SOURCE: Weissman, Judith. “Dracula as a Victorian Novel.” Midwest Quarterly 18, no. 4 (July 1977): 392-405.

[In the following essay, Weissman perceives Dracula as a Victorian novel, asserting that the novel “is an extreme version of the stereotypically Victorian attitudes toward sexual roles.”]

The sexually straightforward and insatiable woman, a stock figure in much of English literature, virtually disappears from the novel after Fielding and Richardson—until she is resurrected by Bram Stoker in Dracula as a vampire. The vampire, an ancient figure of horror in folk tales, undoubtedly represents in any story some kind of sexual terror, some terror of being weakened and hurt by one's lover, but Dracula, a Victorian novel, a novel about marriage, embodies sexual terror in a very particular form. A man's vision of a noble band of men restoring a woman to purity and passivity, saving them from the horrors of vampirism, it is an extreme version of the stereotypically Victorian attitudes toward sexual roles.

Voraciously sexual women are usually presented unsympathetically, but without terror, in literature before the nineteenth century. In Chaucer, Criseyde is indeed as fickle as Troilus fears, and the wife of Bath supports through her actions the contentions of all the anti-feminist satire that she attacks. In Shakespeare, Gertrude is weak and, to Hamlet, disgusting in her sexuality, and women like Juliet's nurse are comic. Only Cleopatra is both sexual and—despite her spitefulness and selfishness—magnificent. The evil of Milton's temptresses is self evident; the older women who chase young men in Restoration comedy are objects of contempt.

In the eighteenth century, Swift and Pope both treat highly sexual women with anger and disdain, but still take their existence for granted. In the eighteenth century novel, both Fielding and Richardson treat women's sexuality quite explicitly. Few men in English literature treat women with more generosity than Fielding does. In Tom Jones, Lady Bellaston, certainly, is an unsavory character, very similar to the women of Restoration comedy, but Fielding dislikes her for her dishonesty and exploitiveness more than for her sexual appetite. Molly Seagrim and Mrs. Waters are not heroines, but neither are they objects of contempt. They both like sex, and a lot of it, and though Fielding values a woman like Sophia, who can control her sexuality for the sake of her integrity, more than he could value Molly and Mrs. Waters, he treats them not as contemptible or frightening creatures, but simply as less-admirable women. When Mrs. Waters, after sleeping with Tom, discovers that he is in love with someone else, Fielding says, with admirable freedom from rancor:

She was not nice enough in her amours to be greatly concerned at the discovery. The beauty of Jones highly charmed her eye; but as she could not see his heart, she gave herself no concern about it. She could feast heartily at the table of love, without reflecting that some other already had been, or hereafter might be, feasted with the same repast. A sentiment which, if it deals but little in refinements, deals, however, much in substance; and is less capricious, and perhaps less ill natured and selfish, than the desires of those females who can be contented enough to abstain from the possession of their lovers, provided they are sufficiently satisfied that no one else possesses them.

(Book IX, chapter vi)

Fielding values warmth and finds nothing to fear in sexual warmth that transgresses the bounds of modesty and chastity.

