Dracula endangers gender boundaries; the divsion between male and female. Craft argues that "the vampiric kiss excites a sexuality so mobile, so insistent, that it threatens to overwhelm the distinctions of gender; and the exhuberant 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 (p. 117). Dracula threatens the boundary between genders and distorts the roles allocated to both the male and female gender categories, although transgressed the difference between the two categories is ultimately kept in its place. Hendershot argues that although the "male" and "female" vampires possess the same reproductive sexual organs, a social distinction between the two is present in Dracula; the female vampires are subservient to the male vampire (p. 379). Female sexual deviancy is more threatening than male sexual deviancy. This is seen in Stoker's Dracula because more attention is drawn to the sexuality of Lucy and Mina; than it is to the sexuality of the male characters. Signorotti argues that Lucy and Mina are contrasted; Lucy represents threatening sexuality, whilst Mina represents socially accepted sexuality (p. 11). Lucy before being vamped contains personality characteristics that are classified as unacceptable in Victorian society. She remarks about wanting to have more than one husband, which displays promiscuity and she also goes for walks at night, which is a suggestion for prostitution. Once women are vamped, they become masculine taking on the role of the penetration; the white teeth are a phallic symbol for this ability to penetrate. "Lucy's unmanageable sexual penetration is presented as inherently evil because it threatens fixed gender distinctions" (Signorotti, p. 12). Therefore in order to repress Lucy back into her accepted gender role a male must use his phallic symbol, in this case a stake, to overpower Lucy's phallic teeth; and consequently restore Lucy to her rightful submissive position in the gender hierarchy (Signorotti, pp. 12-13). "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 vampire threat by reinscribing (upon Lucy's chest) the line dividing the male who penetrates and the woman who receives" (Craft, p. 122). More attention is paid to the transgression of women to the male domain, than is paid to a male crossing over to the female domain. This is seen in the case of Dracula; he cuts his chest open and wills Mina to feed from his breast; a maternal role which indeed feminizes him, it does not pose as much threat as women having the ability to sexually penetrate men (Hendershot, p. 380). The horror of a woman penetrating a man, can be seen in Mina's reaction after she drinks from Dracula's chest, "Oh, my God, my God! What have I done?" (Stoker, p. 343). This declaration also contains sexual innuendo. "Oh, my God, my God!" can be conceived as being a 'verbal ejaculation' suggesting that blood and semen are interlinked, and with the drinking from the chest, blood is also milk (Craft, p. 125).
The characteristic traits that comprise what is feminine and what is male are blurred in Dracula. Dracula, Harker, Van Helsing and his Crew of Light, Mina and Lucy, all display traits that lie outside of their preconceived gendered structure. Dracula in opening his chest for Mina to drink blurs his gender. Craft argues that "such fluidity of substitution and displacement entails a confusion of Dracula's sexual identity, or an interfusion of masculine 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)" (p. 125). This gender distortion is evident in the asexual vampiric mouth; the primary site of the erotic in Dracula. Craft argues "luring at first with an inviting orifice, a promise of red softnesss, but delivering instead a peircing bone, the vampire mouth fuses and confuses what Dracula's civilised nemesis, Van Helsing and his Crew of Light, works so hard to separate -- the gender-based categories of the penetrating and the receptive, or, to use Van Helsing's langauge, the complimentary categories of "brave men" and "good women" (p. 109). The vampiric mouth in Dracula is inherently male, even though all other vampires in the novel are female apart from the Count, because Dracula systematically creates "female surrogates who will enact his will and desire" (Craft, p. 109). This can be linked back to the boundary between the homoerotic and the heterosexual, as Dracula wants to vamp males, but it is disguised through a heterosexual lens.
The blurring of gender can also be seen in Browning's film version of Dracula. Here "Renfield is a high-camp Englishman abroad, complete with spats and homburg ... this gay dandy is a ready victim of the Count's seduction" (Jones, p. 91). Renfield is "florid and faintly effeminate, he is a Hollywood version of a decadent English gentleman" (Auerbach, p. 156). Dracula wears attire consistent of a cloak, tuxedo and medals, despite the occasion, which in the 1930s is considered perverse. He is very clothes-conscious, and at closer inspection he is wearing lipstick and eye-makeup; components clearly gendered feminine (Auerbach, p. 157).
