UNIVERSITATEA „ŞTEFAN CEL MARE”

SUCEAVA
FACULTATEA DE LITERE ŞI ŞTIINŢE A
COMUNICĂRII
SPECIALIZAREA ENGLEZĂ-ROMÂNĂ

LUCRARE DE LICENŢĂ
THE SYMBOLISM IN BRAM
STOKER’S ”DRACULA”

Coordonator ştiinţific
Prodecan Conf. Univ. Elena-Luminiţa Turcu

Student
 Teodora-Elvira Croitoru
Summary

Argument

Introduction

Chapter I “Blood is life”:

A. Who is Dracula?
B. Vampires between myth and reality
C. The symbolism of blood

Chapter II “Blood as another, more seductive facet of femininity”

A. The emerging of New Woman
B. The Weird Sisters

Chapter III “Dracula’s invasion”

A. The association of Dracula with the East
B. Dracula’s metamorphoses
C. The psychoanalysis of Count Dracula

Conclusions

2
 Argument

It is a strange experience writing a degree for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. There is

something interesting about Dracula, about vampires in general. I took several different
approaches in my degree: psychological, folklore, socio-cultural and spiritual/religious.
The psychological aspects of the study of the vampire has intrigued me and te numerous
connections that vampires have with the world around us.
The idea of vampirism associated with immortality is irresistible not only for me,
but for almost all Dracula’s critics. I think that Dracula is not a journey of four men
trying to destroy the Evil, in fact, it is a journey into the dark and hidden explorating of
the self, which is more difficult than everything else.

3
 Introduction

The reputation of Bram Stoker1 rests today almost exclusevely upon his
authorship of Dracula. In his lifetime Stoker was better known as the Anglo-Irish
manager and bigrapher of the London actor Sir Henry Irving2, than as the author of eleven
novels, three volumes of short stories, and a vast corpus of largely uncollected short amd
serial fiction, biography and criticism.
Of Stoker’s eleven novels only five- Dracula (1897), The mistery of the sea
(1902), The jewel of seven stars (1903), The lady of the shroud (1909) and The lair of the
white worm (1911)- may be regarded as unequivocally Gothic. However, two of the
author’s collections of short stories- Under the sunset (1882), a collectionof moral tales
ostensibly for children, and the posthumous Dracula’s guest and other Wierd tales
(1914)- draw perceptibly on Gothic motifs. The remaining novels, with much of the
uncollected short fiction, can be classified essentially as romances, which at times
embody elements of the adventure story and the Gothic Novel. There is a fairly consistent
complex of themes, issues, most notably gender and race, which informs the full range of
Stoker’s fiction, and whose discourses may be traced throughout his writings. Stoker’s
recension of the Gothic is thus one in which the apparent preoccupation of a segment of
the British middle classes are channelled through conventions such as Gothic Hero and
Heroine, the quest for treasure or for the knowledge, and the theme of obduction, in
strengh of one or more discourses may be both fictionally tested and arguably verified.
The critical studies of Stoker’s writings have been largely psycho-biographical in
approach, and have focused attention into Dracula at the expense of the author’s other
works.
Dracula, the character has become the epicentre of a modern curtural myth of
which Dracula3 -the novel- is but a small component. Dracula provides a clear
demonstration of how Gothic yield to contemporany discourses throughout the author’s
fiction. Recent scholarship has associated the distinctive pallor, hairy palms and rank
1
Hughes, William, 1998. The handbook to gothic literature, Edited by Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Macmillan
Press LTD, Haundmills, Basingstake, Hampshire and London
2
Sir Irving Henry (1838-1905) born John Henry Brodribb was an English stage actor in Victorian era. He
was the first actor to be awarded a knighthood.
3
Stoker, Bram, Dracula,1993. New York, Penguin Edition

4
breath of the Vampire with popular signifiers constructing the masturbator in Victorian
culture. The isolation and introspection of the Gothic Hero-Villain have been reworked
into the signification of what was termed the ”solitary vice”. These reworking displaces
somewhat the nature of the sexual threat traditionally posed by the gothic Hero. Dracula,
menacinglys in the theoretical ground between seducer and rapist. The consequence of his
attack is arguably a debasement not of the individual but of the race. The popular
eugenics of Victorian commentators insist that the masturbator not only destroys himself,
but blights his descendants also. The signification of the individual thus begins to embody
a whole series of related racial issues concerning not merely the potential decadenceof the
race from whithin, also the eugenic risks apparently posed by other racial groups- in
particular those that come, like Dracula himself, from the East.
The social script may be seen, equally, to co-exist with the physiological and
symbolic resonances of blood in Dracula. The text’s representations of the secretion,
depletion and transfer of blood participate in a metonymic complex in which the alleged
racial qualities encoded in blood are enhaced, diluted, corrupted or transferred. These
encondings in turn map over further issues of gender and off class, although these latter
are often exposed in Stoker’s other writings.
The combination of Western racial bloods in Dracula, whether literally (as in the
various acts of transfusion), or figuratively (as in the alliance forget around Van Helsing’s
leadership), thus conveys not just the apparently inevitable triumph of Western Stock over
less developed or “degenerate” opposition, but the superiority also of the moral,
intellectual and emotional qualities culturally encoded in the blood signifier.

5
 Chapter I “Blood is life”

A. Who is Dracula?

Secret and secrecy play an important part in Dracula4 and it is obvious that many
facts in the plot of the novel are never clearly elucidated and are often willingly left out.
The reader feels as if an important part of the truth was concealed from him and whenever
an explanation is given, it seems to come too late. Like detective novel writers, who let
their readers devise their own hypotheses for the sake of suspense, and wait until the end
to disclose the truth, Bram Stoker keeps useful information for himself. It is not known
until the middle of the story, for instance, that we are openly told that Count Dracula is a
vampire. Stoker’s narrative strategy is based on secrecy, not only in the way the story is
told, but in the plot itself, since the protagonists often keep secrets from each other.
It appears that the narrative framework of Dracula is meant to confuse and puzzle the
reader. Dracula is in fact a patchwork of texts including diaries, journals, letters,
telegrams, reports, etc. Very often the information contained in these documents seems to
have no link whatsoever with the main plot. Such facts as the tragic events on board the
Demeter, the escape of the wolf Bersicker from London Zoo and Renfield’s medical case
seem to have little to do with Harker’s experience in Transylvania. The reader, who has
no explanation, is non-plussed. Moreover, unlike most earlier Gothic novels, in Dracula
there is no omniscient narrator to help us understand what is happening. The reader has to
find the truth by himself. Thus we can say that Stoker’s novel is quite modern (and
perhaps even postmodern).
In Dracula the only linear narrative is Jonathan Harker’s journal at the very
beginning. Harker tells us of the events he has witnessed in a chronological order. His
narrative, however, poses many questions which are left unanswered. Harker apparently
does not understand what happens and the reader is puzzled when he quotes such
enigmatic words uttered by Dracula as “Enter freely and of your own will” (22) - a