Richardson, on the other hand, comes as close to expressing real terror of sexual women as any novelist before Stoker. The licentious women who are the allies of Mr. B. and Lovelace in their efforts to destroy the virtue of Pamela and Clarissa are bestial and disgusting, and to Clarissa, when she is imprisoned, figures of almost supernatural terror. “Thus was I tricked and deluded by blacker hearts of my own sex than I thought there were in the world. I was so senseless, that I dare not aver that the horrible creatures of the house were personally aiding; but some visionary remembrances I have of female figures flitting before my sight, the wretched woman's particularly” (Miss Clarissa Harlowe to Miss Howe, Thursday, July 6, Night). Lovelace, who is not consciously afraid of women (though his behavior suggests that indeed he is, since he treats them as enemies to be conquered) persistently uses the word devil to describe them. There are only two possible kinds of women for Lovelace, and as far as I can tell, for Richardson—devils, sexually active ones; and angels, absolutely chaste ones. The women who are helping him trap Clarissa are devils: “what devils are women, when all tests are got over, and we have completely ruined them” (Mr. Lovelace to John Belford, Esq. Friday Evening [May 26]). And of Clarissa, he says, “Surely, Belford, this is an angel. And yet, had she not been known to be female, they would not from babyhood have dressed her such, nor would she, but upon conviction, have continued the dress” (Mr. Lovelace to John Belford, Esq. Sunday, May 21). To be female, in his mind, is to be a potential devil, who needs only sexual initiation. He believes in the sexual theory of Fanny Hill and adds demonism to it: in Fanny Hill it takes only one sexual experience to make a woman insatiable, and to Lovelace once she is insatiable, she is a devil. Clarissa disproves his mythology by not desiring him after he rapes her: “By my soul, Belford, this dear girl gives the lie to all our rakish maxims. There must be something more than a name in virture! … Once subdued, always subdued—'tis an egregious falsehood!” (Mr. Lovelace to John Belford, Esq. Monday, June 19). Nevertheless, there is nothing left for Clarissa herself to do but die, since she is not married and no longer a virgin, and can no longer believe in her own sexual myth, that of Comus, that chastity can conquer all attempts to defile it. She has proved Lovelace wrong, but she cannot prove that a woman who has been sexually violated can live a human life.

Though the women of the nineteenth century novel are by no means all Pamelas and Clarissas, they are not Molly Seagrims either. Those who bear illegitimate children, as Molly does, like Hetty Sorrell and Tess Durbeyfield, suffer terribly instead of going on to enjoy more sex. The aggressive flirt survives in the novel, for example in Trollope's Madalina Demolines and Thackeray's Becky Sharp, but their aggression is not really sexual. Thackeray does sometimes treat Becky with terror, because she has so much power over men and is so unscrupulous, so selfish, so dishonest. But she is using her sexuality as a source of credit in a capitalist economy and like Moll Flanders is more interested in the money that sex—or, in her case, perhaps only the promise of sex—can get for her, than in sex itself.

The one violently sexual woman in a major Victorian novel is Bertha Rochester, an older woman (after the wedding Rochester learned to his horror that she was several years older than he was) and a Creole, part black. Rochester sees her as a monster and describes her without a hint of compassion:

What a pigmy intellect she had, and what giant propensities! How fearful were the curses those propensities entailed on me! Bertha Mason, the true daughter of an infamous mother, dragged me through all the hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a man bound to a wife at once intemperate and unchaste … a nature the most gross, impure, depraved I ever saw, associated with mine, and called by the law and by society a part of me. And I could not rid myself of it by any legal proceedings: for the doctors now discovered that my wife was mad—her excesses had prematurely developed the germs of insanity.

(Chapter 27)

Bertha is not she; she is “it.” Her sexuality has cost her her humanity in Rochester's eyes. I wish I could believe that Charlotte Bronte disapproved of Rochester's view of his wife, but I see nothing in the novel to indicate that she did not share it. Having learned of Bertha's existence on what was to be her own wedding day, Jane leaves, refusing to live with Rochester—but not out of sympathy for Bertha. She is angry, understandably, that she has been deceived, but she cares about maintaining her own chastity and her own pride rather than about refusing to betray another woman. Her pride is apparently more concerned with the letter of the law than with a new understanding of the defects of Rochester's character, for she goes back to him as soon as Bertha has been killed by a timely fire and utters not a word of pity for her. In fact, her own vision of Bertha is as extreme as Rochester's.

Oh, sir, I never saw a face like it! It was a discoloured face—it was a savage face. I wish I could forget the roll of the red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments! … The lips were swelled and dark; the brow furrowed; the black eyebrows widely raised over the bloodshot eyes. Shall I tell you of what it reminded me? Of the foul German spectre—the vampire.

(Chapter 25)

For Jane too, Bertha is an it, an inhuman demon, a vampire. When she describes Bertha here, she does not know who she is, having seen her only when Bertha came into her bedroom to tear her wedding veil, but even after she knows Bertha's identity, she never retracts these words.

