Sexuality in Bram Stocker's Dracula Most critics agree that Dracula is, as much as anything else, a novel that indulges

“Man must be pleased; but him to please

Is woman’s pleasure.”

Mina’s moral perfection remains as stainless in the end as any Victorian woman.
Another far less obvious way in which women are put in domestic roles comes at the very end of Dracula. The image at the end of the novel where Mina is portrayed sitting amongst her heroes, with a baby boy on her lap, who has been named coincidentally after the heroes, who she will raise. Thus, Mina has lost her exciting role outside of the home to domestic chores accompanying her baby. The concept of women coming out of the home was clearly one of the feminist issues that was meant
to be recognized however for that freedom to by followed by a quick return to that same place would show that Stoker is not complying with a feminist perspective and still indulges in his heroines choosing traditional roles of marriage and motherhood. Interestingly Stoker’s attitude at the end of the novel reflects perhaps his own judgment of what he deems society’s women should aspire to. Although he appears to break the mould of what is typical in the sense that woman are given sexual power and intellect over men it still comes down to the fact that a good woman will not deem to be sexual or in any way step out of society’s bounds without facing the consequences.

In Victorian Britain energetic discussions and disputes took place across a wide range of social issues. None of which was more impassioned than the one concerning gender laws. Indeed as Elaine Showalter writes, “all the laws that governed sexual identity and behaviour seemed to be breaking down”. From the late 1880’s, there was for exapmple, an unprecedented amount of public discussion and criticism of marriagew and the family in the press, in literature and in pamphlets. Reform began to make inroads in to the patriarchal English legal system with the passage of such acts as the Married Women’s property Act (1882) that permitted wives, who had previously gained the right in 1880 to retain any earnings or property aquired after marriage, to retain possessions they had owned at the time of their union. Marriage therefore began to seems less a relationship of patriarchal dominance and female dependence and more of involving reciprocal rights and duties between husband and wife. As a sign of the intensity of the fear of ‘the New Woman’, traditionalists frequently represented women in contradictory ways. “On the one hand, they pictured her as a nervous type..prone to hysteria, for whom intellectual activity could have delibitating physiological effects; on the other, they cast her asa highly sexual creature, whose permissiveness undermined social stability”.Stoker follows the former lead by having Mina cry uncontrollably after she is first bitten “there now crying again!..I wonder what has come over me today. I must hide it from Jonathon, for if he knew I had been crying twice in one morning”.

More importantly, Stocker depicts the second type in Lucy. Lucy is transformed from a conventional figure of the West’s ideal woman, characterised by her ‘sweetness’ and ‘purity’, in to a figure whose ‘heartless cruelty’ and ‘volumptuous wantonness’ cannote the brutal promiscuity of the world depicted by nineteenth century natural history. With this change, Stoker situates Lucy within the many unmarried, pregnant women who begin to people the Anglo-American novels of the century. These figures, which include Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth and Thomas Hardy’s Tess,  reject hierarchy and gender polarities and suggest a world which is not natural. Stoker therefore rejects ‘the New Woman’ as not being natural.

Upon further analyzing the roles played by both women, critics have stated that Lucy Westenra is one of the "suddenly sexual women" in the narrative and taking into account Mina Harker as the Good Woman who embodies aspects of Mother, Sister, and Child, Griffin argues that "Stoker's gothic is quintessentially Victorian: the worst horror it can imagine is not Dracula at all but the released, transforming sexuality of the Good Woman"

This indulgence is however only a brief glimpse into feminist virtues and in no way can justify Dracula as a feminist work however could it be said that it is a basis for development had been subtlety laid down by Stoker. “Depicting parts of the novel that would deem influential to a feminist reader it would seem that when Dracula lands in England he sets his eyes (or fangs) on the beautiful Lucy Westenra, we can understand from this that the impending battle between good and evil will hinge upon female sexuality”.

