropped in “white patches” which
congeal on the coffin plate bearing her name. Even if we know that sperm is
short for the spermaceti still used in making the candle wax, this is a vivid
description of Van Helsing’c premature ejaculation onto Lucy, a prelude of

things to come. Arthur does the honors when the group of adventurers has
agreed that this Un-Dead must be dispatched, even especially because she
has the body of a provocative Lucy — a “carnal” appearance, the text says. As
the men surround the coffin, Arthur puts the point of the stake to her heart,
“and as I [Dr. Seward] looked I could see its dint in the white flesh. Then he
struck with all his might. The Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous,
blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and
quivered and twisted in wild contortions; th£ sharp white teeth champed
together till the lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared with crimson
foam. But Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor ...” (227).
John Stevenson and others rightly view this as the picture of orgasm. It can’t
be denied that the text is fascinated with this spectacle of sexual violation, and
Lucy is undeniably being punished for her sexuality as a vampire; as the
imperturbable Van Helsing asks Arthur after this, with postcoital non-
chalance, “May I cut off Miss Lucy’s head?” The punishment is additionally
inflicted for the separation of sexuality from reproduction, or its
amalgamation; Lucy only procreates in the sense that vampiric attacks

produce more vampires from the liaison. If this were all the text did with the
cataclysm of female sexuality it would become yet another symptomatic
document of sexual hierarchization. Yet more is entertained here than just
the effacement of Lucy as a female character; what I want to urge is that
there is a dialectical intertwining of the racial and national on the one hand,
and consumption and femaleness on the other, that roughens such tidy
analyses. It makes a difference that Lucy is the victim, so to speak, of the
group of men who accompanied one another on their colonial voyages and
who, as Quincey Morris puts it, “told yarns by the camp-fire in the prairies;
and dressed one another’s wounds after trying a landing at the Marquesas;
and drunk healths on the shore of Titicaca” (65). Their investment in
expunging Lucy the vampire is inflected by this mutual history, and by Lucy’s
emblematic status as Western icon.
The textual investment shifts when Mina is vamped. For one thing, as
Van Helsing has already pointed Madame Mina “has man-brain,” so her
out,
relation to the equilibration of consumption and empire alters. Mina is an
anomaly in evolutionary terms, and as such is affiliated to Dracula; her brain
is not a female one, but instead is white, male and European, according to
the brain science not merely of this book but of Western racial science
generally until it peters out in the 1930s, to persist in Schockley and the
sociobiologies. On that evolutionary scale the female brain, the criminal
brain and the so-called savage or primitive brain are on a par; the adult white
male brain is the evolutionary summit. 15 By leaping over this divide Mina
occupies unclear territory, and one way of reading what happens to her is to
assume that she is set up as Dracula’s next victim as a means of establishing
her femininity. With lavish abandon and extravagant bad faith her so-called
158 JENNIFER WICKE
protectors leave her alone in the insane asylum to spend the night, and
congratulate themselves at every turn on having shielded her from
unbearably painful knowledge; this, of the woman who has typed all the
previous vampire documents, and is therefore the most fully in the know.
Having been imprinted with vampirism in a uniquely mediated way, by
nursing from and fellating Dracula at the same moment, as she is forced to
suck his blood from a wound in his breast, Mina becomes his telepathic
double. There’s a kinky notion of cerebral sex involved in this, to be sure; at
the same time, it begins to make perfect sense that Dracula would have this
intimate cognitive relationship with Mina. If it is the case that at least part of
Dracula’s marshaling of fear has to do with assigning a status to the mass
cultural, and working through the anxieties it evokes, then the gender
slippage that surrounds the characterization of Mina helps account for this.
Consumption is psychosexual, yet also socioeconomic. Mina occupies a
strange niche between these two, since she is consumed by Dracula, who
banquets on her, and also consumes him, but without longing, without
desire, and with all her cognitive faculties intact. She could be said to be a
perfect replica of the labor of consumption in this regard: she is always doing
something with it, always is consciously co-present with the act, unlike
Lucy’s white zombiedom. T he text wants to protect itself from Mina’s brain,
from her knowledge. After her vamping, the men alternately need to tell her
everything, and want to tell her nothing. Oscillating back and forth between
these positions, Mina becomes more and more the author of the text; she
takes over huge stretches of its narration, she is responsible for giving her
vampire-hunting colleagues all information on Dracula’s whereabouts, and
she is still the one who coordinates and collates the manuscripts, although
she has pledged the men to kill her if she becomes too vampiric in the course
of time. Her act of collation is by no means strictly secretarial, either; Mina
is the one who has the idea of looking back over the assembled manuscripts
for clues to Dracula’s habits and his future plans. Despite the continual
attempts both consciously by the characters and unconsciously by the text

itself to view Mina as a medium of transmission, it continually emerges that
there no such thing as passive transmission invariably, intelligent
is —
knowledge is involved, and Mina goes to the heart of things analytically and
structurally.
Mina is treated as a medium when Professor Van Helsing hypnotizes

her repeatedly to allow her to reveal Dracula’s whereabouts; of course we
recognize in this a version of the psychoanalytic “cures” beginning to be
effected through hypnotism, by Freud and others .
16 The woman is placed in
a state where she does not know her own knowledge, she simply relates it as
it is drawn from her by a man who knows what to make of it. All the
reverberations to Freud’s Dora are in place; the mesmeric and hypnotic

world of Charcot is an open intertext of the novel. On all these grounds,
including the professional activities of Dr. Seward and the psychoanalytic
mutterings of Van Helsing as he repudiates surface meanings for deeper
trance states and hysterical body signs, psychoanalysis does a duet with
Dracula. This should point us to Dracula’s role in making vivid the split
nature of consciousness and the predatory energies of the libidinal
unconscious, and yet it should also be an alert that psychoanalysis and the
novel Dracula are up against the same problematic: describing or figuring a
process that is both productive and consumptive, contradictorily placed both
psychically and socially. Mina does tell what her shared or double
consciousness is up to, as if she were in the enviable and dangerous position
of having her unconscious, which she has in a sense swallowed, speak to her
with an audible voice, absent the condensations and displacements of lesser
mortals. And yet she is not a controllable medium for Van Helsing, nor just
a transparent recording device of the id within, Count Dracula. She is
productive in her consumptive possession: Mina essentially becomes the
detective of the final segment of the story.
The situation has gotten desperate in London; the men have found all
but one of the Count’s magic boxes and consecrated them, but he only needs
one, and he has obviously departed in it from London. As the men fall
prostrate in one or another ways, Mina sends them to lie down and
vigorously applies herself to deducing the precise route Dracula must take to
get himself carried back in his box to the Castle. For the first time an entry
reads “Mina’s Memorandum” (371). With relentless logic, the keen use of
maps, geometrical calculations and brilliant speculation, she provides them
all with a plan of attack, deciding which river Dracula will need to use to get
home and how he can best be countered. “Once again Madam Mina is our
teacher,” Van Helsing cries out. “Her eyes have been where ours were
blinded” (374). In a text that claims again and again that women need to be
shielded from the reality of vampirism, a woman is responsible for seeing the
way out. Yet Mina’s prescience and logical ability are predicated on her
proximity to the mass cultural forms she has mastered: for example, her
hobby is memorizing the train schedule, since she is, in her own words, “a
train fiend,” which allows her to recreate Dracula’s line of escape.
Additionally, she is a typist with a portfolio. “I feel so grateful to the man who
invented the ‘Traveller’s’ typewriter,” she testifies in eerie simulation of the
traveling count (371). Mina is that hybrid creature, the consumed woman
whose consumption is a mode of knowledge, as Georg Simmel predicted.
Mina is simply closer to what Dracula is than the men can be. In saying this,
I am not privileging Mina as a heroine, or claiming that her deductive actions
160 JENNIFER WICKE
are some kind of subversion of patriarchal domination. For one thing, in my

understanding of texts the characters aren’t really people; to valorize Mina as
if she had some existence outside the dynamics of the text is, I think, to insert
an allegory of our own making. Moreover, there is no neatly definable
patriarchy available for subverting; the class and racial lines form a web that
denies transgressive primacy to any one figure here, whether or not a female.
When Dracula comes to press his attentions on Mina he criticizes her
for having played her brain against his, and he warns her that her male
companions should feel grateful to him: “They should have kept their
energies for use closer to home. Whilst they played wits against me —against
me who commanded nations, and intrigued for them, and fought for them,
hundreds of years before they were born — I was countermining them. And
you, their best beloved one, are now to me, flesh of my flesh; blood of my
blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful winepress for a while; and shall be later
on my companion and my helper” (304). It is worth remarking that this
extended speech by Dracula is recounted by Mina herself, not available first-
hand from the eyewitnesses to the vamping. Here is the paradox of Dracula.
While he is perforce racially other, of the alien vampire race, and while he
has as a result of his racial otherness what Van Helsing calls a “child-brain”
and a criminal brain, making him vulnerable to the tactics of the European
adult male brain at its peak, he is also a partner in imperialism. In the
“whirlpool of races” he describes to Jonathan at the beginning of the text, it
is his race that emerges as the purest European, a noble race that in
conquering this eastern territory in fact makes it historically possible to
acquire the fruits of empire for the British, Dutch and Texan men who hunt
him. One can readily imagine that the imperial situation produced a fear of
that unspecified otherness coming for retaliation, but Dracula is not simply
that apparition; he is an ally of imperial forces, and in some ways annexes his
own project to that of imperial Britain’s, as an extension to it or an
elaboration of it. This is why he is not content with any vampiric empire that
would take shape in archaic ways —even the Oriental despotism Marx speaks
of is too recherche for the Count. He must come to London to modernize the
terms of his conquest, to master the new imperial forms and to learn how to
supplement his considerable personal powers by the most contemporary
understanding of the metropolis. Dracula has, in short, felt himself to be on
the periphery, however powerful he might be there, and by coming to
England he has an opportunity to meld vampirism to the modern forces of
imperial control.
Benedict Anderson has shown that nations are, in his phrase, “imagined
communities,” and that the chief means of establishing these relatively Active
national unities has been through language, the “print-languages” made
possible by capitalism. As Anderson says: “Nothing served to assemble

related vernaculars more than imposed
capitalism, which, within the limits
by grammars and syntaxes, created mechanically-reproduced print-

languages, capable of dissemination through the market.” 17 Dracula is a
veritable whirlpool of language, a farrago of accents and dialects and classed

speech; this polyglottal quality is the other determinative feature of the
novel’s form. As much as it is extruded, so to speak, in and through the
modern technologies of production that elsewhere the text so abhors, so also
the text relies on pushing at the limits of the common language of English to
mark out its national boundary, and controlling the unruliness of speech by
technologizing it—typing — it as a print-language of hegemony.
“The captain swore polyglot —very polyglot—polyglot with bloom and
blood” (336), comes Dr. Van Helsing’s report on the captain who has taken
Dracula’s box on board his vessel. Of course, the bloom and blood are the
sprinklings of the most common British curses, but they also connect to the
polyglot nature of national “blood” or language. Both Dr. Van Helsing and
Count Dracula speak English with idiosyncratic results, especially in the
doctor’s voluble case. Dracula had wanted to perfect his English by using
Jonathan as a model; he fears being a stranger when he goes to London.
“Here I am boyar, I am noble, the common people know me and I am master.
But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one; men know him not and not —
to know is not to care not for” (21). Why Dracula needs linguistic proof of
being master when he has so much physical proof is unclear, and he exhibits
no particular longing for people to know him. Remarkably enough, I would
suggest that Dracula experiences some of the poignant sense of estrangement
of the colonial intellectual, who has utterly mastered the print language, is an
adept in all things English, including the ascot, and yet who lacks that touch
of spoken familiarity. Rather than seeing Count Dracula as a simple stand-in
for the “fear of otherness” an imperial nation might well exhibit, his situation
has a subtle specificity. He does permit the text to express its confidence in the
levels of mastery of English that “prove” the nationality. The text then veers
off into the extended monologues of, for example, one Mr. Swales, the one
hundred-year-old sailor whose speech is almost impossible to read as
English, let alone to imagine being spoken, and the report of the cockney
zookeeper that is similarly impenetrable as writing. What unifies them is
what must now be called vampiric typewriting, the face of print-language

that can extirpate difference even at the margins of comprehensibility, an
effacement devoutly to be wished, and brought about by the alchemy of a
mass-cultural form.
The nation “has an inner incompatibility with empire,” acutely shown
in the predicaments that Dracula helps to reveal. 18 The empire fans out
162 JENNIFER WICKE
across the globe, collecting its grab-bag of completely incongruous

possessions, while at the same time the maintenance of a national community
back in the metropole, as it were, siphons off tremendous amounts of
ideological energy. “From the start,” Anderson claims, “the nation was
conceived in language, not in blood; and [one] could be invited into the
imagined community” (133). Such an invitation would rest on linguistic
grounds, language being a synecdoche for cultural solidarity. And the only
means of producing a language center on a vast enough scale to indeed make
a nation lay in and through the techniques of mass cultural dissemination.
Count Dracula is matched on the linguistic plane by Dr. Van Helsing,

the Dutch lawyer, doctor and sage who produces the most amazing word salad
put on the page. It is not incidental to the polyglot logic of the text that one
of its chief characters would fracture English so magnificendy; Van Helsing’s
flights of oratory are foreignness bounded by a rigid adherence to the primacy
of English goals in the world. Where his side-kick Dr. Seward will
concentrate on minds, Van Helsing’s first loyalty is to blood, the purity and
strength of which he seems able to determine intuitively. Van Helsing
compares Dracula to a tiger: “Your man-eater, as they of India call the tiger
who has once tasted blood of the human, care no more for the other prey, but
prowl unceasing till he get him” (339). The professor is also knowledgeable
about Dracula’s motives for becoming a modern vampire. “What does he do?
He find out the place of all the world most of promise for him. Then he
deliberately set himself down to prepare for the task. He find in patience just
how is his strength, and what are his powers. He study new tongues. He learn
new social life; new environment of old ways, the politic, the law, the finance,
the science, the habit of a new land and a new people who have come to be
since he was. His glimpse that he have had, whet his appetite only and enkeen
his desire” (339). Dracula’s last attack on the vampire group is not represented
in his taking over of Mina’s soul; before he departs from London, Dracula
mounts an attack on language, the language of print culture itself. He finds
the manuscript of their trials and burns it to ashes, also throwing in the stray
gramophone disk recordings of Dr. Seward’s diary he finds until these are
reduced to wax. Thankfully, Mina has kept a copy. This fortuitous
reclamation of their labors, and also of the text held in the hand of the reader,
all too ironically derives from a copy. If copying is the inevitable fate of the
mass-produced, here it is also the salvation. The vampire hunters do not need
sacral, original, authentic or auratic texts —copies will do, the more
reproduced the better. Dracula’s pyro-technic outrage implies the desire for a
primal relation to texts, and certainly a desire to replace writing with speech,
but his little apocalypse in the fireplace cannot succeed in annihilating the
reproductive powers of technologized language.
As Van Helsing sees it, Dracula’s appetite is not for blood, but for a
kind of knowledge and power he has become aware of as the attributes of
modern, consumer capitalist culture. His “desire is keen” surely not just to
enlarge the vampire dominions, but to transform vampire-dom, to take it to

the heart of the metropolis, where it feeds on the forces already set in motion
by technological development. “What more may he not do when the greater
world of thought is open to him,” the professor muses, imagining Dracula’s
feelings as he lies on the periphery in his moldy Carpathian tomb. This
should make it clear that it is not merely the atavism of Dracula that makes
his appearance in England so frightful; it is his relative modernity, his
attempt to be more British than the British in consolidating his goals. Franco
Moretti interestingly hypothesizes Dracula as the figure for the circulation
of money in late capitalism; Dracula does have a vivid scene where coins
shower out of his clothes. Nonetheless, that symbology may take too literally
the meaning of the “economic,” since Dracula’s economy is so mediated by

its relation to consumption and to the forces of empire.
Understandably, Dracula concludes haltingly, and can only end by
letting the modern, urban world of technology and consumption recede
altogether. The final confrontation with the vampire takes place on
horseback in the countryside, Dracula’s coffin protected by a group of gypsy
cart drivers. This low- tech ending allows the religiosity the text nervously
relies on to resurface with less apparent anachronism, but the ancient and the
modern cannot be made to converge. They each move on separate curves,
asymptotically, never coalescing. Mina, the typist, has lost all her office
equipment by the end, although she does narrate Dracula’s death and records
his last look of peace — a far cry from the orgasmic turbulence that passes
over Lucy’s visage. Mina’s vampire mark, the red scar burned into her
forehead by its contact with a holy wafer, recedes with the setting sun, and
Mina is free to become a mother, to reproduce what she has heretofore only
copied.
The novel doesn’t forget its complex relation to the techniques of
modernity, however; the religious apotheosis is not its last gasp. Dracula is an
unstable brew, because made up out of mass cultural forms, and yet tries
it is
to use this loose collection tomount a retrogressive search and destroy

mission against itself. Only the Bible seems to be a text with enough
authority to confront Count Dracula —
a text that seems (although it is not)
to be unscathed by the market forces of commodity culture, a written

assemblage of the spoken holy word, as composite and palimpsestic as the
textual production this novel itself claims. It would appear that Mina’s
sudden unscarring would be proof of those powers, but the novel has already
shown us again and again that these sacred words are not powerful enough,
164 JENNIFER WICKE
do not address the conditions of modern life, are not sufficiently passed
through the crucible of mass culture to answer the problems of foreignness,
otherness, and the unstable self. The baptismal font of language in this book
has to be the typewriter, and it seems blasphemous to direct attention to the
printed nature of the Bible, its role as the first printed book of Western
culture, by Gutenberg’s hand.
As a final proof of the divisions within the text, divisions that fruitfully
and fearfully show us the dislocations in cultural authority that prompt its new
world of language, consider the last and then the first words of the text. The
group gets together years later, huddling around the boy who is, through
Lucy’s transfusions and the passage of her blood to Dracula, and hence to
Mina, the putative son of all of the men and all the women, the “sexual
history” going back to Dracula and his three brides, and “we were struck with
the fact that, in all the masses of material of which the record is composed,
there is hardly one authentic document: nothing but a mass of typewriting”
(400). The only proof of the ravages of Dracula is the existence of the boy,
young Quincey, named after the gallant Texan who gave his life for Mina’s
unvamping, and while he may constitute bodily proof for the friends, his
unmarked state would represent the opposite to most people. But the first
thing we we begin the text is this: “How these papers have been placed
read as
in sequence will be made manifest in the reading of them there is ...
throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may err, for all the
records chosen are exacdy contemporary, given from the standpoints and
within the range of knowledge of those who made them.” Which is it, truth,
origin, the authority of knowledge, or a “mass of typewriting”? What makes
this text so modern, not to say modernist, is that it knows that it will be
consumed — it stages the very act of its own consumption, and problematizes
it. The energies of modernity flow out of these same ineluctable wounds, and
the undecidable nature of consumption. Most of all, the modernist text
follows Dracula in acknowledging, however repressedly, the necessary relation
of the modern world to its dialectical other, the rest of the globe. In that
encounter, which Dracula enacts, a modernist writing begins.
The reading of the mass of typewriting is the labor of consumption
the text requires of us. This mass is vampiric typewriting, this vampire is
mass typewriting, this typewriting is mass vampirism. Under the sign of

modernity we are vampires at a banquet of ourselves, we are Dracula and
Madame Mina, the one who bites and the one who is bitten, the one who
types and the one who is typewritten.
Notes
1. Karl Marx, Grundrisse trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin,

,
1973), 110.
2. All quotes from Dracula refer to Bram Stoker, Dmcula (1897;
reprint, New York: Bantam, 1981). The citation of this perenially and
immensely popular work from a mass-cultural paperback source seems
appropriate; Mina’s remarks are found on page 57.
3. Franco Moretti, “Dialectic of Fear,” in Signs Taken For Wonders
(London: Verso, 1983), 105.

4. Among the best treatments of the Victorian legacy to be discovered,
in one form or another, in thebook are Nina Auerbach’s commentary on the
text in her Woman and the Demon The Life of Victorian Myth (Cambridge:
:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1982); John Stevenson’s essay “A Vampire in the

Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula ,” PMLA 103 (1988): 139-149; and Daniel
Pick’s essay “‘Terrors of the Night’: Dracula and ‘Degeneration,’” Critical
Quarterly 30 (Winter 1988): 71-87.

5. David Seed touches on this in his “The Narrative Method of
Dracula,” Nineteenth Century Fiction 40 (June 1985): 61-75.
6. Dr. Seward follows recent medical practice in this, as Leonard Wolf’s
The Annotated Dracula (New York: Ballantine Books, 1975) notes (118).
7. See in this connection of course Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of
Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations trans. Harry ,
Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 212-251, since despite its Brechtian
utopianism, this essay forges the vocabulary for apprehending the mass
cultural in modern critical theory.
8. Fine accounts of the relation of women to mass culture can be found

in Andreas Hussen’s After the Great Divide: Modernism and Mass Culture (New
York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1987), and in Tania Modleski’s essay
“Femininity and Mas(s)querade,” in Feminism Without Women: Culture and
a
Criticism in a Post Feminist” Age (New York: Routledge, 1991), 23-34.
9. I have argued for the revisionary nature of consumption elsewhere;
some of the theorists who provide ballast for the rethinking of the process of
consumption include Pierre Bourdieu, especially in his Distinction: A Social
Judgment of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984),

Critique of the
Michel de Certeau’s work, especially The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley,
Univ. of California, 1984), and John Fiske’s Understanding Popular Culture
(Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
166 JENNIFER WICKE
10. I argue for this in Advertising Fictions: Literature , Advertising ,

and
Social Reading (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988); the classic essay is
Leo Spitzer’s “American Advertising Explained as Popular Art,” in Leo
Spitzer: Representative Essays ed. ,

Alban K. Forcione, Herbert Lindenberger,
and Madeline Sutherland (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1988), wherein
Spitzer shows the relation of the Protestant spirit of capitalism, as it were, to
the language of advertising.
11. See Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (London:
Verso, 1971).
12. Auerbach (note 4) allegorizes the sexuality in Dracula as a grappling
with the explosion of female power, and its consequent suppression.
Christopher Craft’s essay “‘Kiss Me with those Red Lips’: Gender and
Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula ,” Representations 8 (1984): 107-133, makes
a persuasive case for the novel’s imbrication in the formation of a medicalized
and legal discourse of homosexuality in the late nineteenth century.
Additional essays speak tellingly to the presence of the sexual in Dracula: see
Robin Wood, “Burying the Undead: The Use and Obsolescence of Count
Dracula,” Mosaic 16 (1983): 175-187; John L. Greenway, “Seward’s Folly:
Dracula as a critique of ‘Normal Science,”’ Stanford Literature Review 3 (Fall
1986): 213-230; Marjorie Howes, “The Mediation of the Feminine:

Bisexuality, Homoerotic Desire and Self-Expression in Bram Stoker’s
Dracula ,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 30 (1988): 4-19; and Judith
Weissman, “Women and Vampires: Dracula as Victorian Novel,” Midwest
Quarterly 18 (1977): 392-405. It is not possible to write about Dracula
without raising the sexual issue; John A. Stevenson’s “A Vampire in the
Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula ” (note 4) has perhaps the best formulation
of the renegade and yet all too familiar sexual practices of Dracula, which he
grafts onto a stimulating argument about the implied anthropology of the
novel.
1 3 . In Consuming Desire: Sexual Science and the Emergence of a Culture of
Abundance 1871-1914 ,
(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988) Lawrence Birken
suggestively argues that the climate of modern sexual discourse is affiliated
with the culture of consumption.

14. See E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1877-1914 (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1987), Illustration Number 21.

15. Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton,
1981) effectively synopsizes these developments. Anne Me Whir interestingly

approaches the anthropological background in her essay, “Pollution and
Redemption in Dracula ,” Modern Language Studies 17 (Summer 1987): 3 1-40.
16. Often mentioned, this link to a nascent psychoanalysis is laid out in
John L. Greenway (note 12). Greenway concentrates on the historical forms
of science Dracula is able to enact.
17. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities ; Reflections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism (London, Verso, 1983), 47. Eric Hobsbawm

adduces further empirical claims for the importance of print culture in
Britain’s nationalism, particularly, in The Age of Empire (note 14), chapter six
and following.
18. Anderson (note 17), 89.
LAURA SAGOLLA CROLEY
The Rhetoric of Reform in Stoker's Dracula:

Depravity Decline and the Fin-de-Siecle “Residuum ”
, ,
In the past decade, critics of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) have discovered
the fruits of historicizing a novel previously read chiefly in psychoanalytic,
anthropological, and transhistorical terms. 1 This new attention to the
“embeddedness” of Stoker’s text has produced a number of persuasive
attempts to flesh out what the Count might represent to late Victorian
readers: criminality and degeneracy, foreignness, and homosexuality, to name
the more noteworthy assertions. 2 While in many ways dissimilar, these
readings all recognize Dracula s capacity to shape and to be shaped by the

'
late-Victorian discourses that together constitute national identity —the

colonial project, scientific theory, race, and sexuality certainly among them.
Moreover, many of these readings share the understanding that the Count
transgresses boundaries near and dear to the late Victorian frame of mind,
and that the novel, betraying a fear of cultural decline occasioned by these
sorts of transgression, struggles throughout to preserve boundaries and
restore cultural order. 3
The reading I offer here seeks to illustrate how Stoker’s novel
associates crossed boundaries and potential decline, as did many social
commentators of the 1890s, with a particular segment of the English

population. I will argue that Stoker’s Count is associated and allied with the
poorest of the poor —not the industrious artisan but the vagrant, not the
From Criticism 37, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 85-108. © 1995 by the Wayne State University Press.
169
$
170 LAURA SAGOLLA CROLEY
respectable working class but its supposedly shiftless, slum-dwelling

underclass 4 —and that the threat of Dracula and vampirism stands in for the
5
late-century threat of the lumpenproletariat. If the wandering and slum-
dwelling poor, like the vampire, presented a material threat to the sound
health and social harmony of England, their moral threat was at least equally
important. Stoker and nineties commentators cast vampire and lumpen alike
as representing —sometimes even causing— cultural decline effected, above
all, by a disregard of middle-class norms, including domesticity,
motherhood, and female sexual purity. Read
tandem with works such as
in
William Booth’s 1890 In Darkest England and the Way Out Stoker’s novel ,
betrays a similar preoccupation with cultural collapse effected by the

lumpenproletariat. In order to halt that collapse, both Booth and Stoker
prescribe for the lowest classes “the way out” of England —expulsion or, put
more politely, emigration.
The very poor were never more in the Victorian imagination than in
the decade and a half before the publication of Stoker’s Dracula. When scores
of homeless poor “slept-out” in Trafalgar Square and St. James park in the
summer of 1887, “the existence of these unfortunates was somewhat rudely

forced upon the attention of Society.” 6 Overwhelmed by the sheer number
of vagrants (there were 300-400 people in Trafalgar Square alone),
constables let them stay put, declining to arrest them for their clear violation
of vagrancy law. 7 The first half of the 1890s brought a period of recession
which caused more vagrancy: one London casual ward which reported
still
the relief of under 5,000 on January 1, 1884, relieved 8,300 on the same night
in 1894 (Rose, 84).
If the plight of the poor became more visible in the nineties, the
written account of that plight magnified it considerably. In the year of the
Trafalgar Square sleep-outs, the first comprehensive English history of
vagrancy, J. Ribton Turner’s A History of Vagrants and Vagrancy and Beggars and
Begging was published.
,
A few years earlier, in 1883, John Thomas Smith’s
1817 Vagabondiana ,
a lavishly-illustrated catalogue of urban beggars, was
reprinted. And the beggar’s sibling in extreme poverty, the slum-dweller,
figured prominently in 1880s newspaper exposes by W. T. Stead and G. R.
Sims, as well as in the “realistic” fiction of Arthur Morrison, Israel Zangwill,
and George Gissing in the 1890s. The most famous and (arguably) most
thorough commentators on homelessness and slumlife in the nineties were
the Booth brothers, William and Charles. Along with extensive work on the
aged poor, Charles conducted a census of London’s East End in the late
The Rhetoric of Reform in Stoker’s Dracula 171
eighties to ascertain how many “paupers,” “homeless,” “starving,” and “the

very poor” (all separate categories) lived there. Charles’s brother William had
created the Salvation Army in own account moved by the dozens
1878, by his
of vagrants sleeping-out near the London Bridge he encountered during a
nighttime walk (Rose, 60). His 1890 In Darkest England and the Way Out ,
which will be referred to throughout, outlined an intricate plan for “saving”

morally and physically the poorest of the London poor.
It is against the work of the Booths and against earlier accounts of the
lower classes that Stoker’s Dracula should be read. In 1861 Henry Mayhew
opens his massive, four-volume London Labour and the London Poor with the
insistence that there are “socially, morally, and perhaps even physically
considered —but two distinct and broadly marked races, viz., the wanderers
and the —the
settlers vagabond and the citizen —the nomadic and the
civilized tribes.” More important for present purposes, Mayhew also insists
some wandering horde intermingled

that “each civilized tribe has generally
with, and in a measure preying upon, it.” 8 For Mayhew, that “wandering
horde” is the London poor; the “civilized tribe” are the middle- and upper-
classes, and even the portion of the poor who have permanent homes and
respect middle-class mores. Claiming that the nomad “preys” upon the
settled, Mayhew sets up an antagonism not unlike that between the
industrious middle-class “Crew of Light” (as Christopher Craft calls Harker,

Van Helsing, Seward, Godaiming, 9 Morris, and sometimes Mina [Craft,
218]) and parasitic Dracula, who is, after all, spatially mobile a nomad. —
Mayhew ascribes to “nomad races” in general several of Dracula’s traits: a
“delight in warfare,” “pleasure ... in witnessing the suffering of sentient
creatures,” “comparative insensibility to pain,” “desire for vengeance,” and
“disregard of female honor” (1:2).
This mid-century notion of poverty as active parasitism did not apply
to the industrious working class (factory hands, domestic servants, shop-
girls, etc.) but to a group the Victorians would have called, according to
Gertrude Himmelfarb, the “residuum” — gypsies, beggars, vagrants, petty
criminals, madmen, slum-dwellers, all of whom were most often unemployed
and unattached to middle-class norms (356). Middle- and upper-class
Victorians took great pains to distinguish the industrious poor from the
residuum or, in Marx’s terms, the proletariat from the lumpenproletariat.
The New Poor Law of 1834 was instituted with an eye to just such a
demarcation, and Mayhew’s categories of “those who will work” and “those
who will not work” lent the demarcation pseudo-scientific weight. 10
By the time Stoker writes Dracula ,
the rhetoric describing the Victorian
residuum or lumpenproletariat has changed little from the forties, when
intrepid social explorer Edwin Chadwick first “penetrated” the terra incognita
of the London rookeries to argue the necessity of sanitary reform. This

rhetoric, including the metaphors of disease, animality, and foreignness,
figures prominently in descriptions of Stoker’s Count. When the Crew of
Light invades Carfax Abbey to destroy Dracula’s" boxes of dirt, Harker’s
description seems to come straight out of Chadwick’s 1 842 Sanitary Report :
“here the place was small and close, and the long disuse had made the air
stagnant and foul. There was an earthy smell, as of some dry miasma, which
came through the fouler air.” 11 The Count seems to inhabit the sort of “low
lodging house” visited and colorfully described by journalists and social
reformers throughout the century —broken down, empty of furniture, and
extremely dusty: “the place was thick with dust. The floor was seemingly
inches deep.... The walls were fluffy and heavy with dust, and in the corners
were masses of spiders’ webs whereon the dust had gathered till they looked
like old tattered rags as theweight had torn them partly down” (250). In his
1883 How George Sims notes similar “heaps of dust,” “rags,
the Poor Live ,
dirt, filth, wretchedness” in the slums he visits. 12 In the Reverend Andrew
Mearns’s pamphlet of the same year, “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London,”
the picture is identical: “poverty, rags, and dirt everywhere.” 1 ^
And Carfax Abbey houses a “dry miasma,” the medium by which
disease was believed for most of the century to spread, and a quintessential
element of slum descriptions. Mearns, for instance, notes the “poisonous and
malodorous gases” (94) of the London slums. Assuming the shape of a “mist”
in his attacks on Lucy (144), Mina (258), and Renfield (278, 280), the Count
personifies miasma. Even Renfield, the Count’s most loyal follower, is made
uncomfortable by this power: “He slid in through the window.... His white
face looked out of the mist with His red eyes gleaming, and He went on as
though he owned the place, and I was no one. He didn’t even smell the same
as He went by me. I couldn’t hold Him” (280). Like the vampiric miasma,
the Count’s “rank” breath (18) speaks the language of disease. Just a few years
before the publication of Dracula, William Booth noted the “foul and fetid
breath of our slums” (14), referring in tandem, as did many Victorian social
commentators, to the moral and physical contagion of slum-life.

While this language of disease applied to the poor in general, it became
heightened in discussions of “nomads” like Dracula, for if physical and moral
disease could be somewhat contained in the slums, it became mobile and
invasive with the moving body. Vagrants traveled the country carrying
“tramp-fever” and, according to Mayhew, a “moral pestilence as terrible and
devastating as the physical pest that accompanies it” (quoted in Himmelfarb,
340); they were a “stream of vice and disease,” a “tide of iniquity and fever”
(3:397).
Vampirism is throughout Dracula similarly figured as a disease with
palpable physical effects — pallor, loss of appetite, loss of blood, and

eventually death (or “un-death”) — and moral effects — libidinousness,
selfishness, and a rejection of domesticity and motherhood. But because
Stoker’s readers and critics have so often concentrated on what the disease of
vampirism might represent the pairing itself of physical
,
and moral contagion
has gone unnoticed. Scrutinizing this particular aspect of vampirism —one
that, like so many others, seems “natural” to the generations of Westerners
familiar with the vampire myth — reveals yet another link to contemporary
representations of the residuum. For it seems that no where else in Stoker’s
culture were physical and moral deterioration paired and figured as
contagious but in descriptions of the lumpenproletariat.

Like the metaphor of disease, the metaphor of animality figures
prominently in the pages of both Victorian reform literature and Stoker’s
novel. Dracula is “panther-like” and “lion-like” with “long and pointed” eye-
teeth (305). His homes and dirt-boxes Van Helsing repeatedly refers to as
“lairs” (291-92, 303), echoing Booth’s (25, 40) and other reformers’
descriptions of the slums as “lairs” or “dens” where the poor live like
dangerous animals. 14 As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White point out, the claim
that the poor live like animals or among animals deteriorates quickly into the
claim that the poor are animals. 15 And Dracula makes literal this claim in his
metamorphosis into various animals — a wolf, a stray dog, a bat, and in the
Carfax Abbey scene a pack of rats. Dracula’s victims also become animal-like:
at Dracula’s castle, Jonathan begins to behave “like a rat in a trap” (27);
Renfield, a “zoophagous [life-eating] maniac” [70], is compared to a dog (69,
141), a tiger (102), and a “wild beast” (102, 155); and Lucy’s teeth grow long
and sharp as her disease progresses (153).
Reform literature’s rhetoric of colonization and miscegenation also
plays a part in the Count’s persona. Although Stephen J. Arata has rightly
pointed out that Stoker’s novel is shot through with anxieties of reverse
colonization, with the fear that the dark-skinned other will invade England
and compromise its racial purity, Arata fails to see the class implications of
Dracula’s racial invasion. Social reformers and journalists throughout the
century used the language of race to talk about the very poor, from Mayhew’s
straightforward insistence in 1861 that costermongers “appear to be a
distinct race” (1:6) to the controlling metaphor of Booth’s 1890 In Darkest
England the,
title an allusion to Sir Henry Morton Stanley’s In Darkest Africa
published in the same year. Dracula’s racial otherness may say as much about
class, then, as it does about race. When Mayhew uses water metaphors to
describe vagrancy —vagrants constitute a “stream of vice and disease” and a
“tide of iniquity and fever, continually flowing from town to town” — his
“tide” and “stream” are literally inside England. But they also stand in for the
English channel, “continually flowing” and bringing the foreigner with it.
This is the same tide Dracula rides to England and must, in the end, be made
to ride home. This is the same water in which William Booth imagines his
“submerged tenth” —not the working class but “paupers,” the “homeless,”
the “starving” and “the very poor” —are floundering. The metaphor
designed, no doubt, to capture the urgency of the problem (“the multitude
struggle and sink in the open-mouthed abyss” [ii]) signals at the same time
that the poor are foreigners preparing, just off shore, for an invasion of
England.
The Count’s aristocratic status —he is, after all, a Transylvanian

nobleman —has probably gone far to obfuscate his connections to the
Victorian residuum. But the contiguity of social extremes was a familiar
nineteenth century theme anatomized in the aristocrat disguised as a vagrant
(from Pierce Egan’s 1821 Life in London to A. Conan Doyle’s 1 892 “The Man
With the Twisted Lip”) and the vagrant disguised as an aristocrat (for
Dickens, “the most vicious, by far, of all idle tramps is the tramp who
pretends to have been a gentleman”). 16 Given that by 1861 Henry Mayhew
can treat “the close resemblance between many of the characteristics of a
very high class, socially, and a very low class” (1:12) as a commonplace, the
meeting of social extremes in Stoker’s main character should come as no
surprise. These extremes meet in the Transylvanian soil Dracula totes
through England, for he can be land-owner (with its attendant security and
power) and vagrant (with its spatial mobility) at the same time. Like the
vagrant, he sleeps in his own dirt —but it is dirt owned by him.
Back at Dracula’s castle social extremes also meet, for Dracula is driver,
butler, and maid as well as master. Stoker structures the narrative in such a
way that we suspect for several pages that the Count is performing household
tasks before we actually see him making Jonathan’s bed and setting his table
(27). And the latter Jonathan discovers (and readers discover) surreptitiously,
“through the chink of the hinges of the door” (27). This minor secret acts as
synecdoche for the Count’s larger secret: he is a lumpen dressed in
aristocratic clothing.
In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1853), Marx, like

Mayhew, links “the characteristics of a very high class, socially, and a very low
class.” Marx conceives of Bonaparte as just such a “princely
lumpenoroletarian.” 17 Like Dracula, he is high and low, nobleman and
nomad. And Bonaparte’s role as “chief of the lumpenproletariat,” like
Dracula’s, is a secret to be uncovered. The scandal Marx discloses in The
Eighteenth Brumaire is that Bonaparte’s allies include
... discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves,

swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters,
gamblers, maquereaus, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ-
grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short,
the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and

thither, which the French term la bohertie. (75)
Fascinating and distressing for Marx, Bonaparte manages to ally the

lumpenproletariat with the bourgeoisie against the respectable proletariat.
The lumpenproletariat are allied, then, with “the bourgeois order ... a
vampire that sucks [the peasantry’s] blood and brains and throws it into the
alchemistic cauldron of capital” (128).
Marx’s linking of vampirism and the bourgeoisie supports Franco
Moretti’s thesis that Dracula represents monopoly capital and the
bourgeoisie. Dracula certainly has some middle-class traits: his library
includes the London Directory, the “Red” and “Blue” books, Whitaker’s
Almanack, the Army and Navy Lists, and the Law List (19); he reads a
Bradshaw’s Guide (mirroring Mina’s knowledge of train schedules) (22); and,
according to Jonathan, he “would have made a wonderful solicitor, for there
was nothing that he did not think of or foresee” (31). But the Count’s
reference books and keen sense of detail do not advance the goals of the
Crew of Light, including successful careers, the protection of female virtue,
and generally “useful” lives (53). Instead, the Count uses these middle-class
tools precisely to upset middle-class norms. Middle- and upper-class
characteristics only cloak the Count’s —
lumpen body his coarse hands (18)
and noxious smell —and allow him the latitude tomaneuver in England as he
chooses, better able to carry out his invasion. 18
Like the aristocrat/begger nexus embedded in late Victorian culture,
Dracula’s network of lower-class allies which extends from Transylvania to

England signals his ties to the lumpenproletariat. These allies aid in his
battle against the Crew of Light and, at the same time, share a telling family
resemblance. The Szgany gypsies are Dracula’s closest allies and protectors
who “call themselves by his name” (41). Their loyalty frames the narrative,
for in the first chapter they hand over Jonathan’s desperate shorthand letter
explaining his imprisonment in Castle Dracula (an act without which the
Count might have been prevented from entering England), and in the last
chapter stab Quincy Morris, theCrew of Light’s only casualty, as he attempts
to charge the Count’s carriage. With his uncanny mastery of the animal
kingdom (especially the London Zoo’s best-behaved wolf) and his proclivity
for animal transformation, the Count himself fits contemporary descriptions
of the gypsy, a skillful animal tamer and, to many English citizens,
disgustingly animal-like in demeanor and disposition. 19 In his ability to

hypnotize and cast the “evil eye” upon his enemies Dracula also resembles a
gypsy. He hypnotizes Lucy and Mina before biting them, and even Jonathan,
after Mina’s gruesome exchange of blood with Dracula, must be awakened
from “a stupor such as we know the Yampire can produce” (283). And en
route to Dracula’s castle, the crowd at the door of Jonathan’s inn makes the
sign of the cross and points two fingers toward him upon his departure, a
gesture one of Jonathan’s fellow passengers identifies as “a charm or guard

against the evil eye” 20
(6).
The dock attendants at Whitby (where the Count begins his invasion)
and at Doolittle Wharf (where he begins his escape) also contribute to the
Count’s mission by transporting his dirt boxes. In fact, the dockhands at
Doolittle Wharf speak Dracula’s language, generously sprinkling their
language with the oath “bloody” (or “with blood,” as Van Helsing records it).
And they are all hesitant to tell the Crew of Light what they know about
Dracula; only alcohol, or money for alcohol, will loosen their tongues. In this
way they are parasites like Dracula, cadging “drinks” off of the upper-classes.
The pairing of working men’s drinking and vampirism earlier in the century,
in an 1858 temperance tract entitled “The Vampyre, by the Wife of a
Medical Man,” indicates that Dracula’s allies’ drinking may be more than
incidental. 21 In that tract, the “Vampyre Inn” sucks in the working class,
turning them from industrious teetotalers to spend-thrift lushes —and

moving them, in Victorian terms, from the respectable working class to the
residuum. Vampirism even before Stoker’s novel, then, can represent the
temptation to acquire the vices of the lumpenproletariat.
If the dockhands appear at first glance to be the “industrious” poor
(they are working, after all), undermining the argument that Dracula only
allies himself with the wandering and dissolute, it is because dock work had
a very different social valence for the Victorians. Dock work was itinerant
labor, and the London quays were the socially and racially charged space of
the Lascar and the vagrant. In fact, the Vagrancy Act of 1824 which, with a
few amendments, dictated the legal treatment of vagrants throughout the
nineteenth century, treated as a particular category of vagrant those
“suspected persons or reputed thieves frequenting or loitering about a ...
dock, or basin, or quay or wharf.” 22

In England, Dracula also allies himself with Renfield. In addition to his
status as “madman,” which places him squarely in the Victorian residuum,
Renfield is, according to Seward, a “selfish old beggar,” his strait) acket one
from which “Jack Sheppard himself couldn’t get free” (102). In these off-
hand remarks, Seward reinstates the class hierarchy Renfield so flagrantly
dismisses — a dismissal that deeply troubles Seward. When Renfield treats a
4
mere asylum attendant and Doctor Seward in the same manner, Seward
attributes this to Renfield’s “sublime self- feeling” (100). “It looks like
religious mania,” Seward conjectures, “and he will soon think that he himself
is God” (10). Similarly, when Renfield acts the part of a gentleman
speaking in a “courtly” (244) manner of “seconding [the former Lord
Godaiming] at the Windham,” and praising suavely Arthur, Quincy, Van
Helsing, and Seward in turn- — Seward calls this “yet another form or phase
of his madness” (245). Seward’s indignation regarding the madman disguised
as an aristocrat recalls Dickens’s disdain for the “idle tramp who pretends to
have been a gentleman.” Like Dracula, Renfield has an uncanny ability to
mask his place in the social residuum, and this ability frustrates and confuses
the Crew of Light, for whom class status is crucial. It is important to them,
for instance, that Jonathan is a “solicitor,” not a “solicitor’s clerk” (15), and
that Arthur is a gentleman with “blood so pure” (122). Seward himself finds
it “soothing” on the rare occasion that Renfield treats him with more respect
than the asylum attendants (107).
Above all, Renfield’s assistance in the vamping of Madame Mina allies
him to the Count. His earlier dealings with the Count have, of course,
empowered the latter to enter Renfield’s window and to travel through the
asylum to Mina’s room (280). If unwittingly, Renfield assists in the novel’s
ultimate violation of bourgeois space and the ultimate —and most starkly
depicted —spread of vampirism.
3
Having pointed out Dracula’s rhetoric of reform, and demonstrated the

Count’s resemblance to and alliance with the poorest of the Victorian poor,
the most important questions still remain: Why would Stoker connect
vampirism with extreme poverty in the first place, and what are the effects of
that connection on our interpretation of Stoker’s text?
Behind Stoker’s use of the residuum lies what seems to be a common
fin-de-siecle anxiety: that the English as a nation will become, like the
residuum, weak, sensual, and undisciplined, and that this transformation will
bring about England’s decline. Social commentators of the nineties counted
among their worries —along with waning global influence, the questionable
legitimacy of the colonial project, and the concept of British “civilization”
itself —complex changes in the middle-class moral fabric. While moral
norms shifted at all levels of society, commentators focused on the poorest of
the poor, since they offered the most striking portrait of domesticity,
motherhood, female sexual purity, and masculinity gone awry. The vagrant
and the slum-dweller lacked the orderly, comfortable home Victorian
domestic ideology designated as source of family values and general moral

health —and they lacked the supposed center of that home, the virtuous
mother, who was often absent or, according to some, herself depraved. In the
slums and “on the tramp,” women did not always observe the rules of
middle-class sexual virtue —be chaste, or, if married, be monogamous. Nor
did men observe the rules of middle-class masculinity —be decisive, be
earnest, and be a reliable provider.
Some commentators actually considered the lumpenproletariat, more

than merely a portrait of deteriorating norms, a source of the nation’s moral
deterioration. If the disregard of motherhood, domesticity, masculinity, and
female sexual purity had been part of representations of lower-class culture
for decades, that disregard seemed in the nineties for the first time to be
“spreading” to the middle- and upper-classes. The infamous Wilde trial of