Nor does she ever protest against the language that Rochester uses to describe herself—a bird, an elf, a fairy, a delicate flower—all images which imply frail asexuality. He says that he needs her to cure him from the taint that Bertha has left, the mark of the vampire, in a way. Though there are passages in which Jane speaks of her passionate love for Rochester, and though at the end she says she is bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, the language of the book suggests that she basically accepts his idea that sexual women are monsters and that good ones are asexual. I would find it impossible to argue that Charlotte Bronte stands apart from Jane Eyre and is using her to expose the power that men's myths have had over women's minds. I think that she shares the sexual myths of men like Richardson and that sexual fear is one of the deepest feelings in Jane Eyre, fear substantiated by the drastic mutilation that Rochester suffers before Jane can come back to him. It would not be hard to control a blind man with one hand.

The vampire is only mentioned in Jane Eyre, but Charlotte Bronte clearly understands the psychological connection between sexuality and demonic blood-sucking. Neither the vampire nor the extremely sexual woman is important in the Victorian novel again until Dracula, a great horror story and a very extreme version of the myth that there are two types of women, devils and angels. Because it is an epistolary novel it has no narrator whose views might be understood as those of the author, but the band of men who gather to fight vampires are amazingly similar in their thoughts about women, as well as in their actions. Arthur, Quincey Morris, and Dr. Seward all begin as suitors of Lucy; Van Helsing is called in to try to save her, and then all four of them join Jonathan in saving Mina. Their lives are devoted to chivalrous concern for women; they are never jealous of each other, never quarrel, and never argue about how women should behave. They all give Lucy transfusions and apparently agree with Seward's sentiment that “No man knows, till he experiences it, what it is to feel his own lifeblood drawn away into the veins of the woman he loves” (Dr. Seward's Diary, 10 September). Van Helsing, the old-fashioned, courtly man, has most of the big lines on women; perhaps his most striking statement to Mina is, “We are men and are able to bear; but you must be our star and our hope, and we shall act all the more free that you are not in the danger, such as we are” (Mina Harker's Journal, 30 September). He has the last line in the book, about Mina's son: “Already he knows her sweetness and loving care; later on he will understand how some men so loved her, that they did dare much for her sake.” It is not easy to find many other books in which women are praised and loved for being passive inspirations to men; Mina sounds like the Virgin Mary of Medieval lyrics. Even Pamela and Clarissa have more spirit than Mina as Van Helsing describes her.

The two women (Lucy's mother dies too early in the book to be much of a character) are, at least superficially, perfect objects of such chivalry. Young, beautiful, chaste, coy, they revel in their passivity. Lucy comes under Dracula's evil influence virtually as soon as we meet her and does little but sleep walk and have blood transfusions; when Mina too gets bitten, she learns to resign the active role she had taken in pursuing Dracula and becomes passive, helping only by being hypnotized and giving messages while in a trance. She loves being called “little girl” by Quincey Morris, especially because she knows he has called Lucy the same thing. And as she grows weaker and weaker, she says more and more often things like “Oh, thank God for good, brave men!” (Jonathan Harker's Journal, 3 October). Knowing that she may become a vampire, she asks her band of men to kill her if they must: “Think, dear, that there have been times when brave men have killed their wives and their womenkind, to keep them from falling into the hands of the enemy. Their hands did not falter any the more because those that they loved implored them to slay them. It is men's duty towards those whom they love, in such time of sore trial” (Dr. Seward's Diary, 11 October). I am not sure what—if any—historical incidents she has in mind; but some women, Like Cleopatra and Lucrece, have been capable of killing themselves when faced with what they considered a fate worse than death. Mina, however, relies entirely on the strength of men.

Mina's final proof of her womanhood is acting as an intercessor for Dracula. The men, naturally, approach him with the purest hatred and vindictiveness, but she pleads:

Jonathan dear, and you all my true, true friends, I want you to bear something in mind through all this dreadful time. I know that you must fight—that you must destroy even as you destroyed the false Lucy so that the true Lucy might live hereafter; but it is not a work of hate. That poor soul who has wrought all this misery is the saddest case of all. Just think what will be his joy when he, too, is destroyed in his worser part that his better part may have spiritual immortality. You must be pitiful to him, too, though it may not hold your hands from his destruction.