4
Marigny, Jean, Secrecy as Strategy in Dracula, URL: http://blooferland.com/drc/index.php?
title=Journal_of_Dracula_Studies

6
strange way of welcoming a guest - or again, “Listen to them - the children of the night.
What music they make!” (25) when the howling of wolves can be heard outside. Besides,
many questions are unanswered: Why does the Count appear only at night? Why is he
suddenly mad at the sight of a drop of blood? Why does he refuse mirrors in his presence?
Harker is dimly aware that there is something supernatural about his host, but he cannot
account for the fact that Dracula does not cast a reflection in a mirror or that he can climb
down a wall, with his head downward. Before he goes to Castle Dracula, Harker does not
even know what the word “vampire” conveys. At the end of his journal, the reader is
perplexed about the events which have been related. Apart from Dracula himself, the
most mysterious character in the novel is Van Helsing. He appears as the very
embodiment of secrecy. As he does not keep any diary or journal, we do not know what
he really has in mind. He never confides in anyone and his attitude is sometimes very
strange. The reader cannot understand why this eminent university professor says, “And
to superstition must we trust at the first” (284), or insists that garlic flowers be put in his
patient’s bedroom as if it was a matter of life and death. He does not give any explanation
on Lucy’s “illness” until he has made Arthur Holmwood put a stake into her heart, after
she has become a vampire.
When Van Helsing finally tells the truth about vampires, there is a drastic change in
the novel. The reader is now treated as an initiate: he is told everything about what is
happening as if Stoker had decided to renounce his narrative strategy:

”There are such beings as vampires; some of have evidence that they exist. Evan had not
the proof of our own unhappy experience[…] This vampire which is amongst us is of
himself so strong in person as twenty men; he is of cunning more than mortal, for his
cunning be the growth of ages […] he is brute, and more than brute; he is the devil in
callous, and the heart of him is not; he can appear at will when, and where, and in any of
the forms that are to him; he can, within his range, direct the elements: the storm, the fog,
the thunder; he can command all the meaner things: the cat, and the owl, and the bat, and
the fox, and the wolf; he can grow and become small, and he can at times vanish and
come unkown.”(283-284)
”The vampire live on, ad cannot die by mere passing of the time; he can flourish when
that he fatten on the blood of the living. Even more, we have seen amoungst us that he
can grow younger; that is vital faculties grow streitous, and seem as though they refresh
themselves when his special pabulum is plenty[…].”(287)

7
 B. Vampires between myth and reality

In his ”Motif index of Folk Literature”, Stith Thompson5 defines a vampire as a

”corpse which comes from the grave at night and sucks blood” in order to sustain its
existence. The vampire has its origins in the folk legends of many countries, most
specifically in central and eastern Europe. Most folklorists agree that the word ”vampire”
has slavic roots, first appearing as a proper name ”Upir” in a russian manuscript of the
eleventh century and as a generic term in a Serbian manuscript two hundred years later.
The form ”vampir” has been found in a fifteenth-century south slavic source.
Vampire- like creatures (by other names) have been identified in the mith and lore of
many other cultures. Another common element found in much of the folklore is that a
person becomes a vampire after death as a result of some condition or set of
circumstances present during his lifetime. Some are predisposed at birth: those born on
certain holidays, or on the new moon; those born with a defect such as a caul, an extra
nipple, or teeth; anyone who is the seventh son of a seventh son. Others are doomed to
return as vampires because of trangressions committed against the acceptable codes of
behavior during their lifetime sush as practising sorcery or engaging in acts of violence.
Still others return from dead because of the circumstances surrounding their death or
burial: they died without baptism, they died in a state excomunication, they commited
suicide, they were in life attacked by another vampire or their bodies or not buried in
accordance with proper rituals. But in each case, the vampire is clearly dead.
Furthermore, vampire lore frequently indicates that the vampire can be destroyed-
that it’s existence can be brought to an and by outside intervention. The most wide spread
was to drive a wooden stake through it’s heart; other techniques included decapitation,
drenching the body in garlic or holy water, extracting and burning the heart or burning the
entire corpse.
Immortality is often citied as one of the chief characteristics of the vampire. For
immortality are two essentially definitions: first, ”endless life, the condition of living
forever, or never dying”, and secondly ”fame, that is likely to last forever”. But
paradoxically, then immortality for the vampire is a temporary state dependent on it’s

5
Thompson, Stith. ”Motif index of Folk Literature”, 1998. The handbook to gothic literature, Edited by
Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Macmillan Press LTD, Haundmills, Basingstake, Hampshire and London

8
ability to procure an adequate blood suply and it’s deftness in avoinding the instruments
of destruction.
The folkloric vampire antered western literature as a result ofd the convergence ot two
factors: the famous vampire sightings of the eighteench century, and the rise of gothic
literature. In neither of these is a trait of immortality, a prominent feature.
The word ”vampyre” made it’s first appearance in the English language in early
1730’s. The occasion was a rash of vampire sightings documented in severed parts of
central and eastern Europe, and eventually reported in the British press. This were so
wide spread, that in some contries government officials became directly involved. So did
the academic community. In 1746, French biblical scholar Dom Augustin Calmet wrote a
treatise on the subject, including his account of the famous case of Arnald Paul6.
These reports concided with (and maybe contributed to) a rising interest in Gothic
literature, first in Germany and later in England. The Gothic movement was part of the
broader period of Romanticism, with it’s clallenge to subjectivity emotion, intuition and
imagination. It was inevitable that the vampire would be adopted by Gothic writers. The
first in English literature to do so were the Romantic poets, notably Robert Southey and
Lord Byron. Southey included a vampire poem, The Giaour (1813) contains the famous
vampire course. Even though the image of vampire become more romanticiesed and
eroticized during the nineteenth century with literary works the issue of immortality is
never the central one.
The Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula which become the template of future
representations of the vampire whether though conformity or deviation. Stoker coins the
6
About five years ago a certain Heyducq, an inhabitant of Madreiga [in Austrian Serbia] named Arnald
Paul was crushed to death by the fall of a wagon-load of hay. Thirty days after his death four persons died
suddently and in the same manner in which according to the tradition of the country those die who are
molested by vampires. They then remembered that this Arnald Paul had often related that in the environs of
Cassovia and on the frontiers of the Turkish Servia, he had often been tormented by a Turkish vampire; for
they believe also that those who have been passive vampires during life become active ones after thier
death, that is to say, that those who have been sucked, such also in their turn; but that he had found means to
cure himself by eating earth from the grave of the vampire; and smearing himself with his blood; a
precaution which , however, did not prevent him fromm becoming so after death, since, on being exhumed
forty days after his interment. They found his corpse all the indications of an arch-vampire. His body was
red, his hair, nails, and beard had grown again, and his veins were repleted with fluid blood, which flowed
presence the exhumation tooka place, and who was skilled in vampirism, had, according to custom, a very
sharp stake driven into the heart of the defunct Arnald Paul, and which pierced his body throught, which
made him, as they say, utter a frighful shriek, as if he had been alive; thatdone, they cut off his head, and
burnt the whole body. After taht they performed the same an the copses of the four other persons who died
of vampirism, fearing that they in their turn might cause the death of others,
URL:http://books.google.ro/books?
id=kbpBPFhEVPMC&pg=PA4&lpg=PA4&dq=arnald+paul&source=bl&ots=Q42e4Tj5Bb&sig=nL1bymy
EZlg97e0Lj5kaA1ptjkg&hl=ro&ei=JVwZSr_xF4O9-
AaOy5zMDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2#PPA3,M1

