[Nancy Rosenberg earned a B.A. in Journalism from Radford
University in Virginia. She is presently completing her M.A. in Humanities at
Marymount University, Arlington VA.]
In addition to being a Victorian Gothic masterpiece, Bram Stoker’s
Dracula mirrors the gender and sexual anxieties as well as the cultural
fears of the late nineteenth century. Conflicting gender roles present in the
novel include the fear of male penetration and extreme male bonding, the
mothering instinct and the New Woman, and the logical versus the hysterical
male. The novel’s sexual anxiety is revealed through three primary scenes of
sexual suppression and release. The character of Dracula not only represents
the cultural fear of a foreign threat to British shores, but also serves as the
novel’s catalyst of sexual desire. While Dracula can be read merely as
an excellent adventure tale of good versus evil, the novel has as many layers
as its author. A discussion of the role of gender in Dracula commonly
brings up the question of whether or not Irish author and Lyceum Theatre
manager Bram Stoker was a misogynist. His biographer Barbara Belford aptly
equates him with matryoshki, the Russian nesting dolls comprising layers
which, in Stoker’s case, she says lead to an amorphous center (xi).
Dracula is at its core a story of male bonding. As Mina (Murray) Harker
writes in her journal: “the world seems full of good men – even if there are
monsters in it” (198). The good men that she refers to are the novel’s gang of
five vampire killers: Professor Abraham Van Helsing, Dr. John Seward, Quincey
Morris, Arthur Holmwood (Lord Godalming) and Jonathan Harker. Dr. Seward’s
mentor, Prof. Van Helsing, is the leader of this merry band of hunters. Dracula
is the clear monster of the novel, but Mina’s use of the plural form suggests
the additional meaning of the “monsters” of the late nineteenth century, among
them the emerging New Woman, homosexuality, immigration, syphilis, the theory
of evolution, and the perception of an overall decay of traditional Victorian
values. In terms of Sigmund Freud’s version of the original male‑bonding
experience (presented in Totem and Taboo), Dracula is the primal father
of the novel, and the five male characters are the brothers. The good men of Dracula
become comrades against evil, and consistently refer to one another as
“friend.” Van Helsing is Seward’s mentor and Arthur becomes like a son to the
professor as well. Van Helsing says to Arthur: “I have grown to love you -‑
yes, dear boy, to love you” (153).
Mina and her friend
Lucy Westenra are the women of Dracula upon whom the men project the
ideals of Victorian womanhood. Upon meeting Mina, Van Helsing is inspired to
say that she has “given me hope ... that there are good women still left to
make life happy – good women, whose lives and whose truths may make good lesson
for the children that are to be” (166). Analogous to Wendy and the lost boys of
J. M. Barrie’s early twentieth century Peter Pan, Dracula’s Mina
is expected to use her mothering instinct to guide the men. The lost boys cry
“O Wendy lady, be our mother” (73) and then immediately proceed to build her a
house, while Mina similarly states as she comforts Arthur that “We women have
something of the mother in us that makes us rise above the smaller matters when
the mother‑spirit is invoked” (203). (The 1987 vampire movie, The Lost Boys,
also correlates the immortality of the vampire to Peter Pan and the lost boys’
desire to never grow up.) In the same
vein, British social critic and Stoker contemporary John Ruskin writes of
woman’s influence in Sesame and Lilies that “it is a guiding, not a
determining function” (86). We see this acted out in Dracula because,
like Lucy, Mina is susceptible to Dracula’s corruption and it is the good brave
men of the novel who set out to save her. Further, in desiring Mina, Dracula is
doubly evil: he attempts to defile the designated mother of the novel, the one
who must guide with her moral hand.
The entrance of the
feminist, sexually independent New Woman into Victorian society indicates the
changing roles of women, and the theme of the New Woman plays throughout Dracula.