There are several scenes in Stoker's Dracula in which the men act in a manner that would be described as effete or feminine. The Count is the only one with the reproductive power to create new vampires, the female vampires in this case are an inversion of reproduction; feeding off children instead of producing them; the Count brings a child for his three vampiric daughters to feed off so as they do not feed off Harker. Harker acts as the passive or subordinate one in his partnership to Mina. Instead of Harker saving Mina from the Count; it seems Harker is taking protection from Mina; in this instance Harker takes on the role of the female and Mina that of the male. Harker is shown to be made of weaker constitution than Mina; as his hair turns white due to stress and anxiety: "a grey look which deepened and deepened ... till ... the flesh stood darkly out against the whitening hair" (Stoker, p. 344). Sedgwick's rule of the female as the hysteric, and the male as the paranoid, is also transgressed. Both Van Helsing, who is portrayed to have one of the strongest constitutions in the males, and Harker experiences some kind of hysteria. Harker is hysteric after he is woken from his dazed state (Stoker, p. 338), and Van Helsing breaks into a fit of hysterics just after Lucy's death: "The moment we were alone in the carriage he gave way to a regular fit of hysterics ... He laughed till he cried and I had to draw down the blinds lest anyone should see us and misjudge; and he then cried until he laughed again; and laughed and cried together, just as a woman does (Stoker, pp. 209-210). The signifier in this sentence that this is behaviour unbefitting a man is "misjudged"; this tells us that he would be critically looked upon and ridiculed by society for behaving in such an uncontrolled manner; one that should only be present in females.
Dracula has also been read from a Marxist perspective, which views the Count as being a metaphor for capitalism. Marx himself made an analogy between a vampire and capitalism: "Like a vampire, capital is dead labor that keeps itself alive only by drinking in living labor and that invigorates itself more the more labor it sucks in" (Marx qtd. Riquelme, p. 400). Marx's Das Kapital also contains images of a vampire, "Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more it sucks"; "the prolongation of the working day ... only slightly quenches the vampire thirst for the living blood of labor" (Marx qtd. Jones, pp. 71-72). Moretti argues that the 'fear of burgeois civilisation is summed up in Dracula, as it arose during the height of the industrial revolution (p. 83). Moretti argues that Dracula "is an ascetic of terror: in him is celebrated the victory 'of desire for possession over that of enjoyment'; and possession as such, indifferent to consumption, is by its very nature insatiable and unlimited ... a rational entreprenuer who invests his gold to expand his dominion: to conquer the city of London" (p. 84). Punter (p. 26) argues that Dracula represents a burgeosie point of view:
a manic individualist; from his own point of view, which is not absent in the text, he is the bearer of the promise of true union, union which transcends death. From the burgeosie point of view, Dracula stands for sexual perversion and sadism; but we also know that what his victims experience at the moment of consummation is joy, unhealthy perhaps but of a power unknown in conventional relationships. Dracula exists and exerts power through the right immemorial; Van Helsing and his associates defeat him in the appropriate fashion, through hard work and diligent application, the weapons of a class which derives its existence from labour.
It is in this Marxist reading that the threat of transgression between anitquity and newness; and the boundary between class and class are realised. We know that Dracula is the final aristocrat, who is not merely an individual; but a "dynasty, a 'house', the proud descendant and bearer of a long aristocratic tradition" (Punter, p. 23). Punter argues that the burgeoisies' need to discover the importance of 'noble blood' is ratified in Dracula: for Dracula has "rarefied his needs, and the needs of his house and line, to the point where he has no longer any need of any exchange-system or life-support except blood" (p. 23). He also argues that Dracula can no longer feed on the blood of the peasantry, those beneath his bloodline (Translyvanians), and goes to London to feed from those with a similar aristocracy (Punter, p. 24). Gelder argues that Dracula is the "wrong kind" of capitalist; he uses the wealth he has purely to satisfy himself. Dracula uses his gold to buy a house in London to feed his desire for noble blood, whereas Van Helsing and the Crew of Light share the wealth that they have and do not use it for selfish purposes (pp. 17-20). Dracula aims to destroy humanity and create a race of vampires in his own image; every vampire he creates has the same characteristics as him: volutptous, with sharp nails, white teeth and red lips. He tries to create Lucy and Mina in his own image; he values Lucy for her sexual strength and Mina for her intellectual ability (Signorotti, p. 624). Croley in contrast to Gelder argues that Dracula is in fact a representative of the 19th century poor, the "lumpenproletariat" (p. 1). His main argument is based around the fact that Dracula is aligned with the more subserviant groups, he attends to household duties in his home; he is linked with animals; particularly wolves; bats and lizards, which are situated near the bottom of the animal hierarchy, and also with madmen (Renfield). Dracula's home is also rather delapidated; filled with cobwebs and the infrastructure is in need of repair: it is reflective of the decay associated with the "lumpenproletariat" (Croley, pp. 3-6). Whether Dracula is in fact representative of the "lumpenproletariat" or whether he is the "final aristocrat" is in itself blurred. Dracula is however likely to be of noble blood as Van Helsing refers to him as "King Vampire" (Stoker, p. 440); and also in Browning's version of Dracula, no dinner is served once Harker arrives, as "Dracula avoids the indignity of cooking for his guest and the awkwardness of watching him eat" (Auerbach, p. 157). The importance of blood also shows Dracula as nobility. Smith argues that Dracula was written at a time when: "the notion of possessing a certain type of blood was of social and economic importance. The aristocrat ensured descent by the virtue of noble blood, and as such, blood lines were closely related to sexuality" (p. 130).