1895 and the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889 (which uncovered a
homosexual brothel catering to gentlemen) (Spencer, 206) made it clear that

alternative versions of masculinity were being imagined and even acted upon
by the aristocracy. Moreover, the aesthetic movement’s emphasis on male

sensitivity and introspection provided evidence that the “virile” ethos, the
hallmarks of which were decisive action and the absence of emotional

expression (Walkowitz, 17), was coming into question — at least among a
vocal minority. The largely middle-class New Women who valorized

women’s education and work outside the home, demonstrated that, like older
versions of masculinity, the cult of domesticity and its idealized version of

motherhood might not prevail. More radical New Women, professing that
women were entitled to the same forms of sexual expression as men,
illustrated that even female chastity was not an irresistibly permanent norm.
Because the middle- and upper-classes began to sanction these views long
after they were sanctioned among the lower-classes (or so, at least, it
seemed), commentators conceived of these views as a moral malaise

spreading from the lowest ranks of the social body upward.
To this end, many myths were created. First, some claimed that
vagrancy and its attendant idleness, promiscuity, and disregard of domesticity
were contagious, that “any contact between intractable vagrants and
respectable workers posed the danger that [wandering] impulses might be
activated.” 23 Others claimed that the mentally ill could spread a “contagion
of moral leprosy,” “multiplying a progeny” of the morally and mentally
diseased, if allowed to mix with the sane of any class (Booth, 205). Slum-
dwellers too were said to imperil the moral health of England. Even if their
vice were somehow spatially contained, they could “rear an undisciplined

population” made up of “not ... exactly the most promising material for the
making of the future citizens and rulers of the empire” (66). It almost goes
without saying that, above all of these, the prostitute was believed to infect
the women and men of the bourgeoisie. In addition to spreading venereal
disease, the prostitute inspired “lust” in men and, in the mere spectacle of her
vice, imperilled the chaste female observer.
Stoker imports this model of moral contagion into his own text, for
moral depravity is there represented as spreading from the vampiric

residuum to the respectable ^middle- and upper-classes. In fact, the central
anxiety among the Crew of Light is precisely the sort of lumpen takeover
imagined by social commentators. Just as the slum-dweller can produce an
infirm ancestral line unfit to be the “future citizens and rulers of England,”
Dracula can produce “a new and ever widening circle of semi-demons” (5 1),
an entire nation of morally depraved vampires. Significantly, the spread of

vice in Dracula occurs among those explicitly named or curiously resembling
—
lumpen types vagrants, madmen, prostitutes. Following the nineties
commentators who believed vagrancy was contagious, Stoker depicts
Dracula, a spatial nomad, as tempting Lucy to stray in Whitby cemetery, she
in turn tempting the children of Hampstead to “stray from home” (177).
Following the commentators who considered madmen morally dangerous,
Stoker makes Renfield responsible for Mina’s assault. And following the
commentators who treated prostitutes as morally infectious, Stoker casts
Lucy as a prostitute of sorts. Before being vamped, Lucy’s nocturnal walks,
alone and scantily clad, at worst suggest prostitution, at best, as Mina
remarks, a serious risk to Lucy’s “reputation” (92). After being vamped,
Lucy’s publicly sexual behavior includes the aggressive gaze and provoking
deportment reformers attributed to the prostitute (Walkowitz, 23): she gazes
unabashedly at the Crew of Light, her eyes “blaz[ing] with an unholy light”
(211), and openly propositions Arthur, “Come to me.... My arms are hungry
for you.”
In addition to casting lumpen types as the transmitters of vice, when
Stoker specifies just what Dracula’s “semi-demons” look like, he focuses on
the same vices journalists and reformers associated with the
lumpenproletariat. For example, some writers castigated the “bad mother”
(or absent mother) of the slums, selfish and inattentive, for causing slum
conditions (Walkowitz, 120). Far less accusatory than many, William Booth
comments in this vein that the lumpen-proletariat “needs a great deal of
mothering, much more than it gets” (219). Stoker similarly associates
vampirism with deviant motherhood. The Count repeatedly separates
mother from child: the pleading Transylvanian peasant woman from her
vamped baby (45), Mrs. Westenra from Lucy (thanks to the shock occasioned
by Dracula’s appearance [143]), and a host of Hampstead mothers from their
“straying children” intent on following the “bloofer-lady,” Lucy (177-78).
The Weird Sifters at Castle Dracula vamp rather than nurture the “half-
smothered child” (39) Dracula throws at their feet. And after being vamped,
Lucy contracts their strain of bad motherhood. When Van Helsing and
Seward spot her in the cemetery, the babe at her breast is not being suckled,
but sucked for blood (211).
Like the journalists of the eighties and nineties who repeatedly
lamented the dust, rags, and lack of furniture in the living quarters of the
very poor, Stoker adds to his picture of bad mothers the perversion of
domesticity. Most of the rooms at Castle Dracula are locked or in disarray,
its one comfortable chamber only a snare laid for Jonathan (16); Carfax
Abbey, as mentioned before, looks and smells like a slum dwelling; and the
house at Piccadilly “smells vilely,” containing a wash-basin of bloodied water
(301). When Dracula invades England, filth and disorder seem to spread to
the Crew of Light’s dwellings. At the Westenra’s, the air assumes the foul
smell of Dracula’s quarters (Van Helsing’s garlic makes Lucy’s room “awfully
stuffy” [133]) and the servants become drugged and debilitated (one even
grows disloyal, stealing the cross that her mistress wears in death). Similarly,
at Seward’s asylum, Renfield actively collects the vermin that plagued the
slums (68-69, 115). Finally, though this raises eyebrows among neither the
Crew of Light nor any of Dracula )s critics, Mina, Arthur, Jonathan, and Van
Helsing have by mid-novel made an insane asylum their home —
compromise of blissful domesticity to say the least.
Vampirism also entails the compromised masculinity of the
lumpenproletariat. Reformers depicted the male casual laborer, like the
slum-mother, as an inadequate parent — lazy, ineffectual, incapable of
supporting a family (Walkowitz, 44). According to Booth, the slum- dwelling
male is “impotent,” his surrondings “manhood destroying” (Booth, 24).
“Would it not be more merciful to kill [the very poor] off at once,” asks
Booth, rather than, by letting them remain in the slums, “crushing out of
them all semblance of honest manhood?” (61). Jonathan and the captain of
the Demeter echo Booth’s sentiment: the captain wants to “die like a man”
(85) rather than suffer the Count’s presence; Jonathan vows that he will jump
from the castle even to his death for “at its foot man may sleep as a man” —
(53). While Jonathan owes his gender anxiety in large part to the aggressively
sexual behavior of the female vamps and his near-miss at penetration (38), he
owes it also to Dracula’s advances. Dracula has, after all, exclaimed within
earshot of Jonathan, “This man belongs to me! ... Yes I too can love” (39).
Van Helsing too suffers the erosion of his masculinity. Otherwise free of the
taints of vampirism, he begins to laugh and cry “just as a woman does” wiien
he reflects on the ironic events surrounding Lucy’s vamping and death (174).
The lumpen vice Stoker most obviously attributes to vampirism is

female sexual impurity. As I have mentioned, Lucy’s vampirism resembles

Even Mina, whose changes are far less extensive than Lucy’s,
prostitution.
becomes more openly amorous with Jonathan after being vamped (267).
Furthermore, after being vamped both Mina and Lucy reject monogamy,
another norm supposedly disregarded by the lumpenproletariat woman
(Mayhew, 1:20): Lucy receives blood transfusions from three men besides
her husband-to-be, the sexual symbolism of this noted later by Van Helsing
and Jonathan is cuckolded by Mina, whose intimate exchange with the
(176),
Count takes place only feet away from him.
Wrapped up in this idea that the residuum will contaminate the upper-
classes —and the vampire will contaminate the virtuous — is a preoccupation
with the transgression of spatial boundaries. In fact, transgressing spatial
boundaries could be identified as the controlling metaphor of Dracula. When
the Count comes around, virtuous English citizens discover strange red
marks on their necks, but, more striking, they experience a whole host of
spatial transgressions, including invasions, escapes, and re-openings. The
Count slips through windows and cracks of doors; “King Laugh” enters Van
Helsing’s body uninvited (174). The zoo animals, Lucy, and the children who
follow her as the “Bloofer Lady” all escape the enclosed space they
previously inhabited. Both Seward and Mina must re-open diaries they have
definitively closed, the former stating explicitly, “everything is ... now
reopened” (190); even Jonathan’s mind becomes “unhinged” (36) after his
encounter with the vamps at Castle Dracula. And of course Stoker’s choice
of homeland for the Count —Transylvania, across or beyond the forest
signals his interest in the crossing of boundaries.
In the decade before Stoker wrote Dracula perhaps not coincidentally,

,
an intense interest in spatial boundaries crossed by the lumpenproletariat

arose among social commentators and journalists. It concerned “the
threatening appearance of the poor in the ‘wrong’ part of town, in the form
of socialist-led demonstrations of the East End unemployed in the wealthy
West End” (Walkowitz, 28). This motion from East to West seemed
especially transgressive in a city that was, since the era of mid-Victorian slum
clearance, spatially segregated according to class (Walkowitz, 26).
(Journalistic exposes such as George Sims’s How the Poor Live [1883] and
Gustave Dore and Blanchard Jerrold’s London: A Pilgrimage [1872], further
rigidified class hierarchy into geographic separation.) The demonstrations
included some violence (one ended, for instance, in sporadic looting and
rioting in London’s principle shopping district), and came to a head on
“Bloody Sunday,” 18 November 1887, with yet another attempt to transgress
spatial boundaries: a group of itinerant laborers and unemployed attempted
to enter Trafalgar Square and were brutally repressed by police.

Only with contemporary fears of lumpen invasion in mind do the

spatial invasions of Dracula come fully into focus. The Count’s movement
from Transylvania in the East to England in the West shares the same
trajectory of the lumpen “invasion” from the East End to the West End of
London. But more remarkable, the Count invades London itself from East
to West. Mr. Joseph Smollet —
the only workman, incidentally, both
employed by the Count and described as “decent a good, reliable type”
...
(260) —divulges the Count’s plan, later recorded by Jonathan: “... the Count
was fixed on the far east of the northern shore, on the east of the southern
shore, and on the south. The north and the west were surely never meant to
be left —
out of his diabolical scheme let alone the City itself and the very
heart of fashionable London in the south-west and west” (261). When
Quincy and Godaiming destroy the dirt boxes at Bermondsey and Mile End,
then wait with the rest of the Crew for Dracula’s arrival in Piccadilly, they
attempt to prevent an invasion of the “fashionable London” stormed by the
lumpenproletariat a decade before. In fact, Van Helsing’s enigmatic
reference to “King Laugh” (whose invasion of Van Helsing’s body roughly
coincides with the Count’s invasion of England) may very well allude to those
demonstrators in the West End, whom contemporary journalists dubbed
“King Mob.”
Vampiric and lumpenproletariat invasion share a spatial parallel even
more striking: windows and doors act as the locus of entry for both. The
Count’s reliance on the open window to access his victims may seem rather
banal for a monster of his supernatural caliber; he can change shape,
command animals, and summon the “strength of twenty men” and the “aids
of necromancy” (237), but has trouble with closed windows. Stoker’s focus on
windows and doors makes more sense, however, in light of contemporary
representations of the lumpenproletariat. An 1850 Punch cartoon entitled “A
Retired Neighborhood” (Figure 1) provides a fairly early depiction of a
vagrant kept from the drawing room (and the female observer) by one thin
pane of glass. 24 Like Dracula, this vagrant seems to be warded off more by a
young woman’s attitude than any physical barrier —she looks more disdainful
than frightened. Doors and windows were associated with the
lumpenproletariat in the nineties as well: Booth notes that “it is customary in
the slums to leave the house door open perpetually, which is convenient for
tramps, who creep into the hallways to sleep at night” (162); slum
neighborhoods were distinguished from respectable working-class
neighborhoods by, among other things, their open doors and broken
windows (Walkowitz, 35); and the demonstrations of 1887 included,
significantly, the breaking of windows in the fashionable Pall Mall district
(Walkowitz, 28).
As the latter suggests, physical violence was certainly a part of late-
century anxieties about the “invading” residuum. But in a decade when, as
Martin J. Wiener demonstrates, novelists and journalists represent the poor

as debilitated and pathetic much more often than powerful and wicked, 25 it
seems clear that the anxiety generated by lumpen invasion extends much
further than material risks to, as I have argued thus far, their ability to
represent a decline in respectability that portends the decline of a nation.
Booth’s vagrant in the doorway does not threaten harm as much as stigma to
the house’s inhabitants. Punch's vagrant at the window is more embarrassing
than menacing, the humor of the cartoon deriving in large part from the
young lady’s predicament —she cannot possibly include a tramp in her
genteel description of aristocratic leisure. Even the shattering of Pall Mall

windows, while threatening and costly, also suggests the disgrace of social
discord — and this at a time when the products featured in those windows
have newly entered into rigorous, discouraging competition with German
and American products (Arata, 622). In Dracula ,
too, the fear that the
vampiric residuum will compromise respectability at times eclipses the fear
that they will physically harm anyone. When Jonathan cuts himself shaving
and the Count lunges with “demoniac fury” at the blood on his neck, then
smashes Jonathan’s shaving mirror in a fit of rage, Jonathan immediately
remarks: “It is very annoying, for I do not see how I am to shave, unless in
my watch-case or the bottom of the shaving-pot, which is fortunately, of
metal” (26).
Given the fin-de-siecle preoccupation with crossed boundaries and the

transmission of lumpen vice, the solution seems simple: the respectable and
the unrespectable must be separated spatially. To this end, reformers of the
last decades of the nineteenth century hatched schemes to segregate the
unrespectable poor from the rest of the working class (Walkowitz, 26). The
plan outlined in William Booth’s In Darkest England and the Way Out clearly
illustrates this trend, and resonates suggestively with Stoker’s solution for the
Count seven years later. Booth opens his book analogizing the English poor
to the African native for a full four pages, concluding that, since English soil
“breeds its own barbarians,” “pygmies” (11), and “savages” (12), attention
should be focused not on colonization and conversion of foreign lands but on
homegrown problems: “... think for a moment how close the parallel is, and
how strange it is that so much interest should be excited by a narrative of
human squalor and human heroism in a distant continent, while greater
squalor and heroism not less magnificent may be observed at our very doors”
(12). While Booth may mean well, selecting this particular analogy for its
potentially powerful rhetorical effect on an audience enthralled with faraway

lands and the “savages'” found there, the analogy transforms the poor into
foreigners who, not born in England, have no right ultimately to settle in
England.
As mentioned above, Booth’s image of the poor floundering in the sea
off the shore of Salvation Army benevolence has the same effect. The very
poor are not of our soil, this image seems to argue, but constitute a nuisance
sufficiently urgent and proximate that they must be rescued. Once rescued,
Booth argues, the poor should be settled in one of three colonies: the City
Colony, the Farm Colony, and the Colony Across the Sea (Figure 2). Booth’s
description of these programs makes it clear that the Colony Across the Sea
is the final solution toward which the tripartite system moves. Some in the
City Colony would be “sent home to friends happy to receive them on
hearing of their reformation” —the respectable reformed, in other words, can
stay —but the rest would be “passed on to the Colony of the second class”
(92), the Farm Colony. Once there, some “would be restored to friends up
and down the country” — again, the reformed remain in England —but the
“ great bulk ,
after trial and training, would be passed on to the Foreign
Settlement, which would constitute our third class, namely The Over-Sea
Colony” (93, emphasis added). The visual depiction of the colonies, included
in the 1 890 edition in an 1 1 x 1 7 color foldout, sets up this teleology along
the axes of Christian salvation, from the depths of the dark sea to the heights
of placid sky. Emigration provides, then, the final heavenly resting place of
the lumpenproletariat.
The three major phases of Booth’s plan —the invasion df the poor, their
stay in English communities, and their ultimate emigration — parallel the
three phases of Dracula’s movement. And in its final expulsion of the Count,
Dracula’s solution to vampirism bears a striking resemblance to Booth’s. For
purging England of the contagion of moral decay in the social residuum
facilitates the restoration of middle-class virtue. Having sheared Dracula’s
throat and sired a child, Jonathan recovers his masculinity; Godaiming and
Seward each happily marry; even Van Helsing is drawn into the domestic
circle, holding little Quincy on his knee in the novel’s final tableau. And of
course Mina redeems the bad mothers of the text, assuming her rightful
position as the “brave and gallant ... mother” who raises Quincy with
“sweetness and loving care” and, equally important, provides an opportunity
for male rescue —the novel’s final line reminds us that the men “did dare
much for her sake.”
But as some critics have noted, the conclusion of Dracula is not as tidy
and resolved as it might first appear. 26 For, as much as the Crew closes their
windows permanently to the Count, and, as this reading suggests, as much as
the late-century English close their windows to the corruption of the

residuum, there seem to be complicated, somewhat inexplicable forces that
let them in. Several critics have identified these forces with the unconscious,
arguing that Dracula’s victims —whatever their conscious professions and
actions — unconsciously desire to be vamped 27 Jonathan wants to cross the
:
threshold at Castle Dracula and later enter the locked drawing room to be
vamped; Lucy walks Whitby cemetery and opens her bedroom window
in
hoping to meet a handsome vampire. While there is some justification for the
assertion that the unconscious motivates these acts (Jonathan is, after all, an
engaged man with the fruits of marital union no doubt on his mind, and Lucy
has professed a playful wish to marry all three of her suitors at once [59]),
these readings tend to impose an enormous amount of order and
predictability on a disease that spreads in a highly disorderly fashion. It is
never clear, for instance, why the supposedly innocent children of

Hampstead want to be vamped, or why they will not themselves become
vampires. 28 Moreover, it is completely unclear what unconscious desires, if
any, explain Mina’s vamping. It is not even nominally her act, as it is with
Jonathan and Lucy, that admits the vampire; instead, it is Renfield, several
rooms away, who admits her attacker.
There is an alternative (or an addendum) to the theory that vampiric

desires are unconscious desires, and this alternative wholly jibes with one of
the most crucial developments of late-nineteenth-century thought. In the
midst of new theories of biological and social determinism, Stoker’s text
demonstrates that resisting or admitting the vampire is not —or at least not
solely — a matter of free will. As David Glover points out in reference to
Dracula ,
“particularly after 1880, the liberal presumption of individual
autonomy came increasingly to be compromised by ideas and findings
thrown up by the rapid expansion of the natural and social sciences” (Glover,
999). This ambivalence about autonomy characterizes Stoker’s work, “the

spheres of freedom and determinism ... always cloudy, and even multi-
accentual.”
In this light, the unpredictability of vampirism’s spread makes more
sense; even a virtuous, middle-class woman like Madame Mina cannot
completely control her fate. Indeed, if, as this reading has suggested, Stoker
means the spread of vampirism to stand in for the spread of cultural decline
occasioned by lumpenproletariat vice, the novel seems somewhat skeptical of
the control any individual English citizen can have over the normative
cultural changes occurring at every turn. The erosion of domesticity, female
chastity, and traditional male sexuality cannot be halted as simply and
irreversibly as Dracula seems to be; nor can tough questions about new
ideas —homosexuality and women’s independence certainly among them

be, like Booth’s lumpenproletariat, simply exiled across the sea.
On the surface, Stoker’s text celebrates through the expulsion of
Dracula the efficacy of sheer human effort to stem the tide of cultural
change; the human will emerges from Dracula more than unscathed,
triumphant. But as Mina’s predicament shows, stealthily and inexplicably the
vampire will come, whether we will or no —even him
if the unconscious bids
stay away. With this understanding, when Bilder the zoo-keeper claims that
the London Zoo’s “nice, well-behaved” wolf “escaped simply because he
wanted to get out” (139), we have the sneaking suspicion that he had no
choice in the matter. When Van Helsing explains that King Laugh does not
ask “May I come in?” but instead “I am here” (174), we might suspect that
Stoker is really talking about cultural change.
Notes
I would like to thank Nina Auerbach and David J. DeLaura for helpful
comments on earlier version' of this essay.
1. For recent attempts at historicizing Dracula ,

see: Stephen J. Arata,
“The Occidental Tourist,” Victorian Studies 33 (1990): 621-45; Christopher
“
Craft, ‘Kiss Me With Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram
Stoker’s Dracula ,” Representations 8 (1984): 107-33; Ernest Fontana,
“Lombroso’s Criminal Man and Stoker’s Dracula ,” Victoridn Newsletter 66
(1984): 25-27; David J. Glover, “Bram Stoker and the Crisis of the Liberal
Subject,” New Literary History 23 (1992): 983-1002; John L. Greenway,
“Seward’s Folly: Dracula as a Critique of ‘Normal Science,’ “ Stanford
Literature Review 3 (1986): 213-30; Marjorie Howes, “The Mediation of the
Feminine: Bisexuality, Homoerotic Desire, and Self-expression in Bram
Stoker’s Draculaf Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30 (1988): 104-19;
“
Daniel Pick, ‘Terror of the Night’: Dracula and ‘Degeneration’ in the Late
Nineteenth Century,” Critical Quarterly 30.4 (1988): 71-87; Carol Senf,
“
Dracula: Stoker’s Response to the New Woman,” Victorian Studies 26 (1982):
33-49; Kathleen L. Spencer, “Purity and Danger: Dracula ,
the Urban
Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis,” ELH 59 (1992):
197-225; Jennifer Wicke, “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and its Media,”
ELH 59 1992): 467-93; Jules Zanger, “A Sympathetic Vibration: Dracula and
the Jews,” English Literature in Transition 34 (1991): 33-44. Further citations
of these in text.
2. On criminality and degeneracy, see Fontana, Pick, and Spencer; on

foreignness, Arata and Zanger; on homosexuality, Craft and Howes.
3. Kathleen Spencer, for instance, identifies the novel as part of the
“urban gothic” and “romance” genres, both of which focus on the
“preservation of boundaries,” attempting to allay fears about cultural decline
through “stabilizing certain key distinctions which seemed, in the last decades
of the nineteenth century, to be eroding: between male and female, natural
and unnatural, civilized and degenerate, human and nonhuman” (203).
4. While a few critics have explored the class dimensions of Stoker’s
novel, none has connected the Transylvanian nobleman with the
lumpenproletariat, and none has explored in depth the Count’s relationship
to the poor in general. Franco Moretti identifies Stoker’s Dracula solely with
capital and the bourgeoisie, rightly emphasizing Dracula’s parasitic nature,
but ignoring his alliance (and the bourgeoisie’s sometimes-alliance) with the
lumpenproletariat. Burton Hatlen in the opposite vein rightly associates
Dracula with the lower classes, identifying the threat of Dracula with “the
threat of a revolutionary assault by the dark, foul-smelling, lustful lower
classes upon the citadels of privilege.” But Hatlen misses Dracula’s distance
from the so-called industrious classes, calling Dracula a “peasant” and a
“The Dialectic of Fear,” New Left Review 136 (1982):

“worker.” See Moretti,
67-85; and Hatlen, “The Return of the Repressed/Oppressed in Bram
Stoker’s Dracula ,” Minnesota Review 15 (1980): 80-97.
5. To date, I have not found better terms than “lumpenproletariat” and
“residuum” (the two are used interchangeably here) under which to group
individuals such as beggars, gypsies, petty thieves, vagrants, and casual
laborers “on the tramp.” On the “residuum,” a Victorian term, see Gertrude
Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1984), 356. On the particular stigma attached to
.casual labor during the latter half of the century, see generally Gareth
Stedman Jones, Outcast London A Study in the Relationship between
,
Classes in
Victorian Society (London: Oxford University Press, 1971).
6. William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (London, 1890),
25. All future references to Booth are from this text.
u
7. Rogues and Vagabonds
Lionel Rose, Vagrant Underworld in Britain
1815-1985 (London: Routledge, 1988), 91. Further citations in text.
8. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (New York:
Dover Publications, Inc., 1968), 1:1. Further citations in text.
9. Of course Godaiming is an aristocrat, but he participates in the Crew
of Light’s mission to uphold middle-class norms — female chastity,
monogamy, medicine, technology, and the written word, among others

against Dracula’s invasion.
10. At times, Mayhew becomes quite adamant about the distinction: “I

am anxious that the public should no longer confound the honest,
independent working men, with the vagrant beggars and pilferers of the
country; and that they should see that the one class is as respectable and
worthy, as the other is degraded and vicious” (3:371).
1 1 . Bram Stoker, Dracula (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 251.
Further references to Dracula are from this edition.
12. Quoted in Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives
of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1992), 27. Further citations in text.
13. Reverend Andrew Mearns, “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London,” in
Peter Keating, ed., Into Unknown England 1866-1913 ,
Selections from the
Social Explorers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976), 1 10.
14. Mearns compares animals’ lairs favorably to slums: “We do not say
the condition of their homes, for how can these places be called homes,
compared with which the lair of a wild beast would be a comfortable and
healthy spot?” (94).
15. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of
Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 131-32.
16. Charles Dickens, “The Uncommercial Traveller — On Tramps,” H//

the Year Round, June 1860, 232.
17. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York:
International Publishers, 1963), 75.
18. Through Arthur, Stoker makes explicit the latitude accorded
aristocrats based solely upon their social status, for only by using “Lord
Godaiming’s” name can Jonathan gain information about Dracula’s house in
Piccadilly, and only by Arthur’s request for a key can they enter the house
an invasion that mirrors Dracula’s invasion of England. Social extremes meet
in Arthur just as they do in Dracula —he is aristocrat and burglar, the former
facilitating the latter.
While the English identified all vagrants and poor wanderers as

19.
somewhat animal-like, gypsies bore the brunt of this stigma for their
supposed fondness of “unclean meat” and their willingness to live in close
quarters with animals. J. Ribton Turner, A History of Vagrants and Vagrancy

and Beggars and Begging (London, 1887), 496-97.
20. Even the history of the gypsies in Transylvania and England
suggests connections with the Count. George Borrow’s 1843 The Zincali, or
An Account of The Gypsies of Spain explains that the first gypsies in Eastern
Europe “made their appearance A.D. 1417 ... and settled in Moldavia.... a
greater number of adventurers followed during the next succeeding years,

making excursions into Wallachia, Transylvania, and Hungary.” This entry
of Gypsies from India to Dracula’s own region coincides roughly with the
lifetime of prince Vlad V of Wallachia, upon whom the character of Dracula
is based, who lived from 1431 to 1476. A conflation of the nobleman and the
gypsies who came to serve him, between Dracula and his Szgany, seems
highly possible given that the Count lived in the historical period during
which his country first became racially “impure.” While Dracula would
never admit to or even suspect gypsy lineage (“I am noble; I am boyar\ the
common people know me, and I am master” [20]), he himself remarks that
his people exist in “the whirlpool of European races,” that his blood, while
strong, is not like Lord Godaiming’s, “pure.” George Borrow, The Zincali or ,
An Account of The Gypsies of Spain (London, 1843), 1:14.

