SOURCE: Johnson, Alan P. “‘Dual Life’: The Status of Women in Stoker's Dracula.” In Sexuality and Victorian Literature, edited by Don Richard Cox, pp. 20-39. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984.

[In the following essay, Johnson explores the depiction of women in Dracula, contending that the novel “presents an incisive and sympathetic analysis of the frustration felt by women in late-nineteenth-century Britain.”]

Leonard Wolf has described exactly the theme in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) which seems to account for the novel's widespread and persistent appeal: “energy without grace, power without responsibility.”¹ “Dracula is considerably more,” Wolf points out, “than a sexual danger. Stoker insists on his brooding, primordial animality—he is antirational, childlike, instinctual,” and, “in Christian terms he is a creature cut off from God because, for the sake of breath and motion, he has abjured salvation.” A rebel against the limits of mortal life, Dracula is “a hero of despair” (pp. 220, 233). As Mina Harker says in the novel itself, “[H]is action is based on selfishness.”²Dracula may be read as an epic struggle between the Count and the forces of western civilization led by Dr. Van Helsing or as a Bildungsroman in which Jonathan Harker and the novel's other young men learn to know and control the energy personified in Dracula.³ The division of materials in the novel, however, implies that the significance of Dracula as an embodiment of “energy without grace, power without responsibility,” is rooted importantly in the experience of his two victims, Lucy Westenra and Mina.

Despite the novel's focus on Jonathan in Transylvania in its first four chapters, the narrative in the remainder of the book forms a diptych—a portrait first of Lucy and then of Mina—which invites the reader to dwell upon and compare the two women, especially with regard to their respective involvements with Dracula. Chapters 5-16 focus upon Lucy in London and in Whitby, where Dracula lands by ship and attacks her, and then in London again, where her several male admirers, led by Dr. Van Helsing, gather to try to release her from Dracula's demonic influence and to find and destroy him. When, in Chapter 17, Mina and her husband Jonathan join the search after Lucy's death and exorcism, the focus shifts to Mina as Dracula's second victim and as an indispensable aid to the men in the pursuit and destruction of Dracula. In this diptych each woman develops what Van Helsing at one point calls a “dual life” (p. 206)—a life of conscious and willing conformity to her society and yet also a life of largely subconscious rebellion against it. In the case of each woman, Dracula symbolizes her inner rebelliousness, and its crisis coincides with her commerce with Dracula. The diptych also shows, however, that each woman's rebellion is justified and has been provoked by the undue constraints and condescension which have been inflicted upon her by her society, chiefly by the men around her and chiefly because the thinking of the society is dominated by anachronistic notions of social class and chivalry. By the end of the novel Dracula's significance as a symbol of selfishness includes the male characters as well as Lucy and Mina, but, with regard to the two women, the facts that he is a male and an aristocrat mirror of the kind of power that frustrates Lucy and Mina, and thus the kind of power they would like to wield. Both are frustrated by male prerogative: Lucy is expected to make an aristocratic marriage, and Mina is simultaneously apotheosized and nullified by the men's chivalry. Dracula is a complex book, but in the main it is not the sadistic exercise in misogyny for which it has sometimes been mistaken.⁴ On the contrary, with the aid of some remarkable psychological symbolism, it presents an incisive and sympathetic analysis of the frustration felt by women in late-nineteenth-century Britain.

In general the historical counterpart of Lucy's and Mina's rebelliousness is the complex of frustrated hopes and resentment which must have motivated and accompanied British women's slow, uphill struggle toward equal status with men in the last half of the nineteenth century. Stoker was definitely interested in this long, wide-ranging effort, but his novel seems particularly to be a response to the concept of the “New Woman” which became hotly controversial in the early 1890s. The frustrating slowness of the general progress toward equality for women is evident in the lapse of forty-eight years between the first Parliamentary defeat of women's suffrage in 1870 and its passage in 1918, and in the long lapse between the first listing of a woman (Elizabeth Blackwell, who held a U.S. medical degree) in the Medical Register of the United Kingdom in 1859 and the decision of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons to grant their diplomas to women in 1908. Women were far less free to enter professions such as medicine and law than to become nurses and teachers, who were honored but underpaid, and clerical workers, who could find “a new type of employment created by such technical inventions as the … typewriter” (first marketed by E. Remington and Sons, for example, in 1874) without competing with an established male work force.⁵

Even as a youth Stoker must have been aware of the practical abilities of Victorian women and aware that they merited self-sufficiency if they wished it. His biographer, Harry Ludlam, notes that Stoker's mother, Charlotte, was active in Dublin in “social welfare work and determined championing of the weaker sex.”⁶ In her published lecture, On Female Emigration from Workhouses (Dublin, 1864), she advocated government-supported emigration for Irish pauper girls in order to “equalize the sexes” numerically. While she recognized marriage as “the true and legitimate end of a woman's existence,” she did not rank marriage as “by any means the first (much less) the only object of emigration.” For her, emigration and numerical equalization were “the best and surest means” by which pauper girls and other “young women of good character” might become “self-supporting young wom[e]n” and attain “that independence in other countries from which they are debarred in this” (pp. 8-9). Ludlam states that Bram himself spoke on the issue of votes for women at the Trinity College (Dublin) Philosophical Society in the late 1860s, but he does not tell us which side Bram took (p. 27).

While Stoker was certainly aware of the late-Victorian women's movement in general and had Charlotte's precedent for sympathy toward it, Dracula seems clearly a response particularly to the “New Woman” controversy of the 1890s because he mentions the “New Woman” in the novel (p. 99) and focuses upon precisely the sort of frustration depicted repeatedly in the so-called “New Woman” fiction published in the first half of the decade. According to Linda Dowling, the “New Woman” concept was a demand for “sexual equality and self-development” for women and a challenge to the traditional Victorian marriage arranged for money and position, to the subservience of wives to their husbands, and even in some cases to the ideas of motherhood and distinctively womanly human “nature.” The “New Woman” concept, Dowling says, was expressed in fiction such as George Egerton's Discords (1893), Mona Caird's The Daughters of Danaus (1894), Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did (1895), and, from a critical viewpoint, Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895). Dowling points out that the outspoken defiance of “established culture” by this fiction created “deep cultural anxiety” in contemporary reviewers and commentators and moved them to respond with an “apocalyptic vocabulary” in which they compared the novelists' attacks to the French Revolution and the decline of Rome. In The New Woman and the Victorian Novel, Gail Cunningham emphasizes that in the “New Woman” novels the usual consequence of the heroine's struggle for sexual and social independence is that she suffers “nervous disorder, disease, and death” as a result of her opposition to the society she lives in.⁷