Antiquity and newness is displayed through the use of technology. Wasson argues that Dracula's best chance for survival is in the West, through technology, and he uses Mina, her skills as a teacher, ability to write in shorthand and to type, give Dracula an insight into the West (p. 387). According to Jones, "Dracula stands poised, quite self-consciously, on the cusp of modernity. Technological advancements - blood transfusions, stenographs, train timetables, typewriters, Kodak cameras - all have their place in killing the vampire, though recourse is needed to the old ways: the host, the cross, the stake. Professor Van Helsing straddles these worlds" (p. 88). This is evident in Browning's Dracula, as Van Helsing is portrayed as a man of science, Waller argues:
Van Helsing is a master from his first appearance in the film, when he -- dressed in a white labcoat-- examines Lucy's body in a large operating room (while other doctors watch from a gallery of seats) and then views Renfield's blood under a microscope. Costume and decor in these two scenes (which have no analogue in the novel or play) immediately establish Van Helsing as an authoratative man of science. Later he reveals that he has devoted a 'lifetime to the study of many strange things, little known facts which the world is perhaps better off for not knowning'" (p. 386).
Helsing and the Crew of Light use technological advancements as their armament against Dracula. Clemens argues that "the up-to-date medical men refer to 'defibrination,' 'trituration,' 'molecules,' 'digital pressure,' and 'hypodermic injection' ... Even the first opening of a vampire's coffin is accompanied not by traditional paraphernalia of stake and cross, but by Van Helsing's fret saw and turnscrew" (p. 158). The diffusion of boundaries between antiquity and newness are transcened through Van Helsing's use of ancient cures, like the paraphenalia used to protect Lucy from Dracula, and also through Dracula, a product of antiquity, and his use of Mina to gain access to the new technology.
The border between national and foriegn, in terms of England and non-England are also threatened in Dracula. In 1890s England the East provided a stark contrast beyond the "ward of science" (Frayling, p. 100). In Browning's Dracula, the real threat is the ease with which Dracula infiltrates London. Waller suggests:
The vampire seems not at all out of place at night on the streets of London. Just prior to his first encounter with Lucy and Mina, Dracula murders a lower-class young woman who sells flowers on a foggy street, and this brief, seemingly digressive episode pointedly suggests how successfully the formally dressed vampire can thrive in the open, unprotected modern world ... Dracula (1931) has allowed us to gauge both the nature of the vampire and the type of threat this foreign aristocrat poses to a secular society that does not arm itself with religious talismans and traditional beliefs (p. 384).
England feared the threat foriengers posed; because according to Arata, it displayed the possibility of a 'reverse colonisation'. Arata argues that "in the case of Dracula, the context includes the decline of Britain as a world power at the close of the nineteenth century, or rather, the way the perception of that decline was articlulated by contemporary writers" (p. 120). He also believes that "the decay of British global influence, the loss of overseas markets for British goods, the economic and political rise of Germany and the United States, the increasing unrest in British colonies and possessions, the growing domestic uneasiness over the morality of imperialism -- all combined to arode Victorian confidence in the inevitably of British progress and hegemony" (Arata, p. 120). He argues that the fear of 'reverse colonisation' is apparent in Stoker's Dracula; "Harker envisions semi-demons spreading through the realm, colonising bodies and land indiscriminately. The Count's 'lust for blood' points in both directions: to the vampire's need for its special food, and also to the warrior's desire for conquest. The Count endangers Britain's integrity as a nation at the same time that he imperils the personal integrity of individual citizens" (p. 125). This is evident on page (67) of Stoker's text:
This was the being I was helping to transfer to London [Harker writes in anguish] where, perhaps for centuries to come, he might, amongst its teeming millions, satriate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever widening cricle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless.
Harker himself conceedes that Dracula is the most Western in the novel. Dracula is punctual, intelligent, organised and well-read in english literature and english life (Stoker, p. 30). It is in Dracula's extensive knowlede of England that a threat between when is English and what is foreign is tested.