21. This tract is mentioned in Brian J. Frost, The Monster with a
Thousand Faces: Guises of the Vampire in Myth and Literature (Bowling Green:
Bowling Green State University Press, 1989), 43; and in Christopher
Frayling, ed., The Vampyre: Lord Ruthven
to Count Dracula (London: Victor
Gollancz, 1978), 40.

22. Encyclopedia of the Laws of England With Forms and Precedents ,
vol. 14
(London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1909), 418.
23. George K. Behlmer, “The Gypsy Problem in Victorian England”
Victorian Studies 28 (1985): 231.
24. The vagrant is more than likely Irish, given that he holds a
shillelagh, a wooden cudgel that was a traditional Irish weapon. Moreover,
the cartoon runs just a few years after the Irish Potato Famine, which
brought an enormous influx of Irish immigrants to England, many of whom
were forced to take up a tramping lifestyle. At the same time, the cartoon
seems to parody Oliver Twist's illustration of Sikes and Fagin gazing through
a window at Oliver, safe with Mr. Brownlow in the suburbs. (I am indebted
to David J. DeLaura and Donald Gray, respectively, for these suggestions.)
25. Martin J. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture ,
Law, and Policy
inEngla?id, 1830-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 215ff.
26. Daniel Pick argues, for instance, that “the text ... recognizes a
certain sense of failure —an element of horror is always left over,
uncontained” (71). Richard Wasson argues, “while on the surface Stoker’s
gothic political romance affirms the progressive aspects of English and
Western society, its final effect warn the twentieth century of dangers
is to
which faced it.... It is Dracula’s menace that is most memorable” (“The
Politics of Dracula,” English Lite?nture in Transition 9 [1966]: 27). Christopher
Craft argues that the “triple rhythm” of Stoker’s novel (characterized by the
Count’s invasion of England, his involvement with English citizens, then
expulsion) provides “aesthetic management” for the fears and anxieties raised
by the Count, but does not ultimately allay them (217).
“
27. For example, according to Carol A. Senf, Dracula reveals the
unseen face in the mirror; and Stoker’s message is similar to the passage from
Julius Caesar which ... might be paraphrased in the following manner: ‘The
fault, dear reader, is not in our external enemies, but' in ourselves’” {“Dracula:
The Unseen Face Mirror,” Journal of Narrative Technique 9 [1979]:
in the
170). According to Burton Hatlen, Dracula is “the other that we cannot

escape, because he is part of us” (125). Gail B. Griffin argues that “the roots
of ... Harker’s experiences in the castle are, of course, in himself: uneasiness
and fear mingle with ‘longing’: the ‘dark and dreadful things’ are in his own
‘wicked, burning desire’” (“ Dracula and the Victorian Male Sexual
Imagination,” International Journal of Women's Studies 3 [1980]: 455).
28. Van Helsing suggests that the staking of Lucy will prevent the
children’s transformation (215), just as the staking of Dracula prevents
Mina’s, but why then does he insist that if Arthur had been bitten by Lucy he
would certainly after death “have become nosferatu as they call
,
it in Eastern
Europe” (214)?
NINA AUERBACH
Dracula: A Vampire of Our Own
Dracula’s New Order
D racula
of ages, that
is so
it
musty and foul-smelling, so encrusted with the corruption
sounds perverse to call him “new.” The up-to-date young
people who hunt him dread his ancientness. To them, Dracula is not simply
evil; he is an eruption from an evil antiquity that refuses to rest in its grave.
The earnest Jonathan Harker, who visits Castle Dracula to his bane, fears
that although his shorthand diary “is nineteenth century up-to-date with a
vengeance,” “the old centuries had, and have powers of their own which
mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill .” 1 Ruthven and Carmilla looked as young as
their enthralled prey; Dracula flings his weight of ages against the acquired
skills of a single generation. Surely this antediluvian leech has no role in their
smart new century.
In his novel, Dracula awes because he is old, but within the vampire
tradition, his very antiquity makes him new, detaching him from the
progressive characters who track him. Ruthven was in some threatening
sense a mirror of his schoolfellow Aubrey; Varney reflected his predatory
society; Carmilla mirrored Laura’s own lonely face. But in our first clue to
Dracula’s terrible nature, Jonathan Harker looks in his shaving mirror and
sees no one beside him. In Jonathan’s mirror, the vampire has no more face
From Our Vampires Ourselves.

,
© 1995 by the University of Chicago Press.
192 NINA AUERBACH
than does Dickens’s Spirit of Christmas Future. In his blankness, his

impersonality, his emphasis on sweeping new orders rather than insinuating
intimacy, Dracula is the twentieth century he still haunts. Not until the
twentieth century was he reproduced, fetishized, besequeled, and obsessed
over, though many of his descendants deny his lovelessness —and perhaps
their own as well. Dracula’s disjunction from earlier, friendlier vampires
makes him less a specter of an undead past than a harbinger of a world to
come, a world that is our own. 2
Most critics who bother to study Dracula at all proceed on the lazy
assumption that since all vampires are pretty much alike, his origins extend
neatly back through the nineteenth century to Lord Ruthven, Varney, and,
particularly, Carmilla. 3 Dracula, however, is less the culmination of a
tradition than the destroyer of one. His indifference to the sort of intimacy
Carmilla offered a lonely daughter is a curt denial of the chief vampire
attribute up to his time.
Carmilla aspired to see herself in a friend. Dracula, in one of his few
self-definitions, identifies only with a vanished conquering race whose token
is not a mortal but an animal: “We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in
our veins flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights,
for lordship” (p. 28). No human can share the mirror with a lord of lost races
whose names Englishmen can’t pronounce. Dracula’s strangeness hurls to
oblivion the Byronic vampire refrain, “Remember your oath.” Earlier
vampires insinuated themselves into a humanity Dracula reshapes, through
magic and mesmerism, into his unrecognizable likeness.
Dracula s literary affinities
' lie less with vampires in earlier prose tales
than with Keats’s Lamia (1820), a poem that insists on the barriers between
immortal predator and human prey. Lamia is a gorgeous serpent-woman
whose influence flowers in vampire works of the 1890s; before that, she
mattered less to vampire writers than did Geraldine, the serpent-woman of
Coleridge’s Christabel ,
who bequeathed human sympathies to the vampires
she engendered.
Geraldine, we remember, diffused herself into Christabel’s bleak
household, exuding her identity into Christabel herself and half-becoming
as Le Fanu’s Carmilla would do —the dead mother of her beloved female
prey. Geraldine’s potency rested in the breast that transfixed Christabel, a
breast the reader never saw: the fountain of her expansive power was “a sight
to dream of, not to tell.”
Lamia dreams and tells; its serpent-woman is less sharer than spectacle.
Like Lycius, the innocent young man she seduces, we watch Lamia’s
transformative gyrations from without. Some of us might have breasts, but
Dracula: A Vampire of Our Own 193
none of us has Lamia’s exotically endowed body, “Striped like a zebra,
freckled like a pard, / Eyes like a peacock, and all crimson barr’d.” 4 Like
Dracula with his Szekelys and lions, Lamia transfixes spectators because she
belongs to a world only exotic animals share; no human body can emulate
hers. Like Dracula’s, Lamia’s main vampiric attribute is not interpenetration,
but transformation.
Keats’s poem, like Stoker’s novel, is a tale of metamorphoses. Lamia
mutates continually (from serpent to goddess to mortal woman to nullity),
confirming as she does so the barriers between life forms; over and over, she
defines herself by what she is not. The world of Keats’s gods, to which she
belongs, is as distinct from that of mortals as is the world of Stoker’s
vampires: “Into the green-recessed woods they flew; / Nor grew they pale, as
mortal lovers do” (11. 144-45). In Coleridge’s poem, Christabel’s father

understandably mistook Geraldine for his friend’s daughter, but Keats’s
Lycius never thinks Lamia is human, even after her transformation into a
maiden: like Stoker’s seemingly mad Renfield, Lycius worships another order
of being and knows he does. Christabel’s household absorbed the vampire,
while Lamia is segregated from the society she intoxicates: Lycius abandons
his own home for Lamia’s “purple-lined palace of sweet sin,” a retreat as
distinct from an ordinary residence as Stoker’s Castle Dracula.
As with Dracula, to know Lamia is to destroy her. In the spirit of

Stoker’s interdisciplinary expert Van Helsing, Lycius’s tutor Apollonius
recognizes Lamia for what she is; he eyes her piercingly at her wedding feast,
forcing her to vanish. The lore — scientific, superstitious, theological,

criminological, legal, and geographic —with which Van Helsing comes
equipped similarly allows Dracula to be defined and thus dissipated. For
Keats and Stoker, vampires are so distinct from humanity that to know them
is to dispel them; they can be cataloged, defined, and destroyed. Scientific
expertise supplants the oath with which Polidori bound vampire to mortal.
Expertise had little relevance to Dracula’s ancestors in English prose.
Weaving in and out of their human prey, mysteriously incorporating their
nature into our own, they were not remote spectacles, but congenial fellow
travelers who were scarcely separable from their victim or from us, their
victim/reader. Dracula is on a journey that is not ours. With his advent,

vampires cease to be sharers; instead, they become mesmerists, transforming
human consciousness rather than entering it. When he rejected Coleridge’s
Geraldine for Keats’s gorgeous Lamia, Bram Stoker created an uncongenial
vampire for an obscure future.
Dracula is defined by repudiations and new beginnings. Conventional
wisdom assumes its derivation from Carmilla but Stoker’s ,
most significant
revision excised from his manuscript the shadow of Carmilla and everything
194 NINA AUERBACH
she represented. In a canceled, posthumously published opening chapter,

frequently anthologized as “Dracula’s Guest,” Jonathan Harker is trapped in
a blizzard on his way to Castle Dracula. He stumbles into the tomb of
Countess Dolingen of Gratz

in Styria
Terrorized by her sleeping, then shrieking, specter, he is trapped until a great

wolf, which may be Dracula himself, shelters him from the storm and saves
him from this terrible woman. 5
Since Carmilla is also a female vampire from Gratz, in Styria, scholars
take Countess Dolingen as proof of Le Fanu’s influence on Stoker. 6 Actually,

though, the shadowy Countess personifies an influence rejected: the
spectacle of a “beautiful woman with rounded cheeks and red lips, seemingly
sleeping on a bier” (p. 170) has little to do with Le Fanu’s insinuating guest,
who, infiltrating the dreams of her hostess, is most dangerous when awake.
Moreover, if this chapter was ever part of Dracula 7 Stoker wisely deleted
,
it,
thereby exorcising an imperial female vampire who drives Dracula into an

alliance with Jonathan. The women Stoker retained — Dracula’s three
lascivious sister-brides; the vampirized Lucy and Mina—may writhe and
threaten, but all are finally animated and destroyed by masterful men. A
ruling woman has no place in the patriarchal hierarchy Dracula affirms, a
hierarchy that earlier, more playful and sinuous vampires subverted.
Dracula is in love less with death or sexuality than with hierarchies,
erecting barriers hitherto foreign to vampire literature; the gulf between
male and female, antiquity and newness, class and class, England and non-
England, vampire and mortal, homoerotic and heterosexual love, infuses its
genre with a new fear: fear of the hated unknown. Earlier prey knew their
vampires and often shared their gender: Carmilla introduces herself to Laura
in a childhood dream. But Dracula is barred from the dream of Stoker’s hero,
which admits only three “ladies by their dress and manner,” one of whose
faces Jonathan, like Laura, “seemed somehow to know ... and to know it in
connection with some dreamy fear” (p. 51). Jonathan’s flash of recognition
remains unresolved, tempting later vampire hunters to identify this fair
predator with Lucy or Mina or both. 8 But whichever woman arouses his
dreamy fear, Jonathan surely does not recognize his own face in the vampire’s
as Le Fanu’s Laura did. Like the empty mirror, the face of the demon cannot
reflect its prey, nor can Dracula participate in Jonathan’s exclusively
heterosexual vision of three laughing chomping women who are not only an
alien species, but an alien gender. Stoker austerely expels from his tale of
terror the “intimacy, or friendship” that had, since Byron’s time, linked
predator to prey.
Dracula-. A Vampire of Our Own 195
Like Lord Ruthven, Dracula was a proud servant’s offering of

friendship to a great man: the actor Henry Irving, whose splendid Lyceum
Theatre Stoker managed from its ascendancy in 1878 to its fall out of Irving’s
control in 1898. Like Byron, Irving became a hero for his age because he
played damnation with flair; his celebrated Mephistopheles gave Dracula his
contours, just as Byron’s sexual predations, in verse and out of it, had flowed
into Ruthven. Moreover, Irving, like Byron, could be turned into a vampire
by an underling not simply because he posed demon, but because both
as a
men radiated the hero’s simulated transparency. Though they were known by
all, they were tantalizingly unattainable in private to the men they lured into
fellowship.
But friendship with Irving was a tribute to exalted distance, not a spur
to dreams of intimacy. Ellen Terry, Irving’s partner at the Lyceum, wrote
shrewdly about his almost inhuman remoteness:
H.I. is odd when he says he hates meeting the company and

“shaking their greasy paws.” I think it is not quite right that he
does not care for anybody much.... Quiet, patient, tolerant,
impersonal, gentle, close, crafty! Crafty sounds unkind, but it is
H.I. ‘Crafty’ fits him.... For years he has accepted favours,

obligations to, etc., through Bram Stoker! Never will he
acknowledge them himself, either by business-like receipt or by
any word or sign. He ‘lays low’ like Brer Rabbit better than any
one I have ever met. 9
Accepting with pride the role of Irving’s liaison with the outside world,
Stoker was no Polidori, fantasizing class equality and impossible
communion. Stoker knew his place, a mightier one than Polidori’s. As
Byron’s personal physician, Polidori was hired to care for that famous body,
but he ministered only to be mocked. Stoker had no access to Irving’s body
but he did run his empire, where his responsibilities were “heady and
overwhelming. He oversaw the artistic and administrative aspects of the new
theatre, and acted as Irving’s buffer, goodwill ambassador, and hatchet man.
He learned the pleasures of snobbery,” admitting only the artistic and social
elite to the glamorous openings and even more theatrical banquets over
which Irving presided after the performance. 10 Like Jonathan in Dracula ,
Stoker deftly manipulated the business of modern empire — particularly the

intricacies of money, travel, and human contact —that paralyzed his master.
Onstage, Irving’s power to mesmerize crowds was as superhuman as the

vampire’s, but he relied, as Byron never did, on the worldly dexterity of the
servant who made him immortal.
196 NINA AUERBACH
Byron’s dismissal was Polidori’s mortal wound, but Irving never

betrayed Stoker’s faith in his master’s protection. Even when Irving’s
theatrical fortunes began to decline, shortly after Dracula was published,
Stoker continued to celebrate his master’s benevolent omnipotence, writing
glowingly about “the close friendship between us which only terminated
with his life — if indeed friendship, like any other form of love, can ever
terminate.” 11 One doubts whether the friendship was “close” in Polidori’s

sense, but when that life did terminate, Stoker wrote a two-volume official
memoir, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906), that consecrated his
subject with a reverence granted only to dignitaries and authors never, until —
then, to an actor. The Irving of Personal Reminiscences is as marmoreally
undead as the more animated Dracula.
Polidori never recovered from the humiliation of his service to Byron,
writing truculently that “I am not accustomed to have a master, & there fore
my conduct was not free & easy”; Stoker grew stately in his master’s shadow,
feeding on hero worship while paying extravagant lip service to heterosexual
love. 12 Polidori ’s “free & easy” vampire who subsists on mortal affinities
yielded at the end of the century to Stoker’s master, an impenetrable creature

hungering for control.
Jonathan’s Master
Dracula’s protracted intercourse with Lucy and Mina, whom he

transforms in foreplay so elaborate that few readers notice its narrative
incoherence, made him a star in the twentieth century. Jonathan Harker, the
only man who is Dracula’s potential prey, is overshadowed by bitten women
who, in Lord Ruthven’s time, were mere shadowy counters in the game
between the men. Jonathan, however, no player. His relation to Dracula is
is
defined solely by power and status, with none of the sympathetic fluctuations
that characterized the intercourse between Ruthven and Aubrey.
Polidori’s Aubrey was a “young gentleman” flattered to travel with
Lord Ruthven; Stoker’s Jonathan Harker is not a gregarious youth on a grand
tour, but a lonely tourist on a disorienting business trip who enters Castle
Dracula as an employee. Dracula’s ritual greeting
—“Welcome to my house.
Come freely. Go safely. And leave something of the happiness you bring” (p.
1 6) —sheds on his plodding solicitor the aura of an earlier age when travelers
were gentlemen whose freedom of motion could be assumed. Fussing about
his itinerary and his comfort, Jonathan is a coerced and reluctant tourist who
is never his own man even before he becomes the vampire’s prisoner.
Encompassed by wonders and horrors, he relinquishes all responsibility for
Dracula : A Vampire of Our Own 197
his journey with the querulous exclamation, “Was this a customary incident
in the life of a solicitor’s clerk sent out to explain the purchase of a London
estate to a foreigner?” (p. 13).
In fact, as Jonathan goes on to remind himself, he is no longer a clerk,
but a full-fledged solicitor. By the same standard, Count Dracula surely

would prefer to be referred to by his title, and he is no foreigner in his own
country. The edgy civil servant diminishes everything he describes; Dracula
inspires in him neither wonder nor curiosity. Because Jonathan withdraws
from communion into petty professionalism, employee and employer have
nothing in common. Dracula’s initial orations about his own heroism are a
self-obsessed public presentation far from the intimate confessions of
Carmilla, which demanded a response in kind. Like the Irving of Stoker’s
Personal Reminiscences, Dracula requires only an audience onto whom he can
exude his construction of himself. Like the Stoker of the Reminiscences
Jonathan is merely the intoning man’s scribe: “I wish I could put down all he
said exactly as he said it, for to me it was most fascinating” (Dracula, p. 28).
Even when Jonathan, spying, realizes that since there are no servants in
the castle, Dracula has been cooking and serving his meals, making his bed,
and driving him in the coach, he feels no affinity with his host in this menial
role: the servant’s proficiency only reinforces the master’s intimidating
omnipotence. From the beginning to the end, this vampire monotonously
plays the role he has assigned himself
—“I have been so long master that I
would be master still” (p. 20) —relinquishing the versatility of his kind.
There are no more companionable journeys, only Jonathan’s

uncommunicative voyeurism. 13 Instead of sharing with Dracula or feeding
him, Jonathan spies on him from distant sites. Critical ingenuity can detect
various subtle affinities between the horrified young man and the horrible
old vampire 14 — Jonathan, does, for instance, crawl out of the castle in the
same lizardlike fashion that appalled him when he watched Dracula do it
but finally, both assume the rigid roles of master and servant, spectacle and
spectator, tyrant and victim, monster and human, making no attempt to
bridge the distance. Caste, not kinship, determines their relationship. It is
impossible to imagine Dracula admonishing Jonathan to remember his oath,
for though Jonathan is a scrupulously obedient employee and even, for a
while, a courteous guest, he is incapable of the voluntary —and lordly— fealty
an oath demands. “Sent out” to the vampire, he quickly becomes the

vampire’s possession, though since he is too pure and proper to be possessed,
he fittingly remains unbitten.
According to Stoker’s working notes, the heart of Dracula was not
blood, but an assertion of ownership. “One incident and one alone remained
198 NINA AUERBACH
constant [from 1890] right up to publication day [in 1897]”: Dracula’s

occupation of Jonathan. One of Stoker’s editors unearths the claim at the
heart of his novel:
In March 1 890 Bram Stoker wrote on a piece of scrap paper, in

handwriting which he always called “an extremely bad hand”:
“young man goes out — sees girls one tries — to kiss him not on
the lips but throat. Old Count interferes —rage and fury
diabolical. This man belongs to me I want him.” Again, in
February 1892, in one of the many “structures he scribbled down:
‘Bistritz — Borgo Pass—Castle— Sortes Virgil—Belongs to me.’”
And in shorthand, again and again, over the next few years: “&
the visitors — —women stoop
is it a dream to kiss him, terror of
death. Suddenly the Count turns her away
— ‘this man belongs to
me’”; “May 15 Monday Women kissing”; “Book I Ch 8 Belongs
to me.” 15
Belongs to me. These words define the vampire the twentieth century cannot
leave alone. The shared Romantic journey in which nothing impedes two
gentlemen’s movements but he occult ends with a servant immobilized and
imprisoned in a castle he never wanted to enter. Byron’s “journey through
countries not hitherto much frequented by travellers” terminates in a
monomaniac’s refrain: “Belongs to me.”
Jonathan’s Progress
i
Dracula’s possession of vampire literature was so unremittingly bleak

that his best-known progeny tried not to hear their master’s words. Whether
they are moviemakers or literary critics, twentieth-century acolytes want to
turn this account of appropriation into a love story, as if invoking “love” and
“sex” would save our culture from seeing its own unresponsive face in the
mirror. 16 It goes against the grain to recast Stoker’s novel as a love story, but
the first (and still the best-known) film adaptations tried to return to a pre-
Dracula tradition by restoring, even intensifying, the homoerotic bond
between predator and prey: both discard Stoker’s Jonathan, a loyal employee
to his bones, for a self-determined protagonist who willfully abandons
domesticity to embrace undiscovered countries. But restoring the mutuality
between victim and vampire does not restore the half-human vampire of an
earlier tradition; instead, it forces us to question the possibility of human
men.
F.W. Murnau’s silent Nosferatu (1922) and Tod Browning’s stagy
Dracula (1931) feature the first male mortals in our tradition whom the
vampire not only lures, but actually bites. 17 Both choose to go to his country;
as penance for voluntarily crossing the border, both belong to the vampire
not only in body, but in blood. The young traveler into the unknown is not
an infatuated schoolmate, as Polidori’s Aubrey was; he is not simply “sent
out,” like Stoker’s Jonathan; he re-creates himself in his journey toward the
vampire. These early cinematic pilgrims are infected by the vampire’s hunger
before they set off to meet him. Their restless willingness to abandon
decorum adds psychological dimension to their relation with the vampire,
but it softens Stoker’s impersonal vision of dominion. Stoker’s Dracula can
subjugate the most stolidly reluctant mortal, while these movie Draculas cast
their spell only over alienated, even tainted visitors.
Murnau’s film features a sick city, not an invaded nation. Renfield, 18
Stoker’s lone “zoophagous” madman who becomes Dracula’s acolyte only
after incarceration in Dr. Seward’s asylum, is in Nosferatu Jonathan’s mad
employer, a secret enemy agent who chortles over the vampire’s occult
messages and gloats over his wish to buy a house “in our city.”
Jonathan —who now represents only a real estate agency, not the lofty
British law — is as receptive to the vampire’s infection as is the city itself.
Gustav von Wangenheim’s performance is all preening and guffawing. He is
delighted to abandon the embraces and mystic foreboding of Nina (not

