SOURCE: Gelder, Ken. “Reading Dracula.” In Reading the Vampire, pp. 65-85. London: Routledge, 1994.

[In the following essay, Gelder elucidates various critical interpretations of Dracula.]

Few other novels have been read so industriously as Bram Stoker's Dracula. Indeed, a veritable ‘academic industry’ has built itself around this novel, growing exponentially in recent years and, in effect, canonising a popular novel which might otherwise have been dismissed as merely ‘sensationalist’. To enable its canonisation (a process to which this chapter contributes), Dracula has become a highly productive piece of writing: or rather, it has become productive through its consumption. To read this novel is to consume the object itself, Dracula, and, at the same time, to produce new knowledges, interpretations, different Draculas. Paul O'Flinn has noted, in his article on Mary Shelley's famous Gothic story, ‘There is no such thing as Frankenstein, there are only Frankensteins, as the text is ceaselessly rewritten, reproduced, refined and redesigned’ (O'Flinn, 1986, 197)—and it is tempting to go along with this view as far as critical readings of Dracula are concerned.

What we have with the many articles and books on Stoker's novel, then, is not one Dracula, but many Draculas, which compete with each other for attention in the academic/student marketplace. Of course, it may be that Dracula—the ‘original’ novel—also in part enables these many readerly productions to come into being. It is, after all, a textually dense narrative, written from a number of perspectives or ‘points of view’, which brings together a multiplicity of discursive fields—ethnography, imperialist ideologies, medicine, criminality, discourses of degeneration (and, conversely, evolution), physiognomy (facial features are described in detail in this novel), early modes of feminism, more entrenched modes of ‘masculinism’, occultism and so on. The productive nature of this novel may lie in the uneasy cohabitation of these various discursive fields and in the variability of their coding—it may undercode at times and overcode at others. At any rate, it seems that there is always more to be said about Dracula, always room for further interpretation and elaboration: this is a novel which seems (these days, especially) to generate readings, rather than close them down.

Some academic interpretations have already been noted—for example, Franco Moretti's reading of the vampire in Dracula as a figure for monopoly capital. But the keenest critical interest in the novel has centred around the topic of sexuality, and this will be the primary focus of this chapter. It is hardly a topic reserved for academic discussion alone, of course—the highly-charged sexual aura of the vampire (and, usually, his or her victims) has been the focus of numerous vampire films and of contemporary vampire fiction, too. Nevertheless, the academic investment in this topic is worth pursuing here in some detail. We shall also see that the readings produced here are post-imperialist; that is, for the most part, they work towards a problematisation of the conventional self/other or good/evil polarities in the novel—and more to the point, far from reproducing the ‘fear’ ascribed to Moretti's passive readers (a readerly position which must, to work, be thoroughly entrenched in imperialist ideology), they draw out the vampire's positive effects. The vampire is seen, in the readings that follow, as more of a symptom than a cause. That is, the vampire is to be redeemed—the problem lies, instead, with the upstanding heroes.

SEX, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE VAMPIRE

[Psychoanalysis] has been an important tool in recent critical accounts of vampire fiction and the topic of sexuality. Dracula itself draws liberally on psychoanalytic concepts, trading on their growing prominence in the popular mind. The novel was in fact published two years after Freud and Breuer's Studies in Hysteria (1895) and one year after the term ‘psychoanalysis’ was actually introduced. The doctors in this novel are themselves psychoanalysts of a kind, doctors of the brain or the mind. Dr Seward is investigating madness in the novel, recording his thoughts about the lunatic Renfield onto a phonograph—although Seward is on the whole psychoanalytically naive. More relevantly, Van Helsing practises hypnosis and admires ‘the great Charcot’ (Stoker, 1988, 191), whose death he laments. Van Helsing's interest in psychoanalysis is consistent with his tendency to believe in the unbelievable, to maintain an ‘open mind’: his claim that hypnosis ‘would have been deemed unholy’ (191) by less up-to-date scientists provides an interesting auto-critique of his own view of the ‘unholy’ vampire (is Van Helsing, then, not up-to-date with Dracula?).