9
term ”un-dead” as a synonym for his concept of the vampire. The word appears several
times throughout the novel, on each occasion used either by Van Helsing or in reference
to what he has said. Stoker was obviouslyvery fond of the word, and had even considered
it as the title of the novel. Even through he had found the name „Dracula” as early as
1890 and had been existing it in notes and outlines, not until very late in the process did
he select it as the title. The title appearing on the California typescript is „THE UN-
DEAD by Bram Stoker” with „Copyright 1987”. Furthermore, the dramatic reading
undertaken on 18 may 1897, prior to publication of the novel, was entitled „Dracula or
theUn-Dead”.
By using the term „UN-DEAD” , Stoker expressed the existence of the vampire in
a sort at „no-man’s alnd” dead, but yet not dead. The vampir appears in an animated
body(unlike the ghost), his body performs at least some of the function of the living., but
how immortals is this „un-dead”? In outlining the powers and limitations of the vampire,
van helsing states: „When they become such, there come with the change the curse of the
immortality, they cannot die but must go on age after age adding new victims and
multiplying the evils of the world”(308). This is a nonsense, another exemple of the
numerous inconsistencies that plague Stoker’s novel. The vampire cand indeed die, as
Van helsing demonstrated in the staking of Lucy and later in the pursuit of Dracula. Later,
the Dutch professor amends his original declaration, pointing aut that „The vampire live
on, and cannot die by mere passinf of the time”(335).

C. The symbolism of blood

William Hughes7 describes very wel the conection between vampires and the
blood. The vampire has long history both as a literary device as a signifier in culture.
Much of the power of the trope is derived from the intimate relantionship between
vampires and blood. Blood is culturally as well as textually an item of multidiscursive
significance a fluid which may signify at various times notions of family, race, religion
and gender. The fluid nature of blood makes both the substance and its meanings
peculiary vulnarable. Blood is easily spilled, mixed or diluted. Unmingled it is the
guvernator of purity and strengh – a strenght which may be desired by others beyond the
7
ibidem 1

10
circle or circulation of one’s „own” blood. Diluted or depleted it may signify
simultaneously personal lassitude alongside racial, familial, or moral decline and
degeneration. Transferred or transfused by medial occult or sexual means(where the
shedding of hymenal blood initiates a sexual encounter), it may either revive or prostate.
The individual may thus function as a synecdoce of greater community united by
encondings invested within a common blood. The vampire in this context constitues a
node at which significations both meet and are modified following thei contact with their
place of conjunction, the vampires itself.
The subscript of these encondings is the cultural equation of blood and semen –
thefigurative and literal carriers of racial and individual qualities. Both fluids have
beenhistorically encompassed by religious and cultural taboos restricting their dispersal
beyond the internal circulation of the body. Medicine in mid-to late- Victorian Britain in
particular linked the two reciprocally in the so called „spermatic economy”, where the
excessive unnecessary „Spending” of semen brought in consequence a decline in the
vitality of the Sanguine fluid. Unmentionable in normal communication beyond restricted
cultural aven as such as medicine, religion and education, the seminal fluid is this
conflated with an acceptable and associated blodly secretion. This conflation is for both
writers and critics of vampire fiction, an opportunity to effectively eroticise the text.
Fred Botting8 has an interesting theory about the symbolism o blood in Dracula in
his book „Gothic”. In his oppinion Van helsing appeals to this spirit (the bonding
produced by exclusively male adventures forms and idylic bay-scout past that is
seconstituled and sanctfied in the pursuit of the vampire) when he describes how the
vampire may be beaten by the „power of combination” and the letting of blood. In the
earlier context , Van helsing says to Quinley „ a brave man’s blood is the best thing on
this earth when a women is in trouble. You’re a man, and no mistake. Well the devil may
work against us for all he’ worth, but God sends us man when we want them”(194). The
jolly fortitude of this statement is tested later when Quincey loses more than the amount
of blood required in a transfusion.
Manhood, blood and bravery form the cornerstones of the Van Helsing’s fatherly
notion of cultural and spiritual renewal. The appeal to male strength, blood and bravery
culminates in the violance of the hunt that marks the return of the buried warrior tradition,
represented and mourned at the beginning of the novel by Dracula’s description of his

8
Botting, Fred, 1996. Gothic, Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London.

11
heritage: the warlike days are over:”Blood is to precious thing in these days of
dishonourable peace and the glories of the great races are as a tale that is told”(43).
Engaging in battle with dracula, Van helsing’s vampire – killers reawaken racial
memories and myths of Blood and nonour: Quincey is described as a „moral Kicking”
and Arthur is compared to Thor as he impales Lucy. To combat the racial myths of
northen tribes, myths linked to Gothic notion of freedom and strength are invoked. A
warlike pagonism is combined with Christianity; a sacralisation of racial myths whose
function within an embatled and aggressive cultural and imperialist imgination is starkly
emphasised when Van helsing invokes divine sanction for their project. In God’s name
they „go out as the old kinght of the Cross”.
The appeal to past history and romance is not merely invocative of a fictional
tradition it alludes to the belligerent pursuit of a religion cause, in the Crusades against
the non-Christian peoples of the East. In the context of gothic fiction this seems like a
nostalgic appeal to a lond dead world, a disappeared past imagined as nobl strong and
purposeful. It is also a return to myths and fictions within a gothic fiction has an uncanny
effect on the values of domesticy and patriarchy whose superiority, stability and
naturalness are finally affirmed at the close of the novel.These start to seem like myths
themselfs. Indead throughout the novel there are not examples of model families. The
only biological parents, Lucy’s mother and Arthur’s father die while other prental and
maternal figures are only surrogates:hawkin bequeather his property to Harker and Mina
in a fatherly gesture; van helsings is a good father for everyone as Mina is their mother.
Dracula represents the bad father. The abssence of family udnerlines the nostalgia for the
family that is literalised by the novel in the paternal and maternal duplicates, the myth is
only realised in the closure of the fiction.
The making real of this mythical model of the family demands, for a culture
disintegrating without it, blood expulsion and sacrifice: family values are restored by the
ritual destruction of Dracula and the sacrifice of female sexualety embodied by Lucy.
Also are vitally monumentalised the self sacrificing death of Quincey and his subsequent
and nominal immortalisation in the Christian name of the Harker’s son. The horror
embodied by Dracula reawakens the primitive and powerful emotions of his apparents,
emotions of attractions and repulsion in which his intimate doubleness is expelled and
repeated in another terible expenditure of energy. Civilisation and domesticy needs to
retain and channel its buried natural even barbaric energies signified in hunter and warrior

12
myths:it’s spirit , unity, strength and immortality are nourished by the undead myths of its
own duplicitious self-image.