“Mina”; see n. 18 above) —to whom he is already married in Murnau’s
version —for a stint in the land of the phantoms. Cautionary expertise, here
embodied in the Book of Vampires he finds at his inn, only makes him guffaw
further; with his instinctive respect for authority, Stoker’s Jonathan wore the
cross the worried peasant gave him, while Murnau’s Jonathan tosses the
book, and all authorities, aside with a blasphemous self-delighted laugh.
Unlike Stoker’s traveler, who waits with impatient helplessness for
yarious and increasingly sinister vehicles, Murnau’s walks across the border.
His coachman refuses to pass over the bridge into the land of phantoms, and
so Jonathan crosses it on foot, accompanied by the portentous title: “And
when he had crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him.”
This momentous transition is far from the nervous docility of Stoker’s
Jonathan: “I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and
would start as near the correct time as possible. The impression I had was
that we were leaving the West and entering the East” (p. 1). In Murnau’s film,
at the moment of Jonathan’s crossing, the world changes: beyond the bridge,
the film is photographed in negative, reversing the phantasmal country to

black-on-white rather than conventional white-on-black.
Max Schreck’s Dracula is closer to the ghostly Ruthven of the Victorian
stage than to the heavily material creatures of Stoker’s novel. Murnau’s
200 NINA AUERBACH
looking-glass photography and Schreck’s luminous makeup, with his

radiantly obtruding bald dome, fingers, ears, nose, and ratlike teeth (which,
unlike the familiar dripping canines, he never seems to use), function like the
Victorian vampire trap to demate rialize the creature’s hunger. Like those of
the Victorian actor disembodied in the vampire trap, his movements are
ostentatiously unnatural: on the ship, he doesn’t climb out of his coffin, but
is miraculously elevated from it; in Bremen, he dissolves (with his coffin!)
through a solid door.
Moreover, while Stoker gets his first big effect by revealing that his
corporeal Dracula has no soul and therefore casts no shadow, Schreck becomes
hisshadow in the climactic episodes when he stalks Jonathan and Nina, a
shadow even more elongated than his body, its interminable fingers seeming
to slide through matter as it glides toward his prey. This vampire is scarcely
bounded by matter, expanding into the shadow, or looking-glass image, of
the madly chortling community that courted him, of which Jonathan is the
representative.
Murnau not only has Dracula bite Jonathan at least once (Nina’s
somnambulistic powers prevent a second attack); his crosscutting emphasizes
the parallel rhythms of the vampire’s and Jonathan’s journeys back to
Bremen — a suggestive convergence that Stoker’s narrative chronology
suppresses —so that when die invasion finally comes, we are never sure
whether Dracula or Jonathan (or both in collusion) unleashes the rats that
carry the plague that wastes the city.
Like his vulnerable agents (Renfield is lynched for his collaboration

with the vampire, and Jonathan is ambiguously debilitated for the rest of the
movie), Murnau’s Dracula is more carrier than master. His ghostliness makes
him as fragile as he is agile. Isolated by his clownlike * makeup and by
immobilizing compositions that confine him within closed spaces or behind
bars, he is no more than a shadow of the community he infects. As the first
vampire to be destroyed by the sun under which Stoker’s Dracula paraded

vigorously, 19 he inaugurates an important twentieth-century tradition; but
when Nina sacrifices herself to family and community by keeping Dracula
with her after daybreak, Schreck merely vanishes. Unlike the more seductive
vampires of the 1960s and ’70s, he is not fleshly enough to burn.
The final title
— “as the shadow of the vampire vanishes with the
morning sun” —presumably heals the stricken community and Jonathan as
well, allowing us to forget the ominous fact that the sun usually creates
shadows rather than dissipating them. But Bremen has already infected itself
from within. It was Jonathan’s wanton walk across the bridge that desecrated
his family and city, thereby fusing the domestic and the foreign, the mortal
and the monster, the victim and the tyrant, all of whom Stoker kept carefully
Dracula : A Vampire of Oivr Own 201
apart. By making Dracula a shadow of the good men of Bremen, Murnau also
crosses the bridge between men and women that Stoker scrupulously erects:
Stoker’s Dracula possesses only females, while Murnau’s uses no lustful,
animalistic women as his agents, but only respectable men. According to the
Book of Vampires that Jonathan discovers, “Nosferatu drinks the blood of the
young.” Indifferent to gender, Nosferatu unleashes mass death, not
individual sexuality. Anyone, under Murnau’s rules, will satisfy a vampire.
But only a pure woman can destroy one. Nina accordingly becomes the
final, crucial bridge between town and invader, humanity and the monster.
By luring the vampire to her bed so that he will vanish with daybreak, Nina
both dies for humanity and, more knowingly than her husband, crosses the
bridge beyond it. Nina’s ambiguous sacrifice abolishes Stoker’s polarization
between pure and carnal women, for Nina is less a victim than a link between
shadow and substance, life and death, corruption and respectability. She may
dispel Max Schreck, but she also marries him to the civil domesticity she
represents 20 .
Murnau’s film is, of course, admonitory, not, as Stoker wanted to be,

congratulatory: Stoker quarantined his vampire from British civilization,
while Murnau’s was a shadow of his own diseased Germany 21 Thus,
.
Nosferatu itself crosses the bridge between classes, genders, and orders of
being that Dracula erected so carefully. But in bringing Jonathan and Dracula
together, as sinister collaborators if not friends (Murnau’s Dracula reads with
silent disdain as Jonathan wolfs down his meals, while Stoker’s declaims
about himself at length as Jonathan nibbles delicately), Murnau does not

restore the vampire’s mortal sympathies; instead, he intensifies Stoker’s
vision of impersonal power. Max Schreck is dispelled, but he was only the
city’s shadow. Nosferatu seems to begin where Dracula might have ended, in a
community that has been transformed into something savage and rampant.
An image of the picturesque antihuman, Bremen survives its citizens,
whether they are mortals or vampires.

Tod Browning’s American Dracula is famous now only for Bela Lugosi’s
performance, but in one sense this commercial American movie, inexpertly
adapted from a popular if quite un-Stokeresque Broadway play, is more
daring than the masterpiece of German Expressionism serious audiences
revere. Following Murnau’s lead, Browning transforms Jonathan from a
dutiful servant with corporate loyalties to an eccentric trespasser who courts

transformation, but Browning’s defiant explorer, the wild and maddened
Renfield, is no prospective husband; he is scarcely even a man of business.
Dracula’s visitor is no longer Stoker’s stolid, if fragile, emissary of Western
civilization; as Dwight Frye plays him, Renfield is so effete and overbred that
he is more bizarre than Lugosi’s impeccably mannered vampire 22 .
202 NINA AUERBACH
Renfield has nothing of the employee about him: florid and faintly
effeminate, he Hollywood version of a .decadent English gentleman.
is a
Stoker’s Jonathan was infallibly, if condescendingly, courteous to his

Transylvanian hosts; Browning’s Renfield orders them around like a stock
American tourist, even calling imperiously to his unholy coachman, “Hi,
Driver! What do you mean by going at this — His disapproval is squelched
only when he sees that his coach is being led by a bat (not, in this version, by
Lugosi himself, whose Dracula is too stately to make a good servant).
Renfield’s white hat and cane make him an oddly dapper figure among the
hefty Transylvanians; he floats through his coarse surroundings with a
demeanor of dreamy rapture that anticipates Fred Astaire’s until, to his
horror, the ghostly vampire women sw arm around
r
him and he faints, only to
be swooped upon by Dracula.
This Dracula never affirms “This man belongs to me,” for Dwight
Frye’s Renfield belongs to nobody. He does claim that his journey is “a
matter of business,” later muttering something to Dracula about the lease on
Carfax Abbey, but he represents no organization, nor is he tied to the
domestic characters we will meet later. “I trust you have kept your coming
here secret,” Dracula intones. Renfield indicates that a secret journey posed
no problem, thereby breaking the social w eb
r
that bound Stoker’s Jonathan to
the mighty institutions of British law' and marriage and implicated Murnau’s
Jonathan in civic corruption and domestic hypocrisy.
The doomed traveler in the American Dracula floats beyond ties, so it
is safe for himbecome Dracula’s servant. Once bitten, he turns

to
extravagantly mad, but unlike the women, he isn’t quite a vampire. In the
long, dull domestic portion of the film, Dwight Frye’s pyrotechnics provide
a counterpoint to the stolidity of humans and vampire alike, just as his
—
character the vampire’s servant w ho can’t shake off human sympathies
links human to inhuman by belonging to neither. Renfield is as alien and
irritating to Dracula, w'ho finally tosses him down a huge staircase, as he is to
his mortal and supposedly sane caretakers. In the American 1930s, the
corrupt traveler, not the vampire, is the movie’s authentic alien. Sucking
blood is less sinful than is Renfield’s mercurial desire to leave home.
The Transylvanian beginning, the most compelling portion of the
movie, hints at the old Byronic fellowship between dandy and vampire.
Renfield is not Dracula’s property as Stoker’s Jonathan was, but neither is he
Dracula’s friend. The film establishes an identification between these tw'o
overdressed creatures —Lugosi wears cloak, tuxedo, and medals even
indoors —that in 1931 America whispered of perversity. Bela Lugosi is not
the phantom Max Schreck w as; he r
is corpulent, clothes-conscious, and, in
close-up, clearly wearing lipstick and eye makeup, the only male character
Dracula A Vampire of Our Own 203
who does. In the “dinner” scene that follows Jonathan’s arrival, no food is
served; this Dracula avoids the indignity of cooking for his guest and the
awkwardness of watching him eat 23 There no coziness
. is in this Castle
Dracula, only the covertly titillating effect of two baroque men eyeing each
other in a grotesque set freighted with cobwebs, candelabra, and suits of
armor. Renfield gets only a glass of wine, and that only so Lugosi can intone
his deathless “I never drink vine ,” an archly self-aware aside that
Browning’s movie originates: Stoker’s growling Count was no ironist.
The wine also allows Renfield to cut himself so that Dracula can eye
him hungrily and then shy away from his crucifix. But even before he sees
blood, Dracula has been leaning lewdly toward Renfield; when Renfield
sucks the blood from his own finger, Dracula grins knowingly, presumably
savoring their affinities. When, in a silent, gracefully choreographed
sequence, he banishes the vampire women and stretches toward Renfield ’s

throat, he communicates less pride of ownership than the embrace of
kinship. Browning’s Renfield is so clearly beyond the pale of any human
community that the bond between vampire and mortal Stoker did his best to
break is, however briefly and perversely, renewed.

But once they leave Transylvania and the domestic story begins, this
faint communion of dandies is over: power and mastery prevail 24 Renfield

.
mutates from fop into madman who is always trying vainly to elude his many
keepers; Lugosi also drops his foppishness, becoming so dependent on
commanding attitudes and penetrating stares that he practically turns into a
monument. His affinities are no longer with the mercurial Renfield, but with
Edw'ard Van Sloan’s marmoreal Van Helsing, who is even more autocratic
than the vampire. Whatever intensity the movie retains comes less from
Dracula’s predations among sketchily characterized women than from Van
Helsing’s and Dracula’s battle of wills.
Humanity triumphs when Van Helsing becomes a more overbearing
patriarch than the vampire. He disposes of the other human men almost as
easily as he stakes Dracula, for Seward is a cipher and Jonathan a fool.
Unable to imagine a heroic human lover, Browning’s adaptation consigns

Jonathan to romantic parody, breathing such lines as “My, what a big bat!”
and (to Mina as she is manifesting vampiric tendencies) “You’re so — like a
changed girl. You look wonderful!” Such a silly man might become a
husband when the vampire is dead, but he is no use to heroes. Browning

drops the corporate ethos that makes the vampire hunt possible in Stoker’s
novel 23 . Van Helsing brooks no collaborators; he saves humanity by barking
out the Dracula-like demand, “I must be master here or I can do nothing.”
The affinities of Transylvania fall away; the question of Browning’s film is
which is to be master. Once the movie concludes that humanity needs a

204 NINA AUERBACH
leader, Dracula becomes surprisingly vulnerable, allowing himself to be

staked with scarcely an offscreen grunt. Does he refuse to fight for his life
because he misses home and Renfield?

Immediate descendants of Stoker’s novel, Murnau’s Nosferatu and
Browning’s Dracula struggle to reunite the vampire to his mortal friend. In
both cases, though, apparent affinity yields to that more vulnerable bond,
perversity. 26 Finally, both films acquiesce in the emphasis on power they
inherit from Stoker: Murnau’s stricken Jonathan languishes into the civic
corruption both he and the vampire represent; Browning’s Dracula abandons

Renfield to his keepers to engage in an authoritarian duel with Van Helsing.
Both movies finally succumb to the coldness at the heart of Stoker’s novel,
the requiem of a tradition of intimacy.
Dracula is a desolate inheritance for Murnau’s Nosferatu and Browning’s
Dracula which
,
become more joyless as they proceed, concluding in images
of ineffable Both are more doleful than the novel they adapt because
loss.
both banish Stoker’s Lucy Westenra, whose kaleidoscopic transformations

are Stoker’s substitute for the affection that had been the primary vampire
endowment. Lucy’s transformations, the most memorable spectacles of the
novel and of most movies after the 1960s, leaven the heterosexual hierarchies
that deform the creatures vampires had been. By relegating Lucy to the role
of an incidental off-screen victim, Murnau and Browning cast off Stoker’s
sadism as well as his spectacle; by focusing instead on a restless man who

travels beyond boundaries toward the vampire, both apparently look back
with some yearning toward the homoerotic phase of vampire literature.
Finally, though, their stories are trapped in the weary decorum with which
Stoker made vampires palatable in the 1890s.
Vampire Propriety
Critics unfamiliar with vampire evolution fail to notice the relative

respectability of Stoker’s predators, especially his women. Bram Dijkstra, for
example, deplores Dracula s legacy in terms quite different from mine.

'
Disapproving of vampires in general rather than these particular vampires,

he laments that after Stoker, “Female vampires were now everywhere.... By
1900 the vampire had come to represent woman as the personification of
everything negative that linked sex, ownership, and money.” 27 But Stoker
cleaned up more than he degraded. Above all, he gentrified female vampires,
who, monogamously heterosexual. Van Helsing even
for the first time, are
seems ô doubt whether Lucy can digest female blood, at least from the veins
of servants. According to his diagnosis, “A brave man’s blood is the best thing
on this earth when a woman is in trouble” (p. 149), and also, presumably,
when she needs nourishment.
Not only do Lucy and the sister-brides in Castle Dracula prowl

exclusively at men; 28 Lucy, at least, becomes more virtuous after death than
she was in life. Far from personifying woman-hating in late

a reversion to
Victorian men, Lucy raises the tone of female vampirism by avoiding messy
entanglements with mortals, directing her “voluptuous wantonness” to her
fiance alone.
“Come to me, Arthur. Leave those others and come to me. My arms
are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband,
come!” (p. 257). As a vampire, Lucy the flirt is purified into Lucy the wife.
The restless pet who had collected marriage proposals and complained,
“Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or asmany as want her, and save
all this trouble?” (p. 78), the enticing invalid who had “married,” through
blood transfusions, those very three men (plus the smitten Van Helsing),
ignores, as a vampire, “those others” who bled into her adoringly: for the
first time she wants her prospective husband and no one else.
Vampirism in Dracula does not challenge marriage, as it did earlier; it
inculcates the restraints of marriage in a reluctant Even before Arthur girl.
celebrates their wedding night with hammer and stake, thumping away
unfalteringly while her “body shook and quivered and twisted in wild
contortions” (p. 262), Dracula had baptized Lucy into wifely fidelity.
Lucy is more monogamous than the promiscuous vampires she
inspired. Two representative vampire women from 1900 have no loyalties
left; both are indiscriminate incarnations of female hunger. Hume Nesbit’s
story “The Vampire Maid” reduces its Ariadne to a biting thing: “I had a
ghastly dream this night. I thought I saw a monster bat, with the face and
tresses of Ariadne, fly into the open window and fasten its white teeth and
scarlet lips on my arm. I tried to beat the horror away, but could not, for I
seemed chained down and thralled also with drowsy delight as the beast
sucked my blood with a gruesome rapture.” 29 When church restorers

disinter an ancient demon in F. G. Loring’s story “The Tomb of Sarah,”
scientific reality is more ghastly than any dream: “There lay the vampire, but
how changed from the starved and shrunken corpse we saw two days ago for
the first time! The wrinkles had almost disappeared, the flesh was firm and
full, the crimson lips grinned horribly over the long pointed teeth, and a
distinct smear of blood had trickled down one corner of the mouth.” 30
Lucy’s progeny, Ariadne and Sarah, do not, like her, mature through
vampirism into true womanhood: they are closer to the will-less killing machines
who dominate later twentieth-century vampire literature. These dreadful female
mouths that feed on popular culture at the turn of the century do personify
unleashed female energy in the fear-mongering way Dijkstra suggests, but this
energy is not as anarchic as it looks. Since these indiscriminate biters are
heterosexual, their raging desire aggrandizes men as well as depleting them.

206 NINA AUERBACH
Moreover, their men are immune from female demonism: Ariadne and
Sarah offer not Carmilla’s dangerous empathy, but oblivion. Ariadne induces
“drowsy delight”; Sarah lures young man by murmuring, “I give sleep and
a
peace —sleep and peace — sleep and peace” (p. 103). These fin-de-siecle
vampires do not arouse unclassified sensations; they induce postcoital
fatigue. Their horror springs from their propriety. As good women, they
want only men; in approved motherly fashion, they do not stimulate, but lull.
The vampires Lucy spawned may be more promiscuous than she, but they
are, like her, sexually orthodox. A model of wifeliness, as much a true woman
as a new one, Lucy infused womanliness into her kind. Her innovative
propriety is a testament to the heterosexuality of her twin creators, Dracula
and Bram Stoker.
Perhaps because he is so normal, Dracula is the most solitary vampire
we have met. He is, as far as we see, the only male vampire in the world: there
isno suggestion that the sailors he kills on his voyage to England will join
the ranks of the Undead. Moreover, he can anticipate no companionship, for
Stoker’s rules allow only humans to unite. “We have on our side power of
—
combination a power denied to the vampire kind” (p. 238), Van Helsing
assures his vigilante community. Ruthven, Varney, Carmilla, and their ilk
flourished because of their “power of combination”: gregariousness was their
lethal talent.
Innovative in his isolation, Dracula can do nothing more than catalyze

homoerotic friendship among the humans who hunt him. His story abounds
in overwrought protestations of friendship among the men, who testify
breathlessly to each other’s manhood. In fact, Van Helsing should thank the
vampire for introducing him to such lovable companion*;. Borrowing the
idiom of Oscar Wilde’s letters to Lord Alfred Douglas, he declares himself to
Lucy’s former fiance “I have —
grown to love you yes, my dear boy, to love
you — as Arthur” (p. 169). For Dracula and his acolyte Renfield, blood is the
life, but the men who combine against him find life by drinking in each
other’s “stalwart manhood” (p. 168).
Dracula forges this male community of passionate mutual admiration,

but he cannot join it. Only indirectly, by drinking Lucy’s blood after the four
men have “married” her (and each other) in a series of transfusions, can
Dracula infiltrate the heroic brotherhood. Turning women into vampires
does nothing to mitigate his solitude: his mindless creations have too little in
common with him to be friends. Many twentieth-century adaptations soften

Dracula’s contempt for women by making him fall in love with Mina, aiming
to promote her to his co-ruler, but in Stoker’s original, Mina is only a pawn
in his battle against the men. Stripped of his power of combination,
catalyzing homoerotic friendships in which he cannot participate, this
vampire loses his story, for he has no confidante willing to hear it.
Dracula begins the novel by telling an unresponsive Jonathan Harker

his history in almost flawless English, but thereafter he is silent. In the
massive, impeccably collated testimony that comprises the long English
portion of the novel, Dracula has no voice: he leaps in and out to make
occasional florid boasts, but his nature and aspirations are entirely
constructed —and diminished—by others, especially Van Helsing.
As Van Helsing gains authority, Dracula’s fluency evaporates into the
dimensions of a case history. The lordly host who began the novel was,
according to Jonathan, a master of civilized “He would have made a
skills:
wonderful solicitor, for there was nothing that he did not think of or foresee.
For a man who was never in the country, and who did not evidently do much
in the way of business, his knowledge and acumen were wonderful” (p. 44).
In England, though, Jonathan and the rest turn their judgment over to Van
Helsing, whose floundering English somehow confirms his authority, as that
of psychiatrists will do in 1930s popular culture. Van Helsing assures his
followers that the vampire is still precivilized, “a great child-brain” growing
only slowly into the position of “the father or furtherer of a new order of
beings” (pp. 302-3). Having devolved, under Van Helsing’s authority, from
magus to embryonic patriarch, Dracula is easily immobilized and trapped. As
a presence, he is extinguished so early that at the end, a mere bowie knife kills
him: his death requires neither Bible nor stake. Dracula is so easily, even
inevitably, obliterated that all concerned forget the elaborate rituals needed
to still the writhing Lucy. 31
Dracula is dissipated less by science or the occult than by the clamor of
experts that gave form to his decade. His responsiveness to his enemies’
classifications sets him apart from the other great monsters of his century.
Frankenstein’s creature galvanized his book with an eloquent apologia
halfway through. Even monsters who had not read Milton defined
themselves with ease: Lord Ruthven in his various incarnations, Varney,
Camilla, all renewed themselves through compelling and compulsive self-
presentations. Varney dissociated himself easily from the ignorant mob that
pursued him, whose superstitious violence threw the vampire’s superior
humanity into relief. Dracula has no mob to tower over, but only the
constraining categories of professional men. His relative silence has, of
course, fed his life in the twentieth century: as we shall see, he is so
suggestively amorphous in Stoker’s novel that he is free to shift his shape
with each new twentieth-century trend. 32 In 1897, though, Dracula was,

despite his occult powers, so comparatively docile a vampire, so amenable to
others’ definitions, that he stifled the tradition that preceded him.
As the first vampire who conforms to social precepts, fading into
experts’ definitions rather than affirming his unnatural life, Dracula is a
consummate creation of the late 1890s, dutifully transmitting its legacy to

208 NINA AUERBACH
our own expert-hounded century. The British 1 890s were haunted not only
by the Undead, but by a monster of its. own clinical making, the
homosexual. 33 In constructing an absolute category that isolated “the
homosexual” from “normal” men and women, medical theory confined
sexuality as narrowly as Van Helsing does the vampire. More in conformity
than in ferocity, Dracula takes definition from a decade shaped by medical
experts.
I suspect that Dracula’s primary progenitor is not Lord Ruthven,
Varney, or Carmilla, but Oscar Wilde in the dock. 34 The Labouchere
Amendment of 1885, which criminalized homosexuality among men, not
only authorized Wilde’s conviction: it restricted sexuality in the next decade
“by shifting emphasis from sexual acts between men, especially sodomy, the
traditional focus of legislation, to sexual sentiment or thought, and in this
way to an abstract entity soon to be widely referred to as ‘homosexuality’”

(Dellamora, Masculine Desire ,
p. 200). The Wilde trials of 1895 put a judicial
seal on the category the Labouchere Amendment had fostered. As a result of
the trials, affinity between men lost its fluidity. Its tainted embodiment, the
homosexual, was imprisoned in a fixed nature, re-created as a man alone, like
Dracula, and, like Dracula, one hunted and immobilized by the “stalwart
manliness” of normal citizens. Now unnatural and illegal, the oath that
bound vampire to mortal was annulled.
Before the Wilde trials, vampires felt free to languish in overtly
in “The True Story of a Vampire”

homoerotic adoration of their mortal prey:
by Count Stenbock, published the year before Wilde’s incarceration,
Eric,
Count Vardalek madly plays Chopin to a faunlike young man, kisses him on
the lips, and weeps over his “darling’s” diminishing “superabundance of
life.” 33 Dracula was born in reaction to Vardalek’s devouring love: new rules
imposed on his alien kind forbid him to love anyone on earth. The only
music that moves him is the music of the wolves, and he cannot participate
even in that.
Dracula’s silence recalls the silence forced on the voluble Wilde after
his trials. The foreigner who had poured out irresistible words in flawless
English tried vainly to speak after the judge had sentenced him to prison.
“‘And I?’ he began. ‘May I say nothing, my lord?’ But Mr. Justice Wills made
no reply beyond a wave of the hand to the warders in attendance, who
touched the prisoners on the shoulder and hurried them out of sight to the
cells below.” 36 As in the London books of Dracula the versatile and florid
,
performer disappears under institutional regulation.