I shall return briefly to the novel's treatment of hypnosis towards the end of the chapter. What is important to note here, however, is that the psychoanalytic concepts and allusions at work in the novel are actually never put to use as a means of analysing a character's sexuality—or, indeed, the sexuality of the vampire. That is, the extensive commentary on events by doctors or analysts like Van Helsing, which runs through the novel, nevertheless has nothing to say—in spite of its Freudian context—about anyone's sexual motivations. Since events in the narrative are so obviously driven by sexual motivations, this silence on behalf of the ‘paternal figures’ is surprising—although we need not put it down to ‘repression’, as some critics have done. In other words, Dracula overcodes sexuality at the level of performance, but undercodes it at the level of utterance. Critical analysis intervenes at this point, enabling these deafening silences to ‘speak’. This is one reason why the novel has been so productive as far as readings are concerned: there is so much to say about sexual motivation in Dracula precisely because the novel's own analysts have nothing to say about it whatsoever.

An early and influential psychoanalytic reading of the vampire's sexuality can be found in Ernest Jones's On The Nightmare (1929). Jones provides a Freudian reading which sees this particular monster as an indicator of ‘most kinds of sexual perversions’ (Jones, 1991, 398). The belief in vampires is, for Jones, a fantasy that returns to infantile sexual anxieties—this is where the more perverse forms of sexuality manifest themselves. In particular, an Oedipal blend of love and hate directed towards the parents—which leads to guilt—occurs in infancy, whereby one loves the mother, incestuously, and hates the father. The vampire may return as the father, evoking fear, or as the mother, in which case desire is evoked—or, indeed, both emotional attitudes may be projected simultaneously onto the vampire who then represents father and mother together. ‘Carmilla’ could certainly be read in terms of an incestuous desire for the mother, although for Jones the Oedipal relationship between vampire and victim is always heterosexually grounded, so that where there is a female vampire the victim must be male:

The explanation of these phantasies is surely not hard. A nightly visit from a beautiful or frightful being, who first exhausts the sleeper with passionate embraces and then withdraws from him a vital fluid: all this can point only to a natural and common process, namely to nocturnal emissions accompanied with dreams of a more or less erotic nature. In the unconscious mind blood is commonly an equivalent for semen, and it is not necessary to have recourse to the possibility of ‘wounds inflicted on oneself by scratching during a voluptuous dream’.

(411)

The vampire's ‘exhausting love embrace’ (411) is complicated by forms of sexual perversity which return to the primitive world of infantilism. The chief form is ‘oral sadism’—where sucking (love) turns into biting (hate).

Jones's reading is an attempt to demystify the vampire ‘superstition’, channelling it through the anxieties produced in familial relationships. He is aware of the contemporary tendency to ‘rationalise all superstitions’ (416) by explaining their ‘essentials’ away. His project, however, is to place familial anxieties at a deeper level than the superstition itself—so that, by demystifying the latter, he uncovers something even more mysterious in the realm of everyday life. We have seen the same kind of reading at work in the previous chapter with the Slovenian Lacanians, for whom vampirism exists not on its own terms, but as a means of evoking a horror much closer to home—and all the more unspeakable for that.