Dracula threatens racial boundaries. Arata argues that "Dracula represents the nobleman as warrior. His activities after death carry on his activities in life; in both cases he has successfully engaged in forms of conquest and denomination ... Racial conquest and denomination" (p. 123). Stoker stays within Western ideology of seeing conflict in the East in terms of racial conflict. "For Stoker, the vampire 'race' is simply the most virulent and threating of the numerous warrior races ... inhabiting the area" (Arata, pp. 123-124). Arata makes the link between the experience of Lucy and Mina losing their "identity -- national, cultural, racial", once they have undergone their transformation after being vamped (p. 126); and the experience felt by those who have been colonised.
Dracula also blurs the boundary between gothic narrative and travel narrative. "Stoker maps his story not simply onto the Gothic but also onto a second, equally popular late-Victorian genre, the travel narrative" (Arata, p. 122). Harker's first two acts -- noting that his train is late, and then transversing a boundary he considers symbolic -- function as a kind of shorthand, alerting readers that Harker's journal is to be set against the background of late Victorian travle narratives" (Arata, p. 131). Harker keeps meticulous records of his travel to the Count's castle; "he writes an account of his travels, including with surprising detail the meals he eats. In the first two pages of the book, he writes two memoranda to be himself to get the recipe for a tasty dish. He tells us that "there are many odd things" to write about, but among the exotic curiousities of Transylvania, he makes room to "put down my dinner exactly," a horrible meal with meat suitably only for cats and a wine merely "not disagreeable" (Foster, p. 486). "The 'realism' of the travel narrative gives way to the fantasy constructions of the Gothic, which can be dismissed -- as Harker urges us to so -- as untrue. 'We want no proofs; we ask none to believe us', Van Helsing says in the novel's final moments, and his words sound remarkably like a plea" (Arata, p. 140). Gothic narrative and travel narrative are both concerned with maintaining as well as transgressing boundaries (Arata, p. 122). "The Count's transgressions and aggressions are placed in the context, provided by innumerable travel narratives, of late-Victorian forays into the 'East'. For Stoker, the Gothic and the travel narrativeproblematise, separately and together, the very boundaries on which British imperial hegemony depended: between civilised and primitive, coloniser and colonised, victimiser (either imperialist or vampire) and victim" (Arata, p. 122). He argues that the transgression of boundaries transgresses cultural and political realms as well (p. 122). Browning's Dracula, the Count "resonates with an American inter-war nervousness about its renewed relation to Europe after the long period of political isolationism in the second half of the nineteenth century" (Kavka, p. 215).
Dracula threatens familial boundaries: the maternal; paternal, good father versus bad father, pre-oedipal and oedipal; and between child and adult. The maternal is threatened because vampire women are 'bad mothers', they feed from children instead of feeding them (Gelder, p. 75). "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 at the appetite in a woman ("My arms are hungry for you") is a diabolic ("callous as a devil") inversion of natural order" (Craft, pp. 120-121). Clemens believes that the female vampires thirst for the blood of children indicates that they are connected with lower life forms. Arguing that such treatment of infants would not be seen in higher mammals, whom engage in an extended period of infant nurturing. The anti-maternal behaviour shows a regression back to the era before higher instincts or behaviour manifested (p. 174). Eltis agrees with Clemens believing "Vampirism infects women with masculine sexual aggression and perverts their maternal instincts into an appetite for infant blood; the three vampire women are fed babies in a bag by Dracula, and the newly risen Un-Dead Lucy clutches her latest child-victim to her bosom in an obscene inversion of maternal suckling" (p. 456). The birth of baby Quincey also distorts the maternal role. Schaffer asserts that "Quincey's spirit fled his dying body, swirled along in his blood, soaked into Harker and became the 'seed' of Harker's son. Harker transmits Quincey's blood to Mina, just as Mina had stained her husband's body with Dracula's blood. Instead of epidemiological worry, this new blood transmission produces thriving sons" (p. 482). In doing so, "Stoker recuperates the infectiousness of the vampire myth by making it into a paradigm for homosexual procreative sex" (Schaffer, p. 482).