The ghostliness of earlier vampires had deflected improper intercourse
with mortals: when a vampire walked through walls or turned for life to the
moon, audiences remembered that he was another order of being, one whose
body (as opposed to his teeth) could not quite penetrate a human’s. Dracula,
fully corporeal, has no sheltering spirituality, and so he is as vulnerable as
Oscar Wilde to opprobrium and incarceration. Unlike Wilde, however,

Dracula is careful.
His intensifying silence, his increasing acquiescence in what experts say

he is, reflect the caution of Stoker’s master, Henry Irving. In 1895, just after
the Wilde trials —which subdued English manhood in general and the
English theater in particular — Stoker began in earnest to write Dracula ,
which had haunted him for five years. Irving had spent 1895 lobbying for his
knighthood (the first ever awarded to an actor) by petrifying himself and his
Lyceum into attitudes of patriotic grandeur, although his imperial postures
had been assaulted by two wicked Irishmen: Shaw, whose savage reviews
exposed, in the person of Irving, all British heroes to terrible laughter; and
the seductively rude Wilde, whose comedies mocked everything that was
supposed to inspire Irving’s audiences. Bram Stoker, a third Irishman but a
loyal one, protected Irving against potentially lethal laughter. His Dracula
was fed by Wilde’s fall, but its taboos were those of his master, whose reward
came on May 24, 1895: on that day Irving’s knighthood and Wilde’s
conviction were announced, ending the comedy. As a martyr, though, Wilde
had won, for he drained the vitality of Stoker’s vampire as consummately as
he had deflated Irving’s heroics in his glory days.
When Irving died ten years later, the Daily Telegraph praised him for
rescuing England from the “cult” of Oscar Wilde (quoted in Skal, Hollywood
Gothic, p. 36). But he never rose again. Irving and all heroes were forced to
define themselves in opposition to the devastating figure of Wilde, whose
fate became an actual vampire that drained the vitality of future theatrical
generations. 37 Irving held the stage for a few more years because of what he
was not; he turned from player to exemplary fagade. Oscar Wilde in prison
constricted actors as well as vampires, forcing expansive figures into self-

protecting silence. The Wilde trials, and the new taboos that made them
possible, drained the generosity from vampires, forcing them to turn away
from friendship and to expend their energies on becoming someone else. 38
T RANS FORMATIONS
Adhering to more taboos than he breaks, Dracula inhibits future

vampires in major ways. Varney and his ilk reached outward to take their
essential life from the moon; Dracula takes his from his coffin. His existence
is hedged by absolute if arbitrary rules vampires fear to break even now. His
need to travel with hampering boxes of native earth; his enfeebling inability
to form alliances; his allergies to crucifixes, communion wafers, and garlic;

210 NINA AUERBACH
his vulnerability to daylight — all defined vampires by the many things they
could not do.
In Transylvania, his fixed role of master blocks his infiltration of human
lives; in London, his helpless responsiveness to expert definition depletes
him long before his actual death. The creature who insists on playing master
is forced to take the shape of human fears. But despite these impediments,
Dracula has one gift that inaugurates a new dispensation for vampires: his
transforming powers, the sole compensation for his hedged-in life.
Before Dracula ,
vampires were incessantly, aggressively, themselves,
though some, like Varney, had a predilection for disguise, while others, like
the stage Ruthven, faded in and out of materiality. The midcentury moon,
the source of their occult powers, turned them on and off like a light switch
without altering their natures. Early film Draculas share these intact egos,
scarcely evoking Stoker’s mutable monster. Max Schreck’s and Bela Lugosi’s
define themselves by florid, reiterated mannerisms and extravagant makeup
that immobilizes their expressiveness. “I am Dracula,” Lugosi announces
with ponderous relish. Surely he will never be anyone else.
Stoker’s Dracula, on the other hand, is many creatures, not all of whom
have titles or even names. Not only does he go from a steely old man to a
frisky young one in the course of his novel, stealing the youth from a
Jonathan grown white-haired and tired; he becomes at need a wolf, a bat, a
dog, as well as fog and mist. Animals flee Max Schreck’s phantasmal Dracula,
the enemy of vitality, but animals become Stoker’s Dracula, who inaugurated
the shape-shifting vampire we live with today. Barred from union with
mortals or with other vampires, Dracula diffuses his solitary nature into
other orders of being.
But his transformations are more convenient than spectacular. After
reaching London, he is so indirect a presence in his story that his
metamorphoses are muffled. We never see him changing shape; his ability to
slide in and out of human form makes him a wily antagonist, not a source of
awe. His changes are modestly presented compared to those of Lucy and
Mina, his female victims. Once again, women perform on behalf of withheld
males the extreme implications of vampirism. Just as Camilla played out the
erotic implications of Ruthven ’s forbidden friendship, Lucy and Mina exhibit
the new metamorphic prowess of vampirism in the 1 890s.
One of Stoker’s great chills is Van Helsing’s tolling line: “Madam Mina,
our poor, dear, Madam Mina, is changing” (p. 382). The line is authentically
frightening because it is uncharacteristically subtle, reminding us that we
have no fixed idea what Mina is changing into. We know what Lucy, the
pampered belle, became when she changed, but how can Mina become a
fleshly predator, a “bloofer [beautiful] lady” who offers children dangerous
kisses?
For Mina, unlike Lucy, is an earnest wife and unwavering motherly

beacon inspiring brave men. Even before she is bitten, her almost occult
secretarial competence endows her with the metamorphic potential of the
New Woman; she repeatedly saves the day by knowing some bit of mystic
lore about office work. Accordingly, once Mina begins to be a vampire, she
is no bloofer lady, but a medium whose mind forces itself into Dracula’s until,
immobilized in his coffin, he virtually becomes her creature. Lucy is
transformed into a ravenous animal, Mina into a clair-voyant; neither is like
their progenitor Dracula (both lack his shape-shifting ability, hairy palms,
red eyes, and veneer of civility), nor do they have the ironic tinkling laughs
of Dracula’s Transylvanian sister-brides. No vampire, it seems, is like any
other. In fact, as vampires, Lucy and Mina have less in common with each
other than they did when they were alive. T he discrepancy between the
women’s transformations hints at the range of a vampire’s possible selves.
Sexually, Stoker’s vampires are dutifully conventional; personally, they

lack flair, craving only power and possession. They are striking only in their
transformative potential. Like all respectable creatures, they suggest more
selves than they let us see. Most particularly, their animal affinities, which
may seem the ultimate constraint in their already constrained lives, point
toward an expanded being new to vampires.
Hitherto I had noticed the backs of his hands as they lay on his
knees in the firelight, and they had seemed rather white and fine;
but seeing them now close to me, I could not but notice that they
were rather coarse— broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say,
there were hairs in the centre of the palm. The nails were long
and fine, and cut to a sharp point. As the Count leaned over me
and his hands touched me, I could not repress a shudder. It may
have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of
nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could not
conceal. (Pp. 25-26)
In Jonathan’s first extended view of Dracula, he is fine (aristocratic) in dim

light, coarse (animal) when he comes close. His civilized and his brutal sides
seem as rigidly differentiated as were Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’s. No one but
Jonathan suggests that his breath may be rank; Lucy and Mina, who know his
mouth, never admit to smelling it; thus it is likely that it is not his bad breath,
but his hairy palm, or animal potential, that brings on Jonathan’s “horrible
feeling of nausea.” On this first meeting, Dracula flaunts his animalism more
than he will do later. His sly touch is a prelude to his lyrical response to the
howling of the wolves: “Listen to them —the children of the night. What
music they make!” (p. 26). His wolfish affinity repels Jonathan, but in this
212 NINA AUERBACH
suggestive tribute, Dracula expands beyond hierarchical categories to

appropriate an inhuman art that goes beyond the mere brutality of a Mr.
Hyde. 39
Apart from his trademark bloody .fangs, Dracula loses his expansive
animalism in most twentieth-century films. Actors like Lugosi, Christopher
Lee, and Louis Jourdan may be sexier on the surface, but they are so self-
consciously irresistible that it is hard to picture them howling with wolves.
In most vampire films, animalism is less metamorphosis than coded
eroticism, but in late Victorian England, animals were not represented as
notably sexual. Instead, they generated a lonely awe human beings were too
socialized to inspire.
“‘I wonder,’ [Seward asks Renfield, his zoophagous lunatic] reflectively,
‘what an elephant’s soul is like!”’ (p. 324). The question torments Renfield,
leading Seward to conclude that “he has assurance of some kind that he will
acquire some higher life. He dreads the consequence —the burden of a soul”
(p. 325). In his assumption that only “higher life” has a soul, Dr. Seward
shrinks into humanity iust as Jonathan Harker did when Dracula’s hairy palm
touched him. The zoophagous maniac knows better. The resonant question
of animal souls, or some purely animal principle of existence, lends
intimations of transfiguration to Stoker’s bleak portrait of vampires. 40
It is not Dracula rampant or Dracula in his coffin that inspires
Jonathan’s half-despairing, half- awed cry: “What manner of man is this, or
what manner of creature is it in the semblance of man?” (p. 48). At the climax
of his Transylvanian visit, Jonathan is stricken with holy terror at his host’s
elusive animalism: “What I saw was the Count’s head coming out from the
window. I did not see the face, but ... I could not mistake the hands which I
had had so many opportunities of studying.... But my very feelings changed

to revulsion and terror when I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the
window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over that dreadful abyss, face
down with
,
his cloak spreading out around him like great wings” (pp. 47-48).
Since he can turn into a bat, Dracula has more efficient means of
transportation than crawling down his castle walls; perhaps he does so here
only for exercise, but his sport devastates Jonathan with a vision of otherness
in human shape. It also teaches Jonathan his own metamorphic potential;
with the deftness of Kipling’s Mowgli picking up animal skills in the jungle,
he will escape from the castle by similarly crawling down the wall: “Where
his body has gone why may not another body go?” (p. 62). Jonathan’s chaste
emulation of his master’s body is as close as he comes to turning into a
vampire. He is never as hungry as Lucy or as clairvoyant as Mina, but when

he emulates Dracula, he does briefly expand his awareness of his own
potential elasticity.
Dracula: A Vampire of Our Own 213
In its time, Dracula’s descent, not the three weird women who captivate
Jonathan in the next scene, was the heart of the novel’s horror; Skal
{Hollywood Gothic p. 39) reproduces the cover of the
,
first paperback edition,
in which Dracula, a dignified old man, crawls down his castle wall. His short
cloak does not begin to cover his agile body; his sleeves and trousers are
hiked up to emphasize the recognizably human hands and bare feet with
which he propels his descent. This Dracula has no fangs, long nails, blazing
eyes, or other vampire accoutrements familiar from later illustrations and
films: his horror is his human body, a horror that lived beyond the turn of the
century. In a draft of The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot amplifies his “bats with baby
faces in the violet light” with the Dracula - derived line, “I saw him creep head
downward down a wall.” 41
Attracted as our own century is to the three slavering sisters, with a

relish we insist is Victorian, these lustful fiends decorate neither the original
paperback nor T. S. Eliot’s Modernist Gothic. In its time, Dracula’s most
resonant image was that of a lone human body doing a supposedly
nonhuman thing associated with neither sexuality nor predation. As in his
paean to the music of the wolves, he is exhibiting, for no particular reason,
his animal affinities.
Dracula was not the first Victorian monster to flaunt his transfiguring
animal potential. In 1884, a young surgeon with some of the compassionate
curiosity of Stoker’s Dr. Seward was transfixed by a poster advertising the
spectacle of an Elephant Man. The actual Joseph Merrick, whose patron

Frederick Treves became, was a tragic example of false advertising: a small
man weighted down by deforming epidermal growths, the frail Merrick had
little in common with an elephant. Nevertheless, when Treves wrote his
memoir forty years later, he described the poster more vividly than he did his
patient:
Painted on the canvas in primitive colours was a life-size portrait
of the Elephant Man. This very crude production depicted a
frightful creature that could only have been possible in a

nightmare. It was the figure of a man with the characteristics of
an elephant. The transfiguration was not far advanced. There was
still more of the man than of the beast. This fact —that it was still
human —was the most repellent attribute of the creature. There

was nothing about it of the pitiableness of the misshapen or the
deformed, nothing of the grotesqueness of the freak, but merely
the loathing insinuation of a man being changed into an animal.
Some palm trees in the background of the picture suggested a
jungle and might have led the imaginative to assume that it was
in this wild that the perverted object had roamed. 42
214 NINA AUERBACH
Responding to the “transfiguration” of the poster rather than the pathos of

the man, Treves could be describing the crawling Dracula: “There was still
more of the man than of the beast. This fact —that it was still —
human was
the most repellent attribute of the creature.” Like Dracula crawling down his
battlements or Kafka’s Gregor Samsa waking from uneasy dreams, the poster
of the Elephant Man reveals the creaturely capacities of an apparent human
whose “repellent” animalism may endow him with holy terror: Leslie Fielder
associates the Elephant Man with such un-Christian divinities as “the
elephant-headed Ganesh from the Great Temple at Karnak, awesome but
somehow neither loathsome nor grotesque.” 43 The image of a monster who
may also be a god forces on Treves Dr. Seward’s perplexed question: “I
wonder ... what an elephant’s soul is like!”
After Merrick died, Treves convinced himself that this elephant at least
had a soul, one that cast off the beast to assume a perfect manly body: “As a
specimen of humanity, Merrick was ignoble and repulsive; but the spirit of
Merrick, if it could be seen in the form of the living, would assume the figure
of an upstanding and heroic man, smooth browed and clean of limb, and with
eyes that flashed undaunted courage.” Dracula brings no such assurance to
the professional men who study him. Dracula, like Merrick, is a dandy who
lives without mirrors, an essential celibate with embarrassingly “amorous”
proclivities, 44 a charismatic isolate who is helpless before the human
community. As with Merrick, his one source of stature is his propinquity to
animals.
The nineteenth-century Development Hypothesis, most famously
demonstrated in Darwin’s revelations of humanity’s animal origins, revised
Victorian faith in humanism —and thus in heroism — in ways that involved
both denial and abashed embrace. Throughout the century, guardians of
powerful institutions affirmed their shaky humanity by cataloging and thus
controlling animals as Van Helsing does Dracula: as Harriet Ritvo
demonstrates, “Animals were uniquely suitable subjects for a rhetoric that
both celebrated human power and extended its sway, especially because they
concealed this theme at the same time that they expressed it.” 45 Accordingly,
at midcentury, Tennyson became Poet Laureate after his In Memoriam A. H.
exhorted struggling readers to evolve beyond their animal inheritance by
“working out the beast, / And let the ape and tiger die.”
But animals were not so easily killed: their new genealogical intimacy
with humans raised them, in the eyes of compassionate reformers, to moral
and spiritual exempli whose life shared human sacredness. In 1847, the
Christian Remembrancer forbade pious readers to let apes and tigers die:
“There is a growing feeling of reverence for the lower creation.... We regard
them as sharers in one quality, and that the most tangible portion of our
inheritance —they share in life, they are living creatures.” 46 Like Renfield’s
biblical “the blood is the life,” human-
philanthropic reverence undermined
centered hierarchies on behalf of a whose sacred essence was
vital fellowship
pagan. As literary rhetoric became increasingly weary and pessimistic, this
fellowship became covert salvation: union with animals beatified a declining
humanity. By the 1 890s, man himself seemed so depleted that, in fiction at

least, the ape and tiger might have been all that kept his vitality alive.
Kipling’s Jungle Books (1894) feature a boy-hero fitting for a shrunken
decade who, far from working out the beast, takes his power from beasts:
raised by wolves and schooled by a wise panther and a tender bear, Mowgli
relishes the ontological fluidity and heroic skill instilled by his jungle
teachers. Though Kipling’s narrator ranks the animals in incessant if
arbitrary fashion, assuring us, like the guardian of culture he wants to be, that
they all defer to Mowgli human ’s superiority, these hierarchical protestations
fall away when Mowgli graduates into a human society more brutish than the
jungle. In his first foray to his kind, he is banished for being a “wolf-child,”
“a sorcerer [like Dracula] who can turn himself into a beast at will.” 47 When,
indisputably a man, he leaves the jungle for the last time, his life as an Indian
civil servant will surely lack the perpetual transfiguration of a jungle
existence where he spoke every animal’s language. Kipling tempts us to
picture a colonized Mowgli sighing nostalgically for the wolves and his wolf-
self: “Listen to —
them the children of the night. What music they make!”
Only his animal affinities make Mowgli worth writing about at all. Like
the Elephant Man who preceded him and the vampire that followed, Mowgli
is a hero because he can become an animal. The animals that glorify the boy
have little to do with eroticism, which, in the Jungle Books ,
is virtually a
human trait: Mowgli knows he must leave the jungle when he reaches
puberty and finds himself drawn to a woman. The loving and potent
.community he leaves behind —the snake Kaa, the bear Baloo, the panther
Bagheera, and his tutelary brother wolves — composed of aging male
is
celibates. In most 1890s representations, animals are grand because they

scarcely couple. Like that of the Elephant Man, their allure is their
singularity.
Dracula crawling down his castle walls is not as winsome as the

Elephant Man or Mowgli, but he is like these late-Victorian hybrids in that
his creaturely alienation from humanity makes him the center of a cult, one
that in Dracula’s case is thriving today. Monotonously asserting a dominion
that isolates him from humans and other vampires; so alone that, like most
tyrants, he is vulnerable to anything that is said about him; hedged by the
arbitrary rules that have come to define his vampireness: Dracula steals
power from awe-inspiring animals.

216 NINA AUERBACH
This power is muted compared to Mowgli’s; aside from a few nostalgic

remarks and his one solitary crawl, we never see him changing. In England,
his —apart from commanding swarm of
one gesture of animal kinship a rats
to frighten the vampire-hunters away— of the wolf Bersicker

is his release
from the zoo, a perplexing gesture described so indirectly that we never see
Dracula and the wolf together. Does he need Bersicker to let him into Lucy
Westenra’s bedroom, to which he always had access before? Or does he, like
Mowgli, come into his powers in the company of wolves? Like his crawl, his
release of the wolf makes little narrative sense, 48 but it does provide this
vampire with the one bond his author does not taboo.
Though Stoker only sketches Dracula’s animal metamorphoses, awe at
animals underlies his story. Van Helsing demonstrates wonders to his
skeptical hearers by summoning a pageant of immortal beasts: “Can you tell
me why, when other spiders die small and soon, that one great spider lived
on for centuries in the tower of the old Spanish church and grew and grew,
till, on descending, he could drink the oil Can you
of all the church lamps? ...
tell me why the tortoise lives more long than generations of men; why the
elephant goes on and on till he have seen dynasties; and why the parrot never
die only of bite of cat or dog or other complaint?” (p. 237).
Dracula’s association with these vigorous creatures gives him a
subterranean vitality new to his kind: it is less his autocratic assertions than
hisunbounded identity and his ability to expand the identities of others

beyond human limits that give Dracula the aura of power his plot, in fact,
denies him. Succeeding Draculas would not know what make of the
to
metamorphic power that had such intensity in the 1890s. While Max
Schreck’s teeth are ratlike, he never turns into a rat, seeming most alive when
he is half-disembodied or swelling into a shadow. Bela Lugosi is occasionally
replaced with a rubbery bat, but Lugosi himself is so statuesque that one
cannot imagine him changing into anything. 49 Wolf aficionados in the first
half of the twentieth century took the more pathetic form of were-wolves. I
suspect, though, that without his furtive animalism, Dracula would never
have survived to metamorphose on film. His empathy with “children of the
night” rather than with humans released a dimension of fear: the fear, not of
death and the dead, but of being alive.
The Blood Is the Life
Earlier vampires may not have been mortal, but they could pass as
human. Despite his corpse-like pallor, Ruthven was a popular party guest,
while even with his protruding teeth Varney was a far better neighbor than
Dracula would be. Only his eyes reveal his malevolence, but there is nothing
characteristically animal about “a lurking and suspicious look,” which could

characterize any number of human villains and paranoid heroes.
Carmilla appears to be winsomely human. She becomes an animal only
fitfully and ambiguously, and only when she is feeding. Laura perceives “a
sooty black animal that resembled a monstrous cat. It appeared to me about
four or five feet long, for it measured fully the length of the hearth-rug as it
passed over it; and it continued to-ing and fro-ing with the lithe sinister
restlessness of a beast in a cage.... I felt it spring lightly on the bed,” but in

Laura’s kaleidoscopic perception the cat quickly mutates into “a female
figure standing at the foot of the bed, a little at the right side.” When the
General replaces her as narrator, he describes the feeding creature as less
animal than thing, “a large black object, very ill-defined, crawl [ed], as it
seemed to me, over the foot of the bed, and swiftly spread itself up to the
poor girl’s throat, where it swelled, in a moment, into a great, palpitating
mass.” 50 Compared to Dracula, whose first appearance reeks of animalism,
Carmilla is at best “very ill-defined.” We know her only as a passionate friend
who in her hunger becomes something else.
Dracula’s blatant animal affinities are new to vampires; they alone lend
vitality to this constricted, life-denying tyrant. Dracula is not only
unprecedentedly animal-like; he is the first vampire we have met who is not
visibly a corpse. Like the vampires he makes, he is alive even in his coffin: “It
seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood; he lay
like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion” (p. 67). Ruthven was notable
for “the deadly hue of his face, which never gained a warmer tint” (Polidori,
The Vampyre in Penguin

, ,
p. 7), but Dracula is hideously ruddy. Ruthven was
dead; Dracula, in Stoker’s suggestive coinage, is z^zdead.
This coinage was central to Stoker’s image of his book, which, as late
as a month before publication, was titled not Dracula but The Un-Dead
(Frayling, Vampyres p. 300). ,
The original title may be less striking than the
weird name, but it points toward the essential gift of Stoker’s vampires to the
twentieth century: a reminder, not of the dreadfulness of death, but of the
innate horror of vitality.
“The blood is the life! The blood is the life!” Renfield cries for them
all (p. 181). But this paean to bodily fluids entered our imaginations only
with Bram Stoker’s Undead. Earlier vampires enfeebled their prey; Dracula
energizes his, reminding his victims —and us—that they have life in them.
Just as he makes Jonathan aware of his animal potential, he executes

transformations that are less purely erotic, in the sense of something shared,
than they are sensory: the women he transforms come to apprehend the
vibrancy of their world. Le Fanu’s Laura was aware under Carmilla’s
ministrations only of Carmilla and her own sensations, but Stoker’s Lucy
218 NINA AUERBACH
describes hep initiation as a breathtaking awareness of newly vivid

surroundings. Despite our own critical infatuation with Dracula’s sexuality,
Lucy’s awe at her expanded world is as solitary as Jonathan’s crawl down the
castle:
I remember, though I suppose I was asleep, passing through the

streets and over the bridge. A fish leaped as I went by, and I
leaned over to look at it, and I heard a lot of dogs howling —the
whole town seemed as if it must be full of dogs all howling at
once — as I went up the steps. Then I have a vague memory of

something long and dark with red eyes, just as we saw in the
sunset, and something very sweet and very bitter all around me at
once; and then I seemed sinking into deep green water, and there
was a singing in my ears, as I have heard there is to drowning
men; and then everything seemed passing away from me; my soul
seemed to go out from my body and float about the air. I seemed
to remember that once the West Lighthouse was right under me,
and then there was a sort of agonising feeling, as if I were in an
earthquake, and I came back and found you shaking my body. I
saw you do it before I felt you. (P. 130)
Stoker’s Undead do not drain vitality; they bestow it. Anne Rice will glorify
this sensory reincarnation as quasi-angelic “vampire sight,” but in the 1890s