VAMPIRES AND INCEST

Several critics—including Franco Moretti—have taken up the taboo of incest in relation to Dracula. Moretti's chapter ‘Dialeectic of Fear’ is divided into two parts which in fact bear little clear relation to each other, a materialist reading, discussed in Chapter 1, and a psychosexual reading. In this second part, he draws on Marie Bonaparte to allegorise vampirism as an expression of the ‘ambivalent impulse of the child towards its mother’ (Moretti, 1988, 104). This ambivalence comes about because of the prohibition of incestuous desires. For Moretti, this prohibition is activated by turning the vampire into a man, as if it is somehow always essentially and originally female. This is where his ‘dialectic’ resides: horror narratives initialise tabooed desires and then repress them by shifting their significance elsewhere or hiding them out of sight. This reading is underwritten by Moretti's modernist disdain for mass culture: ‘The vampire’, he claims, ‘is transformed into a man by mass culture, which has to promote spontaneous certainties and cannot let itself plumb the unconscious too deeply’ (104). How this transformation is effected in the novel is never explained; more fundamentally, the novel's own complex association with ‘mass culture’, which I shall take up towards the end of this chapter, remains unaccounted for. And what about those vampire narratives in which the vampire is a woman—like ‘Carmilla’? It must be said that Moretti has it both ways in his (conventionally heterosexual) reading of the vampire's sexuality: for the allegory of incest to be acceptable, the vampire must always be essentially female—but when the victim is female, like Lucy, the incest paradigm is dropped for a heterosexual account of the liberated Victorian libido as it operates outside the family circle.

Certainly this tendency to maintain the incest paradigm in the face of the vampire's maleness causes all kinds of interpretive problems. James Twitchell's ‘The Vampire Myth’ (1980) provides one kind of resolution, maintaining the incest paradigm but foregrounding the father instead. He draws on Freud's Totem and Taboo (1912-13) to read the novel as enacting a version of the Girardian triangle discussed in the previous chapter, with Dracula as the ‘evil father’ who does battle with his sons over the body of the mother (Twitchell, 1988, 111). Richard Astle (1980) and Rosemary Jackson (1981) give similar readings—for Jackson, indeed, ‘any vampire myth’ is a ‘re-enactment of that killing of the primal father who has kept all the women to himself’ (Jackson, 1981, 119). The sons both identify with the father and fear him because they, too, desire the mother but know that such a desire is prohibited. For Twitchell, the sexual aspects of this arrangement are emphasised in vampire narratives (he seems mainly to have vampire films in mind) because—it is assumed—the audience are male adolescents. They experience ‘a masturbatory delight’ (113) in seeing the female seduced by the vampire—as if witnessing ‘the primal scene’ between parents (112). Twitchell, however, has some difficulty in explaining why female adolescents might also derive pleasure from the seduction scenes in vampire narratives. His account finally settles on a familiar gender distinction, where boys are active and sadistic, and girls are passive victims:

When the male audience interprets the action, the female represents his own displaced mother, virginal to him, who is being violated by his father, an ironic projection of his own self in the guise of the vampire. But when the adolescent female views the myth, she is the victim, virginal again, but now being swept through her ‘initiation’ by her gentle father—a father who must then disappear into the darkness, leaving her to other men and strange disappointments.

(115)

Phyllis A. Roth, in her article ‘Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker's Dracula’ (1977), also sees the novel as enacting ‘the Oedipal rivalry among sons and between the son and the father for the affections of the mother’ (Roth, 1988, 60). However, for Roth a much more powerful and disturbing subtext cuts across this structure: the hatred of the mother. The novel allows the reader to identify with the aggressors and thus to accept their victimisation of women: matricidal desires motivate events more than patricidal desires. This reading is bolstered by collapsing Lucy and Mina together, as ‘essentially the same figure: the mother’ (62)—whereas, as we shall see shortly, other critics emphasise their differences. Nevertheless, Roth's argument is important for its refusal to accept the Freudian Oedipal paradigm outright, and for turning instead to a more appropriately feminist reading of gender relations in the novel. Her account of the novel's evocation of ‘the desire to destroy the threatening mother, she who threatens by being desirable’ (65) will be taken up by other feminist critics, discussed below.