Karen Volland Waters writes, “The New Woman’s sexual independence made her
particularly troublesome to the patriarchal order” (124). Many periodicals of
the day parodied the New Woman; Elaine Showalter observes that “Scarcely an
issue of Punch appeared without a cartoon or parody of New Women” (41).
When referred to directly in Dracula Stoker also describes her,
tongue-in-cheek, through the mouth of Mina: “I believe we [with Lucy] should
have shocked the ‘New Woman’ with our appetites” (86) and “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”
(86‑87). I believe that these remarks reflect the assumptions of the day rather
than Stoker’s opposition to the New Woman.
However, given the fact
that there are no real New Women in Dracula, Stoker can hardly be
considered a supporter of the movement. Although Mina is certainly closer than
her flighty friend Lucy to being a New Woman, Mina is not a doctor or professor
or journalist, but an “assistant schoolmistress” (55), an accepted occupation
for women of the period. Additionally, while she is clearly intelligent (she
not only learns but masters the new technologies of shorthand and typewriting),
she states early in the novel that her intent is that “When we are married, I
shall be able to be useful to Jonathan” (55). Not only is Mina described as
“sweet‑faced,” “dainty‑looking,” and a “pearl among women” (194), but Van
Helsing gushes to Jonathan that “She is one of God’s women, fashioned by His
own hand to show us men and women that there is a heaven where we can enter,
and that its light can be seen here on earth. So pure, so sweet, so noble, so
little egoist -‑ and that, let me tell you, is much in this age, so skeptical
and selfish” (168‑169). This is another instance of Stoker reminding the reader
that Mina belongs in the category of “angel” as opposed to “devil,” the term
assigned to husband Jonathan’s three vampire seductresses and the post-bitten
Lucy. The reader is made further aware of this Eve/Mary dichotomy throughout
the novel. Elizabeth Lee states in “Victorian Theories of Sex and Sexuality”
that “women were portrayed either frigid or else insatiable. A young lady was
only worth as much as her chastity and appearance of complete innocence, for
women were time bombs waiting to be set off. Once led astray, she was the
fallen woman, and nothing could reconcile that till she died.”
Significant to
Victorian ideology was the sanctity of -‑ and the mother’s fixed role within -‑
the home and family. “Written during the demise of decadence and the birth of
psychoanalysis, Dracula celebrates Stoker’s final quest to safeguard
embattled Victorian values from modernism, to preserve the romance of the
family,” writes Belford (xii). But what a family Stoker has created in Dracula!
The word “dysfunctional” takes on new meaning. If we look at the novel’s
characters in terms of a family unit, their home is an insane asylum, three of
the brothers have proposed marriage to a mother who later dies despite their
male‑bonding attempts, and their second mother is corrupted by the primal
father who is an amalgam of all that is evil.
Ruskin writes of the
importance of men going outside the sheltered domestic sphere and returning to
the home and the family to be refreshed: “This is the true nature of the home –
it is the place of Peace; the shelter; not only from all injury, but from all
terror, doubt, and division” (87). That Dr. Seward’s home is a madhouse is the
perfect setting for this Gothic horror novel. The insane asylum is where the
characters eventually base themselves, and it represents the safe place in
which desire is controllable and reason prevails. However, Mother Mina is not
safe in this home, a further example of how Dracula embeds conflicting
gender roles. Terror in the form of Dracula not only penetrates the peace of
first Lucy’s mother’s home, then the insane asylum; it also penetrates the
women. Ruskin writes, “By her office,
and place, she is protected from all danger and temptation. The man, in his
rough work in open world, must encounter all peril and trial: - to him,
therefore, the failure, the offence, the inevitable error: often he must be
wounded or subdued, often misled and always hardened” (87). The men of Dracula
do go out into the dangerous world to fight evil, but the way in which they
attempt to protect Mina at her home in the insane asylum leaves a lot to be
desired. Mina becomes pale and fatigued, and to the reader this is an obvious
sign of Dracula’s influence. The men, however, do not clue in on it and their
protection of her is so incompetent it is almost as if they personally open the
door to Mina’s (and Jonathan’s) bedroom for Dracula.