Stoker associates it with the unabashed blood-awareness only animals enjoy.
A pageant of wounded women illustrates vampires’ progress, at the
turn of the twentieth century, from death to heightened fife. In Polidori’s
Vampyre Aubrey ,
is entranced by the “lifeless corpse” of his beloved, on
whom Ruthven has fed: “He shut his eyes, hoping that it was but a vision
arising from his disturbed imagination; but he again saw the same form,
when he unclosed them, stretched by his side. There was no colour upon her
cheek, not even upon her lips; yet there was a stillness about her face that
seemed almost as attaching as the life that once dwelt there” ( Penguin ,
p. 15).
Aubrey’s Ianthe is doubly still no suggestion that Ruthven

because there is
has transformed her; the vampire’s animating powers affect no one but his
splendid self. Like Wordsworth’s mountains or Keats’s urn, Ianthe lures the
poetic viewer because she is utterly without life. The vampire bestows a
stillness no mortal can emulate.
Varney's supine Flora is more ambiguous. As a potential vampire,
she is “more beautiful than death” not because she is livelier — like Ianthe,
she is irresistibly immobile — but because death’s proximity turns her into
art.
She looked almost the shadow of what she had been a few weeks
before. She was beautiful, but she almost realized the poet’s
description of one who had suffered much, and was sinking into
an early grave, the victim of a broken heart:
“She was more beautiful than death,
And yet as sad to look upon.”
Her face was of a marble paleness, and as she clasped her hands,
and glanced from face to face ... she might have been taken for
some exquisite statue of despair. (Rymer, Varney p. 134) ,
Death clings to Flora while she lives, making her desirable. When Stoker’s Lucy is
a corpse, she is desirable because she is not dead at all: “There lay Lucy, seemingly
just as we had seen her the night before her funeral. She was, if possible, more
radiandy beautiful than ever; and I could not believe that she was dead. The lips
were red, nay redder than before; and on the cheeks was a delicate bloom” (p. 245).
Once again, women display the powers male vampires are too
respectable to release. 51 “She was more beautiful than death”; “I could not
believe that she was dead.” It is not only that Lucy changes; she embodies the
change in the vampire’s powers. Earlier female victims were seductive
because stilled. Through them, death immobilized life, while in Dracula ,
life
engorges death. Lucy enthralls spectators because she is not stilled. After
death, she continues to writhe and foam, prowl and shriek, turning not to
marble, but to blood.
It is easy and obvious to condemn out of hand the sexist sexuality of her
staking, in which her fiance “looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling
arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, while
the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it” (p. 262),
but its erotic vitalism is, for better or worse, vampires’ new medium. The
parallel scene of Clara’s staking in Varney is all bloodless, loveless horror. The
blacksmith, a more efficient executor than the vampire’s stricken fiance, does
the staking with dispatch, after which Clara’s father goes mad and the family
collapses. We last see the benevolent patriarch Sir George Crofton gibbering
about his own transformation: “I am a vampyre, and this is my tomb —you
should see me in the rays of the cold moon gliding ’twixt earth and heaven,
and panting for a victim. I am a vampyre” (p. 839).
When Clara is staked, her father’s authority dissolves into vampiric
babble, while Lucy’s staking confirms the authority of an armed community
of fathers. Granted that her wedding is a rape; vampires who appreciate only
200 NINA AUERBACH
looking-glass photography and Schreck’s luminous makeup, with his

radiantly obtruding bald dome, fingers, ears, nose, and ratlike teeth (which,
unlike the familiar dripping canines, he never seems to use), function like the
Victorian vampire trap to dematerialize the creature’s hunger. Like those of
the Victorian actor disembodied in the vampire trap, his movements are
ostentatiously unnatural: on the ship, he doesn’t climb out of his coffin, but
is miraculously elevated from it; in Bremen, he dissolves (with his coffin!)
through a solid door.
Moreover, while Stoker gets his first big effect by revealing that his
no shadow, Schreck becomes

corporeal Dracula has no soul and therefore casts
hisshadow in the climactic episodes when he stalks Jonathan and Nina, a
shadow even more elongated than his body, its interminable fingers seeming
to slide through matter as it glides toward his prey. This vampire is scarcely
bounded by matter, expanding into the shadow, or looking-glass image, of
the madly chortling community that courted him, of which Jonathan is the
representative.
Murnau not only has Dracula bite Jonathan at least once (Nina’s
somnambulistic powers prevent a second attack); his crosscutting emphasizes
the parallel rhythms of the vampire’s and Jonathan’s journeys back to
Bremen — a suggestive convergence that Stoker’s narrative chronology
suppresses —so that when the invasion finally comes, we are never sure
whether Dracula or Jonathan (or both in collusion) unleashes the rats that
carry the plague that wastes the city.
Like his vulnerable agents (Renfield is lynched for his collaboration

with the vampire, and Jonathan is ambiguously debilitated for the rest of the
movie), Murnau Dracula ’s is more carrier than master. His ghostliness makes
him as fragile as he is agile. Isolated by his clownlike makeup and by
immobilizing compositions that confine him within closed spaces or behind
bars, he is no more than a shadow of the community he infects. As the first
vampire to be destroyed by the sun under which Stoker’s Dracula paraded

vigorously, 19 he inaugurates an important twentieth-century tradition; but
when Nina sacrifices herself to family and community by keeping Dracula
with her after daybreak, Schreck merely vanishes. Unlike the more seductive
vampires of the 1960s and ’70s, he is not fleshly enough to burn.
The final title
— “as the shadow of the vampire vanishes with the
morning sun” — presumably heals the stricken community and Jonathan as
well, allowing us to forget the ominous fact that the sun usually creates
shadows rather than dissipating them. But Bremen has already infected itself
from within. It was Jonathan^ wanton walk across the bridge that desecrated
his family and city, thereby fusing the domestic and the foreign, the mortal
and the monster, the victim and the tyrant, all of whom Stoker kept carefully
apart. By making Dracula a shadow of the good men of Bremen, Murnau also
crosses the bridge between men and women that Stoker scrupulously erects:
Stoker’s Dracula possesses only females, while Murnau’s uses no lustful,
animalistic women as his agents, but only respectable men. According to the
Book of Vampires that Jonathan discovers, “Nosferatu drinks the blood of the
young.” Indifferent to gender, Nosferatu' unleashes mass death, not
individual sexuality. Anyone, under Murnau’s rules, will satisfy a vampire.
But only a pure woman can destroy one. Nina accordingly becomes the
final, crucial bridge between town and invader, humanity and the monster.
By luring the vampire to her bed so that he will vanish with daybreak, Nina
both dies for humanity and, more knowingly than her husband, crosses the
bridge beyond it. Nina’s ambiguous sacrifice abolishes Stoker’s polarization
between pure and carnal women, for Nina is less a victim than a link between
shadow and substance, life and death, corruption and respectability. She may
dispel Max Schreck, but she also marries him to the civil domesticity she
represents 20 .
Murnau’s film is, of course, admonitory, not, as Stoker wanted to be,

congratulatory: Stoker quarantined his vampire from British civilization,
while Murnau’s was a shadow of his own diseased Germany 21 Thus,
.
Nosferatu itself crosses the bridge between classes, genders, and orders of
being that Dracula erected so carefully. But in bringing Jonathan and Dracula
together, as sinister collaborators if not friends (Murnau’s Dracula reads with
silent disdain as Jonathan wolfs down his meals, while Stoker’s declaims
about himself at length as Jonathan nibbles delicately), Murnau does not

restore the vampire’s mortal sympathies; instead, he intensifies Stoker’s
vision of impersonal power. Max Schreck is dispelled, but he was only the
city’s shadow. Nosferatu seems to begin where Dracula might have ended, in a
community that has been transformed into something savage and rampant.
An image of the picturesque antihuman, Bremen survives its citizens,
whether they are mortals or vampires.

Tod Browning’s American Dracula is famous now only for Bela Lugosi’s
performance, but in one sense this commercial American movie, inexpertly
adapted from a popular if quite un-Stokeresque Broadway play, is more
daring than the masterpiece of German Expressionism serious audiences
revere. Following Murnau’s lead, Browning transforms Jonathan from a
dutiful servant with corporate loyalties to an eccentric trespasser who courts

transformation, but Browning’s defiant explorer, the wild and maddened
Renfield, is no prospective husband; he is scarcely even a man of business.
Dracula’s visitor is no longer Stoker’s stolid, if fragile, emissary of Western
civilization; as Dwight Frye plays him, Renfield is so effete and overbred that
he is more bizarre than Lugosi’s impeccably mannered vampire 22 .
222 NINA AUERBACH
13. In Ered Saberhagen’s wonderfully witty and astute novel The

Dracula Tape in which Dracula gets to
,
tell the story Stoker refuses to include,
the vampire complains sardonically about his doltish guest: “He
misinterpreted these oddities, but never asked openly for any explanation,
whilst I, wisely or unwisely, never volunteered one.... My little Englishman
was tolerant of it all, but he was dull, dull, dull. A brooder, but no dreamer.
There was no imagination in him to be fired.” The Dracula Tape (1975;
reprint, New York: Ace, 1980), pp. 16, 31. Saberhagen’s Dracula wants to
restore the communion with mortals that was the birthright of earlier
vampires.
14. Christopher Craft, “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips,”’ pp. 110-16,
is particularly ingenious in describing, and thereby authorizing, the
homoerotic contact that does not take place in Dracula .
15. Stoker’s “original Foundation Notes and Data for his Dracula ” in
the Rosenbach Library in Philadelphia, quoted in Frayling, p. 301; reprinted

by permission (see n. 40 below).
16. Two of the most stylized Dracula films, directed by Tod Browning
(1931) and Francis Ford Coppola (1992), advertised themselves as love
stories: Browning’s was billed as “the strangest love story ever told,” while
Coppola’s ads reassured us that “love never dies.” In both, though, the
vampire performs on a plane so remote from the other characters that one
can scarcely imagine vampire and mortal touching or even conversing, much
less biting or loving.
17. These Jonathans are presumably uninfected at the redemptive
endings of their movies, but later film Jonathans amplify Murnau’s suggestive
variation by actually becoming vampires. See especially Terence Fisher’s
Horror of Dracula (1957), the first of the brightly colored Hammer films that
illuminated the 1960s, in which Jonathan, here a susceptible vampire-hunter,
is easily seduced by a chesty vampire woman who wears a tunic; Dan Curtis’s
TV movie ( Bram Stoker's Dracula , 1973), starring Jack Palance, which follows
the Hammer tradition by abandoning Jonathan to the three ravenous
vampire women so that he can become a snarling monster Van Helsing must
stake at the end; and, most dramatically, Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the
Vampyre (1979), a searing remake of Murnau’s film. In Herzog’s revision, a
grinning, fanged Jonathan ends the movie by galloping off to become king of
the vampires after his wife has sacrificed herself in vain. Only Herzog follows
Murnau by discarding the three intermediary female vampires, allowing
Dracula himself to transform his vulnerable guest.
These later Jonathans are all oafish revisions of Stoker’s supposedly
heroic civil servant, who obeys a paternalistic employer by bringing to a wild
country the light of British law. In the 1960s and 1970s, movie Jonathans,
like the imperial mission they represent, are corrupt and vulnerable.
Although, unlike Stoker’s pure survivor, they become vampires with scarcely
a whimper of protest, they resemble Stoker’s character, who exists to belong
to someone in power, more than they do the passionate friends of the
generous Byronic gentry.
18. I use Stoker’s names here for the reader’s convenience. Nosferatu
was a pirated adaptation of Dracula whose original titles muffle its debt to
Stoker by renaming the characters; Dracula, for example, becomes Graf
Orlok. Some later prints revert to the Stoker names, though “Mina” mutates
into the more powerful and euphonious “Nina.” Skal, Hollywood Gothic esp. ,
pp. 43-63, provides a thorough and witty account of Florence Stoker’s Van
Helsing-like pursuit of Murnau’s elusive film.
19. Stoker’s Van Helsing affirms that the vampire’s “power ceases, as
does that of all evil things, at the coming of day” (p. 290), but the sun is no
threat to Dracula’s life: it merely limits his shape-shifting capacity.
20. Gregory A. Waller writes eloquently about the wives in Murnau’s

original Nosferatu and Werner Herzog’s remake, whom he sees as solitary
warriors, independent of traditional weapons and of the wise directing father

figures who contained Stoker’s women. According to Waller, Nosferatu
1,
women are as isolated in bourgeois society as the vampire, sacrificing

themselves ironically —and, ultimately, tragically —to institutions that ignore
and silence them; see Gregory A. Waller, The Living and the Undead From
:
Stoker’s Dracula to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (Urbana and Chicago:

University of Illinois Press, 1986), p. 225.
Waller’s excellent account of mutating vampire representations is
sometimes sentimental about victimized women, who, in both versions of

Nosferatu ,
seem to release through self-sacrifice their own rebellious vampiric
allegiance, though they refrainfrom snarling and growing fangs.
2 1 . Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of
German Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947) reads Noferatu
prophetically, as an allegorical warning against the plague of Hitlerism.
Kracauer’s influential reading is truer, perhaps, to the coldly imperial
Dracula than it is to Murnau’s ravished ghost.
22. Waller, The Living and the Undead ,
p. 92, notes astutely that in the
American film, Renfield is maddened by Dracula, while in Stoker’s novel the
vampire manipulates a madness, embodied in Renfield, that lurked in

England before his coming. This contrast holds if one reads the screenplay
alone, but Dwight Frye’s performance is so bacchanalian from the beginning
that it is difficult to call the pre-Dracula Renfield “sane.”
23. In the so-called “Spanish Dracula” (1931, dir. George Melford) —
Spanish-language adaptation for Mexican distribution that was filmed at
224 NINA AUERBACH
night, on the sjme set and from the same shooting script as the Hollywood
version — Dracula feeds Renfield generously, but Pablo Alvarez Rubio’s
affable chicken-chewing dispels any erotic tension between himself and
Carlos Villarias’s vampire. Accordingly, Villarias’s Dracula leaves Renfield’s
prone body to his sister-brides.
The Spanish Dracula is technically superior to the Hollywood original:

its photography is more sophisticated, its women are sexier, and its narrative
is slightly more logical. It ignores, however, the subterranean attraction
between the vampire and his guest that invigorates Browning’s version.
24. The jarring shift of rhythm and focus after the movie leaves
Transylvania is due in part to the producer’s squeamishness; on the final
shooting script, Carl Laemmle, Jr., wrote the Van Helsing-like rule,
“Dracula should only go for women and not men!” David J. Skal, The
Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993),
p. 126. Early Hollywood movies allow emotional complexity to spill out in
improbable countries like Transylvania or King Kong’s Africa or Oz, but it is
barred from home.

25. This shift of authority from an egalitarian vampire-hunting
community to Van Helsing’s autocratic leadership is the thesis of Waller’s
analysis of Dracula's immediate descendants in film (The Living and the
Undead pp. 77-109).
,
26. Jonathan Dollimore writes compellingly about the rise of perversity

as a creed in the 1 890s, a decade in which the rigid categories erected by new
experts in sexology came to restrain the play of affection. Because of Oscar
Wilde’s imprisonment and its aftermath, the willful evasion of categories that
the creed of perversity proclaims is at best fragile, at worst doomed: “So in
creating a politics of the perverse we should never forget the cost: death,
mutilation, and incarceration have been, and remain, the fate of those who
are deemed to have perverted nature.” Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde
Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 230.
27. Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-
desiecle Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p.
351.
28. Judith Weissman notes that in Dracula ,
“the one group of people
that [female vampires] never attack is other women.” Weissman, “Women
and Vampires: Dracula as a Victorian Novel” (1977), reprinted in Carter, ed.,
Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics, p. 75.
29. Hume Nesbit, “The Vampire Maid” (1900), reprinted in Dracula's

Brood: Rare Vampire Stories by Friends and Contemporaries of Bram Stoker ed. ,
Richard Dalby (London: Crucible, 1987), p. 221.

30. F. G. Loring, “The Tomb of Sarah” (1900), reprinted in The
Undead: Vampire Masterpieces, ed. James Dickie (London: Pan, 1971), p. 100.
Roth suggests plausibly that since Dracula is not staked,

31. Phyllis A.
but only stabbed with a bowie knife, he does not die at all: he simply turns
himself into mist after sending his captors a last look of triumph. See her
“Suddenly Sexual Women in Dracula ” (1977), in Carter, ed., Dracula : The
Vampire and the Critics ,
p. 67, n. 27.
By so flagrantly ignoring his own elaborate rules, Stoker was probably

leaving room for a sequel he lacked the heart or energy to write. Dracula’s
anticlimactic death, if it is a death, reminds the reader that once he has been
silenced, even a vampire is easy to kill.
32. Many critics and novelists, even more loyal to the vampire, perhaps,
than Renfield, have reconstructed Dracula’s suppressed narrative. The most
“
persuasive critic to do so is Carol A. Senf, D?~acula The Unseen Face in the
Mirror” (1979), reprinted in Carter, ed., Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics.
Senf claims that Dracula is dominated by a series of unreliable, even criminal

narrators who suppress their vampire/victim: “Dracula is never seen
objectively and never permitted to speak for himself while his actions are
recorded by people who have determined to destroy him and who, moreover,
repeatedly question the sanity of their quest” (p. 95).
Senfs persuasive essay could be a gloss on Saberhagen’s Dracula Tape

(1975), whose urbane Dracula reinserts himself into Stoker’s narrative,
exposing with relish the incompetent dolts who persecuted him in the 1890s.
This Dracula plays Van Helsing by telling Van Helsing’s story: “When I have
made you understand the depths of the idiocy of that man, Van Helsing, and
confess at the same time that he managed to hound me nearly to my death,
you will be forced to agree that among all famous perils to the world I must
be ranked as one of the least consequential.” Fred Saberhagen, The Dracula
Tape (1975; reprint, New York: Ace, 1980), p. 101. Like Senf, Saberhagen
accuses Van Helsing of murdering Lucy with incompetent blood
transfusions, then exploiting vampire superstition to cover up his own
malpractice. Like most Draculas in the 1970s, Saberhagen’s is, emotionally
and intellectually, a superior being who genuinely loves Mina. He transforms
her to save her from the mortal idiots who bully and adore her.
Saberhagen’s iconoclastic Dracula paved the way for garrulous and
glamorous vampires like Anne Rice’s Armand and Lestat, who not only tell
their own stories, but initiate them, thus becoming culture heroes in a
manner impossible to Stoker’s compliant Count.

33. The word homosexual had been part of medical jargon since the
1870s, but it began to infiltrate popular discourse in the 1890s. The first
reference to it in the Oxford English Dictionary is dated 1897 Dracula’s
year — in which Havelock Ellis apologizes for using this “barbarously hybrid
word.” There is an abundance of studies exploring the emergence of
homosexuality as a new clinical category in the late nineteenth century. All
226 NINA AUERBACH
acknowledge debt to Michel Foucault’s pioneering History of Sexuality

tiieir
2 vols., trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980, 1986). In writing
about nineteenth-century constructions of homosexuality as a clinical
monster, I am especially indebted to Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of

Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the
Present (New York: Morrow, 1981), and Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire:
The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1990).
34. Eve Sedgwick claims that in literature, 1891 was a watershed year
in the construction of “a modern homosexual identity and a modern
problematic of sexual orientation.” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of
the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990),
p. 91. For most nonliterary observers, however, 1895 — in which homo-

sexuality was publicly, even theatrically, defined, isolated, and punished in the
famous person of Oscar Wilde —was surely the year in which the public
learned what writers had sensed four years earlier. Talia Schaffer’s essay “A
Wilde Desire Took Me’: The Homoerotic History of Dracula” ( ELH A
:
Journal of English Literary History 61 [1994]: 381-415) demonstrates in

persuasive detail the association between Dracula and the Wilde trials.
35. Eric, Count Stenbock, “The True Story of a Vampire” (1894),

reprinted in The Undead p. 169. ,
36. H. Montgomery Hyde, Oscar Wilde (London: Methuen, 1975), p.

374.
37. In the theater at least, Wilde’s disgrace seems to have had, if
anything, a freeing impact on the next generation of women, in part because

the Labouchere Amendment ignored lesbianism: the new constraints on men
freed women to experiment with new theatrical idioms. As they did when
they were vampires, women acted uninhibited roles that were taboo for men.
See, for instance, my account of Edith Craig’s unabashed — if admittedly
professionally marginal —community of homosocial and homosexual women
in Ellen Terry Player in
,
Her Time ,
esp. pp. 364-436.
38. Skal, Hollywood Gothic, pp. 34—38, discusses the affinities between
Stoker and Wilde, two Irishmen who adored Whitman and loved the same
woman: Wilde proposed to Florence Balcombe, whom Stoker later married.
Skal does suggest that Wilde’s trials motivated the strident antisex rhetoric of
Stoker’s later career, but he ignores the power of the trials over Stoker’s
imagination of Dracula, a conjunction Schaffer analyzes with depth and
thoroughness.
39. This aesthetic animalism evokes Henry Irving’s famous
performance in The Bells, in which, during his reenactment of murder, he is
“
said to have thrown back his head and howled when he reached the line:
‘How the dogs howl at Daniel’s farm — like me they are hungry, searching for
prey.’ And then [continues the enthralled observer] he howled. It makes my
hair stand on end when I think of it.” Like Irving, Dracula turns animalism
into a compelling art form. Quoted in Marius Goring, Foreword to Henry
Irving and The Bells, ed. David Mayer (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1980), p. xv.
40. Stoker’s working notes include typed excerpts from a “Goldon
Chersonese” by “Miss Bond,” many of which deal with transfiguration and
animal worship: “The Malays have many queer notions about tigers, and
usually only speak of them in whispers, because they think that certain souls
of human beings who have departed this life have taken up their abode in
these beasts, and in some places for this reason, they will not kill a tiger
unless he commits some specially bad aggression. They also believe that
some men are tigers by night and men by day!” Stoker’s own commentary
makes clear that this animal possession generates not degradation, but awe:
“It almost seems as if the severe monotheism to which they have been
converted compels them to create a gigantic demonology.” Quoted by

permission of the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, Pa. (Stoker,
Bram, Dracula: ms. notes and outlines [ca. 1890-ca. 1896], EL4/f.s874d/MS).
41. Leonard Wolf makes this connection in The Essential Dracula ,
p. 47.
42. Sir Frederick Treves, “The Elephant Man” (1923); reprinted in

Michael Howell and Peter Ford, The True History of the Elephant Man
(Middlesex: Penguin, 1980), p. 190.
43. Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (1978;
reprint, New York: Anchor, 1993), p. 174.
44. Howell and Ford, pp. 210, 110, 206. On p. 35, Howell and Ford
make explicit what Treves’s memoir discreetly implies: that Merrick’s “penis
and scrotum were perfectly normal.”
45. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in
Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987),

the Victorian p. 6.
Quoted in James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain and
46. ,
Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,

1980), p. 133.
47. Rudyard Kipling, Jungle Books (1894-95; reprint [The Jungle Book],
Middlesex: Penguin, 1987), pp. 81, 93.

48. Adaptations that use the release of the wolf feel the need to
rationalize it more clearly than Stoker does. In Dan Curtis’s 1973 TV movie
(Bram Stoker's Dracula), for example, Jack Palance’s Dracula uses the wolf to
attack and distract the vigilant Arthur, his primary antagonist, while the
vampire finishes off Lucy. Stoker’s Bersicker only frightens to death Lucy’s
innocent mother, which Dracula surely could have done himself.
228 NINA AUERBACH
49. In the exuberantly revisionary 1970s, vampires regained hints of

their animal powers. Louis Jourdan, in Philip Saville’s BBC Dracula of 1977,
was the first cinematic Dracula to crawl down his castle walls in the lizardlike
manner Stoker described. Saville, however, insulates his human characters

from vampiric transformations more chivalrously than Stoker did: his
Jonathan never attempts to emulate Dracula’s crawl, but instead jumps

awkwardly, feet first, out of the castle window, retaining his humanity at the
cost, one imagines, of a painful fall.
50. J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla (1872; reprinted in The Penguin Book

of Vampire Stories ed. Alan
,
Ryan [New York: Penguin, 1988]), pp. 102, 130.
51. Elisabeth Bronfen claims that dead women are powerful artistic
subjects because of their otherness: “Because the feminine body is culturally
constructed as the superlative site of alterity,” it both expresses death and
deflects it from the artist and viewer, who are inevitably male. Over Her Dead
Body: Death Femininity and the Aesthetic
,
(New York: Routledge, 1992), p. xi. I
doubt whether, even in the most patriarchal societies, men have a premium
on seeing. I suggest instead that women are culturally constructed vehicles of
intimacy rather than otherness, and thus — in art, at least — are freer than men
to act out embarrassments like desire or death.
Chronology
1847 Born Abraham Stoker on November 8 to Abraham Stoker,

who works in the Civil Service at Dublin Castle, and
Charlotte Matilda Blake Thornley, his wife. Sickly as a
child, Bram remains in the care of his uncle, Dr. William
Stoker, until the age of seven.
1859 Begins at Reverend William Wood’s preparatory school in

Dublin.
1868 Graduates from Trinity College with honors in science.
Following in his father’s footsteps, enters the Civil Service
at Dublin Castle.
1871 Father moves the family to Europe following his
retirement. Bram stays on in Dublin, writing theater
reviews for the Evening Mail.
1872 Completes a master’s degree in mathematics at Trinity.

Delivers an address entitled “The Necessity for Political
Honesty,” which is later published.
1875 Publishes short fiction in The Shamrock.

