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Dracula’s portfolio
Sexuality in Dracula’s Bram Stoker.
The next portfolio I going to write about a essential topic in Dracula novel of Bram Stoker focusing on two articles. The first one is an article belongs to a book called Essential Criticism in its chapter number two; Medicine, mind and body: The psychological studies of Dracula and within that chapter the excerpt; Sexuality, infection and the obsessive consumer. And the second one is an article called Fictional conventions and sexuality , written by Carrol L. Fry.
Essential Criticism, Chapter two; Medicine, mind and body: The psychological studies of Dracula.
Nowadays, the pale skin is considered in many cultures like something of notoriety, above all in oriental societies, as Chine, Japan, Korea, etc. Like in past historical periods, even in the Victorian era a pale complexion was a sign of nobility. It meant that women were well-off and could afford not to spend hours working outdoors, which would inevitably result in a tan, something considered very vulgar. But in Dracula novel, the pale or pallid skin is not seen as well as the conventional Victorian society (except in its most important character the Count Dracula as he represents a sense of nobility). In Dracula the pale skin represents a weak illness associated with sexual excess and sexual contagion too. We can see that in one character of Bram Stoker, concretely Lucy Westenra in Dracula where she is compared as a masturbation object and in the anonymous erotic novel called Lady Pockingham its main female character is related with the pathology of Tuberculosis:
‘Just then I caught a glimpse of her face, which was usually pale, but now flushed with excitement, and her eyes sparkled with unwonted animation. "Ah!" she continued, "young ladies beware of my rod, when I do have to use it. How do you like it, Lady Beatrice? Let us all know how nice it is," cutting my bottom and thighs deliberately at each ejaculation..’ Lady Pockingham, the pearl, vol 1.
‘She looks so sweet as she sleeps, but she is paler than is her wont, and there is a drawn, haggard look under her eyes which I do not like. I fear she is fretting about something. I wish I could find out what it is’. Chapter VIII: Minas Murray’s Journal
Lucy consider as a eugenic case study, as she develops a great verbal sexual precocity:
‘It seemed only a moment from his coming into the room till both his arms were round me, and he was kissing me. I am very, very happy, and I don’t know what I have done to deserve it. I must only try in the future to show that I am not ungrateful’ Chapter V: Letter Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray.
She has a weak inheritance, a somnambulistic father and a valetudinarian mother;
‘Then, too, Lucy , although she is so well, has lately taken to her old habit of walking in
her sleep. Her mother has spoken to me about it, and we have decided that I am to lock the door of our room every night. Mrs Westenra has got an idea that sleep-walkers always go out on roofs of houses and along the edges of cliffs and then get suddenly wakened and fall over with a despairing cry that echoes all over the place. Poor dear, she is naturally anxious about Lucy, and she tells me that her husband, Lucy's father, had the same habit, that he would get up in the night and dress himself and go out, if he were not stopped’ Chapter IV: Mina Murray’s Journal.
“Another bad night. Mother did not seem to take to my proposal. She seems not too well herself, and doubtless she fears to worry me”. Chapter IX: Lucy Westenra’s Diary
She also has a strange relationship with Mina, maybe too much close:
‘There, it is all out, Mina, we have told all our secrets to each other since we were children. We have slept together and eaten together, and laughed and cried together.’ Chapter V: Letter Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray.
Lucy’s lust woke up to an early age; many contemporary medical writers defined this behavior as ‘hot-bed’ a symptom related to masturbation. They are so close friends that there is a suspicion that they can practice some sexual acts, maybe produced by the sexual curiosity, and the last quotation we see that Lucy asserts that they have secrets, but, what type of secrets? That’s make us understand that it is referred to a vices secrets.