VAMPIRES AND PERVERSION

Maurice Richardson, in his essay ‘The Psychoanalysis of Ghost Stories’ (1959)—part of which discusses Dracula—returns to Freud and notes an indebtedness to Ernest Jones's early work. The vampire, he says, takes us into ‘the unconscious world of infantile sexuality with what Freud called its polymorph perverse tendencies’ (Richardson, 1991, 418). Stoker's novel is ‘inclusive’ in this respect: it engages in ‘a kind of incestuous, necrophilious, oral-anal-sadistic, all-in wrestling match’ (418), whereby a sequence of perversions come into play and fold into each other—hence, the novel's ‘force’ (419) and its ability to produce a variety of interpretations. Richardson's analysis is on the whole fairly crude, however; it merely reinforces a view of Gothic popular fiction as sensationalist and out of control (so that Richardson doubts whether Stoker—for all the novel's many perversions—‘had any inkling of the erotic content of the vampire superstition’, 420). Nevertheless, it opens up a topic which other critics have since developed: the vampire's ‘polymorphous’ sexuality. It is here—rather than through incestuous structures—that taboos are broken. David Punter, in The Literature of Terror (1980), has emphasised the Gothic's involvement with taboo generally speaking. Although Punter identifies Gothic fiction as ‘a middle-class form’ (Punter, 1980, 421), he nevertheless sees it operating ‘on the fringe of the acceptable’ (410). For Punter, Dracula is ‘hard to summarise’ (262) for a number of reasons, some of which will be elaborated below. But the novel's power ‘derives from its dealings with taboo’ (262), since the vampire's function is to cross back and forth over boundaries that should otherwise be secure—the boundaries between humans and animals, humans and God, and, as an expression of its ‘polymorphous’ sexuality, man and woman.

Christopher Bentley's ‘The Monster in the Bedroom: Sexual Symbolism in Bram Stoker's Dracula’ (1972) also draws on Ernest Jones's study and notes that, by disguising the vampire's ‘perversions’ through the use of ‘symbolism’, the novel ensured its popularity—since an overt treatment of sexuality was prohibited. Bentley concentrates on the three scenes in the novel in which perverse or ‘polymorphous’ sexualities seem most manifest: the scene in Dracula's castle where Jonathan Harker is approached by three vampire women, the scene in which Arthur Holmwood drives a stake through Lucy's heart and the scene in which the Crew of Light break into Mina's bedroom and find her kneeling on the bed before Dracula and sucking blood from an open wound in his chest. Bentley goes along with Jones's connection between blood and semen, which helps to demystify the first scene. The second scene—and we have already encountered Slavoj Žižek's psychoanalytic account of it—is read conventionally as a means of bringing Lucy to orgasm through ‘phallic symbolism’ (Bentley, 1988, 30). The third scene is interpreted as ‘a symbolic act of enforced fellatio’ (29). However, this reading is complicated by the presence of a ‘thin open wound’ on Dracula's chest and Mina's blood-soaked nightdress. The latter—and Mina's cry that she is now ‘Unclean’—would suggest ‘ancient primitive fears of menstruation’ (29). The ‘thin open wound’ on Dracula's chest suggests ‘a cut or slit similar to the vaginal orifice’ (29)—a means, perhaps, of bringing Mina into contact with her own sexual cycle.

This point would appear to erase the former reading of ‘enforced fellatio’ and the equation between blood and semen; it draws attention instead to Mina as a menstruating girl—this is the taboo that is violated in this scene. Mina's bloodstained nightdress, and the ‘thin open wound’, might also signify her own defloration by Dracula. After all, the scene takes place in her bedroom, and Dracula's potency is contrasted with Jonathan Harker, who—in Dr Seward's first account of what happened—is lying beside her ‘breathing heavily as though in a stupor’ (Stoker, 1988, 281) and who had earlier complained of feeling ‘impotent’ (188). But Mina's account of the scene, given shortly afterwards, returns us to the ‘enforced fellatio’ reading:

he [Dracula] pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails opened a vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some of the—Oh, my God, my God! what have I done?

(288)

At the point of swallowing, Mina is unable to say the word ‘blood’—or rather, she allows the fluid at this moment to be appropriately unrepresented, making the space for its reading as semen.