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. The debate
over sexuality was active; two years prior to the 1897 publication of Dracula,
Oscar Wilde stood trial for sodomy. According to Christopher Craft, “the
novel’s opening anxiety ... derives from Dracula’s hovering interest in
Jonathan Harker; the sexual threat this novel evokes ... but never finally
represents is that Dracula will seduce, penetrate, drain another male” (446).
Another example of
gender role anxiety is that Dracula illustrates discord with respect to
the Victorian assumption that men are rational and women are emotional. As Alan
Sinfield writes in Manly Sentiments, “By the time of Wilde, the link
between the (supposed) feminine and emotional sensitivity ... had long been the
ground of substantial cultural contest” (52). The conventional notion is most
clearly represented in Van Helsing’s praise of Mina: “She has a man’s brain ...
and a woman’s heart” (207). However, a twist occurs with respect to the
characters who are directly described as being overcome by “hysterics.” A
footnote in the Norton Critical Edition of Dracula notes that
“hysterics” is a term that “derives from the Latin word for uterus” and
was therefore “naturally associated with women” (157). Yet in Dracula
they are men: Van Helsing and Arthur Holmwood. (Renfield is of course in a
constant state of hysteria as he awaits Dracula.) Freud writes on the subject
of hysterics that “we often find in men a combination of the two neuroses or
the replacement of an initial hysteria by a later obsessional neurosis” (96).
This premise is interesting if only in that it leads the reader to examine the
causes and effects of the men’s hysteria.
In the case of Van
Helsing, Seward writes that he “gave way to a regular fit of hysterics” (157),
and although it is made clear that this is a “womanly thing” for him to do (as
Seward adds “I tried to be stern with him, as one is to a woman under the
circumstances” [157]), it is nonetheless a man who is hysterical in this situation, not a woman.
The cause of the Professor’s hysterics is his contemplation of Arthur’s belief
that the blood transfusion he made to Lucy “made her truly his bride” (158).
Because Van Helsing, Dr. Seward and Quincey Morris all donated blood to Lucy,
unbeknownst at this point to Arthur, Van Helsing’s distress is due to the fact
that “this so sweet maid is a polyandrist” (158). In referring to her as such,
not only does he reveal that his hysterics are a result of what he sees as
chaste Lucy’s impurity, but by relating the blood transfusions to the
consummation of marriage they take on a sexual connotation. In the case of
Arthur, his hysterical episode occurs after Mina presents him with her
typewritten compilation of diaries and journals and Quincey leaves him alone in
her “mothering” care. Now that Arthur is able to release his suppressed
emotions regarding Lucy’s final death with a comforting mother figure, he “grew
quite hysterical” and “shook with emotion” (203).
The anxiety about
gender roles also surfaces through Dracula’s depiction of the friction
arising from suppressed sexuality. In the Victorian era, sexual impulses were
to be resisted. As John Stuart Mill writes in On Liberty, “All women are
brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of
character is the very opposite to that of men; not self will, and government by
self‑control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others” (486). In Dracula,
female characters are depicted as being sexually aggressive, and the results of
their aggression vary in the novel’s three primary sexually-anxious scenes:
Jonathan’s seduction by Dracula’s three brides/sisters; Lucy’s final death at
the hands of the brothers‑in‑altruism; and Mina’s drinking blood from Dracula’s
chest as Jonathan lies powerless close by.