13
 Chapter II „Blood as another, more seductive facet of feminity”

A.The threat of female sexual expression

Most critics afirm that Dracula is, much as anything else, a novel that indulges the
Victorian male imagination, particularly regarding the topic of female sexuality. In
Victorian England women’s sexual behavior was dictated by society’s extremely rigid
expectations. A Victorian woman effectevely had only two options: she was either a
virgin - a model of purity and innocence, or else she was a mother and wife. If she was
neither of these, she was considered a whore and thus of no consequence to society.
By the time Dracula lands in England and begins to work his evil magic on Lucy
Westerna, we understand 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. But Dracula
threatens to turn the two women into their voluptuousness and open sexual desire.
Katharina Mewald 9 says that in Stoker’s novel Mina is presented as the prototype
of the Victorian woman. Almost her whole existence is devoted to her future husband and
she wants to become a good wife and mother, the ”angel of the house”. Jonathan, during
his business in Transylvania, refers to her only sporadically, in connection with cooking
recipes and the like, suggesting her preoccupation with marriage and household. In the
correspondence between Mina and Lucy, marriage is a frequent topic and seems to be
everything they dream of. When Mina is finally married to Jonathan, she writes in her
diary that she is ”happiest woman in the wide world” and her life will consist of ”love
and duty for all the days of [her] life” (140). This focus on marriage is linked to her strong
sense of duty towards others and, most of all, Jonathan. When she is writing about her
marriage she mentions about the ”grave and sweet responsibilities [she has] taken upon
[herself](139). This sense of duty can be observed in her motivation of writing her diary ,
which is to practice her shortland and typewriting skills in order to be useful to her
9
Mewald, Katharina, The emantipation of Mina? The portrayal of Mina in Stoker’s Dracula and Coppolo’s
Bram Stoker’s Dracula ,
URL: http://blooferland.com/drc/index.php?title=Journal_of_Dracula_Studies

14
husband. She also learns the train timetable by heart ”so that [she] may help Jonathan in
case he is in a hurry ” (241). Futhermore, she considers it her duty to support her husband
emotionally: ”i do believe that if he had not had me to learn on the support him he would
have sunk down”(223).
Her sense of duty also entails the keeping up of appearences. As an assistant
school mistres who teaches etiquette to young girls, she is eager to dressed adequately and
behave properly at all times. An example of this is when she gives her own shoes to Lucy
during her sleepwalking in Whitby, and then she dobs her own feet in mud so that passers
by will not notice her being barefoot. Also the fact that Mina deduces that Lucy cannot be
sleepwalking outside the house because she is only wearing a nightdress comically
underlines this characteristic trait. However, Mina obviously sense that these norms are
somewhat too strict an she writes that ”you can’t go on for some years teaching etiquette
and decorum to other girls without the pedantry of it biting into yourself (emphasis
mine)”10 and decides to allow Jonathan to take her arm in the street.
Further characteristics of Stoker’s Mina befitting her image as the prototypical
Victorian woman are presented in Katharina’s Mewald paper. Mina is modest and chastic.
Contrary to Lucy with her polyganist tendencies (desiring to marry three men) Mina is
decidedly innocent and morally adequate. She doesn’t exhibit any kind of pshysical
attraction towards Jonathan. Her chastity is only once questioned when she writes about
Dracula’s seduction and mentions that she ”did not to hinder him” (370). Also Mina is
never envious of Lucy’s beaty and popularity with men, he even admires her friend.
Mina’s intelligence and practical skills contribute to the usefulness that is expected of
Victorian women. She knows shortland and typewriting, and a very interesting thing is
the fact that she has the knowledge of Cesare Lombroso’s theories about criminals (to be
discused later).
Mina, as the ideal Victorian woman, serves as an example of the prevailing gender
roles at the time. Women were supposed to marry, have children and support their
husbands. Lucy is also influenced by these norms, as she is disappointed not to have
received a proposal at ”almost twenty”. In generally Mina and Lucy are the women of
Dracula ”upon whom the men project the ideals of Victoria womanhood”. At the time
Dracula was written, the emergence of the ”New Woman” was challenging traditional
gender roles. The writters in that period mention that the New Woman was characterizad

10
9 The connection of decorum and etiquette and the notion of bitting in this utterance is noteworthy, since
it implies that not only Dracula bites his victims, but also excessively strict Victorian norms ”bite” women.

15
bt her ”demands for both social and sexual autonomy”, which includes sexual
independence and taking up male professions.
The woman in Dracula, however, ridicule the New Woman, thay have a behaviour
that seems conditioned by the male character’s opinion. On the contrary, Mina is a
schoolmistress and her goal is to follow the traditional Victorian model. Yet, if we take in
consideration the important part of Mina’s hunting of Dracula and Lucy’s flirtations
bahavior into account, we might establish the argument that both women exhibit
tendencies that hint at social (Mina) and sexual (Lucy) autonomy. Each of Stoker’s
women fins her own way of breaking up with Victorian gender roles, a more moderate
way of emanticipation that the radical feminism of the New Woman.
Ashley Craig Lancaster 11 thinks that Stoker presents his female characters negatively,
making them seem responsable for the immortality not only of themselves, but of the
others. Lucy Westerna exhibits the most controversial traits of both groups because she
exudes a high amount of sexual energy even before she becomes a vampire. Despite
Lucy’s angagement to Arthur Holmwood, in her letters is revealed the fact that she is
unable to love one man, as society expects her to do. In her first letter to Mina, Lucy
declares her ”love” for Dr. Jack Seward. Later, she refuses both Seward’s and Quincey
Morris’s marriage proposals, but still struggles with hurting each man, an even kisses
Quincey before she leaves. Even after her chooses to marry Arthur, Lucy once again
professes rather flagrantly her ”love” for another man, Dr. Van Helsing. Although Lucy
chooses which of her loves will become her husband, she seems unwilling to relinquish
her right to love each man, regardless of how shollow ar deep those feelings may seem.
Stoker has presented Lucy as a woman who not only loves multiple men, but symbolicaly
(through blood transfusions) had sexual relations with each man. However, Lucy is not
only ”married” to the ”good” men of the novel , but also to the ”Evil”, represented by
Dracula. Dracula like Arthur, Seward, Van Helsing and Quincey has shared blood with
Lucy; as a result Lucy has become a tainted victim married by her inconclusive love and
her literal and metaphoric sexuality.
After becoming vampire, Lucy arouses an greater sense of immortality through her
sexuality and also through her cruelty to the children. Before Lucy become an Un-dead