[This] scene is—in Copjec's words—a ‘horrifyingly obscene moment’ in the novel. It is also particularly difficult to read. The problem lies primarily in the ways in which this scene is reported. There is no single authorial voice in the novel; rather, a number of characters (Harker, Mina, Dr Seward, Lucy) give their versions of what is happening using their own voices. The ‘polyphonic’ aspects of Dracula are one reason why it is—as Punter had noted—so difficult to summarise. One must account not only for what is being said, but who is saying it—and to whom. Moreover, a single event may be reported by different characters in different ways. As far as the scene with Mina and Dracula is concerned, it is reported three times: twice by Dr Seward and once by Mina. Van Helsing also offers a commentary on certain aspects of the scene. And, together, these various reports are in themselves enough to make what is happening at the very least ambiguous.

In her article ‘Women and Vampires: Dracula as a Victorian Novel’ (1977), Judith Weissman wonders who exactly had caused Harker's ‘stupor’ in the bedroom—Dracula, or Mina? Van Helsing's remark, that ‘Jonathan is in a stupor such as we know the Vampire can produce’ (Stoker, 1988, 283), is difficult to interpret because ‘he does not say which vampire produced this stupor’ (Weissman, 1988, 75). Mina is becoming a vampire at this point, and she, rather than Dracula, may be responsible for it: ‘Flushed and tired, Jonathan seems to have just had intercourse’ (75). Weissman doesn't explore the more obvious possibility of hypnosis—Harker is soon awoken by Van Helsing, leaping up ‘at the need for instant exertion’ (Stoker, 1988, 283). Nevertheless, her reading, which turns on Dracula's ability to make the women in the novel sexually insatiable (so that Mina simply exhausts Jonathan), has a certain appeal. In the light of it, it is difficult to agree with Anne Cranny-Francis's somewhat dismissive view of Mina, that her sexuality ‘has no expression; it is completely muted, neutered’ (Cranny-Francis, 1988, 71)!

A fuller reading of the ambiguities of the scene, however, is given in Philip Martin's essay, ‘The Vampire in the Looking-Glass: Reflection and Projection in Bram Stoker's Dracula’ (1988). Martin also sees Dracula as the ‘catalyst which awakens women's desire’ (Martin, 1988, 87); the novel sees ‘dangerous vampiric tendenc[ies]’ (87) lurking in all its female characters. For Martin, the scene involving Mina and Dracula is more of a seduction than a rape, and the evidence he gives for this centres on a crucial difference between Dr Seward's first and second account of what happened. In the first account, Seward positions Dracula and Mina in the following way: ‘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’ (Stoker, 1988, 282). In his second account—told to Van Helsing almost directly afterwards—Seward gives a very different account of Dracula's hands: ‘It interested me, even at that moment, to see that whilst the face of white set passion worked convulsively over the bowed head, the hands tenderly and lovingly stroked the ruffled hair’ (284). The first account sees Dracula as ‘sadistic’, while the second account sees him as ‘affectionate’. So why are they so different?

Martin returns to Freud and the family romance for an answer, reading Seward as a child who blunders into his parents' bedroom and discovers them in the act of intercourse. The ‘primal scene’ is read as a contradiction—he is hurting her/he is loving her—which the child cannot reconcile. Moreover, Dracula has mutilated himself in the process, opening a vein in his chest: it is even more difficult to reconcile affection with sado-masochistic sexual behaviour. It first seems as if Dracula is dominating Mina, as men conventionally dominate women; looking a second time, however, we see affection, not domination—and it is Dracula who is in pain, not Mina. The vampire crosses gender relations here, being simultaneously patriarchal (dominating, sadistic) and yet—producing the ‘thin open wound’—expressing ‘the sexuality that denies phallocentric power in its mutilation, taking on thereby the role of the women as conceived by the narrators’ (Martin, 1988, 90, my italics). The narrators see this perverse contradiction, but cannot give it interpretation: as I have noted above, they offer no analysis of the sexual behaviour they nonetheless bear witness to. It should be added, however, that this does not amount to the usual cliché of Victorian repression, as Moretti would have it. The narrators in Dracula do not obstruct investigation simply by remaining silent about such contradictions. Quite the opposite, in fact: for Martin, although the narrators cannot accurately read what they see (consequently ‘undercoding’ it), they nevertheless tentatively gesture towards a realisation of the ‘massive complexity of the libido’ (91).

