[In the following essay, Fry maintains that the latent sexuality of Dracula is an important part of the novel's popular appeal.]

To the general reading public, Bram Stoker's Dracula is one of the best known English novels of the nineteenth century. It was an immediate best seller when it appeared in 1897, and the frequent motion pictures featuring the machinations of Count Dracula since the 1931 film version of the novel have helped make vampire folklore very much a part of the English and American popular imagination. The work's fame is in part attributable to its success as a thriller. The first section, “Jonathan Harker's Journal,” is surely one of the most suspenseful and titilating pieces of terror fiction ever written. But perhaps more important in creating the popular appeal of the novel is its latent sexuality.

This feature of the work is most apparent in Stoker's use of disguised conventional characters, placed in new roles but retaining their inherent melodramatic appeal for a sexually repressed audience. The most apparent of these characters is the “pure woman,” the staple heroine of popular fiction from Richardson to Hardy. In dozens of novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this pure woman is pursued by a “rake,” a seducer who has designs on her virtue. The melodrama is based on the reader's suspense regarding whether or not he will succeed. Those women who lose their virtue become “fallen women,” outcasts doomed to death or secluded repentance. In Dracula, there are two “pure women,” Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker, the former of whom actually does “fall.” The role of “rake” is played by Count Dracula, and vampirism becomes surrogate sexual intercourse. The women who receive the vampire's bite become “fallen women.”

Stoker establishes Dracula as a rake in large part by making him a “gothic villain,” a derivative of the rake in English fiction. Like most gothic villains, Dracula lives in a ruined castle, remarkably like Udolpho, Otranto, Grasmere Abbey, and dozens of other sublimely terrifying structures in English fiction. It even has subterranean passages, slightly modified to serve as daytime resting places for the vampires. Moreover, Dracula's physical appearance is that of the rake-gothic villain. He has a “strong—a very strong” face and “massive eyebrows.” His face shows the pallor typical of Radcliffe's Schedoni, Maturin's Melmoth, and Lewis' Antonio, and, most impressively, he possesses the usual “glittering eye” of the villain. Stoker returns to this feature over and over. When Harker first sees him, he immediately notes “the gleam of a pair of very bright eyes, which seemed red in the lamplight”¹ and the Cockney zookeeper interviewed by the reporter for the Pall Mall Gazette describes the Count's “'ard cold look and red eyes” (p. 120).

The rake and the gothic villain pursue and “distress” the pure woman in melodramatic popular fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Dracula sets out in pursuit of Lucy Westenra and later of Mina Harker in the best tradition of this character type. First, however, Stoker firmly establishes his heroines in their roles. Lucy gets three proposals (a frequently used method of establishing worth in women) from thoroughly admirable men, and when she tells the heroic Quincy Morris that she has a prior attachment, he says: “It's better worth being late for a chance of winning you than being in time for any other girl in the world” (p. 56). Dr. Van Helsing says of 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—and that, let me tell you, is much in this age” (p. 161). But perhaps the most important aspect of Stoker's presentation of Lucy and Mina is that the description of both, before Dracula preys on them, completely omits physical detail. One gets only an impression of idealized virtue and spirituality. They are like Rose Maylie in Oliver Twist, who is “cast in so light 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.”²

Stoker had apparently done some research on the folklore of vampirism,³ and most of the detail he gives is verified by the work of Montague Summers.⁴ The vampire's inability to cast a reflection, his fear of daylight, and the stake in the heart as a means of killing him are all part of the folklore of eastern Europe. But one element of this folklore is particularly appropriate for melodramatic fiction: the contagious nature of vampirism. Both the rake of the popular novel and the vampire of folklore pass on their conditions (moral depravity in the former and vampirism in the latter) to their victims. In fiction, it is conventional for the fallen woman to become an outcast, alienated from the rest of mankind, or to die a painful death. If she lives, she often becomes a prostitute or the chattel of her seducer. The bawdy house to which Lovelace takes Clarissa in Richardson's novel is staffed by the rake's conquests, and in Mrs. Radcliffe's Romance of the Forest, Adeline, the heroine, is abducted by the villain and kept in a house occupied by his numerous kept women.