(Dr. Seward's Diary, 3 October)

As the Virgin Mary intercedes with God for sinners, Mina uses her womanly power of pity to intercede with men even for the worst of criminals, insisting that even he can be redeemed. Her idea of dying to one's worse self so that the better self may live is the traditional Christian idea of dying to the flesh that the spirit may live: vampirism is only an extreme version of the evil of the body against which Christians have been told to fight for almost two thousand years. And Mina is the ideal Christian woman, recalling men to an ideal of charity and love through her holy influence.

Lucy and Mina, however, occasionally say things which reveal—without Stoker's conscious knowledge, I am sure—his anxieties about women's sexuality. Writing to Mina about her three proposals in one day, Lucy says, “Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble? But this is heresy, and I must not say it” (Letter from Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray, 24 May). The intended meaning is that she would like to be kind to these three fine men who love her; the implicit meaning is that she feels able to handle three men sexually. And her friend Mina, writing ostensibly about the lunch that she and Lucy have eaten, says, “I believe we would have shocked the ‘New Woman’ with our appetites. Men are more tolerant, bless them!” (Mina Murray's Journal, 10 August, 11 P.M.). Mina of course does not like the ‘New Woman’ and continues: “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 the future to accept; she will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will make of it, too!” She wants to defend women from the dangers of feminism, but on the other hand admits that she has an appetite that not even what she imagines nineteenth-century feminism to be would be able to accept.

The only other women in the book are vampires, lost souls controlled by inhuman appetites. Jonathan Harker knows perfectly well that the vampire women in Dracula's castle offer him the temptation of illicit sex:

I seemed somehow to know her face, and to know it in connection with some dreamy fear, but I could not recollect at the moment how or where. All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down; lest some day it should meet Mina's eyes and cause her pain; but it is the truth.

(Jonathan Harker's Journal, 15 May)

She seems familiar because he does know, subconsciously, that women are sexual, and terrifying; if they did not represent real women to him, he would have nothing to be ashamed of with respect to Mina. They are the forbidden women, the other women, whose existence is produced by bourgeois marriage. Though he says later, “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!” (Jonathan Harker's Diary, 30 June, morning), the whole book reveals the fear that they do indeed have something in common. There is always the possibility that the chaste Victorian wife will become the kind of woman that her husband both desires and fears.

We never know who these women were before Dracula transformed them into vampires, but it is significant that the two women he attacks in the book, Mina and Lucy, are either engaged or newly married. He does not attack single women, preadolescent women, or old women. He attacks women who are desired by other men and who are becoming sexually experienced. We watch Lucy change as she comes more and more under Dracula's influence: during the day she simply becomes weak, sad, absentminded; but at night, even before her death, she becomes very sexual. Seward reports: “in a sort of sleep-waking, vague, unconscious way she opened her eyes, which were now dull and hard at once, and said in a soft, voluptuous voice, such as I had never heard from her lips:—Arthur! Oh, my love I am so glad you have come. Kiss me!” (Dr. Seward's Diary, 20 September). She becomes even more frightening as a vampire: “the sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness” (Dr. Seward's Diary, 29 September, Continued). She has again tried to seduce—and therefore, attack—Arthur as a vampire, but she spends most of her time attacking children. The women in the castle are also satisfied with a child when they are denied Jonathan; there is obviously a suggestion that women become child molesters. The one group of people that they never attack is other women.

Mina fights becoming a vampire much harder than Lucy did, and never becomes wantonly sexual. Nevertheless, in the scene where her friends discover Dracula with her, Jonathan has been attacked by a vampire, and is not clear whether she or Dracula was the attacker. Dracula is forcing Mina to drink blood from his chest, while “on the bed beside the window lay Jonathan Harker, his face flushed and breathing heavily as though in a stupor” (Dr. Seward's Dairy, 3 October). Van Helsing says that “Jonathan is in a stupor such as we know the Vampire can produce,” but he does not say which vampire produced this stupor. Flushed and tired, Jonathan seems to have just had intercourse, and we do not know whether Dracula produced this state in order to have access to Mina, or whether Mina, during what she thought was normal intercourse with her husband, produced the stupor. At any rate, Mina realizes that she must never again have sex with Jonathan, as long as she is a vampire, in order to keep him from becoming one too: “Unclean, unclean! I must touch him or kiss him no more. Oh, that it should be that it is I who am now his worst enemy, and whom he may have most cause to fear.” As the women in Dracula become vampires, they become too sexual for their husbands or fiances to endure.