PERVERSE VAMPIRE WOMEN

The second perverse scene in Dracula—where Harker meets the three vampire women—has also led to a critical discussion of the complexity of the libido. It is the most sustained piece of erotic writing in the novel. Harker describes in great detail the approach of the women, their appearance, the way one of them leans over him ‘fairly gloating’, and—although his eyes are lowered—the way he looks voyeuristically up at her from ‘under the lashes’ (Stoker, 1988, 38). There are at least two moments in this scene which are textually undercoded. The first involves one of the vampire women, who Harker seems to recognise. She is the first to approach Harker: the others remark cryptically, ‘yours is the right to begin’ (38). More strikingly, while the other two women are dark-haired, she is ‘fair’: ‘The other was fair, as fair can be, with great, wavy masses of golden hair and eyes like pale sapphires. 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’ (37).

Clive Leatherdale has offered some clues to this particular ‘puzzle’ in the novel. He rightly dismisses the possibility (entertained by Showalter, 1990, 180) that Harker may be thinking of ‘the arch-temptress Lucy’—Lucy is dark-haired—or that he may be projecting an erotic image of Mina (Leatherdale, 1985, 148). However, his own explanation is equally unlikely—namely, that Harker is recalling events described in Stoker's short story ‘Dracula's Guest’ (1914), where he sees a beautiful woman ‘with rounded cheeks and red lips’—Countess Dolingen of Gratz—sleeping on a bier (Stoker, 1990, 16). The connection here is too imprecise; moreover, it is doubtful that ‘Dracula's Guest’ was ever intended as part of Dracula itself.¹ Leatherdale goes on to note that, because the two dark-haired vampire women are said to resemble Dracula, they are ‘probably his daughters’—and the fair-haired woman, who goes first, is ‘presumably their mother’ (Leatherdale, 1985, 149).

This interesting (although somewhat arbitrary) suggestion nevertheless does not account for Harker's recognition of her. Two other interpretations can briefly be noted here. The first, drawing on Freud's ‘The “Uncanny”’ once again, would return us to the Oedipal paradigm: Harker has in fact seen his own mother (who is otherwise absent from the novel). The combination of Harker's ‘dreamy fear’ and ‘delightful anticipation’ (Stoker, 1988, 38) would thus recall the incest taboo, evoking the child's love for his mother—and the prohibition of that love. Indeed, Harker's descriptions of the fair-haired vampire woman are always contradictory in this sense: for example, her breath is both ‘honey-sweet’ and tinged with ‘a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood’ (38). Of course, we have seen something similar to this arrangement in Le Fanu's ‘Carmilla’—where, interestingly enough, Carmilla also has ‘golden hair and blue eyes’ (Le Fanu, 1988, 86). Harker's recognition of her may even be a kind of in-house vampiric allusion (Stoker knew Le Fanu's story well).² The point is, however, that in both stories the fair-haired vampire women signal the (sexual) return of the mother. By intervening, Dracula—the ‘evil father’?—thus serves a moral purpose similar to Laura's father and the ‘paternal figures’ in Le Fanu's story: he prevents the incest taboo from being violated.