Dracula threatens the paternal boundary; a dichotomy between the good father and the bad father is constructed. In Dracula, "'Van Helsing represents the good father figure', pitted against the Big Daddy, Dracula" (Roth, p. 33). Fraying sees "Dracula as big Daddy -- to a defence of tradtional family values against the discontents of modern civilisation" (p. 106). Craft sees Van Helsing and Dracula as two antithetical father figures. "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" (p. 116). In order to look at the paternal from a pyschoanalytical perspective, the pre-Oedipal and Oedipal complex's need to be examined. The pre-Oedipal complex as described by Lacan, is the moment when the child does not differentiate itself from its mother. The child is unable to communicate through the medium of language, apart from Cooing, which therefore enters the mirror stage. The mirror stage entails the child becoming aware that it is a separate entity from the mother; and the child experiences three changes. Firstly the child recognises and also fears aggression from another; secondly; the child begins to desire what is beyond itself, usually the mother, and third; the child recognises competition and feels the need to compete for the desired object seen in the second change (Murfin, p. 474). The Oedipal complex on the other hand begins with a child; who views itself; its mother; and its father as separate entities. The child also recognises gender distinctions, and is able to identify gender distinction between itself and one of its parents; and also make a distinction between the gender of both parents in relation to one another. The Oedipal complex argues that it is in this gender distinction that acknowledgement of rivalry is born. In boys, they look at the father as the phallic symbol in relation to the mother; and identifies with the father's gender. The boy then realises that his father, who is both older and more powerful, is his rival. The object of desire and hence rivalry is usally the mother (Murfin, p. 474). Richardson, looks at Dracula through a Freudian perspective. He views Dracula as expressing the Oedipal complex; the battle of the father who wants to keep all women to himself (qtd. Riquelme p. 414). He also sees Van Helsing and Dracula as doubles. "In his reading, Van Helsing leads the younger men, as if they were sons in Freud's pyschoanalytic narrative, to defeat his evil anatagonist and satisfy their sexual appetites in legitimate ways" (Richardson, qtd. Riquelme, p. 414). "Richardson calls Dracula a 'quite blatant demonstration of the Oedipus complex ... a kind of incestuous, necrophilous, oral-anal-sadistic all-in wrestling match'" (qtd. Roth, p. 30). Roth however believes that Dracula displays pre-Oedipal qualities, child hostility towards the maternal figure and desire for her destruction. Riquelme argues that Roth, "reads the parallel but contrasting stories of Lucy and Mina as two symbolic confrontations with the mother, in the first of which she is destroyed and in the second of which she is saved, as part of the structure that works through 'the desire to destroy the threatening mother ... who threatens by being desirable'" (p. 416).
Dracula, threatens the boundary between child and adult. Van Helsing describes Dracula as having a child-like brain, and to not be fulled by his man-stature (Stoker, p. 341). Smith argues that Dracula threatens the boundary because he accumulates knowledge, which makes him mature, and it therefore becomes necessary to defeat him "before he can become 'the father or futherer of a new order of beings, whose road must lead through Death, not Life'" (p. 137). "He is childlike in another sense, namely, that he does not know death. Children only think they immortal: eventually they come to know that they will die and consequently become more careful in what they desire and do" (Murfin, p. 477). Harker can also be read as the child. This is evident in the scene where Harker is with the three vampire women and the Count interrupts: "How dare you touch him, any of you?" (Stoker, p. 49). Roth argues that Harker is contrasted to a child because Dracula takes him from the vampire women and in his place they are given a bag of babies. Roth also links Harker's description of the vampire women, in particularly the vampire with golden hair and blue eyes, to the archetypal mother, Medusa. She also makes an interesting point that this appears to echo the desciption given of the pre-vamped Lucy (p. 39). This can either be analysed through the Oedipal complex; or through forbidden desire: desire for his fiancee Mina's best friend Lucy. Morris is also set up as a child in the Oedipal sense; Morris first looks at Dracula as a phallic symbol, and then identifies him as a rival. Moretti argues that "So long as things go well for Dracula, Morris acts like an accomplice. As soon as there is a reversal of fortunes, he turns into his staunchest enemy. Morris enters into competition with Dracula; he would like to replace him in the conquest of the Old World" (p. 95). Dracula also threatens the boundary between childhood innocence and adult knowledge. This is seen in Little Quincey, Mina and Harker's son. "Little Quincey can be read as the child of Dracula's and Harker's mutual desire" (Schaffer, p. 482). He was spawned from sexual transactions through blood, and Craft argues that "this is the fantasy child of those sexualized transfusions, son of an illicit and nearly invisible homosexual union" (p. 129). The newborn who should be innocent; has been unnaturally sexualized through the sharing of blood.
Dracula transgresses the boundaries between life and death, and therefore induces fear. Moretti argues that "An analogous ambivalence had already been described by Freud in relation to the taboo on the dead (and the vampire is, as we know, also a dead person who comes back to life to destroy those who remain":
This hostility, distressingly felt in the unconscious as satisfaction over the death ... [is displaced] on to the object of hostility, on to the dead themselves. Once again ... we find that the taboo has grown up on the basis of an ambivalent emotional attitude. The taboo upon the dead arises, like the others, from the contrast between conscious pain and unconscious satisfaction over the death that has occurred (101).