11
Lancaster , Craig Ashley, Demonizing the Emerging Woman: Misrepresented morality in Dracula and
God’s little acre, [http://blooferland.com/drc/index.php?title=Journal_of_Dracula_Studies]

16
vampire, she posesses a beaty that three man fail to withstand, but after she enters in the
world of the Un-dead, her beaty grows more outstanding than before: ”She was, if
possible, more radiantly beautiful than ever; and i could not believe that she was
dead”(254). While asleep Lucy possesse the same beauty she has always had; making the
complete change into a vampire, she has lost the weakness and the emotional trappings
that have plagued her lost few days as a human. Lucy has become more powerful, and, as
a result, more dangerous. Now, Lucy does not just want to love each man, she wants to
manipulate them to submit as her next victims. When Arthur witnesses her trnsformation
into a vampire for the first time, Lucy utilises his atraction to her saying ”Leave these
others and come to me. My arm are hungry for you my husband, come!”(272). However,
Lucy wants to feed off his blood rather than love him, but she kows that Arthur longs for
her and the marriage thay never get to have.
Just as Lucy becomes more like New Woman through her dangerous sexualety, she
also emerges as a trecherous mother figure because of her choise of victims; once
againaligning herself with the immoral New Woman. After Lucy’s ”death” reports from
children suggestthat a woman they refer as ”The Bloofer Lady” has begun to attack
children, leaving her child victims ”weak [and] emaciated”.(230) The men reveal Lucy as
the child stalker when fiind her holding a child ”strenuously to her breast, growling over
it as a day growles aver a bone”(271). By attacking children, Lucy personifies the worst
possible characteristic of the New Woman, the destructive abandonment of the nurturing
role.
Stoker creates through Lucy the imagine of a sexually deviant woman who seems
unwilling or unable to commit completely to one man, especially whean she says: ”Why
can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?”.
(81) It is possible that this passage has usually been read as indicating a dangerous
(masculine)sexual independence; however is possible to be interpreteded as Lucy’s
passivity. Both of these conclusions neglect the fact does choose one specific man for her
husband, she does not have to deny the reality that she has had feelings for each man at
some point.
Many commentators have pointed aut the sexual nature of Lucy’s vampirism, but
John Greenway12 affirms that her vampirism is more complex than that. She’s not as
”sweet” as other characters think she is, but as with Seward, she has cause for repressed
12
Greenway, John, ”Unconscious cerebration” and the Happy ending of Dracula,
[http://blooferland.com/drc/index.php?title=Journal_of_Dracula_Studies]

17
anger as well. Here vampirism angages the idea of negative evolution: atavism. In the
contxt, it is interesting that the characters, through Mina, are willing to apply Cesare
Lombroso’s13 then-current theories of criminal behavior to understand the Count’s
vampirism, but not to Lucy’s. Lombroso asserted that criminal behavior expressed
evolutionar regression-atavism- and supported his conjectures with cranial measurements.
Fontana has pointed out the similarities between the description between the descrition of
the Count and that of the ”born criminal” in Lombrosan details apply to Lucy as well.
Had they looked at the ”Bloofer Lady” through the same lens as they do the Count, as
Lombroso looked at The female offender14 in 1895, they would know that:

“When piety and maternal sentiments are wanting, and in their place are strong passions
and intensely erotic tendencies ... for the conception and execution of evil, it is clear that
the innocuous semi-criminal present in the normal woman must be transformed into a
born criminal more terrible than any man ... the criminal woman is consequently a
monster.” (151)

Mina, who brings Lombroso into the analysis in the first place, alone knows of Lucy’s
desire to marry three men. She won’t, however, go farther and realize that:

“Nymphomania transforms the most timid girl into a shameless bacchante. She tries to
attract every man she sees, displaying sometime violence, and sometime the most refined
coquetry. She often suffers from intense thirst, a dry mouth, a fetid breath, and a tendency
to bite everybody she meets, as if affected with hydrophobia...” (Lombroso 296)

One wonders if Lucy is (to use Van Helsing’s term) as “predestinate to crime” as the
Count.15 After all, Stoker gives us reason to infer that the Count does not cause anything
Lucy was not predisposed to do. We know that Lucy, “curious psychological study” that
she is, had a history of sleepwalking before the Count entered the story: twice we are told

13
Lombroso, Caesareand William Ferrero, The FemaleOffender [La donna delinquentz,1983], Trans W.
Douglas Morrison, New Yourk: Philosophical Library, [http://blooferland.com/drc/index.php?
title=Journal_of_Dracula_Studies]

14
Lombroso also notes “Anormalous teeth” in 78% of prostitutes, vs. In “normals” (Female offender)
15
ibid 13

18
she inherited the trait from her father (96, 147). While Carpenter discusses insanity as a
fixation on a “dominant idea,” Seward notes about Lucy that “there is an odd concentration
about her” (98)
As did Seward, Lucy has a self-imposed prohibition against expressing atavistic
ideas. When she writes to Mina that “Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as
many as want her, and save all this trouble?” she breaks off the thought by saying “But
this is heresy, and I must not say it” (78). Van Helsing, however, will complete the idea
for her by realizing the erotic implications of the transfusions in his hysterical “King
Laugh” speech, when he says that not only was Lucy a polyandrist, but he is a bigamist
(219). So Lucy got what she wanted.
The by-then obsolete technique used for the transfusions, the active male donor to
passive female recipient, does serve to hint at the motives the characters repress16.
Seward’s transfusion to his would-be fiancée leaves him feeling “faint and a little sick”
(166). Van Helsing predictably cautions silence, lest Arthur feel fear and anger: “if our
young lover should turn up unexpected, as before, no word to him. It would at once
frighten him and enjealous him, too” (166). But the other characters share this traditional,
qualitative view as well: Lucy “turns crimson” when her mother says Seward needs a
wife and a nurse (167); Seward, realizing the transfusion’s erotic import, “laid a finger on
my lips” in response to Lucy’s tacit imploring. When Arthur talks about transfusion after
Lucy’s death, saying that he felt since then as if they had been really married and that she
was his wife in the sight of God, Seward “could see Van Helsing’s face grow white and
purple by turns” (217). In other words, others had hints of Lucy’s metaphoric polyandry
(78). Predictably, they vow to remain silent.
Quincey continues this chain of thought. When he realizes that Lucy has the blood of
“four strong men” in her, he “whispers” the question none have dared ask: “What took it
out?” (193). To complete the thought, however, would involve the same psychological
danger that Renfield’s experiment posed for Seward.
The mother of Lucy makes her, first, economically vulnerable by leaving all her
property to Arthur, knowing that this act “might leave her daughter either penniless or not
so free as she should be to act regarding a matrimonial alliance.” Her mother leaves her
vulnerable to the Count by removing the garlic flowers from her room, later from Lucy’s
neck; and dies of a stroke in her arms. Though all the characters blither about Lucy, she
16
With all Stoker’s injections of up-to-date technology in the norrative, the doctors’ view of transfusion is
obsolete. By the time of the novel, doctors in general had ceased to view transfusions in qualitative terms, but not
Stoker’s doctors.