A second—and not unrelated—interpretation would draw on Harker's diary entries just before the scene takes place. Harker has gone to a room in Dracula's castle which ‘was evidently … occupied in bygone days’ (35). It has—for the otherwise anxious Harker—‘an air of comfort’ (35). As he sits down at a table and begins to write in his diary, he imagines who might have written there before him: ‘in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen, with much thought and many blushes, her ill-spelt love-letter’ (36). Harker is led both to contrast and to connect his own modern shorthand diary entries with this earlier moment of writing: ‘It is nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance. And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have powers of their own which mere “modernity” cannot kill’ (36). Writing in this context helps to restore Harker's sanity: he notes, in a sentence which has interesting sexual overtones, ‘The habit of entering accurately must help to soothe me’ (36). Finally, he decides to sleep in the room, ‘where of old ladies had sat and sung and lived sweet lives whilst their gentle breasts were sad for their menfolk away in the midst of remorseless wars’ (37). Harker's image of the ‘fair lady’ certainly reproduces conventional male views of the woman writer—confined, submissive, emotional, defining themselves through the absence of men—and poor spellers! A maternal influence seems to be operating on Harker; he is comforted by the room, soothed by these ‘old’ thoughts, and so on. But he also identifies with the image he projects, imprisoned as he is inside Dracula's castle with only his diary for company—and through that identification, he, too, is feminised.

That is, Harker becomes the ‘fair lady’ he imagines to have inhabited the room before him. In this context, his recognition of the fair-haired vampire woman—‘in connection with some dreamy fear’—amounts to self-recognition. Certainly, at one level, the experience with the vampire amounts to a masturbatory fantasy stimulated by the image of the blushing lady and her love-letters—something akin to Jones's description of ‘nocturnal emissions’. At another level, however, it involves an ‘uncanny’ structure where a familiar image (of the self, of the mother; of woman) becomes, suddenly, unfamiliar: the submissive ‘fair lady’ of Harker's reverie now becomes an aggressive fair-haired vampire. Or rather, the two are simultaneously figured through Harker himself—who, as the fair-haired vampire woman leans over him, maintains a submissive, feminised position beneath her.

HOMOSOCIAL/HOMOSEXUAL

The second undercoded moment in this complicated scene occurs after Dracula intervenes—with the exclamation, ‘This man belongs to me!’ (39). The fair-haired vampire turns to Dracula with the accusation, ‘You yourself never loved; you never love!’—and Dracula, after looking ‘attentively’ at Harker's face, replies in ‘a soft whisper’, ‘Yes, I too can love; you yourselves can tell it from the past’ (39). The scene closes with Dracula giving the vampire women a bag containing ‘a half-smothered child’ (39)—upon which they presumably feed (although this, too, is undercoded). Shortly afterwards, Harker sees the child's mother calling for her child (she mistakes Harker for Dracula); but when she is torn to pieces by Dracula's wolves, he considers that, given what has happened to her child, she is ‘better dead’ (45).

Several critics have turned their attention to these latter events, looking at the connection between sexually aggressive women and ‘bad mothers’. For Anne Cranny-Francis—because of the association of blood-sucking and intercourse—the vampire women subject the child to sexual as well as physical violence: they are not only ‘homicidal maniacs’, but ‘child molesters’ (Cranny-Francis, 1988, 66). The point is confirmed later on in the novel when Lucy becomes a vampire. As the ‘bloofer lady’, she reputedly lures children away from Hampstead Heath and bites their necks—although at least one child enjoys the experience. Later, the Crew of Light see her clutching a sleeping (and possibly dreaming) ‘fair-haired child’ (Stoker, 1988, 210), which—when she sees Arthur—she throws to the ground. We should note, however, that the vampire women's behaviour is always represented to us by men. It is Harker who suggests that—after her child has been taken—the mother is ‘better dead’. And Dr Seward judges Lucy as ‘cold-blooded’ in her treatment of the sleeping child. The point is taken up by Thomas B. Byers, in his article ‘Good Men and Monsters: The Defenses of Dracula’ (1981). Byers claims that the men in the novel not only fear aggressively sexual women; by constructing them as ‘bad mothers’, they also project onto them their own dependencies upon children—and upon themselves. That is, the men in the novel invent sexually aggressive women as ‘bad mothers’ as a way of disguising their own ‘male dependency needs’ (Byers, 1988, 150).

