Of the vampire tales to date, Bram Stoker's Dracula has unquestionably become the most popular and the most critically examined.

University Degree Linguistics, Classics and related subjects

Of the vampire tales to date, Bram Stoker’s Dracula has unquestionably become the most popular and the most critically examined. It constitutes, however, the culmination of a series of nineteenth-century vampire tales that have been overshadowed by Stoker’s 1897 novel. To be sure, many of the earlier tales provide little more than a collective history of the vampire lore Stoker incorporated in Dracula, but Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s little known Carmilla (1872) is the original tale to which Stoker’s Dracula served as a response. In Carmilla Le Fanu chronicles the development of a vampiric relationship between two women, in which it becomes increasingly clear that the lesbian relationship between Carmilla and Laura defies the traditional structures of kinship by which men regulate the exchange of women to promote male bonding.

On the contrary, Le Fanu allows Laura and Carmilla to usurp male authority and to bestow themselves on whom they please, completely excluding male participation in the exchange of women, as discussed by Claude Levi-Strauss and Gayle Rubin. Stoker later responded to Le Fanu’s narrative of female empowerment by reinstating male control in the exchange of women. In effect, Dracula seeks to repossess the female body for the purposes of male pleasure and exchange, and to correct the reckless unleashing of female desire in Le Fanu’s Carmilla. In Victorian days when women hardly even recognized the existence of sex, female sensuality was portrayed as being unhealthy. No good woman had anything to do with sex; therefore a sexual woman must have been a bad one, a predator. In this repressive pre-Freudian atmosphere, sex and death became synonymous.

Throughout most of the nineteenth century the central figure in vampire tales was a male whose relationships were used to depict various conflicts in contemporary society. James Twitchell observes in The Living Dead: a Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature that nineteenth-century writers mainly used the vampire “to express various human relationships, relationships that the artist himself had with family, with friends, with lovers, and even with art itself”. Other critics note that the vampire, a dead body that drinks blood and preys on innocent victims to sustain its own life, acts as a complex metaphor: it could represent the economic dependence of women; the parasitic relationship between the aristocracy and the oppressed middle and lower classes; unrepressed female sexuality; eugenic contamination; enervating parent/child relationships; and, of course, sexual relationships deemed subversive or perverse in hegemonic discourse.

Perhaps most interesting is Nina Auerbach’s contention that the demonized (or vampirized) woman in nineteenth-century literature and art really depicts a “hero who was strong enough to bear the hopes and fears of a century’s worship”. Auerbach’s comment may be true in some instances, but by and large the majority of women in vampire tales, at least in the early and mid-nineteenth century, were far too marginalized and victimized to be seen as heroic; like the male protagonists of those tales, who brutalized them, women vampires were generally perceived as loathsome and diseased.

Dracula is Stoker’s response to Le Fanu’s portrayal of female empowerment. If Le Fanu frees his female characters from subject positions in the male kinship system, Stoker decidedly returns his to exchange status and reinstates them in that system. Stoker’s female characters are the “supreme gifts” whose exchange finally binds Dracula’s “little band of men” together. In Dracula Stoker creates what Fredric Jameson would call a “laboratory space” to carry out “experiments” on female characters, ultimately achieving an “imaginary vengeance” against the rising power of women, particularly against women who tried to assert control over their own sexuality. It is usually assumed that Stoker sought vengeance against women in Dracula because of his hostility toward prostitutes who had infected him with tertiary syphilis. But the root of Stoker’s struggle with women’s sexuality can be traced to his relationship with his wife.

In 1878 he married Florence Balcombe, who one year later gave birth to their son, Noel. Stoker’s granddaughter believed that Florence “refused to have sex with Bram” after Noel’s birth, which has led to the perception of her as a “cold,” “aloof” woman who was “very anti-sex”. Whether or not she was sexually frigid is debatable. What is clear, though, is that her behaviour toward her husband was unconventional -- that sexually she did not fulfil her part of the marriage contract. In creating Dracula, then, Stoker was probably less concerned with achieving vengeance against a particular group of women who had infected him than he was with asserting control over a whole range of women, who, like his wife -- indeed, like women throughout Victorian England who had welcomed the ‘New Woman’ movement -- had violated conventional expectations about women’s sexuality. Rather than embrace sexually self-determining women such as Laura and Carmilla, Stoker placed the women of Dracula firmly under male control and subjected them to severe punishments for any sexual transgression.