This boundary between life and death is visualised in Browning's Dracula. The coffin opens slowly and a "claw-like hand menacingly protrudes ... The theme of the Undead is thus keenly visualized: in the cellar of this dark, uninviting, ever-distanced castle, the lid of the coffin itself serves to mark the boundary between life and death, a boundary which is crossed by a hand pushing inexorably from within, coming as it were from the "other" side" (Kavka, p. 216). Craft argues that Dracula is like "Nosferatu, neither dead or alive but somehow both, mobile frequenter of the grave and boudoir" (p. 117). Dracula is able to escape both the entrapments of life and death; but he also has different constraints: "he and his children rise and fall for a drink and for nothing else, for nothing else matters" (Craft, 117).
Dracula blurs the boundary between good and evil; fair and dark. It is "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)" (Craft, p. 116). Dracula is identifiably evil and Van Helsing and the Crew of Light are identifiably good. The boundary between Dracula and Van Helsing is confused because they are doubled. Every puncture the Count inflicts is equaled by Van Helsing. The morphine injection that Van Helsing gives Lucy immobilizes her, and Van Helsing then gives her the blood transfusions which masculizes Lucy. In contrast when Dracula penetrates Lucy, she also becomes masculinized. The morphine injection has the same affect on Lucy as Dracula's hypnotic power (Craft, p. 126). Van Helsing and Dracula both penetrate and it perturbes the border between good and evil. The border between fair and dark is threatened through Lucy. She is fair before her contact with Dracula, and after being vamped she becomes dark. "Early in the story when Lucy is not yet completely vampirised, Dr Seward describes her hair 'in its usual sunny ripples' (p. 180); later, when the men watch her return to her tomb, Lucy is described as 'a dark-haired woman' (p. 235)" (Roth, p. 36).
Animal boundaries are threatened by Dracula. Dracula's "ability to metamorphose into a wolf or bat illustrates his 'unnatural' command of nature (or more radically the challenge he presents to Jonathon Harker's assumptions about nature)" (Smith, p. 132). Harker describes Dracula as being lizard-like after he sees Dracula crawling down the castle wall "just as a lizard moves along a wall" (Stoker, p. 158). Smith argues that "Like the lizard, Dracula is actually a very limited being whose activities are almost entirely dominated by his drive for food, safety, and the preproduction of his species; but his power" (p. 159). "With his power to subdue wolves and other creatures from the lower orders of the animal kingdom, Dracula signifies the link between the human and animal worlds that modern urban life tends to obsure" (Smith, p. 158). Dracula's piercing of the flesh is also animal like. Frayling argues that Stoker had researched vampire piercing and discovered that if both upper canines were to be used to pierce the flesh they would get stuck, and instead the vampires in Dracula use an upper and a lower canine from one side of the mouth; similar to the way a rodent or a wolf tears at flesh (Frayling, pp. 103-104). Cusick links the 'anthropomorphic figures' in Dracula to the supernatural, in which he argues that "Dracula's supernatural presence in manifested through many animals, in particular the wolf and the bat" ( p. 142).
Dracula also highlights the battle between the Victorian and the New woman. The boundary between the two is represented through Lucy and Mina. Showalter sees Lucy as being representative of the New Woman's sexuality, and supports this claim by Lucy's wish to marry three men (p. 180). Cranny-Francis on the otherhand disagrees with this interpretation, instead suggesting that there is no evidence that Lucy is sexually active or aware before she is vamped (p.. 68). Lucy is more representative of the Victorian woman, whereas Mina is more representative of the New woman, according to Eltis; she sees Lucy as embodying Victorian qualities:
Some critics have identified Lucy as a New Woman, as manifested in her sleepwalking desire to escape from the home and her aberrant sexual appetite, complaining to Mina, "Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?" (p. 80). But taken as a whole Lucy is far more reminiscent of the traditional feminine defenseless and frivilous Victorian lady ... Nor is the contrast between the rampant sexuality of the female vampire and the normality of "untainted" woman that clear-cut. As Nina Auerbach has pointed out, the Un-Dead Lucy is faithfully monogamous in directing her sexual attentions to Arthur Holmwood alone. Once vampirized, Lucy is unfaithful only through the blood transfusions, given to her while she is unconscious, which, as Van Helsing observes, render her a "polyandrist" (p. 186)" (pp. 457-458).