Count Dracula sees Lucy in a very different way when she is alive and when she is death. The pallid skin is something that attracts very much Dracula; Lucy’s pale skin
Both indicate a pre-existent condition upon which vampire predates, instead of a novel departure in her personal pathology initiated by the Count. But medical criticisms have other reason; they consider Lucy as an embodiment of desire. She does not change, but awakened, an innate but denied sexual identity becoming not merely active but assertive. Speaking about masturbation, this remembers me a case very curious occurred in 1894 when Dr. A.J. Block, a physician from New Orleans, shared his disgust over female masturbation in an article entitled "Sexual Perversion in the Female." In it he describes one of his own successes, a case in which a nineteen-year-old girl was cured of a nervous disorder. After Dr. Block manhandled her vagina and labia and found no response, he decided to touch her clitoris. Her body responded with short and rapid breaths, a pale face, and slight moans, and he deduced that the clitoris itself was the cause of her disease and therefore aptly removed it.
In another hand, Mina Murray centralizes her curiosity not in sexual themes but it is focus in the intellectual. Her curiosity encompasses:
Technologies:
‘He accordingly set the phonograph at a slow pace, and I began to typewrite from the beginning of the seventeenth cylinder. I used manifold, and so took three copies of the diary, just as I had done with the rest’ Chapter XVII: Mina Murray’s Journal.
“I feel so grateful to the man who invented the “Traveller’s” typewriter and to Mr. Morris for getting this one for me. I should have felt quite astray doing the work if I had to write with a pen.. .” Chapter XXVI: Mina Murray’s Journal
“Yes,” he answered. “I keep it in this.” As he spoke he laid his hand on the phonograph. I felt quite excited over it, and blurted out, “Why, this
beats even shorthand! May I hear it say something?” Chapter XVII: Mina Murray’s Journal.
Negativity at the alluring voluptuousness displayed by the vampire woman in Transylvania:
‘They smiled ever at poor dear Madam Mina. And as their laugh came through the silence of the night, they twined their arms and pointed to her, and said in those so sweet tingling tones that Jonathan said were of the intolerable sweetness of the water glasses, “Come, sister. Come to us. Come!” In fear I turned to my poor Madam Mina, and my heart with gladness leapt like flame. For oh! The terror in her sweet eyes, the repulsion, the horror, told a story to my heart that was all of hope” Chapter XXVII: Memorandum by Abraham Val Helsing.
And the male discourse of medicine, concretely in Hypnotism:
‘I want you to hypnotize me!” she said. “Do it before the dawn, for I feel that then I can speak, and speak freely. Be quick, for the time is short!” Without a word he motioned her to sit up in bed’. Chapter XXIII: Jonathan Harker’s Journal
Mina is a character that represents the spirit of the new woman. The term ‘New Woman’ was popularized by British-American writer Henry James, to describe the growth in the number of feminist, educated, independent career women in Europe and the United States. The New Woman pushed the limits set by male- dominated society, especially as modeled in the plays of Norwegian Henrik Ibsen ‘The New Woman sprang fully armed from Ibsen's brain,’ according to a joke by Max Beerbohm. Van Helsing asserts this when he makes a sexist praise about Mina:
‘Ah, that wonderful Madam Mina! She has man's brain, a brain that a man should have were he much gifted, and a woman's heart .The good God fashioned her for a
The sexuality repression that Stoker lived in the Victorian age was fundamental for the characterization of his characters. He divided them into the pure woman and a seducer. The pure woman is represented by Mina Murray and Lucy Westenra and the seducer is represented by Count Dracula.
‘..poor Lucy when the Count had sucked her blood. As yet there was no sign of the teeth growing sharper, but the time as yet was short, and there was time for fear.’ Chapter XXII: Jonathan Harker’s Journal
Dracula represents the old Gothic villain as he lives in a ruined castle with subterranean passage like Udolpho and Otranto’s Walpole:
‘At last I pulled open a heavy door which stood ajar, and found myself in an old ruined chapel, which had evidently been used as a graveyard. The roof was broken, and in two places were steps leading to vaults…’ Chapter IV: Jonathan Harker’s Journal.