Nervous disorder is precisely what Stoker's two heroines are driven to suffer by the clash between their aspirations and social rejection, and in Lucy's case he adds not only disease and death but also a period of postmortem vampirism. His handling of feminine rebellion differs from the “New Woman” fiction in three notable ways, however. First, despite his sympathetic understanding of the causes of the rebellion, he resembles the “New Woman's” anxious critics by characterizing the rebellion with the “apocalyptic” figure of an alien vampire. Like the journal, Lady's Realm, which characterized the modern woman of 1887 as “this feminine Frankenstein” (Calder, p. 164), Stoker is ultimately conservative, as the novel's ending will show, although he implies that the traditional family and social structure should be conserved by means of reform. Second, neither Lucy nor Mina is literally a full-fledged “New Woman.” Lucy is a traditional, upper-class, Victorian young woman and is consciously unconcerned with feminist reform, whereas Mina is aware of, and has strong affinities with, the “New Woman,” but desires only recognition within a freely chosen marriage rather than radical sexual and social independence. And, third, since Stoker has chosen to show that women like Lucy and Mina who are consciously and outwardly conformists feel the same rebellious impulse displayed by the overt, radical rebels of the “New Woman” fiction, he has introduced the element of dual personality within each of his heroines. In responding to the “New Woman” controversy, then, he sees the broad scope of feminine rebellion and focuses upon its subconscious and barely conscious, rather than polemical and overt, mode, and he attempts to suggest changes which will obviate feminine rebellion and preserve the ideal of family-centered society.

Stoker depicted the public, fully conscious personalities of Lucy and Mina with a wealth of detail. As Stephanie Demetrakopoulos has pointed out, Lucy is what Peter Cominos has called the Victorian “Womanly Woman” in Suffer and Be Still. Lucy is the fragile, feminine “angel in the house” whose activities are never more than trivial. In the eyes of those around her, Lucy in her normal, public character is repeatedly “sweet,” for example.⁸ Her family has some continuity socially as her father, who is dead at the time of the story, has inherited an entailed estate (Dracula, p. 174). The family is at least modestly wealthy, for they have servants, a home called Hillingham in the London area, and perhaps a second residence at 17 Chatham Street, London, and they take rooms for the summer in a house at the Crescent in Whitby. In Whitby Lucy goes out “visiting with her mother” on “duty calls” (p. 74) and in London Lucy goes “a good deal to picture-galleries and for walks and rides in the park” and to the “pops” or popular concerts (p. 64; cf. 103, 116). Her vocation is apparently to be courted, and, although she receives proposals from Dr. Seward and Quincey Morris before Arthur Holmwood proposes, it seems understood by her mother and Lucy that she will marry Arthur, the only son of Lord Godalming, an aging peer. Early in the novel, Lucy writes to Mina that Arthur “and mama get on very well together; they have so many things to talk about in common,” and Lucy goes on, “Mina, I love him,” although she doesn't say why (pp. 64, 65).

In contrast to Lucy, Mina, even in her public, conscious role, resembles the “New Woman,” but not in the sexually advanced mold of Grant Allen's Herminia in The Woman Who Did or Hardy's Sue Bridehead. Rather, Stoker's characterization of Mina recalls George Eliot's heroines or, more precisely, Wilkie Collins' Marian Halcombe, the independent, practical young woman who helps the young art teacher, Walter Hartwright, in solving the mystery of her helplessly “feminine” half-sister Laura's supposed death and in rescuing her from incarceration in an asylum by her fortune-hunting husband in The Woman in White (1860).⁹ Probably the type of woman Stoker intends to represent in Mina is described in his remark in his printed lecture, A Glimpse of America (London, 1886), that American women are not bound by “those petty restraints which, with us, are rather recollections or traditions than social needs, or the logical outcome of the spirit of the age. In the United States, a young woman is, almost if not quite, as free to think and act for herself as a young man is. This personal freedom is of course based on a large measure of education, practical as well as of book-learning, and has its correlative in a very stringent law of personal discretion” (pp. 24-25).

In her journal Mina jokes about the “New Woman's” disapproval of the conventional feminine appetite for “severe tea” and about the “New Woman's” probably wanting to do the proposing of marriage; but Mina also adds, “And a nice job she will make of it, too! There's some consolation in that” (pp. 99-100).¹⁰ Mina's status as “New” is suggested in the fact that she is an orphan and “never knew either father or mother” (p. 164). All that is known of her background is that she and Lucy have been childhood friends. Mina's “New Woman” status is established mainly by her practical competence. She supports herself at the novel's beginning as an “assistant schoolmistress” (p. 63), and, when she marries, she chooses a rising solicitor rather than an artistocrat who might give her vacuous leisure. As Harker's fiancée she has learned typing and stenography so as to “be able to be useful to Jonathan” (p. 63), and after their marriage she memorizes train schedules “so that [she] may help Jonathan in case he is in a hurry” (p. 192; cf. 343). After joining the alliance of Lucy's friends in pursuit of Dracula, she puts all their information in chronological order, types all of it in triplicate, and, except for a brief and disastrous interval, acts as “secretary” to the group.

As Professor Van Helsing soon sees, Mina “has a man's brain,” but she also has “a woman's heart” (p. 241; cf. 344). Her engagement to Harker is a donnée at the outset of the story, and her devotion to him in her public, conscious role is a pattern of romantic fidelity. She marries him when he is a mental wreck in Budapest after his escape from Castle Dracula and sustains him through his subsequent self-doubt by “keeping up a brave and cheerful appearance” (p. 165). When she learns that she has been infected with vampirism, she is stricken with “horror and distress,” and when she sees “some sure danger to him: instantly forgetting her own grief, she seize[s] hold of him and crie[s] out:— … ‘Stay with these friends who will watch over you!’” (p. 289). To the young men who have courted Lucy, Mina acts as an affectionate, maternal, and sisterly comforter. Along with her romantic fidelity and perhaps her feminine sympathy, her religious faith and a ludicrous sense of propriety also set her off from the “New Woman.” She shows the religious fiber of her character, for example, as she writes about her marriage: “Please God, I shall never, never forget … the grave and sweet responsibilities I have taken on me” (p. 115). After becoming consciously aware that Dracula has attacked her, she cries out, “What have I done to deserve such a fate, I who have tried to walk in meekness and righteousness all my days” (p. 294), and she persistently reassures her allies “that it is in trouble and trial that [their] faith is tested … and that God will aid [them] up to the end” (p. 295; cf. 301, 313, 321). Mina's propriety is a curious oddity. When she leads Lucy back from a sleepwalking in Whitby's parish churchyard, for example, and has put her own shoes on Lucy's bare feet, Mina daubs her own feet with mud “using each foot in turn on the other, so that … no one, in case we should meet any one, should notice my bare feet” (p. 102). Nevertheless, Mina's practical competence makes her a self-sufficient woman in the style, for example, of Collins' Marian Halcombe and Stoker's own Glimpse of America and an obvious contrast to Lucy.