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Stoker’s overriding concern in Dracula is the threat of rampant female sexual desire. Carol Senf rightly points out that this ancient, aristocratic vampire who preys on the wives and fiancées of England’s working class reveals, among other things, the “power that negative social values from the past often have over the present”. As Troy Boone further concludes, the novel suggests that “a new understanding of sexuality and decay is necessary for any attempt to attain social order and growth,” and that for all its apparent “`reification’ of dominant political beliefs, [Stoker’s text] exposes the dangers of failing to challenge their authority”. Both Senf and Boone present valid arguments, but, like other readings in Dracula’s critical legacy, theirs fail to emphasize the degree to which Stoker responds to the threat of female sexuality in Dracula. In Stoker’s text Dracula -- and Dracula’s sense of sexuality -- actually dominates very few of the scenes, whereas the sexually-charged female vampires -- those at Castle Dracula, Lucy, and Mina -- receive most of Stoker’s attention.

For his first “experiment” in Dracula, Stoker presents the problem of Lucy’s sexual aggressiveness, a problem to which he ultimately provides a violent solution. Although Lucy’s sexuality does not become rabid until her vampiric possession, Stoker presents her from the beginning as exhibiting personality traits potentially dangerous in women. In a letter to Mina, Lucy asks, “why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her?” Her wishing for the right to have more than one sexual partner -- a reality for males such as Stoker himself -- makes her a threat to established gender roles. Stoker feels obliged to inform the reader that her wishes are unseemly when, in the same passage, she again asks Mina, “why are men so noble when we women are so little worthy of them?” Lucy serves as Stoker’s paradigm of woman-gone-wrong and predictably suffers for it. Stoker also suggests that Lucy has lesbian tendencies. In a letter to Mina she says:

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, and I don’t want to stop, for I do so want to tell you all.

Lucy’s wish to share her secrets while undressing suggests her desire to reveal what is truly hidden; something she knows is not acceptable in the repressive environment in which she resides. The men in the text can control Lucy’s and Mina’s homosocial relationship as long as they both remain accessible; they cannot, however, control what Lucy presumably has in mind.

As if to temper her questionable behaviour, Stoker denies Lucy her inheritance rights and places her firmly within the male-governed kinship system. Lucy’s mother, who controls the Westenra estate after her husband’s death, dies shortly before Lucy’s impending marriage to Arthur Holmwood. Dr. Seward tells us that:

Mrs Westenra had for some time expected sudden death from her heart, and had put her affairs in absolute order; . . . with the exception of a certain entailed property of Lucy’s father which now, in default of direct issue, went back to a distant branch of the family, the whole estate, real and personal, was left absolutely to Arthur Holmwood.

Separating Lucy from her inheritance fictionally and historically positions her in “a long tradition in which women do not inherit”. Even before Lucy’s wedding, Mrs Westenra ensures Lucy’s total dependence on her future husband. If her daughter had any wild ideas about being financially independent in marriage, she has permanently disabled her.

Once Dracula kisses Lucy into sudden sexuality, she grows “voluptuous,” “savage,” “wanton,” and “diabolically sweet”. Dracula’s kiss enables women to become sexual penetrators. Using their sharp teeth to penetrate men, they reverse traditional gender roles and place men in the passive position customarily reserved for women. In Carmilla the penetration of female vampires -- in effect, the female appropriation of the phallus -- is seen as an act of empowerment; in Dracula, however, Lucy’s unmanageable sexual penetration is presented as inherently evil because it threatens fixed gender distinctions.

In an attempt to cure Lucy of her reckless sexuality, Van Helsing and his crew of “brave men” perform massive blood transfusions on her. By having her drained blood replaced with a “brave man’s blood”, Lucy might survive. The act of transfusing blood, of penetrating Lucy’s body with the phallic needle and enabling the men to deposit their own fluids in her, conjures up images of gang rape. As Rubin stresses, “women [in some societies] are frequently kept in their place by gang rape when the ordinary mechanisms of masculine intimidation prove insufficient”. Ironically, Lucy’s wish to marry “as many [men] as want her” violently comes true. Each transfusion symbolizes a kind of ghastly marriage and prompts Van Helsing to fret that “this so sweet maid is a polyandrist”. Stoker gives Lucy what she wants and teaches her a lesson at the same time.