The late
nineteenth-century struggle with the motif of female sexual independence is
first apparent in Dracula in the scene in which Jonathan is seduced by
the three brides/sisters of Dracula. In the Learning Channel’s Great Books:
Dracula, narrator Donald Sutherland calls the encounter “Every Victorian
man’s nightmare.” Jonathan’s desire for the sexually aggressive women who
descend upon him is certainly not acceptable for an engaged middle‑class
Victorian man aspiring to become a gentleman. In fact, he desires and loathes
the women at the same time: “I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that
they would kiss me with those red lips” (42). James V. Hart, screenwriter and
co‑producer of the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola‑directed movie Bram Stoker’s
Dracula, observes in Great Books: Dracula, “That sexuality, that
empowerment of women, that admission by Victorian man that these women were
that powerful, and he enjoyed it, was a revelation to me.” The concept that
woman can be sexual is a radical one, but the women of Dracula are
allowed no middle ground and are not necessarily empowered. The brides/sisters
are the Eves to Jonathan’s steadfast mother/fiancée Mina’s Mary and it is made clear that,
although he does desire them, it is wrong for him to do so. Jonathan later
writes in horror: “I am alone in the castle with those awful women. Faugh! Mina
is a woman, and there is nought in common. They are devils of the pit!” (55).
We find, nevertheless, that the four women have more in common than Jonathan
thought, and that Mina does have the capacity to be like them. Dracula’s
women, unfortunately, cannot be sexual without also being diabolical.
We see this more
explicitly in Lucy’s final death, which presents the consequence of her
released sexuality: death at the hands of the three men who once desired to
marry her. She begins as a good, if superficial, woman with hair of “sunny
ripples” (146) who is described in terms of sweetness and purity. Following her
contamination by Dracula, however, the word most often used to define her
is “voluptuous.” In her metamorphosis as
Woman in White, she becomes dark‑haired, symbolic of light versus dark, good
versus evil. As “anti-mother” she lures children to the cemetery and throws a
baby, “callous as a devil” (188), to the ground. This parallels the
anti-mothering representation of the three brides/sisters of Dracula, who
eagerly snatch the baby-filled bag that Dracula presents them with as a
replacement for Jonathan. The men’s reaction to Lucy’s transformation is
revealing. When Van Helsing informs Seward of what he intends to do with Lucy’s
“Un‑Dead” body, Seward writes: “It made me shudder to think of so mutilating
the body of the woman whom I had loved. And yet the feeling was not as strong
as I had expected. I was, in fact, beginning to shudder at the presence of this
being, this Un‑Dead, as Van Helsing called it, and to loathe it” (179). The
desire that Seward felt for Lucy has turned to loathing, and there is now no
turning back. As Carol A. Senf comments, “The rapidity of the changes implies a
degree of latent evil that is easily unleashed by sexual initiation” (52).
At the men’s initial
encounter at the cemetery with the Vampire Lucy, she beckons Arthur: “Come to
me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you.
Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come!” (188). Seward writes
that her voice is “diabolically sweet ... something of the tinkling of glass
when struck – which rang through [their] brains” (188) and bewitched them. This
description of Lucy’s voice is similar to that of the three vampires who
enticed Jonathan with a laugh that was “like the intolerable, tingling
sweetness of water-glasses played on by a cunning hand” (42) and is reminiscent
of the Sirens of Greek mythology. It’s a trick, the novel seems to be saying:
these women are not sweet; they’re evil and they want to kill (or at least
confuse) men with their newfound sexuality. Another Greek mythological creature
used to describe Vampire Lucy is Medusa: Lucy’s “brows were wrinkled as though
the folds of the flesh were the coils of Medusa’s snakes” (188). Medusa in
Greek mythology turned people into stone with a look, and while the story of
the gargoyle Medusa is generally a story of good versus evil (Perseus versus
Medusa), according to The Encyclopedia Mythica, “There is a particular
myth in which Medusa was originally a beautiful maiden. She desecrated Athena’s
temple by lying there with Poseidon. Outraged, Athena turned Medusa’s hair into
living snakes.” Richard Dellamora writes of this myth that “Medusa is a victim
first of male aggression [rape by Poseidon], then of a vengeful complicity,
finally, of the injunction condemning female victims to silence” (138). Applied
to the fate of Lucy, Dracula is the rapist, the band of men are the vengeful
schemers, and her decapitation is symbolic of her silence (and possibly of
castration).