Although Dracula presents the traditional, Victorian, womanly ideal in Lucy and an approximation of the “New Woman” in Mina, both Lucy and Mina are led by the conflict between their personal wishes and their social surroundings to develop a mainly unconscious, egocentric rebelliousness whose crisis coincides with, and is symbolized by, Dracula's attacks upon each character. In giving Lucy and Mina each a powerful, subconscious mental life distinct from her conscious self, Stoker drew upon the general notion of double personality, or dissociation, which had been developed in recent psychology—for example, by Jean Charcot, who is mentioned in Dracula (p. 197)¹¹—and had been popularly immortalized in Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Stoker's awareness of double personality within one person in the years preceding Dracula is suggested in his Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906) in references to Irving's opinion that while performing a role an actor should have “‘a double consciousness, in which all the emotions proper to the occasion may have full sway, while the actor is all the time on the alert for every detail of his method.’” Stoker discussed his employer Irving's views with him at least by 1889 and probably read them in Irving's preface to Diderot's Paradox of Acting edited by W. H. Pollock in 1883.¹² Stoker made explicit use of the literary “double,” a character who is an external embodiment of a “self” which exists naturally within the mind of another character, in the playful story “Crooken Sands,” published in 1894. In it, the central character not only sees his own “double,” but also reads what seems to be a book invented by Stoker, “Die Döppleganger [sic,] by Dr. Heinrich von Aschenberg.”¹³ In Dracula Stoker uses not only the notions of “dual life” and the external double, Dracula, but also the notion of “unconscious cerebration.” According to Leonard Wolf, the term was used by nineteenth-century physicians to label thought processes which were examined in contemporary research such as Dr. Thomas Laycock's Treatise on the Nervous Diseases of Women (1840) (The Annotated Dracula, p. 71, n. 27). In Personal Reminiscences of Irving, Stoker once uses the term synonymously with “dual consciousness” (I, 265). In Dracula Dr. Seward uses the term twice to refer to the thought processes of his patient, Renfield (pp. 79, 276). The rebellious selves of Lucy and Mina seem to be largely the product of their unconscious cerebration as they respond to their social surroundings. After their discontentment develops to the stage of strong rebellion, Dracula appears and attacks each character. He is thus in this context a symbolic double of each woman's rebellious egoism, and the literal vampirism which results from his bite represents the change in personality produced by the egoism.

Lucy's duality first shows itself in the novel in her sleepwalking at Whitby and culminates in her funeral vault, where Arthur, under Van Helsing's direction, hammers a three-foot stake through her heart and sees “Lucy as she [lies] there; the pointed teeth, the bloodstained, voluptuous mouth … the whole carnal and unspiritual appearance,” change to “Lucy as we had seen her in her life, with her face of unequalled sweetness and purity” (pp. 220, 222). Between her death and the exorcism, Van Helsing sums up her condition as a polarity of sleeping and waking: “[H]ere is some dual life. … She was bitten by a vampire when she was in a trance, sleep-walking … in a trance could he best come to take more blood. In trance she died, and in trance she is Un-Dead, too” (p. 206). To the reader who focuses upon Dracula as a literal creature with extraordinary powers, Lucy's sleepwalking and trances may seem to result simply from his influence. The novel suggests, though, that the sleepwalking precedes his influence. Lucy's sleepwalking first occurred in her childhood, and, during the seven-month period of the novel's present-time action, the sleepwalking recurs shortly before July 26, twelve days before Dracula's move upon England. He probably does not and cannot know of her existence until he disembarks from the Demeter on the night of August 7 and becomes aware of her at the funeral of the Demeter captain in the Whitby parish churchyard on August 10. She is apparently first attacked by Dracula on the night of August 10.

The emergence of Lucy's “vampire” self is a product of her feelings of vigorous sexual desire and a disinclination for the constraint of marriage which confronts her as a girl who is attractive, about to turn twenty, and comfortably placed in polite society, but it is also a product of the ineffectuality of her fiancé, Arthur, and the impercipient selfishness of her mother, who promotes Lucy's and Arthur's marriage. Writing to Mina in a mood of playful vanity in May, Lucy boasts of “Three proposals in one day!” and later comments, “Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her … ?” (pp. 65, 68). Although her tone is still playful, the comment reflects her genuine sexual attraction to Seward and Morris, whom she has refused. She has found Seward “handsome … one of the most resolute men I ever saw, and yet the most calm” (p. 64), and she reflects, “[I]t isn't at all a happy thing when you have to see a poor fellow, whom you know loves you honestly, going away … and to know that … you are passing quite out of his life” (p. 66). With regard to Morris, whom she regards as “manly,” she “would worship the very ground he trod on … if [she] were free” (pp. 68, 69).

When Mina first refers to Lucy's sleepwalking in July, she mentions at the same time that “Lucy is to be married in the autumn” to Arthur “and … is already planning out her dresses and how her house is to be arranged,” noting that Arthur is expected to join them soon at Whitby (p. 81). Apparently to Lucy the house she is in at Whitby represents the coming marriage since her sleepwalking takes her outside, and when her somnambulism is frustrated by Mina, Lucy “tries the door, and … goes about the room searching for the key” (p. 82; cf. 103). Her antipathy to the social role she is expected to assume is underscored in the sleepwalking section of the novel by her similarity to the “white lady” who, according to local legend, haunts Whitby Abbey. The white lady is supposedly the nun described in Walter Scott's poem “Marmion” who was unfaithful to her vows by plotting with Marmion in an attempt to win his love and was punished by being immured in the abbey. Like the lady, Lucy characteristically wears white. The parallel is recalled later when Lucy, after her death, becomes the “Bloofer Lady” or beautiful lady attacking children in London, again wearing white. The fact that her victims are all children suggests that her animosity, like the rebelliousness of the most radical heroines in “New Woman” fiction, is directed not only at the vows and legal constraints of the role she has been expected to assume but at motherhood itself.