Jonathan, however, seems unaffected the next day by his brush with vampirism. In this book men do not become transformed into sexual demons as women do. Dracula himself is cruel and powerful but not particularly sensual in the same way that the women are. The women at the castle say, “You yourself never loved; you never love” (Jonathan Harker's Journal, The Morning of 16 May), and though he answers, “Yes, I too can love, you yourselves can tell it from the past,” the book seems to support what the women say. He seems more interested in power and conquest than in the sensual pleasure of being a vampire, which the women clearly enjoy. His control and brutal power is clear when he forces Mina to drink blood from his chest, a demonic reversal of the Pelican's feeding of its child from its own blood, an image of Christ's sacrifice: “with his left hand he held both Mrs. Harker's hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. … The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink” (Dr. Seward's Diary, 3 October). Mina does not want to be a vampire—to drink blood—and he is trying to force her to become one. His cold control is also shown by his power over animals, especially wolves, and the zoo-keeper in London reveals the connection between this power and the power that he has over Mina and Lucy when he says, of the wolf which has escaped: “He was a nice well-behaved wolf, that never gave no trouble to talk of. I'm more surprised at ‘im for wantin’ to get out nor any other animile in the place. But, there, you cannot trust wolves no more nor women” (The Pall Mall Gazette 18 September).

The difference between the sexuality of Dracula and the women vampires is, I think, the key to the psychological meaning of the book. For him, sex is power; for them, it is desire. He is the man whom all other men fear, the man who can, without any loss of freedom or power himself, seduce other men's women and make them sexually insatiable with a sexual performance that the others cannot match. He is related to Lovelace and to the tradition of noble rakes who ruin middle and lower class women and go scot-free, but the women who are the victims of Lovelace and the young squires of The Vicar of Wakefield and Tom Jones (the one who preceded Tom in Molly's bed) are not said to be ruined for other men because they are now insatiable. They are, supposedly, simply no longer respectable. And yet I think that Dracula reveals one of the reasons why they are no longer respectable, why there has been an obsession in western culture with marrying virgins. Our culture is founded on the belief that men are more powerful than women, and perhaps women who are not virgins have not been considered eligible for marriage because they may make invidious sexual comparisons between their husbands and their previous lovers. Fielding, that great man, recognizes this possibility without horror when Shamela Andrews complains that all men are “little” compared with Parson Williams and says that she might have been well enough satisfied, too, on her wedding night, if she had never been acquainted with Parson Williams.

For Fielding, differences in sexual capacity are not a cause for terror; for Stoker, they are. His band of trusty men, loyal and chaste, are not simply trying to destroy Dracula, who has come to England to “create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless” (Jonathan Harker's Journal, 30 June morning). Their fight to destroy Dracula and to restore Mina to her purity, is really a fight for control over women. It is a fight to keep women from knowing what the men and women of the middle ages, the renaissance, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries knew, and what people of the nineteenth century must also have known, even if they did not want to—that women's sexual appetites are greater than men's.

Bibliographic Note

The sexual imagery in Dracula and the varieties of sexual activity implied by vampirism have been discussed by C. F. Bentley in “The Monster in the Bedroom: Sexual Symbolism in Bram Stoker's Dracula” (Literature and Psychology 22: 27-34). In “Fictional Conventions and Sexuality in Dracula” (Victorian Newsletter 42:20-22) Carol L. Fry points out that Lucy and Mina are the pure women of Victorian fiction, that Dracula is a rake, and that vampirism is surrogate intercourse; but she does not really pursue Stoker's tranformation of the fictional conventions.