“Both Lucy and Mina are less like real people than two dimensional embodiments of virtues that have, over the ages, been coded as female”. Both women are chaste, pure, innocent of the world’s evils, and devoted to their men. Many of the eighteenth century moralists, such as Moore and Cowper, described femininity as innate, they also insisted that feminine virtues needed constant cultivation and that important characteristics were needed in women for her to be ‘the angel of the house.’ This term, coming from Coventry Patmore’s popular poem, describes these virtues, of his wife, as “a strange beauty with extreme innocence of manner”, Patmore wrote of the purity of a brides blush, “when she says, I will, into she knows not what”. Dracula however threatens to turn the two women into their opposites, into women noted for their voluptuousness, a word Stoker turns to again and again. Here, the count voices a male fantasy that has existed since Adam and Eve were turned out of Eden, namely, that women’s ungovernable desires leave men poised for a costly fall from grace.

Another encounter of female sexuality stems from the three beautiful vampires. Harker encounters them in Dracula’s castle in which they are bound from freedom, this is a means to prevent their sexuality prevailing. "With a fierce sweep of his arm, he hurled the women from him, and then motioned to the others, as though he were beating them back; it was the same imperious gesture that I had seen used to the wolves."
To Harker these beautiful women are both his dream and his nightmare. “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.” Jonathon is described as being “in an agony of delightful anticipation” as the three discuss who should feast on him first.  Indeed, they embody both the dream and the nightmare of the Victorian male imagination in general. The sisters represent what the Victorian ideal stipulates women should not be, that of sexually aggressive and voluptuous. This therefore makes their beauty both a promise of sexual fulfillment and a curse. These women offer Harker more sexual gratification in two paragraphs than his fiance Mina does during the course of the entire novel.
As Van Helsing faces the voluptuously beautiful vampires, he is nearly paralyzed with the desire to love and protect them “She was so fair to look on, so radiantly beautiful, so exquisitely voluptuous, that the very instinct of man in me, which calls some of my sex to love and to protect one of hers, made my head whirl with new emotion.”.Even the righteous and pious doctor is susceptible to the vampires ‘diabolical temptation’. However, this “sexual proficiency threatens to undermine the foundations of a male dominated society by compromising men’s ability to reason and maintain control” . For this reason, the sexually aggressive women in the novel must be destroyed without consequence.

Vampirism and sexuality are closely related, and Freud observes “morbid dread always signifies repressed sexual wishes”. Although the tone of morbid dread is evident throughout the novel, also is that of lustful anticipation; anticipation of killing Dracula himself and anticipation of a sexual consummation.

 In 1899, The Interpretation of Dreams, the book that Sigmund Freud regarded as his most important work, was published, only two years after the publication of Dracula.  Freud's interest in the Interpretation of Dreams led him to propose that people were often subject in an early "phallic" stage of development to a so-called Oedipus complex where individuals were erotically attached to their parent of the opposite sex and were hostile to the parent of the same sex. It is likely that Stocker would have been aware of and possibly influenced by Freud’s theories, this is evident in Dracula. In psychoanalytic terms, vampirism conceals desired and feared fantasies, fantasies that point to the Oedipus complex. Dracula turns people into vampires; he plays the creator and therefore father figure. The brothers battle against the father who has stolen the desired woman, and mother figure from them.

In the scene of Harker’s seduction by the three female vampires, Harker has previously disobeyed the counts instructions to stay in his room. At Dracula’s discovery of Harker’s violation he becomes like an irate father. Jonathon’s role becomes that of child in both the way he is replaced by a child and how he awaits the embrace of a female vampire he sees as particularly fair – who we should translate as the face of the mother, one he desires yet fears. This could represent the need for motherly care following a father’s scorn. Also, when Lucy becomes a vampire she is referred to by children as the ‘Bloofer’ lady, which is possibly childish language for ‘beautiful’ lady. This then suggests that the children, who were all boys, were attracted to Lucy, as a mother figure and a sexual figure which is in keeping with Freud’s theory.

Early in the novel, as Harker becomes uncomfortable with his lodgings and his host at Castle Dracula, he notes that “unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.” Here, Harker voices one of the central concerns of the Victorian era. The end of the nineteenth century brought drastic developments that forced English society to question the systems of belief that had governed it for centuries. Darwin’s theory of evolution, for instance, called the validity of long-held sacred religious doctrines into question. Likewise, the Industrial Revolution brought profound economic and social change to the previously agrarian England.