The importance of Arthur as an effective cause of Lucy's rebellion is implied by the extreme destructiveness of her intention when, on her deathbed, she invites him in a “voluptuous” voice to kiss her (pp. 167-68) so that she may draw out his blood and infect him, too, with vampirism. In fact, he has given her reason to regard him not only as a prime agent of social constraint because he is her fiancé, but as a mere nullity as well. When Arthur visits Lucy at the end of August, he takes her on a merely conventional round of diversions—“walks and drives, and rides, and rowing, and tennis, and fishing” (p. 116)—and before and after that visit he is detained at the bedside of his dying father. When the illness that accompanies Lucy's vampirism appears during Arthur's visit at the end of August, he calls in Seward and returns to his father for a week. He returns briefly on September 7 and gives blood at Van Helsing's request but immediately goes away again to his father until Lucy calls him to her deathbed on September 19. Although Van Helsing sees Arthur as “stalwart … and … strong” and eager to help at the time of the transfusion (p. 130), Stoker's management of the story hints that Arthur's attachment to the class system of the past keeps him from thoroughly effective action in the present.¹⁴ Lucy frequently proclaims her love for Arthur, but she reserves her specific adjectives of praise for Seward and Morris. Her antipathy becomes murderously evident when Arthur approaches her deathbed, and after her death she repeats her offer of a fatal kiss, now with a mocking tone, when Arthur sees her as a vampire returning to her tomb on what would have been their wedding night.

By means of the conclusion of Lucy's story, in which Arthur hammers a stake through her heart, Stoker suggests that her rebellion could have been prevented by the presence of a strong self-dependent fiancé. Van Helsing apparently insists that Arthur perform the exorcism and that the phallic stake be used in order to teach him the masculine strength he has lacked. However, because Arthur's ineffectuality was largely a result of his subordination of personal interest in Lucy to aristocratic family duty, Stoker seems to imply that the aristocratic duties prevent vigorous, independent, procreative, life-sustaining action and should be thrown off or transcended. In the words of A Glimpse of America, Arthur has been governed by outmoded “tradition” rather than “social needs, or … the spirit of the age.” Although he retains the title he inherits from his father, Arthur subsequently takes an active part in the hunt for Dracula and devotes distinctly aristocratic contributions to its success: terriers to destroy Dracula's rats, the weight of the Godalming title to persuade a locksmith to open Dracula's Piccadilly house, and a steam launch which Arthur stokes, repairs, and pilots himself. While he learns through the exorcism to use the resources of his class in a self-dependent, socially beneficial way, his “mercy-bearing stake” seems to release Lucy's waking self, now her soul, from the domination of her rebellious, vampire self by assuring her that the aristocracy could have provided her with a strong partner worthy of her submission to the constraints of marriage and motherhood.

Arthur is an important cause of Lucy's rebellion and almost becomes the first victim of her vampirism, but her rebelliousness seems to be brought to the intensity of vampirism by her antipathy toward Mrs. Westenra. Although Lucy never speaks against her, Lucy must see Mrs. Westenra as repressive, outdated, and selfish. In mid-August Mina writes that Mrs. Westenra expects to die of heart disease “within a few months” and “is rejoiced that [Lucy] is soon to have some one [Arthur, that is] to protect her” (p. 105). Lucy will have little choice but to accept this protection because Mrs. Westenra has altered her will so as to leave her entire estate, against her lawyer's advice, to Arthur rather than Lucy. Mrs. Westenra's domination by the past is suggested generally, as is old Lord Godalming's, by failing health but especially by her tampering with the garlic with which Van Helsing tries to protect Lucy from Dracula. Because of Mrs. Westenra's heart trouble, the physicians Seward and Van Helsing conceal from her any information about Lucy's sickness which might upset Mrs. Westenra and cause her “sudden death” (p. 127). Since she has not been told that the garlic wreath which Van Helsing puts around Lucy's neck and the garlic seal on her closed window are protection against a vampire, Mrs. Westenra removes the wreath and opens the window “to let in a little fresh air” (p. 142), as she says, exposing Lucy to an attack by Dracula. Mrs. Westenra's reasoning is traditional, and her error suggests that the traditional social ideal which she embodies cannot comprehend or cope with a threat to its existence such as Lucy's rebelliousness. Moreover, the fact that the error allows Dracula to enter through the window suggests that Lucy's rebelliousness is directly fostered by her mother's traditionalism.

Mrs. Westenra's selfishness appears clearly when Dr. Seward introduces Van Helsing to her as his consultant about Lucy's illness. Seward notes that Mrs. Westenra is “alarmed, but not nearly as much as I expected. … Here, in a case where any shock may prove fatal, matters are so ordered that … things not personal … do not seem to reach her.” Seward calls her attitude “an ordered selfishness” (p. 129). Later on, when a wolf which Dracula has freed from the London Zoo thrusts his head through Lucy's window while her mother is with her, Mrs. Westenra, according to Lucy's report of the incident, “crie[s] out in fright … and clutche[s] wildly at anything that would help her,” including the protective garlic wreath which she tears from Lucy's neck (p. 151).

Lucy's antipathy toward her mother is strongly suggested in Lucy's affection for a particular seat in the Whitby parish cemetery and is suggested also in the episode of the wolf. The cemetery seat is introduced in a scene in which Mina and Lucy, sitting in the seat, talk with Mr. Swales, an old native, who argues that epitaphs are usually untrue. To prove his claim he points to the epitaph of George Canon on a slab under their feet. The epitaph says that the slab and seat were “erected by his sorrowing mother to her dearly beloved son” and that he “died, in the hope of a glorious resurrection.” Swales states that “the sorrowin' mother was a hell-cat that hated him … an' he hated her so that he committed suicide in order that she mightn't get an insurance she put on his life.” Although George Canon was outspoken in his filial rebellion, the antagonism between him and his hypocritical mother parallels closely the implicit antagonism between Lucy and Mrs. Westenra. Lucy's response to Swales is revealing: “Oh, why did you tell us of this? It is my favourite seat, and I cannot leave it; and now I find I must go on sitting over the grave of a suicide” (pp. 76-77).