But the gang transfusions fail to cure Lucy’s sexual recalcitrance, prompting Van Helsing’s crew to attempt to mask her sexuality by surrounding her with pungent garlic flowers. While garlic plays a symbolic role in traditional vampire folklore, in Dracula its role has a dual purpose. More than just a traditional means of discouraging Dracula’s visits, the ability of garlic to disguise odours, especially body odours, suggests, as Alain Corbin argues in The Foul and the Fragrant, “a way of denying the sexual role of the sense of smell, or at least of shifting the field of olfactory stimulation and allusion”. Van Helsing and Dr. Seward saturate Lucy’s body and environs with garlic flowers not only to keep Dracula at bay but possibly to disguise the sexual odours her newly excited body exudes.

Lucy’s unresponsiveness to ordinary mechanisms of masculine intimidation while alive permits Van Helsing and company, after her death and resurrection as an Undead, to resort to the most violent means of correction available to them. In Victorian fiction, punishment for female sexual transgressions usually resulted in the loss of social status. For Stoker, though, the traditional punishment is not severe enough to rectify Lucy’s transgressions. Instead, he employs vampire lore’s extreme phallic corrective: staking and beheading Lucy. In this scene, Stoker’s gang of brave, noble men carry candles dripping “sperm” into Lucy’s tomb. Even more sexually alive in the coffin, Lucy’s “body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions”. But before she can perform any other sexually suggestive gyrations, Arthur, shining with “high duty,” drove “deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake” into her chest. This act of transfixation “cures” Lucy and returns her to the accepted role of a sexually passive female. Arthur and his companions have repossessed her body, permanently fixing her in the limitative role of gender and the male system of alliance. Lucy’s sexuality is “corrected.”

Stoker’s “experiment” with Lucy reveals the unpleasant results of woman’s attempting to escape male systems of exchange and usurping traditionally male power. Lucy’s potential power is effectually exterminated, leaving Mina the lone woman in the text. This repressive atmosphere for Victorian women in Stoker’s text is in contrast to the promising and progressive efforts of the `New Woman’ movement. It is also in comparison with the many advances in Victorian society; new methods of communication, travelling, and medical practices were all creating opportunities for the Victorian populace. Regardless of these advances in society, through Mina’s example, Stoker creates another, more successful experiment, one that communicates the happy outcome for a woman who willingly remains a vehicle for the promotion of male bonding. By the end of Dracula, Mina’s body becomes a male-occupied zone. She has no more control over her own body than Lucy finally had.

Stoker portrays Mina as the traditional Victorian angel-in-the-house. A doting, adoring wife to Jonathan, she confesses that she has “nothing to give him except myself, my life . . . my love and duty for all the days of my life”. Mina completely surrenders to Jonathan’s will, and any self-improvement she undergoes is only to better serve him. She practices shorthand and typing “very assiduously” so that she “shall be useful to Jonathan” once they are married. And to complete the picture of the ideal woman, she expresses the obligatory note of disdain for the `New Woman.’ Despite Alan Johnson’s contention that “Mina’s status as `New’ is suggested in the fact that she is an orphan and never knew either father or mother, a status further established mainly by her practical competence”. Mina twice disassociates herself from the `New Woman’ movement.

In bragging about her voracious appetite, Mina believes she would have “shocked the ‘New Woman’”. Similarly, she disdainfully remarks that:

Some of 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!

In the latter comment, Mina supports gender divisions based on female inferiority. Stoker imbues her with all the qualities an ideal woman should possess -- for the Victorian male. Unlike Lucy, she is not predisposed toward vampirism, but eventually she, too, becomes “unclean” by Dracula’s kiss, an empowering kiss that threatens her presumably static position in the male alliance system.

In their quest to exterminate Dracula and his influence over women, Mina becomes the intermediary link between Dr. Van Helsing, Dr. Seward, Lord Godalming, Quincey Morris, and Jonathan Harker -- the tracking party. To assist these men in their pursuit, she transcribes their journals and notes pertaining to Dracula. In fact, she considers it her fundamental role to serve as group secretary. The text she compiles, which eventually becomes the Dracula manuscript, links the men in their common knowledge and common purpose and provides the means of binding them together. In addition to linking the men through her text, Mina functions as the receptacle for male emotion and the victim of restrictive male chivalry.