Eltis also argues that "Mina is the character who most clearly subverts traditional gender categories" (p. 459). She contains qualities that are befitting the New Woman: she is a school teacher who has the ability to write in shorthand and to type, attributes of the modern day woman, and she travels across Europe to look after Harker, when he falls ill. Mina's character is deceptive; she incorporates a masculine role with a feminine appearance (Eltis, p. 459). The novel portrays Mina's masculine qualities as adding to her feminity (Eltis, p. 462). Cranny-Francis on the otherhand, argues that Mina is portrayed as relatively asexual, incapable of having sexual relations with Harker, inside or outside of wedlock, until Dracula seduces Mina; in a type of sexual awakening (pp. 69-71). To Cranny-Francis Mina embodies a conservative form of the New Woman; she asks the men to return her to normality if she becomes vamped, and therefore sexually aggressive. She wants to retain herself within the patriarchal expectations surrounding a woman's sexuality (Cranny-Francis, pp. 71-72). Sexual woman poses a threat to Victorian society. From the beginning Lucy is portrayed as a temptress, and prone to promiscuity as she wishes to marry three men; but when bitten by Dracula her sexuality is heightened (Signorotti, p. 623). Waller argues that "Lucy of Browning's film is easy prey for the vampire, not only because she recites somber poetry and is immediately fascinated by the Count's melancholia and Old World mein, but also because she is to some degree independent, with no father or lover to protect her" (p. 385). Mina on the otherhand is more confident in the role she possesses as both daughter, and wife-to-be of Harker, even in the male dominated world (Waller, p. 385).
Debates have surfaced over whether Dracula is a conservative or liberatory piece of text. "Many critics emphasizing social relations argue that the narrative largely supports already existing structures, which have determined its shape and its attitudes, while some suggest that it enables the imagining, by contrast with its own social context, of quite different relations that have yet to come fully into being" (Riquelme, p. 418). Moretti argues that the text is politically conservative. To him "Dracula takes on an ancient form that threatens the vampire hunters, burgeoisie defenders of a status quo bound up with capitalism. For Moretti the book is an allegy of monopoly capital, whose 'ambition is to subjugate the last vestiges of the liberal era and destroy all forms of economic independence' (92)" (Riquelme, p. 419). Feminist readings often view Dracula as being conservative and somewhat detrimental, with the text often reinforcing conservative images towards women and often envokes images that makes the reader victimize or condone the victimization of women (Riquelme, p. 420). Another critique is that Dracula is conservative because it does not challenge marriage and its expected roles; instead it shows the restraints of marriage. Auerbach argues that "Even before Arthur celebrates their wedding night with hammer and stake, thumping away unfaltering while her 'body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions' (p. 262), Dracula had baptised Lucy into wifely fidelity" (p. 160). Moretti concurs and asserts "Mina and Jonathan get married in hospital, when Jonathan is in a state of prostration and impotence; and they marry in order to mend, to forget the terrible experience (which was also sexual) undergone by Jonathan in Transylvania" (p. 98). There are some critiques who disagree with these conservative takes, and opt for a more liberatory view. Clemens provides a feminist critique. She views Mina as being a progressive New Woman, and as somewhat liberatory:
Mina herself is part of the newness of the radically changing modern world that the vampire invades, although she is somewhat uncomfortable about the challenges currently being made to traditional notions about womens' social identity ... The plot of Dracula appears to endorse the movement toward female emancipation that was undermining the bastions of traditional male privilege, for Mina is exposed to the danger of becoming a vampire mainly because she has been denied active participation in the men's "moving world." Viewed symbolically, her situation reflects that of women whose intellectual and emotional powers remain undeveloped, who become parasitic in their personal relations because they have been prevented from exercising their nondomestic skills and talents (pp. 172-173).
Clemens concludes that Dracula appears to "endorse the movement toward a female emancipation that was undermining the bastions of traditional male privilege" (p. 172). Eltis agrees that Dracula is liberatory. Mina is kept in the home out of the men's activities, unattended, Dracula mocks them for their ignorance in living Mina easily accessible to him (p. 461). Dracula blurs the line between being a conservative text and a liberatory text, as seen by the debates.