While Lucy occupies the cemetery seat nine days later on August 10, Dracula apparently becomes aware of her for the first time and draws her blood. He has come from Transylvania on the Demeter, has taken refuge in George Canon's grave, and thus is there when Lucy and Mina use the seat during the funeral of the Demeter captain on the morning of the tenth. On the evening of the tenth, Mina discovers that Lucy has sleepwalked and finds her “half reclining with her head lying over the back of the seat” with Dracula bending over her (p. 101). Four days later the two girls see his “dark figure” on the seat, and in the evening Lucy is attacked a second time (pp. 104-05). Stoker's use of the seat and his timing of events suggest that the suicide's grave symbolizes Lucy's antipathy toward her mother and that psychologically Lucy progresses from resisting marriage with Arthur, to the antipathy against her mother for promoting the marriage, to a climactic indulgence in selfish hatred toward her mother which is symbolized by the advent of Dracula from the grave.

The later episode in London in which the wolf thrusts himself into Lucy's window reiterates the suggestion that her submission to Dracula—that is, her rebellious egoism—is partly and importantly a response to her mother's actions. As literal narrative the episode is a peculiar combination of events. Prior to the episode, Van Helsing has successfully protected Lucy in her room at night by means of garlic, and Dracula has released a wolf, “Bersicker,” from the London Zoo. In the episode Mrs. Westenra looks in on Lucy at night, and as they lie together in Lucy's bed for warmth, they hear “the flapping and buffeting” of Dracula in the form of a bat at the window. Bersicker breaks in, and Mrs. Westenra clutches at Lucy's garlic wreath, then dies. As she falls, her head strikes Lucy's, making the young woman “dizzy for a moment or two.” Lucy sees the wolf withdraw, and “a myriad of little specks [seem] to come blowing in through the window.” The specks are a characteristic vampire form, as Van Helsing later explains (p. 245). Lucy at first feels as if she is under “some spell” and is unable to move, but she “recover[s] consciousness” and places all her garlic flowers on her mother's body (pp. 151-52).

In the literal narrative the wolf is Dracula's means of creating a passage through the window, which apparently has been sealed with garlic, but because Dracula has become symbolic of Lucy's rebellious egoism, the wolf is perhaps symbolic of her potentiality for physical violence. This meaning is supported emphatically by the zoo-keeper's description of Bersicker, which precedes the episode. Bersicker is docile to his trainer and so accustomed to captivity that he “ain't … used to fighten' or even providin' for hisself,” but “you can't trust wolves no more nor women,” the zoo-keeper says, and he fears that if Bersicker cannot find food during his escape, he might devour an untended baby in the park (pp. 145, 148). With reference to Mrs. Westenra, the wolf's intrusion through the window seems to suggest that she now perceives the potential violence in Lucy's character as they lie in Lucy's bed. With reference to Lucy, Stoker's use of the wolf suggests that she feels a desire to destroy her mother completely, whereas the vampirism which expresses Lucy's essential egoism drains the victim of his power but permits him to exist. The events following Bersicker's intrusion suggest that Lucy advances to a new affirmation of her vampirish rebelliousness. As she is literally stunned by her mother's fall, so apparently is Lucy stunned by the revelation of selfishness in her mother's clutching at the garlic wreath. At this point Dracula enters in the form of specks—that is, Lucy's egoism rises climactically within her—and this development seems to determine her next action. She puts the protective flowers on her dead mother and away from herself even though they can do her mother no good and even though Lucy recalls Van Helsing's instructions to wear them. As she is recalling her experience immediately afterward, “the air seems full of specks.” Although she has “recovered consciousness” and goes on to pray for divine help, she has apparently given her allegiance decisively to her rebellious impulse in response to her mother's self-revealing clutch at personal survival.

The characterizations of Arthur and Mrs. Westenra which emerge from their relationships with Lucy suggest that Stoker does not intend his presentation of her to be a simple excoriation of a lustful woman whose mask of superficial propriety falls away. Of course, Lucy begins with a vigorous sexual vitality and, after her infection with vampirism, becomes seethingly “voluptuous,” and Stoker's lurid rendering of Arthur's driving a stake through her heart suggests that a lustful woman must be shown her place with a vengeance. The intensity of the imagery strongly supports speculation that Stoker wrote under the grip of an Oedipal fantasy or saw female sexuality as what Phyllis Roth calls the “pre-Oedipal threat” of the vagina dentata of folk lore.¹⁵ The totality of Lucy's story, however, represents her as a victim before she becomes a villainess, a victim not only of her own vitality and vanity but especially of the class system which is perpetuated by Arthur's subordination of himself to aristocratic duty and by Mrs. Westenra's egocentric, socially ambitious management of Lucy's life. Lucy's story suggests that the ideal courtship would be one between an independent man and woman, both oblivious of aristocratic concerns—that is, between a man and woman like Jonathan and Mina.

Having shown that aristocratic concerns block the way to satisfactory marriage and evoke rebellion even in a thoroughly conventional, relatively unthinking young woman like Lucy, Stoker shifts his focus to Mina and shows that even in the seemingly ideal marriage of an independent, freely choosing man and woman, the woman encounters reluctance on the part of the men around her, including her husband, to accept her as an able, self-determining person. The dual life which such reluctance evokes in Mina passes through two phases: its emergence, culminating in her commerce with Dracula, and the extension of her dual life from the time the men discover her vampirism until they destroy Dracula at the end of the novel. The emergence of Mina's dual life is a clear, direct result of her exclusion from the pursuit of Dracula by Jonathan, Van Helsing, Seward, Arthur, and Quincey Morris because of their chivalric preconceptions about her proper role.