Similarly, Dracula's castle is occupied by his “wives,” who were at some earlier time his victims. At the outset of the novel, when the fair bride who is about to drink the blood of Jonathan Harker is stopped by the Count, she utters “a laugh of ribald coquetry,” and says to her lord: “You yourself never loved; you never love!” (p. 40). Dracula replies: “Yes, I too can love; you yourselves can tell it from the past. Is it not so?” (p. 40). He has loved them with the vampire's phallic bite, and they have become outsiders, Un-Dead, and, like the fallen woman, not part of the human race. The frequent references to “love” and to “kisses” and the type of physical description of the lady vampire makes the parallel between seduction and vampirism apparent. The wives are consistently described in terms of erotic physical beauty, but they are hard and wanton in their attractiveness. Moreover, in Victorian fiction, prostitutes, like cockroaches, most often appear at night (one thinks, for instance, of Esther in Mrs. Gaskell's Mary Barton), just as vampires, in folklore, must avoid the daylight.

The change in Lucy Westenra's appearance after she receives Dracula's attention is marked. Physically, her features are altogether different. Dr. Seward describes her in her tomb when the group goes there to destroy her: “The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to wantonness” (p. 179). Instead of the “pure, gentle orbs we knew,” her eyes are “unclean and full of hell fire” (p. 180). She approaches Arthur with a “languorous, voluptuous grace,” saying “My arms are hungry for you” (p. 180). In all, “The whole carnal and unspiritual appearance” seems “like a devilish mockery of Lucy's sweet purity” (p. 182). Throughout, the description of female vampires underscores their sexuality, and the words “voluptuous” and “wanton” appear repeatedly in these contexts, words that would never be used in describing a pure woman. Clearly, Lucy has fallen, but in the end she is saved from herself in rather conventional fashion. Her death and the smile of bliss on her face as she passes satisfy the reader's desire for a happy ending to her story and fulfill his expectation regarding the fate proper to a fallen woman.

Much of the interest of the novel from this point on lies in the fate of Mina Harker, who begins to take on the character of the fallen woman. After the vampire has mixed his blood with hers and has been routed from her bedroom, she cries: “Unclean, unclean! I must touch him [Jonathan, her husband] or kiss him no more” (p. 240). Later, after she is burned by the holy wafer used as a weapon against the Count, she exclaims: “Unclean! Unclean! Even the Almighty shuns my polluted flesh” (p. 250). During the journey to Dracula's castle, she has begun to take on the “beauty and fascination of the wanton Un-Dead” (p. 309). But when Dracula is killed, all of the physical effects are reversed, and she again becomes a pure woman, fit for motherhood and a happy life. She never quite becomes a fallen woman and hence can be saved at the end of the novel.

There are a good many other parallels drawn between vampirism and sexuality in addition to the melodramatic effects achieved through the manipulation of conventional characters. The fact is that vampire lore has much in common with human sexuality. The vampire's kiss on the throat and the lover's kiss are easily made one in the reader's mind, and the Nosferatu's bite can be made parallel in the popular imagination with the love bite or the phallic thrust. In the novel, the very act of biting is made highly erotic. In describing Dracula's embrace, Mina says: “strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him” (p. 250). But perhaps the most suggestive passage in the novel occurs when Jonathan Harker describes his experience while in a trance induced by Dracula's wives. As the fair bride approaches him, he finds in her a “deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive,” and he feels “a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips” (p. 39). After a certain amount of coquettish argument as to who would begin, the fair bride bends over his throat, and Harker describes his sensations:

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. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and I could feel the hot breath on my neck. … 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.

(p. 39)

One can hardly wonder that the novel was enormously popular.

Notes

1. Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York, 1965), p. 38. Further page references appear in the text.

2. Charles Dickens, The Adventures of Oliver Twist, The Oxford Illustrated Dickens (London, 1949), p. 212.

3. In A Biography of Dracula: The Life Story of Bram Stoker (London, 1962), Harry Ludlam states that much of the author's information came from Arminium Vambery, a professor of oriental languages at the University of Budapest. Also, there was a historical Dracula. Stoker was aware that one of the fifteenth-century leaders of the fight against the Turks, Vlad V, was called Dracula; and the Count's lecture to Jonathan Harker in Ch. 3 of the novel shows that Stoker knew a little about the history of eastern Europe. But according to Professor Grigore Nandris, there is “no association in Rumanian folklore between the Dracula story and the vampire mythology” (“The Historical Dracula: The Theme of His Legend in the Western and in the Eastern Literatures of Europe,” Comparative Literature Studies, III [1966], 366-96).

4. See The Vampire in Europe (New Hyde Park, N.Y., 1962) and The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (New Hyde Park, N.Y., 1960).