Mina is not allowed direct access to her readers but must go through male channels to be heard. Harker’s final note further silences Mina, re-establishing the dominant cycle of male arbitration. Her lengthy journal entry, which initially closes the narrative, obviously causes Harker some anxiety because it affords her the final word and allows the reader to remember her voice over all others. Seven years later he encloses her words completely within his. The completed narrative frame and the birth of Mina’s child, the “little band’s” son, subsume her forever under male control. This, for Stoker, was the happy and just ending for his novel.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Auerbach, Nina. The Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Boone, Troy. “`He is English and Therefore Adventurous’: Politics, Decadence, and Dracula,” in Studies in the Novel, spring, 1993.

Corbin, Alain. The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. Leamington Spa and New York: Berg Publishers, 1986.

Farson, Daniel. The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker. London: Michael Joseph, 1975.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Metheun, 1981.

Johnson, Alan P. “‘Dual Life’: The Status of Women in Stoker’s Dracula,” in Sexuality and Victorian Literature, ed. Don Richard Cox. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984.

Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.

Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the `Political Economy’ of Sex” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1975.

Senf, Carol. Dracula: Between Tradition and Modernism. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998.

Stoker, Bram. Dracula, London: Penguin Books, 1993 edition.

Stoker, Bram. “The Censorship of Fiction” in The Nineteenth Century and After, New York and London: Marston & Co., July-Dec., 1908.

Twitchell, James. The Living Dead: a Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1981.

Twitchell, James. The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature. (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1981), p. 4.

For useful a discussion of vampirism as metaphor see Senf, Carol. Dracula: Between Tradition and Modernism, (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998), pp. 31-74.

Auerbach, Nina. The Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 10.

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. (London: Penguin Books, 1993 edition), p. 485.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 201.

Farson, Daniel. The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker. (London: Michael Joseph, 1975), pp. 213,214.

Daniel Farson considers it doubtful that Stoker “recognized the lesbianism in ‘Carmilla’” and is “sure he was unaware of the sexuality inherent in Dracula” (see The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker. London: Michael Joseph, 1975, p. 22). This comment is unconvincing, especially given Stoker’s own comment in “The Censorship of Fiction” which appears in The Nineteenth Century and After, September 1908: “A close analysis will show that the only emotions which in the long run harm are those arising from sex impulses, and when we have realised this we have put a finger on the actual point of danger.” It is difficult to view this comment from a man unable to recognise sexual impulses in his or someone else’s fiction.

Senf, Carol. Dracula: Between Tradition and Modernism, (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998), P. 44.

Boone, Troy. “`He is English and Therefore Adventurous’: Politics, Decadence, and Dracula,” this essay appears in, Studies in the Novel. Spring, 1993, p. 76.

This is not to say that female sexuality in Dracula has been critically ignored. See, for example, Christopher Craft, “`Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” which appears in Speaking of Gender. (ed. Elaine Showalter. New York and London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 216-242.

Stoker et al., p. 81.

Stoker et al., p. 80.

Stoker et al., p. 76.

Stoker et al., p. 216.

Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the `Political Economy’ of Sex” which appears in Toward an Anthropology of Women. (ed. Rayna R Reiter. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1975), p. 164.

Stoker et al., p. 272.

Stoker et al., p. 194.

Rubin et al., p. 163.

Stoker et al., p. 81.

Stoker et al., p. 227.

Corbin, Alain. The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. (Leamington Spa and New York: Berg Publishers, 1986), p. 74.

Stoker et al., p. 277.

Stoker et al., p. 140.

Stoker et al., p. 25.

Johnson, Alan. “`Dual Life’: The Status of Women in Stoker’s Dracula,” which features in Sexuality and Victorian Literature. (ed. Don Richard Cox. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), p. 24.

Stoker et al., p. 118.

Stoker et al., p. 119.

In his conclusion to the Elementary Structures of Kinship, Claude Levi-Strauss romanticizes the male system of kinship by stating, “In the matrimonial dialogue of men, woman is never purely what is spoken about; for if women in general represent a certain category of signs, destined to a certain kind of communication, each woman preserves a particular value arising from her talent, before and after marriage, for taking her part in a duet. In contrast to words, which have wholly become signs, woman has remained at once a sign and a value. This explains why the relations between the sexes have preserved that affective richness, ardour and mystery which doubtless originally permeated the entire universe of human communications.” (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 496.

Of the vampire tales to date, Bram Stoker's Dracula has unquestionably become the most popular and the most critically examined.

This is a preview of the whole essay

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