The men's exclusion of Mina is foreshadowed by their persistent protectiveness toward and apotheosis of her. Jonathan, for example, writing journal entries during his adventures in Transylvania at the beginning of the novel, wishes to spare Mina “the pain” of learning about his “wicked, burning desire” to be kissed by the vampire women there (p. 46) and supposes that although “Mina is a woman,” she has “nought in common” with “those awful women” (p. 61). Similarly when Seward meets Mina and she asks him to inform her about Lucy's death, he thinks of Mina as “a sweet-faced, dainty-looking girl” whom he “must be careful not to frighten” (p. 226), although he is soon struck by her “courage and resolution” and gives her his full journal to read (p. 229). Quincey Morris, at his first meeting with Mina, expresses his admiration for her but diminishes her with the title, “‘Little girl’—the very words,” Mina reflects, “he had used to Lucy” (p. 237). Van Helsing is the most florid of the men in the exercise of paradoxically condescending courtliness. To him, at his first meeting with Mina when he visits her in Exeter to acquire information about Lucy, Mina 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 … in this age, so sceptical and selfish” (p. 194, cf. 191 and 225). He has greeted her with a “courtly bow” and has been surprised that she seems to have a “good memory for facts, for details[, since i]t is not always so with young ladies” (p. 189). When the men and Mina gather at Seward's London asylum to raid Dracula's house, Carfax, next door and to discover his other lairs, Van Helsing proposes that Mina be excluded and is supported by the other men. On September 30, the eve of the Carfax raid, he says to Seward, “[A]fter to-night she must not have to do with this so terrible affair … it is no part for a woman. Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her. … And, besides, she is … not so long married; there may be other things to think of some time, if not now” (p. 241). “[Y]ou must be our star and our hope,” Van Helsing tells her, “and we shall act all the more free that you are not in danger” (p. 248). Jonathan is “relieved” by the exclusion since the men's work “is too great a strain for a woman to bear” (pp. 248, 260; cf. 254, 268), and Seward reflects after the Carfax raid that “if she had remained in touch with the affair, it would in time infallibly have wrecked her” (p. 262; cf. 241).

Ironically, it is by being put out of touch with the pursuit of Dracula that Mina indeed is “infallibly … wrecked.” Her response to the exclusion is foreshadowed in her reaction to Van Helsing's underestimation of her ability to remember facts at their first meeting at Exeter. In an uncharacteristically discourteous act, Mina shows him the area of her competence and his ignorance by handing him her diary to read in shorthand. As she describes the action in her journal, she notes her similarity to Eve: “I could not resist the temptation of mystifying him a bit—I suppose it is some of the taste of the original apple that remains still in our mouths” (p. 189). Later, the exclusion of Mina is followed immediately by her overt cooperation but also by her conscious displeasure and covert commerce with Dracula. When Van Helsing announces the exclusion on September 30, she sees it as “not … good … a bitter pill for me to swallow,” but she agrees because the men's “minds were made up,” and, she writes, “I could say nothing, save to accept their chivalrous care of me.” Their instruction for her “to go to bed and sleep” as they set off for Carfax she describes immediately afterward as “manlike” (p. 248). While the men count coffins and kill the rats with which Dracula decoys them in the Carfax chapel, Mina experiences Dracula's first attack upon her, which she recalls confusedly as a dream of a “pillar of cloud” from which emerge two fiery red eyes and then a “livid white face” (pp. 264-65). The image of the phallic pillar suggests her desire to exercise the power which the men reserve for themselves. Consciously, the following morning, Mina continues to assent to the exclusion although she finds herself, she says, “crying like a silly fool” (p. 262).¹⁶

As the exclusion continues through the two days, October 2 and 3, Dracula's visits continue during the nights, culminating in what Van Helsing calls Mina's “baptism of blood” (pp. 327, 347). Although the episode is not without puzzling details, it clearly implies a magnification of Mina's rebellious desire for power. She is awake rather than sleeping when Dracula enters her room, and, although she is “bewildered” when he prepares to take a “little refreshment,” she recalls later that “strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him.” When he finishes he tells her, “You shall be avenged in turn; for not one of them but shall minister to your needs.” Somewhat puzzling are the facts that when Mina tries to awaken Jonathan, who sleeps next to her, she cannot, and that Dracula forces Mina to drink from a wound he makes in his own chest. By the depth of Jonathan's sleep, Stoker perhaps intends to represent the stolidity of Jonathan's misconception of Mina's needs and abilities. Mina's forced drinking of Dracula's blood seems to suggest that when Mina has yielded up her energies to her wish for egocentric power, then, next, the newly energized wish for power forces itself upon her conscious, everyday mind and begins to energize it.¹⁷

As soon as Van Helsing and the other men discover Mina's vampirism, they see that their exclusion of her has been a mistake and include her once again in their councils “in full confidence” (p. 296). This rectification of the condition which was the immediate cause of her discontent and consequent vampirism does not, however, halt or reverse the effects of her vampirism. Her teeth elongate, for example, and she discovers that she has a telepathic connection with Dracula. When, before departing to ambush Dracula at his Piccadilly house, Van Helsing touches Mina with a sacramental wafer to protect her and it burns her forehead, the Cainlike “mark of shame” it leaves convinces Mina and the others that she is still “unclean” even in the eyes of God (p. 302, cf. 290). While the vampire, or rebellious, self persists in Mina, her pious and loving self rises in reaction to it to the level of saintly martyrdom, but without freeing her from the vampirism. She repeatedly expresses religious hope, for example, and she offers her telepathic link with Dracula as a means of locating him. Realizing that it may be a danger to the men and that she must obey if Dracula summons her, she vows, with eyes that “sh[i]ne with the devotion of a martyr,” to die at the first “sign of harm to any that [she] love[s]” (p. 296). She also excludes herself from the men's councils, asks for posthumous exorcism, and memorializes her self-sacrifice by having Jonathan read a burial service for her in the presence of the other men. Even her saintly, martyrlike intentions, however, do not break the telepathic link or erase her Cainlike mark until Jonathan's and Quincey's knives destroy Dracula in the final scene in Transylvania.