19
has no authority over her own life, privacy or personal effects, as the narrative shows us
through her friend Mina’s revelations about her. As an ironic note, sentiment dictates
she’ll be buried next to her mother, while Arthur for some reason has the key to the tomb.
One could also see Lucy’s metamorphosis into the “bloofer lady” as a rebellion
against wife/mother role she’s destined for. She preys upon children and attempts to
seduce an all-too-willing Arthur not out of love, but for power. Unlike Mina, whose anger
will take a different route, Lucy enjoys vampirism as a kind of liberation. Lucy does feel
a “vague fear,” which then becomes a “dread thought,” but avoids realization by
rationalizing that what is happening to her is a dream (“this weakness comes to me in
sleep,” (162). Still, she manipulates Seward into leaving her alone. Even when asleep, her
unconscious governs her actions: “As I came close, she put up her hand in her sleep and
pulled the collar of her nightdress close around her throat” (123).
If Lombroso’s observations on the atavistic nature of criminal behavior apply to
Lucy as well as the Count, in a certain sense they apply to the men as well. All the men
break social and professional norms to deal with the Count (36): Seward falsifies death
certificates, Arthur uses his nobility to mask a daylight breaking-and-entering on
Piccadilly Circus, Harker suggests the break-in and becomes angry at Dracula’s agent
when he will not divulge confidential information. However noble the motives of the men
(as doctor, lawyer, aristocrat and adventurer they form an emblem of the Victorian male
establishment) Seward, Harker, Arthur and Quincey all deal with Dracula by becoming
like him, as Van Helsing fears.
Harker becomes a double of Dracula in his competition for Mina. As with Seward, he
fears madness as his world erodes, opting to work rather than think about the implications
of what is happening. After the incident with Mina and the Count, he says that “I must do
something or go mad.” Harker’s motive is for revenge rather than the official one of
duty, given the Count’s seduction of his wife who “did not want to hinder him”; Mina
“shrieked” when Harker whacks at him with his Kukri knife; as with Lucy’s “scream,”
one could read this reaction on several levels. The dispatch of Dracula does not even
follow the rules Van Helsing has elucidated; it is rather a berserk assault. But nobody
comments upon this, except perhaps Mina with her shriek.
John Greenway 17 says that Mina does not get the erotically suspect transfusions from
men, but vampirism expresses itself differently in her than in Lucy: her intelligence
increases to the point of being able to outwit Dracula, something the men have been
17
Ibid 6

20
unable to do. Van Helsing speaks of her “man’s brain,” which speaks to her evolution if
we remember that contemporary medical manuals saw women as unevolved males
(Lansbury 417). Yet she has some repressed resentments as well. First, she notices that
she does not have Lucy’s latent sensuality. Without any overt resentment, Mina writes
that the Whitby men paid no notice to her but “did not lose any time in coming up and
sitting near her [Lucy] when we sat down” (87). She does not follow that thought out, and
officially repudiates the brazen qualities of the “New Woman” . But her vampiric power
takes a different, more subtle form, although it still could express anger.
On the surface Mina only wants to be “useful” to, first, her husband then to the male
collective, but her emerging intelligence controls the men in a less lurid manner than
Lucy’s sexuality. Her idea of using hypnotism comes through “unconscious cerebration”:
“I suppose it must have come in the night and matured without my knowing it” (369), but
she then “bustles off to get tea” for the men.
Let us return to our speculations on “unconscious cerebration” by recalling her
“shriek” when Harker’s enormous knife shears through Dracula’s throat. We have
conjectured that Harker’s motives here might be less noble than the narrators announce.
Though Mina’s vampirism expresses itself in intelligence, one could understand Mina’s
physical involvement with the Count as revenge for Harker’s infidelity with the Wierd
Sisters, who call her “sister.” Before she reads Harker’s journal she says to Lucy that “I
felt a thrill of joy through me when I knew that no other woman was a cause of trouble”
(138). When she is with Van Helsing at the circle, one could read some ambiguity when
she says, “Let us go to meet my husband who is, I know, coming towards us” (438), for
Dracula saw the lurid scene in her room as a consummated marriage, much as Arthur had
regarded the morally ambiguous transfusion with Lucy. One could wonder which
“husband” she anticipates.
If Lucy got her atavistic wish for Lombrosan polyandry, Mina bonds more subtly.
While her intellect lets her control the plot and the sources for the narrative, she also
becomes a receiver of men’s emotions, not as an object of desire. She mothers Arthur and
Quincey in their grief, and has a curious, intellectually flirtatious relationship with Van
Helsing, beginning with her teasing him about Harker’s journal being in shorthand. She
not only takes over through her intellect, but also creates the text we read through
synthesizing the various media of communication. If Lucy gets the men’s blood, Mina
gets all their names in her son.

21
 Looking to one level, we are led to believe that the crew saves the sentimental
Victorian world through typewriting, technology and the group’s crusading moral
solidarity. But the plot evolves through inhibition, fear of hurting Lucy, embarrassing
Arthur, provoking Jonathan, or frightening Mina (who is not of “fainting disposition”
anyway). All the males violate professional and social conventions, and Quincey’s
prudish reluctance to break in on Mina’s fellatio with the Count - “May it not frighten her
terribly? It is unusual to break into a lady's room!” (336) - must have struck even
contemporary readers as comic, under the circumstances.
The characters all profess “love” in the sentimental terms that assume “chaste” and
“pure” as natural states. But love in the novel’s vampiric catalyst craves power or
revenge, not affection, as Dracula makes clear: “Your girls that you all love are mine
already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine - my creature, to do my
bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed” (367) This power in turn comes from
anger: recall that “fury,” “rage” and “anger” appear more often than does “voluptuous,”
and we have an index to the subcurrent interplay of sexuality and anger in the novel. We
have seen that Harker, Lucy, Arthur, Seward and Mina all have cause for repressed anger,
while the Count embodies “malignity, anger, hellish rage” (364).
In addition to attacking the women, there is also an undercurrent of
fear that Dracula may penetrate the men as well. He is at his most
threatening when he declares of Jonathan: “This man belongs to me!”
(43). This exclamation does have homoerotic overtones, and is
important in its implication of power and control, as well as its
reflection of the gender controversy of the nineteenth century.