The men return to the
cemetery the next night to do what is “necessary” (189). Of Lucy’s final death
scene, Showalter writes: “The sexual implications of the scene are
embarrassingly clear. First there is a
gang‑rape with the impressive phallic instrument,” and Lucy’s subsequent
decapitation and mouth‑stuffing of garlic serve to “shut woman up” (181‑182).
The stake that Van Helsing presents to Arthur with which to kill Lucy – on what
would have been her wedding night – is “some two and a half inches thick and
three feet long” (190). The scene is replete with sexual innuendo:
The Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood‑curdling
screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted
in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were
cut, and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam. But Arthur never faltered.
He looked like a figure of Thor, as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving
deeper and deeper the mercy‑bearing stake, whilst the blood fell from the
pierced heart and welled and spurted up through it. (192)
According to Belford, “The staking of Lucy, which marks the
novel’s real – and the woman’s only – climax, violates another taboo, for it
too obviously depicts passionate intercourse ending in orgasm” (7). She
continues that “In this scene, Lucy’s fiancé, the shallow aristocrat Lord
Godalming delivers her from evil by acting out the wedding‑night deflowering”
(8). In killing Lucy, the men have not only rid the world of her evil, but have
in the process saved her from her own sexuality. Interesting to note, the three
female brides/sisters of Dracula are killed in the same manner (by Van
Helsing), but the male Dracula is instead “killed” by Quincey’s Bowie knife to
the heart.
Third, in what Belford
calls “the final primal scene” (8), Dracula is caught in the act of forcing
Mina’s mouth to his bleeding chest like “a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a
saucer of milk to compel it to drink” (247). The scene is essentially about
control and who wields that control over whom. According to Phyllis Roth, “the primary preoccupation [of the novel] as
attested to by the behavior of both Mina and Dracula in the primal scene, is
with the role of the female in the act. Thus, it is not surprising that the
central anxiety of the novel is the fear of the devouring woman” (122‑23). This
is a horrifying experience for Mina and although she could be seen as a
“devouring” woman in that she is drinking Dracula’s blood, she is not the
aggressor, and is not the one in control here. The fact that husband Jonathan
lies in a stupor in the same room as the scene unravels is telling. Jonathan is
not able to protect Mina from Dracula and this reveals Dracula’s continued
power over him. This leads me to question how much of this scene is about
Dracula’s control of Jonathan, rather than Mina.
The issue of gender
roles is raised again in the final portion of the novel. The men cannot seem to
figure out whether or not they should allow Mina to help them pursue Dracula in
the dangerous outside world. They are initially happy for her help, then they
say that their work is manly work, then they don’t want her help because of her
suspected telepathic link with Dracula, and, finally, they regret not letting
her in on their hunting and bring her back into the fold. Consider the
following responses: Van Helsing argues “it is no part for a woman” (207);
Jonathan concedes “I am so glad she has consented to hold back and let us men
do the work” (218) and reiterates “She looks paler than usual ... I am truly
thankful that she is to be left out of our future work ... It is too great a
strain for a woman to bear. I did not think so at first, but I know better now”
(223); and Seward confirms “Mrs. Harker is better out of it. Things are quite
bad enough to us, all men of the world, and who have been in many tight places
in our time; but it is not place for a woman ” (225). Mina goes along with their Victorian logic,
though not without some difficulty: “their minds were made up, and, though it
was a bitter pill for me to swallow, I could say nothing, save to accept their
chivalrous care of me” (214). However, she does eventually express her
annoyance, albeit in a gentle way, telling Van Helsing: “It seemed funny to
hear you order me about, as if I were a bad child!” (300). Finally, Van
Helsing, the most vocal of all the men regarding Mina’s exclusion from their
manly work, states, “Our dear Madam Mina is once more our teacher” (306).