The persistence of Mina's dual life implies that even after the men redress their error of excluding her they remain guilty of their chivalric prejudice or of the egoism from which it sprang. The second, saintly phase of Mina's rebellion, then, calls attention to the fact that Dracula has been available throughout the novel as a symbol of egoism in the men as well as in the women. The nature of the men's error is suggested by their lack of control over Dracula. He himself points out their freedom from his domination when they confront him at his Piccadilly house and he taunts them: “Your girls … are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine - my creatures” (p. 312). While his threat prophesies that the men will become his subjects, it also admits that they are not yet under his power. He, however, is not under their power either. All they have succeeded in doing is to identify him as their enemy. Van Helsing has learned of Dracula's identity by reading Jonathan's Transylvanian diary and documents pertaining to Dracula's acquisition of Carfax and has taught Seward, Arthur, and Quincey “to believe” in Dracula's reality when they discover Lucy returning to her tomb in vampire form. In the novel's opening chapters, Jonathan has found Dracula in his box of earth in Transylvania and attempted to destroy him with a shovel but has been “paralyse[d]” by his look so that “the shovel turn[s] in [Jonathan's] hand” and merely wounds Dracula's forehead (p. 60). Later Jonathan comes to wonder whether he has imagined Dracula's existence until Van Helsing assures Jonathan, “[I]t is true.” With the reassurance, Jonathan feels himself to be “a new man … I was in doubt,” he says, “and … did not know what to trust, even the evidence of my own senses” (pp. 192-94). Neither Jonathan nor the other men, however, succeed in seizing Dracula when they confront him at his Piccadilly house, and, after that confrontation, they cannot pursue him without Mina's help. Jonathan and the other men have learned to believe in the reality of egoistic energy but apparently have not learned how to grasp and eradicate it as it lingers elusively within themselves.

The fact that, as Dracula flees to Transylvania, Jonathan and the other men can track him only by means of the telepathic link between Dracula and Mina suggests that the men can know and master the egoistic energy in themselves only by studying it in Mina and letting what they see in her guide them on a psychic journey into themselves or perhaps into a species of collective unconscious.¹⁸ Perhaps at the novel's end, Stoker assigned the exorcism of the sensual, Transylvanian vampiresses to Van Helsing because of his earlier mental philandering when he jokes, for example, about his blood transfusion to Lucy as a sort of marriage. And perhaps Quincey, who is repeatedly characterized by rough-and-ready resolution, assists at the destruction of Dracula to stress that Jonathan has acquired that quality as his knife shears the Count's throat. In any case, the pursuit of Dracula into Transylvania suggests the sort of psychic journey which Rider Haggard implied in She (1886) and Conrad would depict in “The Heart of Darkness” in 1899. A journey into the underworld of the mind is suggested, for example, by Mina's, Jonathan's, and Seward's comments that, since Dracula's escape, “it is almost impossible to realise that the cause of all [their] trouble is still existent” (p. 327). Later, as Jonathan journeys upriver during the pursuit he comments, “We seem to be drifting into unknown places and unknown ways; into a whole world of dark and dreadful things” (p. 361). Moreover, a psychic journey is implied not only by Mina's telepathy but also by the fact that Van Helsing taps the telepathic link by hypnotising Mina. The telepathy, he tells her, is a “power … you have won from your suffering,” and the hypnosis is his “volition”—that is, his desire to learn what she has suffered (p. 347). Mina's telepathy provides the clues to Dracula's escape from London into Transylvania and makes the men's journey possible. Without her telepathy, Van Helsing's epic struggle would fail, and his and the younger men's education would fall short of self-knowledge and self-mastery.

The persistence of Mina's dual life until the men destroy Dracula implies, then, that the rebellion of an intelligent, good woman may be the only means by which she and the men who slight her can destroy the egoism which the men inadvertently admit from their own psychic depths and evoke from hers. In the context of Dracula as a whole, the men's chivalric preconceptions, which frustrate Mina's desire for acceptance as an able, independent person, recall the outworn concerns with social class which were a major cause of Lucy's rebellion against her conventionally Victorian, arranged, socially advantageous marriage to an ineffectual husband. Whereas Stoker symbolized the constructive male response in Lucy's case with the phallic stake, representing a strong, self-dependent transcendence of the obligations of class, at the novel's end the emasculating knife symbolizes a rejection of the male egoism implicit in the chivalric ideal. The ideal which the novel affirms is summed up in its final vignette of solidarity among its “little band of men” and Mina, and in the procreative, married love between Mina, the novel's “New Woman,” and its “new man,” Jonathan, who are equal in their marriage and equally capable in the larger society.

Notes

1. A Dream of Dracula: In Search of the Living Dead (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), p. 302.

2. Dracula (1897; rpt. New York: New American Library, 1965), p. 347. Unless otherwise noted, all page numbers cited in text are from this edition. For a photooffset edition of the first edition (second printing) and textual notes, see The Annotated Dracula, ed. Leonard Wolf (New York: N. Potter, 1975). The NAL edition omits the first edition's untitled, unsigned 77-word prefatory note which states that the book is a sequence of records written by persons who were contemporary with, and close to, the events they describe. The only serious typographical error in the NAL edition is madams on p. 123 for The Annotated Dracula's madmans.

3. See, e.g., Richard Wasson, “The Politics of Dracula,” English Literature in Transition, 9 (1966), 24-27, and Mark M. Hennelly, Jr., “Dracula: The Gnostic Quest and Victorian Wasteland,” English Literature in Transition, 20 (1977), 13-26, which provocatively argues that Van Helsing leads the novel's young men through an initiation into the mystery of procreative force and that Dracula embodies that force.

4. See especially Daniel Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1976), pp. 212-16, 233-35; Stephanie Demetrakopoulos, “Feminism, Sex Role Exchanges, and Other Subliminal Fantasies in Bram Stoker's Dracula,” Frontiers: Journal of Women's Studies, 2 (1977), 104-13; Phyllis A. Roth, Bram Stoker (Boston: Twayne, 1982), pp. 111-26; Judith Weissman, “Women and Vampires: Dracula as a Victorian Novel,” Midwest Quarterly, 18 (1977), 392-405; and Gail B. Griffin, “‘Your Girls That You All Love Are Mine’: Dracula and the Victorian Male Imagination,” International Journal of Women's Studies, 3 (1980), 545-65. My essay is not a blanket contradiction of these works but differs from them by focusing upon evidence of Stoker's understanding and disapproval of victimization of women by men.

5. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1911 ed., s.v. “nursing,” s.v. “women”; ibid., 15th ed., Macropaedia, s.v. “typewriter,” s.v. “women, status of.”

6. A Biography of Bram Stoker, Creator of Dracula (London: New English Library, 1977), p. 14, retitled from A Biography of Dracula: The Life Story of Bram Stoker (1962). I am indebted to Miss Ann Stoker for permission to use the pamphlet by Charlotte Stoker, cited below in my text.