‘As these thoughts passed rapidly through her mind, she recollected a subterraneous passage which led from the vaults of the castle to the church of St. Nicholas.’ Chapter I: The castle of Otranto.
Dracula’s physical appearance is significant of this type of character:
‘His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth. These protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed. The chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.’ Chapter II: Jonathan Harker’s Journal.
Dracula as a Gothic villain induces and anguishes the pure woman, represented by Mina and Lucy like in the melodramatic fiction of the 18th^ and 19 th^ century. Stoker establishes very well both roles of them, one of them as fallen woman pre-destiny to be a fallen woman (Lucy) and the other one pre-destiny to be a pure woman (Mina).
Quincy Morris to Lucy:
‘That’s my brave girl. It’s better worth being late for a chance of winning you than being in time for any other girl in the world’ Chapter V: Letter Mina to Lucy.
Val Helsing to Mina:
‘She is one of God’s women, fashioned by his own hand to show us men and other women that there is a heaven where we can enter, and that its light can be here on earth. So true, so sweet, so noble, so little an egoist’ Chapter XIV: Mina Harker’s Journal.
But the most curios of both presentations is that in both case there is an omission of physic appearance, we have to idealize them as Rose Maylie in Oliver Twist:
‘She was not past seventeen. Cast in so slight and exquisite a mould; so mild and gentle; so pure and beautiful; that earth seemed not her element, nor its rough creatures her fit companions.’ Oliver Twist: Chapter XXIX
The fear of daylight and he stake in the heart are part of the folklore and tradition of Eastern Europe, it also the contagions nature of vampirism, the secure and the vampire pass on their condition morally depravity, where the fallen woman are out from the rest of the humanity or die painfully, even they survive, they become as a prostitutes or object of their seducer. Like Adeline, in the Romance of the forest’s Mrs. Radcliffe, where she is taken by a seducer in a house with many kept women:
‘Night came on, however, before we reached the place of our destination; it was a lone house on the waste; but I need not describe it to you, Madam’….…’The interior appearance of the house was desolate and mean; I was surprised that my father had chosen such a place for his habitation, and also that no woman was to be seen’……‘On the death of his wife he received into his house a maiden sister, a sensible, worthy woman, who was deeply interested in the happiness of her brother.’ Chapter III and XVI: The Romance of the Forest.
When she is burned by the holy wafer used as a weapon against Dracula:
‘Unclean! Unclean! Even the Almighty shuns my polluted flesh! I must bear this mark of shame upon my forehead until the Judgement Day’. Chapter XXII: Jonatha Harker’s Journal.
During the journey to Dracula’s castle:
‘So he delay, and delay, and delay, till the mere beauty and the fascination of the wanton’ Chapter XXVII: Val Helsing’s Memorandum.
But when Dracula is killed by the team, Mina becomes a pure woman again, leaving behind the fallen woman, fit for motherhood and happy life.
To sum up, we encounter many parallels between the vampire and the sexuality, the vampire tradition has much in common with human sexuality, vampire’s kiss and the typical lover’s kiss easily made one in reader’s mid or even Nosferatus’s bite can be made similar in the popular imagination with the love bite or phalli thrust, biting is made greatly erotic, as very well know Jonathan Harker in the next quotation:
‘Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed to fasten on my throat’…. ‘I could feel the soft shivering touch of the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited—waited with beating heart’ Chapter III: Jonathan Harker’s Journal.
References:
- Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the novel
- Lady Pockingham or They all do it, the novel. Anonymous
- The castle of Otranto’s Horace Walpole, the novel
- Oliver Twist’s Charles Dickens, the novel
- Masturbation in the Victorian age, Reality Sandwich, http:// realitysandwich.com/782/masturbation_victorian_age/
- Bram Stoker, History, Psychologist and the Gothic, edited by William Hughes and Andrew Smith.
- Article from ‘Essential Criticism, Chapter two; Medicine, mind and body: The psychological studies of Dracula’
- Article from Fry Fictional Conventions and Sexuality in Dracula.