The novel ends in a
rush, with Jonathan’s knife going through Dracula’s throat and Quincey’s
through his heart. This is not the way to kill a vampire. Where is the stake,
the decapitation and the garlic as was seen when the female vampires were
killed? Is Dracula truly dead, thus suggesting different rules for women and
men? Did Dracula survive? Or did Stoker have a memory lapse? Quincey dies “a
gallant gentleman” (326), and using his final breath he says that death was
worth it to remove the stain of uncleanness, the burn of Van Helsing’s wafer,
from Mina’s forehead. Quincey’s words and the final lines sum up the crux of
the novel: the men’s quest was to save good Mina from evil Dracula, and,
accordingly, to rescue both Victorian woman and Victorian ideology.
But was it saved? The
ambiguous ending is indicative of the entire novel and the contradictions embedded
within it. In Dracula, Stoker brings to light Victorian anxieties about
gender roles and sexuality. He creates a dialogue on the role of gender within Dracula
through depictions such as the mothering and the anti-mothering female, and the
logical and the hysterical male. In the process of doing this, the assumptions
of the age naturally seep in. As Senf notes, “Stoker created a work that is
somehow larger than the values and beliefs of its characters, a work that
manages to criticize many of the traditional beliefs that its characters hold
dear. As a result, readers remember both Dracula and Mina as powerful figures,
not simply as characters who are either destroyed or returned to their proper
niche when the novel ends” (61). The question is, what is their proper niche?
Mina is not destroyed at the end of the novel, yet neither is Dracula (you
can’t kill Dracula with a Bowie knife). Both male and female survive, as does
the legacy of the adventure, Jonathan and Mina’s baby, Quincey, who is born of the
blood of all of the characters (“the children that are to be” [166]).
It is up to the
individual reader to decide the ultimate outcome. What we read into Dracula
is a matter of personal perception. As for what Stoker intended, this has long
been a subject of debate among Dracula scholars. For example, was Stoker
aware of the sexual innuendo present in Dracula? Belford argues that “He
was many things, but naive was not one of them; he was fully aware of the
subtexts of his horror tale” (xiii). Stoker was a man who loved codes and
puzzles, she writes, and “In response to the question ‘Who are you?’ I imagine
him saying, ‘I am who you want me to be’” (xi). The novel, in turn, is what we
want it to be.
Works Cited:
Barrie, J. M. Peter Pan. New York:
Viking Penguin, 1991.
Belford, Barbara. Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of
Dracula. New York: Knopf, 1996.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Dir. Francis
Ford Coppola. Columbia Pictures, 1992.
Craft, Christopher. “Gender and Inversion in Dracula.” Dracula. Ed. Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal. New
York: Norton, 1997.
Dellamora, Richard. Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of
Victorian Aestheticism. Chapel Hill: U
of North Carolina P, 1990.
Gay, Peter. The Freud Reader. New York: Norton, 1989.
Great Books: Dracula. Narr. Donald
Sutherland. Writ. Trish Mitchell. Television documentary. The Learning Channel,
1999.
Internet Movie Database. The
Lost Boys. Dir. Joel Schumacher,
1987. http://us.imdb.com/Title?0093437.
Lee, Elizabeth. “Victorian Theories of Sex and Sexuality.” The
Victorian Web.
http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/gender/sextheory.html
“Medusa.” Encyclopedia Mythica. Internet.
http://www.pantheon.org/mythica/articles/m/medusa/html
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991.
Roth, Phyllis A. Bram Stoker. Boston: Twayne, 1982.
Ruskin, John. “Of Queens’ Gardens.” Sesame and Lilies.
Senf, Carol A. Dracula: Between Tradition andModernism. New
York: Twayne, 1998. Showalter, Elaine.
Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle. New York:
Penguin, 1990.
Sinfield, Alan. “Manly Sentiments.” The Wilde Century:
Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Movement. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. Ed. Nina Auerbach and David J.
Skal. New York: Norton, 1997.
Waters, Karen Volland. The Perfect Gentleman: Masculine Control
in Victorian Men’s Fiction 1870-1901.
New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1997.
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