7. Linda Dowling, “The Decadent and the New Woman in the 1890s,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 33 (1979), 434-53, esp. pp. 438, 446, 450, 453, and 446-48. Gail Cunningham, The New Woman and the Victorian Novel (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1978), p. 49. See also ch. 12 of Jenni Calder, Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), and Lloyd Fernando, “New Women” in the Late Victorian Novel (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1977), esp. pp. 1-25, 129-33. Although Calder and Fernando use “New Woman” to refer broadly to the “modern” woman of the last quarter or so of the nineteenth century, their quoted uses of “New Woman” come from the 1890s.

8. Demetrakopoulos, “Feminism … in Dracula,” p. 109.

9. I am indebted to Professor Elaine Showalter for the comparison between Mina and Marian and the suggestion that Stoker's two young women may derive from Collins'. It is generally recognized that he borrowed Collins' concept of the novel as a collection of documents written by various characters and edited by one of them. Stoker's MS notes for Dracula do not mention Collins or his work but do show that from the start Stoker planned to include a “girl,” who becomes Lucy in a plan dated March 8, 1890, and a shrewd, skeptical woman, who seems to become Mina, Lucy's “Schoolfellow” and a “teacher” in the March 8 plan. His inclusion of a “detective inspector,” Cotford, in the notes may suggest The Moonstone (1868) as his model, however. The fact that Stoker associates Lucy with “the white lady” who allegedly haunts Whitby Abbey (p. 72) is probably a misleading clue. The MS notes show that he learned the legend of the white lady from three fishermen in Whitby on July 30, 1890, at least four months after planning the novel. Thus the question of his specific debt to The Woman in White remains open. For permission to use and quote from Stoker's MS notes for Dracula, I am indebted to Ann Stoker and to the Phillip H. and A.S.W. Rosenbach Foundation of Philadelphia and its assistant director, Walter C. Johnson. For the materials cited, see Notes, bk. 1, p. 35; bk. 2, n.p., slip dated 30/7/90; and book lists and reading notes in bks. 2 and 3.

10. As Phyllis Roth notes (Bram Stoker, p. 48), Stoker based his novel The Man (1905) on a foolish and egocentric proposal of marriage by a “modern” girl who ultimately learns that true feminine love is submissive and sexual. The novel, however, does not reject her desire for a useful education and social function and portrays her as an intelligent, capable person. Stoker is also highly sympathetic toward the “modern” woman while advocating the submissiveness and sexuality of true feminine love in The Mystery of the Sea (1902) and Lady Athlyne (1908).

11. See ch. 10, “Psychiatry from Pinel and Mesmer to Charcot,” in Gardner Murphy and J. E. Kovach, Historical Introduction to Modern Psychology, 3rd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972); Edwin O. Starbuck, “Double-Mindedness,” in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings (Edinburgh: T. T. Clark, 1911); Bernard Hart et al., “The Concept of Dissociation,” British Journal of Medical Psychology, 6 (1926), 241-63; and Ralph Tymms, Doubles in Literary Psychology (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1949), ch. 3, esp. p. 95.

12. Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1906), II, 1, 19-21; see also I, 149, 170, 265. The only distinctly psychological work mentioned in Stoker's MS notes for Dracula is Theory of Dreams (attr. to Robert Gray, Bishop of Bristol), 2 vols. (London: F.C. and J. Rivington, 1808), from which he abstracts such anecdotes as reports of a woman who became cataleptic twice daily and of a man able to die and revive at will (Notes, bk. 3).

13. Bram Stoker, Dracula's Guest (1914; rpt. London: Jarrolds, 1966), p. 185, originally titled Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories (see The English Catalogue of Books: vol. 9, London: Publishers' Circular, Ltd., 1916, p. 1306). Crooken Sands (New York: T. L. De Vinne, 1894) is listed in The National Union Catalogue, Pre-1956 Imprints, vol. 570 (London: Mansell, 1978), p. 623. For the concept of the literary double see especially Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 151, 192-95; Edwin Honig, Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory (1959; rpt. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966); and C. F. Keppler, The Literature of the Second Self (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1972), esp. pp. 1-13, 182-210. For its use in Victorian literature generally, see Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Self (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1969).

14. Arthur's ineffectuality and subordination to his father are noted as an example of the Oedipal pattern by Richard Astle, “Dracula as Totemic Monster: Lacan, Freud, Oedipus and History,” Sub-stance, 25 (1980), 99. Astle also notes, as I do in the text below, Arthur's demonstration of strength later in the novel.

15. Roth, Bram Stoker, p. 123; cf. Demetrakopoulos, “Feminism … in Dracula,” p. 108. For Oedipal fantasy, see Astle, “Dracula as Totemic Monster”; Maurice Richardson's seminal “Psychoanalysis of Ghost Stories,” Twentieth Century, 166 (1959), 419-31; C. F. Bentley, “The Monster in the Bedroom: Sexual Symbolism in Bram Stoker's Dracula,” Literature and Psychology, 22 (1972), 27-34; Royce MacGillivray, “Dracula: Bram Stoker's Spoiled Masterpiece,” Queen's Quarterly, 79 (1972), 518-27; and Joseph Bierman's untenable “Dracula: Prolonged Childhood, and the Oral Triad,” American Imago, 29 (1972), 180-98.

16. Gail Griffin (“‘Your Girls That You All Love Are Mine,’” 461-62) notes the “bitter pill” exchange and other provocation of Mina cited in my text in order to argue that the men's “chivalric glorification of womanhood” causes Mina and Lucy to assert their sexuality. My point is that, as their vampire mate, Dracula serves as a symbol of their self-concern (their indignation), which may include an assertion of sexuality but is not limited to it.

17. The parallel between Mina's “baptism of blood” and fellatio is often noted, and, like the staking of Lucy, it supports speculation that Stoker was gripped by Oedipal fantasy (see, e.g., Bentley, “Monster in the Bedroom,” p. 30) or fear and hatred of women (Roth, Bram Stoker, p. 122). As a symbol for Mina's psychological experience, however, the “baptism” is consistent with the preceding narrative's presentation of her increasing resentment toward the men's chivalry and represents an act of mind.

18. For anticipations of the collective unconscious in the 1890s, see Yeats's postulation of an Anima Mundi as reported in his Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1953), p. 158; also see Oscar Wilde's “collective life of the race … race-experience … the dreams, and ideas, and feelings of myriad generations,” in “The Critic as Artist” (1890) in his Poems and Essays (London: Collins, 1956), pp. 319-21, which is noted by Wendell Harris in “Arnold, Pater, Wilde, and the Object as in Themselves They See It,” Studies in English Literature, 11 (1977), 745.