B. The Weird Sisters

22
 The Weird sisters (Dracula’s daughters) encounter’s Jonathan in Dracula’s castle.
The three beatiful vampires are both his dream and his nightmare. The sisters represnt
what the Victorian ideal stipulates women should not be- voluptuous and sexually
aggressive/thus making their beaty both a promise of sexual fulfillment and a curse.
These women often offer Jonathan more sexual gratification in two paragraphs than his
fiancée Mina does during the course of the entire novel. However, this sexual proficienty
threates to undermine the foundations of a male- dominated sociey by compromising
men’s ability to reason and maintain control. For this reason, the sexually aggressive
women in the novel must be destroyed.

Chapter Three “Vampirism as invasion”

A. The association of Dracula with the East

23
 In Fred Botting18 opinion Dracula’s Crossing boundaries is relentless: returning
from the past he tyrannises the present, uncannily straddling the borders between life and
death and thereby undoing a fundamental human fact. In crossing the borders between
East and West he undoes cultural distinctions between civilization and barbarity, reason
and irrationality, home and abroad. Dracula threat is his polymorphousness, both literally,
in the shapes he assumes and symbolically in terms of distinctious he upsests.In the scene
where he is interrupted in the act of pressing Mina’s mouth to his beeding breast he
appears as an inversion of Chist as Pelican, rousishing his subjects with his blood in an
unholy communion and a mother suckling Mina with the milk of his blood.
Dracula’s fluid shifting amorphous shape is threats because it has no singular or
stable nature or identity. Meanings identities and proper family boundaries are utterly
transgressed in the movements of vampiric desire and energy. For all his sovereignty and
vidence Dracula is in respect of his polymorphousness strangely feminised and Lucy
condensed into an abjectification of total excess “a Thing” as inhuman “hellish” and
inorgothic. Restoring the boundaries between life and death, body and soul, eath and
heaven, the ritualized killing of vampires reconstitutes properly patriarchal order and
fixes cultural and symbolic meanings. The vampire is constructed as absolute object, the
complete antithesis of subjectivity, agency and authority.
The ritul killing also restores sytems of communication in which women remain
objects for male exchange. By way of women Dracula attacks men; through women he
will contaminate and colonise the teeming metropolis of London. In the name of women
the good men respond to the threat. Through and over women their bonds, relations and
identities are established, Lucy, for instance, being courted by Arthur, Quincey and
Seward.
Dracula’s invasion represents also a threat to the progress of modernity. As Harker
observes “ unless my senses deceive me the old centuries had , and have, powers of their
own which mere modernity cannot kill”(51). Irrepressible forces from the past continue to
threaten the present’s idea of itself. In respons to the deficiencies of contemporany culture
and society, in part embodied in its superstition with deterministic knowledge, the latter
bound up with cultural degenation and the parasitic nature of capitalist social
organization.
18
ibedem 7

24
 The threat of wanton and corrupt sexuality is horrifically displayed in vampirism
shape. Their decadence, nocturnal existence and indiscriminate desire distinguish
vampires as a particularly modern sexual threat to cultural moves and taboos. They are
modern visions of epidemis contagions from the past , visited on the present in a form that
, like venereal disease, enters the home only after (sexual) invitation. Against the threats
of contagion and disintegration a sacred order is reconstituted. Dispensing with its
inadequate materialism, science offers grander visions of a mysterious and sacred
universe.
Van Helsing is more than a scientist; he is also a metaphysician who deals with
“spiritual pathology” as well as physical disease. The doctor does not discount
superstition and is the first to use sacred objects like the crucifix and the Hast. Science
involves mysteries and opnes on to a more than rational place in line with Victorian
attitudes towards spiritualism and psychic values is made possible by the demonic threat
of Dracula: his diabolical power and primitive energy leading to a “baptism of blood” for
his victims mark the utter profanity that demands a more than rational response.
Dracula is the dark double of the brave and unselfish men whose identity is forged
in their struggle. Dracula is the regressive in human otherness lifted from the realm of
individual psychopathology into a cultural field as its absolute antithesis. Without mirror
image or shadow Dracula is a pure invention. On a symbolic level he is the mirror and
shadow of Victorian masculinity; a monstrous figure of male desire that distinguishes
what men are becoming from what they should become. Dracula forms a mirror that must
be destroyed since its represents narcissism, pervers egoism and duplicity of appearance
that threatens all cultural values and distinctions.
Harker’s meeting with Dracula on the street gives the prove og his duplicity,
Harker “donned” his clother when he escapes from the castle. On the street Dracula was
wearing Harker;s clothes, he is foreigner trying to pass as English. On a symbolic level he
passes for Christ, Beast and various identities within the family. This has the effect, as in
the case of his interception of Harker’s true letter and ordering him to write brief notes, of
a dissimulative disruption of proper systems of communication.
Dracula recuperates the Gothic romance in making men the primary subjects of
terror and horror, thereby addressing and attempting to redress, in its movement between
figures of the past and present, the uncanny mobility of normal natural and sexual
boundaries in the 1890’s. The malevolence of the count, his pale, gaunt features, demonic

25
eyes an calbous libertinism and bolstered by supernatural powers of metamorphosis,
flight and immortality.

B. Dracula’s metamorphoses

Dracula heritage extends deeper into the Gothic post: the account of his family
history is full of tribal migrations and conquests, a militaristic warrior past characterized
by values for blood and honour. This history is that of the romance as traced by
eighteenth century antiquarias: stories of uncertain origin, romances, according to
different versions, began among the nomadic warlike tribes of northen Europe or peoples
migrating from the East. The Carpathians formed the crossroads where these tradition
met. The vampire is not only associated with dissemination of the romance. In traveller’s
accounts from the eighteenth century onwards the significance of the vampire in the
folklore, superstitions and customs of Eastern peoples was recorded and assessed. The
origins of the vampire were explained as fears of the Plague, through, since the Middle
Ages, to have emanated from the East. Dracula’s principal companions and altenative
forms-rats, wolves and bats – were associated with disease.
In the setting of Dracula stack features of the Gothic novel make a magnificent
reappearance: the castle is mysterious and forbidding, its secret terros and isolation in a
wild and mountainous region form a sublime prison as any building in witch a Gothic
heroine was incarcerated. The place of heroine is taken by the young lawyer Harker.
Throughout the novel ruins, graveyards and vaults – all the macabre and gloomy objects
of morbid fascination and melancholy – signat the presence of the gothic past.
Dracula is more than a Gothic villain, more than a mercernary and mundane
bandit. As the sublime synthesis of the human and supernatural terrors of Gothic writing,
he is both villain and ghostly diabolical agent whose magic and power cannot be reduced
to mere tricks or effects of overindulgent, superstitious imagination. Dracula serves to
eleicit rather than dispel superstitious beliefs , demanding, not a return to reason and
morality, but reawakening of spiritual energies and sacred one. The form of the novel
testifies to the excessive, unpresentable nature of this demand. The letter and journal
entries telling different but connected parts of the same story compose a whole whose