There is also a direct link to the theories of Darwin, concerning evolution. It can be seen that Dracula and vampires are evolved from man. Dracula himself was once human, as were his predecessors, Lucy and the vampiresses in Castle Dracula. The fact that Stocker creates these characters as evil suggests he was against the theory of evolution. Also Dracula and the vampires can be repelled with the use of religious iconography. Indeed, in the fight against Dracula, these symbols of good take the form of the icons of Christian faith, such as the crucifix. “The novel is so invested in the strength and power of these Christian symbols that it reads, at times, like a propagandistic Christian promise of salvation”.It can therefore be seen that Stocker believed that the theory of evolution, as well as other scientific discoveries, threatened the place of religion within society and so threatened society’s morals. By portraying vampires as sexual therefore it highlights how the lack of religion affects morals and therefore the impending battle between good and evil hinges upon female sexuality.

On conclusion, female sexual expression was dictated by Victorian society’s rigid expectations. It is clear by the abundance of advice literature available on domesticity in Victorian Britain, that to be a domestic goddess was an essential quality of the middle class female. It is also clear that the separation of the sexes did mean that the female domain was the home, whilst the male domain was the public. Upon exploration of this sexuality it would seem that a sexually aggressive female would spur a conventional Victorian male to loose all dignity and control. At the time of Stoker’s Dracula this quality in a woman would be unacceptable however not totally unappreciated by the male imagination.
”Dracula has many scenes that seem to revel in sexual language and sensual description; these pleasures are of course sublimated to a Victorian sense of morality” . Sexual energy, in Stoker's view, has great potential for evil, but part of the novel's trick is that Stoker is allowed to express this sexual energy without the repercussions of doing just that. In other words writing a novel that implicitly
conflates sin with sexuality in a moralizing way, Stoker is also given free reign to write incredibly lurid and sensual scenes. This is his deceptive means of representing a society with feminist equality and any female who breaks the boundaries of desire will inevitably become part of the undead in order to restore innocence and decorum. However his allowance to portray woman as sexual in the first place and his generous portrayal of Mina throughout the novel spark a light for feminist readers and in turn start the development of the feminist era.
The contrasting female characters of the novel not only reflect values of the time, but also, in the case of the female vampires, feelings which were present, but which were frowned upon, such as temptation and lust. They embody the value in the name of which the men fight (Miss Mina's purity, goodness, virtue: she is the embodiment of pure human virtue); women are also the site of human vulnerability; the medium through which Dracula touches them and they can reach Dracula. Ideas of feminism are contrasted with ideas of power, making the novel one which reflected (in the Victorian era) what was, and what was feared.

Bibliography

Primary:

Freud, S., ‘The interpretation of dreams’ p. 17 (Wordsworth Editions Ltd 1997)

Freud, S., ‘The Penguin Freud Reader (Penguin Modern Classics Translated Texts)’ p. 76 (Penguin Books Ltd 2006)

Stoker, B., ‘Dracula’ (Wordsworth Editions 2000)

Secondary:

Cunningham, G., ‘The New woman and the Victorian Novel’ (Barnes and Noble Press 1978)

Davidoff, L., and Hall, C., “Family Fortunes – Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780 – 1850” (Routledge 2002)

Dollimore, J., ‘Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault’ (Clarendon Press 1991)

Farson, D., ‘The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker’ (St. Martin’s Press 1975)

Fraser, F., “The English Gentle Woman” (Barry Jenkins Press: London, 1987)

Flint, K., ‘The Woman Reader 1837-1914’ (Clarendon Press 1993)

Hall, L., ‘Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain Since 1880’ (UMI Research Press 2000)

Leatherdale, C., ‘Dracula – The Novel and the Legend: A Study of Bram Stoker’s Gothic Masterpiece’ (Aquarian Press 1986)

Poovey, M., ‘’  (Chicago London : University of Chicago Press , 1984)

Roth, P. A., 'Suddenly Sexual Women in Dracula' (Palgrave 1998)

Showlater, E., ‘Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle’ (Bloomsbury Press 1991)

Thompson, F., ‘The Rise of Respectable Society : Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830-1900’ (Fontana Press 1988)

Twitchell, J., ‘The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature’ (Duke University Press 1981)

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