1876 Father dies in Italy. Meets actor Henry Irving.
1877 Resigns his position with the Evening Mail to travel in

Ireland and research his first book, The Duties of Clerks of
Petty Sessions in Ireland.
229
$
230 CHRONOLOGY
1878 * Hired by Henry Irving to serve as business manager at the

Lyceum Theater. Marries Florence Anne Lemon
Balcombe, who had been courted previously by Oscar
Wilde, on December 4.
1879 Publishes The Duties of Clerks his ,

first book. Florence gives
birth to Irving Noel Thornley Stoker, their only child, on
December 31.
1882 Publishes Under the Sunset a book of short stories. Receives

,
the Bronze Medal of the Royal Humane Society for his

attempted rescue of a suicide.
1886 Takes up the study of law and publishes A Glimpse of
America based on lectures on the United States delivered
,
at
the London Institution.
1889 The Snake's Pass ,

a work that draws on his experiences as
Inspector of Petty Sessions, appears serially in People.
1890 Finishes legal studies and is called to the bar, though he

never practices law. Publishes The Snake's Pass in book form
and starts preliminary work on Dracula.
1897 Publishes Dracula. Produces a play based on the novel in

order to widen the scope of his rights to the story.
1898 Publishes Miss Betty ,

an historical novel, which he
dramatizes soon after.
1899 Publishes Snowbound: The Record of a Theatrical Touring

Party.
1901 Mother dies.
1902 Publishes The Mystery of the Sea and presents a dramatic

version at the Lyceum in the spring, shortly before the
theater closes.
1903 Publishes The Jewel of Seven Stars.
1905 Henry Irving dies in October and is buried in Westminster

Abbey. Publishes The Man.
1908 Publishes Lady Athlyne.
1909 Publishes The Lady of the Shroud.
1910 Publishes Famous Impostors.
1911 Receives a grant from the Royal Literary Fund. Publishes

his last novel, The Lair of the White Worm.
1912 Dies April 20, with his wife and son at his bedside.
Contributors
HAROLD BLOOM is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale

University and Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English at the
New York University Graduate School. He is the author of over 20 books,
including Shelly’s Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company (1961), Blake’s
Apocalypse (1963), Yeats (1970), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and
Criticism (1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism (1982), The American
Religion (1992),The Western Canon (1994), and Omens of Millennium: The
Gnosis of Angels Dreams and Resurrection (1996). The Anxiety of Influence
, ,
(1973) sets forth Professor Bloom’s provocative theory of the literary

relationships between the great writers and their predecessors. His most
recent books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human a 1998 ,
National Book Award finalist, and How to Read and Why which was published
,
in 2000. In 1999, Professor Bloom received the prestigious American

Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism .
PHYLLIS A. ROTH is Professor of English at Skidmore College. Her

publications include Bram Stoker The Writer’s Mind: Writing
,
as a Mode of
Thinking and Critical Essays on Vladimir Nabokov.
,
CAROL A. SENF is an Associate Professor in the School of Literature,

Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. A
specialist in 19th century literature, she is the author of The Vampire in
Nineteenth -Century British Fiction and The Critical Response to Bram Stoker.
231
2 32 CHRONOLOGY
GEOFFREY WALL is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and

Related Literatures at the University of York. He has published translations
of Madame Bovary and Flaubert’s Selected Letters, and is currently at work on
a biography of Flaubert.
CHRISTOPHER CRAFT teaches English at the University of California,

Santa Barbara, and has written Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire
in English Discourse, 1850-1920.
JOHN ALLEN STEVENSON is Associate Professor of English at the

University of Colorado, Boulder. He specializes in 18th century literature
and cultural studies and has published The British Novel, Defoe to Austen: A
Critical History as well as essays on Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, and Emily
Bronte.
DANIEL PICK is Professor of Cultural History at the Queen Mary

University of London. His publications include Face of Degeneration: A
European Disorder, SvengalPs Web: the Alien Enchanter Modem
in Culture, and
War Machine: the Rationalization of Slaughter in the Modem Age.
KATHLEEN L. SPENCER teaches in the Humanities Division at

Cincinnati State Technical and Community College and specializes in 19th
and 20th century literature and science fiction.
JENNIFER WICKE is Professor of English at the University of Virginia. A

specialist in modernism, critical theory, and media studies, she has published
Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading.
LAURA SAGOLLA CROLEY teaches English at the University of

Pennsylvania and specializes in 19th century British literature.
NINA AUERBACH is Professor of English at the University of

Pennsylvania. Co-editor of the Norton edition of Dracula, her publications
include Women and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth, Romantic
Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts, Private Theatricals: The
Lives of the Victorians, and Our Vampires, Ourselves.
Bibliography
Arata, Stephen. “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse
Colonization.” Victorian Studies 33, no. 4 (Summer 1990): 621-45.
Astle, Richard. “Dracula as Totemic Monster: Lacan, Freud, Oedipus, and
History.” Sub-stance 25 (1980): 98-105.
Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires Ourselves. Chicago: Chicago University Press,

,
1995.
, and David J. Skal, eds. Dracula. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

Belford, Barbara. Bram Stoker. New York: Knopf, 1996.
Bentley, C.F. “The Monster in the Bedroom: Sexual Symbolism in Bram
Stoker’s Dracula.” Literature and Psychology 22, no. 1 (1972): 27-34.
Carter, Margaret, ed. Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1988.
Case, Alison. “Tasting the Original Apple: Gender and the Struggle for
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Craft, Christopher. “‘Kiss me with those red lips’: Gender and Inversion in
Bram Stoker’s Dracula .” Representations 8 (Fall 1984): 107-33.
Croley, Laura Sagolla. “The Rhetoric of Reform in Stoker’s Dracula :
Depravity, Decline, and the Fin-de-Siecle ‘Residuum.’” Criticism 37,

no. 1 (Winter 1995): 85-108.
Davison, Carol M., ed. Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Sucking Through the Century.
Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1997.
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234 BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Subliminal Fantasies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula .” Frontiers: A Journal of
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NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1986.
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London: Michael Joseph, 1975.
Florescu, Radu and Raymond McNalley. In Search of Dracula. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1994.
Gelder, Ken. Reading the Vampire. London: Routledge, 1994.
Glover, David. Vampires ,

Mummies and
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Liberals. Durham: Duke University
Press, 1966.
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Greenway, John. Dracula as a Critique of Normal Science.” Stanford Literary
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Halberstam, Judith. “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula.”

Victorian Studies 3 6 (Spring 1993): 333-352.
Hatlen, Burton. “The Return of the Repressed/Oppressed in Bram Stoker’s

Dracula.” Minnesota Review 15 (1980): 80-97.
Hindle, Maurice, ed. Dracula. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993.
Howes, Marjorie. “The Mediation of the Feminine: Bisexuality, Homoerotic

Desire and Self-Expression in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Texas Studies in
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Hughes, William and Andrew Smith, eds. Bram Stoker: History Psychoanalysis,
and the Gothic. London: Macmillan, 1998.

Johnson, Alan. “Bent and Broken Necks: Signs of Design in Stoker’s
Dracula.” Victorian Newsletter 12 (1987): 17-24.
Leatherdale, Clive. Dracula: The Novel and the Legend. Westcliff-on-Sea:

Desert Island Books, 1993.
Ludlum, Harry. A Biography of Dracula: The Life Story of Bram Stoker. London:
Foulsham, 1962.
MeWhir, Anne. “Pollution and Redemption in Dracula .” Modem Language
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Miller, Elizabeth, ed. Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow. Westcliff-on-Sea:
Desert Island Books, 1998.
Pick, Daniel. “‘Terrors of the Night’: Dracula and ‘Degeneration’ in the Late
Nineteenth Century.” Critical Quarterly 30, no. 4 (1988): 71-87.
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Richardson, Maurice. “The Psychoanalysis of Ghost Stories.” Twentieth

Century 166 (1959): 419-431.
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Literature and Psychology 27(1977): 113-121.
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. “The Narrative Method in Dracula.” Nineteenth — Century Fiction 40,
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Urban Gothic, and
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Acknowledgments
“Introduction” from How to Read and Why © 2000 by Scribner. Reprinted by

permission.
“Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula ,” by Phyllis Roth. From

and Psychology 27, no.
Literature 3 (1977): 113-121. © 1977 by Phyllis
Roth. Reprinted by permission.
u
Dracula : The Unseen Face in the Mirror,” by Carol A. Senf. From The
Journal of Narrative Technique 9, no. 3 (1979): 160-170. © 1979 by The
journal of Narrative Technique. Reprinted by permission.
“‘Different from Writing’: Dracula in 1897,” by Geoffrey Wall. From

Literature and History 10, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 15-23. © 1984 by
Thames Polytechnic. Reprinted by permission.
“‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s
Dracula ,” by Christopher Craft. From Representations 8 (Fall 1984):
107-133. © 1984 by the Regents of the University of California.
Reprinted by permission.
“A Vampire the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula ,” by John Allen

in
Stevenson.From PMLA 103, no. 2 (March 1988): 139-149. © 1988 by
The Modern Language Association of America. Reprinted by
permission of the Modern Language Association of America.
“‘Terrors of the night’: Dracula and ‘degeneration’ in the late nineteenth

century,” by Daniel Pick. From Critical Quarterly 30, no. 4 (Winter
1988): 71-87. © 1988 by Manchester University Press. Reprinted by
permission of Blackwell Publishing.
237
»
238 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian
Degeneracy Crisis,” by Kathleen Spencer. From ELH 59 (1992): 197-
225. © 1992 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted by
permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press.
“Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and its Media,” by Jennifer Wicke. From

ELH 59 (1992): 467-493. © 1992 by The Johns Hopkins University
Press. Reprinted by permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press.
“The Rhetoric of Reform in Stoker’s Dracula : Depravity, Decline, and the

Fin-de Siecle ‘Residuum’,” by Laura Sagolla Croley. From Criticism 37,
no. 1 (Winter 1995): 85-108. © 1995 by Wayne State University Press.

Reprinted by permission of the Wayne State University Press.
“Dracula: A Vampire of Our Own,” by Nina Auerbach. From Our Vampires,

Ourselves 63-98
: © 1995 by The University of Chicago. Reprinted by
permission of the University of Chicago Press and the author.
Index
Anderson, Benedict vampiric pleasure in, 39, 97-98,

nations as ‘imagined’, 160-161 132-133
Auerbach, Nina Chadwick, Edwin
on Dracula, 191-220 and sanitary reform, 172
on Dracula’s new order, 191-194 Charot in Dracula
transformations in Dracula 209-216,
as hypnotist, 99
on vampire propriety, 204-209 Chauncey, George
on women’s mysterious amalga the heterosexual paradigm, 48, 53
of imprisonment and power, Civilization: Its Cause and Cure,
52-53 (Carpenter)
on primitive tribes, 103
Bentley, C.F. Craft, Christopher
on intercourse as nursing in engendering gender in Dracula
Dracula 10-11
,
49-64
Bernays, Martha gender and inversion in Dracula,
and Freud, 36 39-64
Bierman, Joseph inversion and desire in Dracula,
on the most primal scene in oral 45-48
terms in Dracula 5-6 ,
on Lucy in Dracula, 54-58
Bloom, Harold narrative form of Dracula, 40
introduction to Dracula 1-3 ,
prolonged middle of Dracula, 49
Booth, William Croley, Laura Sagolla
three major phases of his plan, on crossed boundaries and decline,
184-186 169-170
on Victorian social commentators, rhetoric reform in Dracula, 169-186
172-174 on vampiric and lumpenproletariat
Breuer, Joseph, 30, 36-37 invasion in Dracula, 180-183
Calder, Jenni Degeneracy, (Talbot)

study of the Victorian home, 119 crime and parasitology in,
Carmilla (LeFana)
,
103-104
239
240 INDEX
Degeneration ,
A Chapter in Darwinism theatricalisation and sexuality in,
(Lankester) 32-33
revisionist work, 104 the urban gothic and the
Dr Jeklyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson) Victorian crisis, 111-134
and Dracula ^ 39-40 unstable brew in, 162-163
Dolingen, Countess in Dracula, vampirism as disease, 172-173
194-196 Dracula, Count in Dracula
Donato in Dracula animal infinities of, 217
as hypnotist, 99 anxiety, 40-41
Douglas, Mary aristocratic status, 174-177
on models of culture crisis in condemnation of, 19
Dracula 112 ,
and Countess Dolingen, 194-196
work on pollution fears and defeat of, 16
witchcraft societies, 120-121, as ‘father’ figure, 6
132-133 homoerotic friendships, 206-207
Dracula (Browning)
,
inhibitions of, 209-210
the commercial American movie and Jonathon, 42-43, 198-204
and Strokers’ Dracula, 201-204 and Nina, 59, 79-84
the doomed traveler in, 202 narration, 17, 22-23
Dracula need for self-preservation, 77-78
consumption of blood in, 152 primal scene, 5-6
derived from Camilla, 193-194 sexual dualism with VanHelsing,
and degeneration, 93-108 50-51
doubt in, 100 and silence, 208
emerging forgiveness in, 85-86 social relations, 33-35
as epistolary novel, 28
fantasy in, 3 Ego and The Id, The (Freud)
gender and inversion in, 39-64 and instinctional' control, 61-62
good vs. evil myth in, 15-16, 24 Eighteenth Burmaire of Louis Bonaparte,
homoerotic threat and desire, 43-44 (Marx)
independent and feminine sexual characters of class, 174-175
desires in, 48-49
Marxism in, 141-143 “Fictional Convention and Sex in
and its’ media, 141-164 Dracula ”, (Fry)
narration of, 28-29 female vampires and the
new order in, 191-194 1 8th century, 4
the ‘New Woman’ in, 106, 112, 119 Foucalt, Michael
and Oedipus complex, 3-7, 93 on putting sex into disclosure, 45
questioning sanity in, 1 Fox, Robin
racial otherness in, 173-174 on boundaries of exogamy, 73
reading it historically, 96-97 Frankenstein, (Shelley)
repeating the Bourgeois family and Dracula, 39
crisis in, 27-37 Freud, Sigmond and Bernays, 36
revealing the unseen face in, 15-24 and relevance to Dracula, 95-100
Index 241
Fry, Caroll as a vampire, 157-128

on female vampires and History of Vagrants and Vagrancy and
18th century fiction in Dracula, 4 Beggars and Begging (Turner) ,
Frye, Northrop and Dracula 170-171

,
on romance and psychomania, 122 Holmond, Arthur in Dracula 7 ,
driving stake through Lucy, 2 3

Giddens, Anthony uninhibited sexuality of, 5-6
the bulwarks of identity, 117-118 Homogenic Love, (Carpenter)
Girard, Rene’ polemical text, 45
models of cultures in crisis and
Dracula 112 ,
In Darkest England, (Stanley )
Grundriesse (Marx)
,
race in, 173-174
Greek art and present day, 141 In Darkest England and the Way Out,
(Booth) and Dracula, 183-184
Harker, Jonathon in Dracula 4 8-9, 32, Intermediate Sex The (Carpenter)
,
142 polemical text, 45

deformity, 101-102 Irving, Henry
diary and his anxiety with and Stroker, 32-33
Dracula, 11-12,40-41, 145
on Dracula, 19-21, 198-204, James, Henry
211-212 on change from gothic to urban
enjoying feminine passivity, 41 gothic in writing, 115
gift to Dracula, 146-147] Jungle Books, (Kipling), 215
journey of, 145-146
his master, 196-1698 Klein, Paul Rudolf
most pornographic scene, 4-5 account of vampire myth, 95
as prisoner, 105-106
questioning, 16-18 Lamia, (Keats)
at risk, 128-129 and Dracula, 192-193
as scribe to Dracula, 197 LeFana, Joseph Sheridan
Harker, Nina in Dracula, 6, 11, 31, analogy between monstrosity and
99-100, 145, 177 sexual desire and reading
affections, 10 vampirism, 39, 97-98
analysis of Dracula, 20-21 Lewis, Monk
changes of, 84-85 as gothic writer, 114
demand for euthanasia, 7 Quincy in Dracula, 63-64
Little
discursive position, 30 Lombroso, Cesare

as ‘good’ woman, 31-32 reference of in Dracula, 101
and Lucy, 9, 29, 129-131, 141, London Labour and the London Poor,
153-154 (Mayherw) the wanderers and
as mother like, 9 settlers in, 171
and ‘man’ brain, 29

and the ‘New Woman’, 4, 154-155 MacGillwray, Royce
salvation of, 12 myth as success for Dracula, 3-6
$
242 INDEX
Man ,
The the split between vampire families
positive eugenic homily in, 106-107 and vanishing group in
Maturin, Charles Dracula, 7-12
as gothic writer, 114 Ruskin, John
Morretti, Franco on Victorian conventions of
stimulating analysis of Dracula, sexual difference, 41
142-143
on vampirism as example of desire Senf, Carol A.
and fear, 39 the methods of narration in
Dracula 16
,
Nordau, Max the unseen in, 15-24

reference to in Dracula 101 ,
Seward, Dr. in Dracula, 7, 98, 123,
Nosferatu, (Murnau) and Dracula 212
198-199, 204 his account of Dracula, 41-42
description of, 144-145
Pick, Daniel rejected by Lucy, 8
doubt in Dracula ,
1 00 Sexual Inversion, (Ellis)
on Dracula and degeneration in polemical text, 45

the 19th century, 93-108 Sexuality and its Discontents, (Weeks)
Prisoner of Zenda The (Hawkins)
,
sociology and sexology, 131-132
known romance in, 116-117 quote from, 1 1
Problem in Greek Ethics (Symond) ,

Spencer, Kathleen L
polemical text, 45 debate on the ‘New Woman’,
Problem in modem Ethics A, ,
(Symond) 119-121
polemical text, 45 degeneracy crisis in Dracula,
Purity and Danger. (Douglas), 128
;
111-134
quote from, 111 and the ‘fanatic’, 112-115
the ritual victim^ in Dracula,
Radcliffe, Anne 123-131
experiment with characters and the romance revival, 115-117
violating laws of nature, 114 scapegoat in Dracula, 122
Rank, Otto the urban gothic and purity and
on Dracula as a threat in the danger in Dracula, 117-122
novel, 12 Stevenson, John Allen
Renfield in Dracula sexuality and anti-incestuous
as ‘star’ patient, 151-152 desire in Dracula, 71-89
Richardson, Maurice the structure of the group identity, 77
on Dracula as a demon of the Stroker, Bram
Oedipus complex, 3-4 chronology, 229-230
Roth, Phyllis A. clues to unreliability of narrators’
erotic descriptions in Dracula 5-6 in Dracula, 16-17
on sexual women in Dracula ,
3-12 his description of women, 81-83
significance of the mother figure his fin-de-dPecle anxiety, 177-178,
in Dracula ,
10-11 183-184
Index 243
and LeFana’s influence, 194-195 hypnotizing Lucy, 158-159

and Irving, 32-33 on Nina’s changes, 84-85
representation of fear, 74 as representing the ‘good’ father,
the Victorian maternal function, 54 6-7
Studies of Hysteria (Freud
,
and Beuer) rivalry with Dracula, 6-7, 50-51
and Dracula 30, 36-387
, saving Lucy, 54-59
an investigation of femininity, 36 tolling line, 210-211
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, (Ellis) ultimate victory, 60-6
polemical text, 45, 56-57 on vampire nature, 2
Subjection of Women, (Mill) on what ‘good’ women do, 30
and the nature of women, 51-52,
45-
119-120 Wall, Geoffrey
Summers, Montague addressing femininity in Dracula,
studying vampirism, 94-95 31-32
Symond on the Bourgeois crisis in Dracula,
establishing the term ‘inversion’, 27
46 on Dracula in 1897, 27-37
gender technique in Dracula, 30-31
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, theatricalisation in Dracula, 32-33
(Freud) charting masculinity in, Westenra, Lucy in Dracula, 4, 7,
46-
107 204-206
Todorov, Tzuetan becoming a vampire, 6
and the ‘fanatic’, 113 being saved, 54-59
Totem and Taboo, (Freud) explicitly uninhibited sexuality of,
and Dracula, 6-9, 94-95 5-6
and Nina, 9, 29, 129-131, 141,
Ulrlich, Karl 143-154
account for homoerotic desire, as monstrous double of Nina, 124
47 as a ‘New Woman’, 154-155
phallic punishment for polygamous
Vampyre, (Polidori), 218-219 wish, 34-35
VanHelsing in Dracula, 80-81, 99, progeny of, 204-205
102, 123, 154, 161 Wicke, Jennifer
as absolutely open-minded, 94 on Dracula and its media, 141-164
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.
Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
Since its publication in 1897 Bram
Dracula has never been out of
Stoker’s
print. A classic of fin de siecle fiction, the novel opens with Jonathan
Harker’s horrific experiences at Count Dracula’s castle, then removes to
England to follow the Count’s seduction of Lucy Westenra and Harker’s
fiancee Mina, returning ultimately to Transylvania to recount the thrilling
— —
pursuit led by Dr. Van Helsing and destruction of the vampire. Within
the narrative’s gothic recesses — its mansions Stoker
vaults, coffins, cells, —
captures and inventories a host of anxieties and concerns, from the rise
of a new media ecology to the status of women, that run through late
nineteenth- century culture and continue to be relevant today.
The novel is in one sense committed to the contradistinction of vice and

virtue, purity and corruption, human and
vampire; but it tacitly ques-
tions the possibility of such sharp separations . .
—DANIEL PICK
I would argue instead that the central appeal of fantastic literature is
scapegoat rituals it mimics, it allows its writers and

that, like the violent
readers simultaneously to acknowledge and deny those aspects of them-
selves and their world that they find most troubling to see them both as —
part of the community and available for sacrifice.
—KATHLEEN L. SPENCER
Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations, a series of over 100 volumes,

presents the best current criticism on the most widely read and studied
poems, novels, and dramas of the Western world, from Oedipus Rex and
The Iliad to such modern and contemporary works as William Faulkner’s
The Sound and the Fury and Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Each volume
opens with and introductory essay and editor’s note by Harold Bloom and
includes a bibliography, a chronology of the author’s life and works, and
notes on the contributors. Taken together, Bloom’s Modern Critical Inter-
pretations provides a comprehensive critical guide to the most vital and
influential works of the Western literary tradition.
CHELSEA HOUSE
PUBLISHERS
A Haights Cross Communications#^" Company
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Introduction © 2003 by Harold Bloom.

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Dracula / edited with an introduction by Harold Bloom,

English— History and criticism. 3 Dracula, Count (Fictitious

character) 4. Vampires in literature. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Series.

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Editor’s Note vii

Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula 3

Dracula : The Unseen Face in the Mirror 15

‘Different from Writing’: Dracula in 1897 27

“KissMe with Those Red Lips”:

A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula 7

‘Terrors of the night’: Dracula and ‘degeneration’

Purity and Danger: Dracula the ,

Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and its Media 141

The Rhetoric of Reform in Stoker’s Dracula :

Depravity, Decline, and the Fin-de-Siecle “Residuum”

Dracula A Vampire of Our

My Introduction meditates upon sexuality and violence, both

I^ereading the original Dracula on the verge of turning seventy-two is a

curious and charming experience. Though the tale is rather clumsily

more vulgar, gory, and pathologically disturbed, and no better visualized or

many seeking approaches to Dracula.

From How to Read and Why. ©2000 by Harold Bloom.

Dracula is far more interesting for itsupon us than it can be

Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker's Dracula

in wrestling match”^ and this reading would seem to be valid.

propose, in the following, to summarize the interpretations to date, to

toward female sexuality. In “Fictional Convention and Sex in Dracula”

permeated by “morbid dread.” However, another tone interrupts the dread

anticipation, certainly anticipation of catching and destroying forever the

the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about

Lord Godaiming, which is worth quoting from at length:

The thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-

driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the

Such a description needs no comment here, though we will return to it in

Two major points are to be made here, in addition to marking the

Moreover, in psychoanalytic terms, the vampirism is a disguise for

greatly desired and equally strongly feared fantasies. These fantasies, as

of the novel. Dracula, for example, is seen, as the “father-figure of huge

the set-up reminds one rather of the primal horde as pictured

defended against by the constant, almost obsessive, assertion of the value of

the defense of overcompensation is employed, most often by Van Helsing in

rivalry and hostility.

matricide underlying the more obvious parricidal wishes.

cause as my poor mad friend there [significantly, he refers to Renfield] —

In other words, Christianity is on our side, we must be right. In this