26
immensity like the unrepresentable horror of Dracula’s unreflecting image, remains
obscure.
Dracula’s adeventurous romance also alludes to the tales of adventure that, from
Scott’s romances onwards, provide a more popular that and exciting alternative to
domestic realism. The associations of Dracula with East are important in this aspect. For
the East, at the hight point of Victorian imperialism provided many wonderful adventures
and strange tales, which, in Kippling’s stories about India and similarly , in Rider
Haggard’s narratives of Africa, projected the darkness of Gothic fears and desires on to
other cultures peoples and places.

C.The psychoanalysis of Count Dracula

In Maurice Richardson19 opinion, Dracula provides realy striking confirmation of

the Freudian interpretation. The vampire superstition embodies a particulary complex
form of the interest, both natural and unnatural, which the living take in the dead. In
vampirism the dead first visits the living and then drags him into death being himself
reanimated in the process
The starting point from witch to investigate the hidden content of the superstition
is once agains Freud’s dictum that morbid dread always signifies repressed sexual wishes,
that in vampirism become visible. Here is a twilight borderland where religious and
psychopatological motives intermingle. The Keynote is ambivalence. Death exist side by
side with desire for immortality. Frightful cruelty, aggression and greed is accompanied
by a madly possessive kind of love. Guilt is everywhere and deep. Behavior smacks of
unconscious world of infantile sexuality with what Freud called its polymorph perverse
tendencies. These is an obvious fixation on oral level, with all that sucking and bitting,
also a generous allowance of anality. We are left in no doubt about the origin of the
frightful smell, compost of channel house and cloaca, that attaches to the vampire.
In Dracula Stoker makes use of all the traditional mythical propertics and blends
them with a family type of situation of his own contriving that turn out to be a quite
19
Richardson, Maurice, 1991. “The psychoanalysis of Count Dracula”, Vampyres, Lord Byron to Count
Dracula, edited by Christon Frayling, Queen Square London,

27
blatant demonstration of the Oedipus complex. From a Freudian standpoint and from no
other does the story really make any sense - it is seen as a kind of incestuous ,
necrophilous, oral- sadistic all in wrestling mach. And this is what gives the story its
force. The Vampire Count , centuries old is a father figure of huge patency. He is
planning from his ancestral lair in the Carpathians a roind on England to set up a
contemporary vampire empire.
Vampires are not very particular about their choise of object. When on his first
morning as a guest in castle Dracula, Jonathan Harker cuts himself, the count’s eyes brake
with oral sadism. He makes a sudden garb but just manages to restrain himself. That night
when Dracula’s daughters who are themselves vampires crow into Harker’s bed-room,
the directly sexual nature of the phantasy underlying the superstition is revealed. Later in
the story Dracula lands in England and the endogamous motiv linking all the characters
tighter as members of one family becomes apparent. Dracula’s first English victim is
Miss Lucy, belove by a psychiatrist, Dr. Seward. The second victim is Lucy ‘s bosom
friend, Mina Harker, as dear if not dearer to her as any sister. She is the wife of Jonathan
Harker. Mina is naved and Lucy avenged by a noble brother by hand led by Van Helsing.
He is up to all the vampires tricks, through until the very end he is always a step or two
behind. Apart from Van Helsing, who represents the good father figure, the set up
reminds one rather of the primal horde with the brothers banding together against the
father who has tried to keep all the females to himself. Dracula seems almost conscious of
this. When he is realy traped in the house of “Cartox” he screams: “you shall be sorry yet,
each one of you […] your girls that you all love are mine already….”
This attempt to add “mine” has a perverse bisexual timeless orgy. There are
several more passages in witch the symbolism and the underlying incestuous complex
stick out a mile. Stoker shows insight into the infantile nature of the vampire’s personality
during some of Van Helsing lectures to Seward on the Count psychology.
Maurice Richardson20 doubts whether Stoker had nay inkling of the erotic content
of the vampire superstition. Abraham Stoker was a formidable allrounder at Trinity
College, he took a degree in math, was President of the Philosophical Society also athletic
champion of the university; Dracula is planly an athlete’s phantasy.
There is some evidence in Stoker ‘s life of an unusually strong father fixation. He
was certantly a born hero worshipper. In 1878 he threw ups his Irish cover to become
Irvings’s manager. He had met the great tragedian when he was playing in Dublin, where
20
Ibidem 2

28
Stoker was among other things dramatic critics for an evening paper might encourage a
model for Dracula in Irving.
But Stoker indicates an authentic model for Dracula. The name represents the
nickname of the Rumanian Prince Vlad Tsepesh (born in 1456) who was also know
because of his atrocious cruelty as “The Impaler”. His reputation was spread through
medieval Europe in a German pamphlet printed in Bambarg in 1491. This carried a
portrait of him in witch the features correspond exactly with Bram Stoker’s description of
Dracula’s baleful aristocratic countenance in the novel. Stoker must have seen the
pamphlet or a reproduction of it on his travels.
In 1909 twelve years after the publication of Dracula, some peasants in
Transylvania, where Stoker located Dracula’s ancestral scat, burned down the local
landowner’s castle because they said he was carrying of their children.
A marxist interpretation of the vampire myth might , with justice, mare more of
this aspect, viewing it as a perveted extension: he straves us an sucks our children ‘s
blood.

Conclusions

Bram Stoker’s Dracula has been one of the masterpiece of all times. The novel
went on the nudge the thoughts of readers, writers, artists, mouvies, directors across the
world.
Widely accepted as a horror story, Dracula is a tale of immortal love. The book
talks about issues pertaining to mortality and how Count Dracula takes himself to stand
up against God so to speak.

29
 Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula brings forward the Victorian era culture. The man,
the women, the methods and modes of living – everything in essence is deeply rooted into
Victorian ethics and asthetics. Van Helsing’s personality, the calm motherliness of Mina,
the voluptuonsness of Lucy, the brave of four man – everything is Victorian to the truest
detail.
Transylvania and Vlad Dracula may or may not have been a motivation for
Stoker, but the clear picture he paints of his targets is one that deserves parise in its own
merits.

References

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