The boundary between self and other is also threatened. Dracula blurs the boundary between Jonathan and Dracula. "Instead of sharing with Dracula or feeding him, Jonathan spies on him from distant sites. Critical ingenuity can detect subtle affinities between the horrified young man and the horrible old vampire" (Auerbach, p. 151). Dracula wears Jonathan's clothing to the village and Dracula is mistaken for Jonathan by a woman there (Gelder, p. 43). "When Harker sees Dracula in his own clothes, the image is profoundly disturbing" (Schaffer, pp. 475-476). Smith argues that the Count's desire is manifested through others, he has no self, "he becomes an object, rather than a subject, of discourse; he does not self-reflect (he does not appear in the mirror)" (p. 133). Smith argues that Dracula is worked out on a level of sexuality:
It is sexuality, as a displaced form of the sublime, which is 'held in check by a prior and unexamined discourse of ethics'; in doing so, the 'potential power of the sublime', or the troublesome sexuality manifested by the vampire, has only an implicit presence. The Count's apparent 'otherness' then, is a disguised 'sameness'; the Count is linked to the group because he expresses, and exposes their sexual desires. This means that the Count is an internal rather than an external enemy (p. 145).
Auerbach shows the connection between Dracula and Jonathan, asserting that: "Jonathan, does, for instance, crawl out of the castle in the same lizardlike fashion that appalled him when he watched Dracula do it" (pp. 151-152).
Dracula distorts the boundary between desire and fear. Foster argues that "the real fear is not that some unslakable thirst will produce monsters, but that some master could command any one of us to fulfil some horrible drive that has been repressed with the greatest diligence" (p. 494). This is repressed desire, in particular repressed sexual desire. Dracula also blurs the line between homosexual desire and fear. The desire for homosexual activity is rampant throughout Dracula, but it is feared due to sexual taboo. The text is shrouded in homosexual desire, and it is implied that this desire results out of fear, the desire for the forbbiden.
The boundary between the conscious and the unconscious is threatened in Dracula. Smith argues that the function of the dream is problematized because in "Dracula the dream bridges the conscious / unconscious divide, but in a way which seems to unsettle both" (p. 142). He sees the sublime being present in the discrete or the unconscious which is associated with the uncanny, through uneasy recognitions. An example of this the bourgeois subject finding "in vampirism something which is inherent in their own suppressed model of desire" (Smith, p. 141). The unconscious desire moves into the realm of the conscious through Dracula, as he awakens sexual desires that are repressed, Lucy becomes sexually aggressive, and he is physical embodiment of desire repressed in the unconscious, in which case he makes the repressed real.
The line between sanity and insanity is crossed in Browning's Dracula. Renfield travels to Transylvania instead of Harker in this version, he is an English madman, and according to Waller both he and Dracula must both die in order to restore the balance and to sever all ties to Transylvania and England. Renfield embodies Browning's depiction of madness, a disease spread by the vampire. In Stoker's Dracula, Renfield is put into an asylum before Dracula leaves Transylvania for England and he therefore "implies that England harbors insanity that can be manipulated by the vampire" (Waller, p. 388). Browning depicts Renfield as a sane, although eccentric, Englishman, who once bitten by Dracula becomes insane and animal like. "Browning's most interesting suggestion in Dracula is that those who struggle against the vampire and his abnormal creations could also be considered insane" (Waller, p. 389). It is in this suggestion that the transgression between sane and insane is the most coherent.
Dracula threatens Christianity. Punter argues that Dracula is an inversion of Christianity, and in particularly "Pauline Christianity, in that Dracula promises -- and gives -- the real resurrection of the body, but disunited from soul" (p. 27). Punter argues that Dracula blurs the line between man and God; seen in the relationship between Renfield and Dracula. "His 'disciple' Reinfield regards him as a god; and his satanic aspects are all the more interesting if we remember that his real-life ancestor gained his reputation for cruelty because of his assiduity in defending the Christain faith against the marauding Turk" (Punter, p. 28). Renfield as a disciple of God (Dracula) is especially evident in Browning's Dracula, because Renfield refers to Dracula as "master" and also grovels to him and does his bidding, which shows Dracula's omnipotence. Dracula is set up as the anti-Christ, because instead of giving life, he takes life.
Dracula threatens and crosses a myriad of boundaries. Stoker does challenge the conventions of society in his novel, such as challenging the domestic role in women, but Stoker ultimately takes the safe road as he reverts back to the marriage between Jonathan Harker and Mina, and he also puts Mina back into a domestic role, through her becoming a mother. Although giving birth to Quincey can be seen as regressing back into the traditional Victorian role of women, Stoker sets this up to show that women can both be educated as well as embodying maternal qualities. Dracula is very complex and it is open to a number of different readings. This essay has looked at Dracula from a historical perspective; a psychoanalytical lens (primarily Freud and Lacanian); queer and gender studies analysis; Jungian approach; and a Marxist interpretation, and there are still other possible readings available from which Dracula can be read. Dracula evokes fear, and illuminates its Gothic properties by contesting and distorting the existing social normatives of Victorian society, and by introducing themes and attitudes considered sexual and human taboo.
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