Byers is one of several critics who sees the Crew of Light—Van Helsing, Dr Seward, Arthur Holmwood and Quincey Morris—as unstable and vulnerable, held together homosocially by ‘needs’ they cannot properly identify except through the anxiety-ridden ‘supernaturalising’ of the vampire. Perhaps only Dracula gives this topic expression, in his remark to the vampire women, ‘This man belongs to me!’ The fair-haired vampire woman's accusation—‘You yourself never loved; you never love!’—would seem bitterly to evoke Dracula's own inadmissible ‘male dependency needs’: he does not need them. But Dracula has in fact just admitted that he needs Harker. This admission—and, of course, the vampire woman's accusation—would suggest that Dracula is homosexual. The vampire women burst into ‘mirthless, hard, soulless laughter’ (39) when the accusation is made. Dracula, on the other hand, speaks softly, staring ‘attentively’ at Harker. His reply to the women does not reconcile his sexuality in any way—it certainly does not suggest that he was once their lover, only that they ‘can tell’ that he is (or has been) capable of loving in one way or another.

The sexualities evoked in this scene are discussed in Christopher Craft's essay, ‘“Kiss Me with Those Red Lips”: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula’ (1990). Craft notes Harker's ‘feminine’ passivity here as he ‘awaits a delicious penetration from a woman whose demonism is figured as the power to penetrate’ (Craft, 1989, 218). Dracula intervenes at precisely this point, claiming Harker for himself just as penetration begins. For Craft, the novel never again represents so directly ‘a man's desire to be penetrated’ (220); nonetheless, it ‘does not dismiss homoerotic desire and threat; rather it simply continues to diffuse and displace it’ (220). Craft returns to a version of the ‘erotic triangle’, as discussed in the previous chapter—where men can touch each other only through the woman. Lucy's suitors—Dr Seward, Quincey and Arthur—bond together by transfusing their blood into her body. The Crew of Light stabilises itself by expelling Mina—for a while, at least. In order to stabilise the group homosocially, however, homoerotic desire cannot be represented directly. It is ‘there’, all the same, inhabiting ‘normal’ behaviour, ‘inverting’ it. That is, the novel channels homoerotic desire through heterosexual relations—and because of this, those relations are always figured as excessive or ‘monstrous’. A tension arises between the pull towards homoeroticism and the need to stabilise heterosexual relations between men and women—where the imagining of ‘mobile desire as monstrous’ leads always to ‘a violent correction of that desire’ (224) and the restoration of conventional (heterosexual) gender differences.

It is doubtful whether the two perverse scenes discussed so far work in this way: they seem, to me at least, too undercoded, and (since both scenes are interrupted) incomplete—necessarily so, to preserve the undercoding. The ‘mobile desires’ at work in these scenes are never violently ‘corrected’, only curtailed. The scene Craft has in mind, however, certainly does support his case. It is the third perverse scene in our sequence, a scene which is not interrupted—it is described right through to the end—and which is, by contrast, overcoded: its meaning is too obvious. That scene is the killing of the vampire Lucy.

LUCY AND MINA

I have already presented this scene in the previous chapter, along with Slavoj Žižek's commentary on it. Žižek is not interested in gender relations; for Craft, however, the description of Arthur Holmwood hammering the stake into Lucy's body is the novel's ‘most … misogynist moment’ (230). Anne Cranny-Francis agrees: ‘[t]he scene in which Lucy is killed is one of the most brutal and repulsive in the book’ (Cranny-Francis, 1988, 68). Carol A. Senf suggests that the scene ‘resembles nothing so much as the combined group rape and murder of an unconscious woman’ (Senf, 1988, 100). For Elaine Showalter, ‘[t]he sexual implications of this scene are embarrassingly clear’: like Senf, she reads the killing, where the Crew of Light use such an ‘impressive phallic instrument’, as ‘gang rape’ (Showalter, 1990, 181).³ This is where the feminist backlash against Dracula coheres: following Phyllis A. Roth's argument, outlined above, these and other critics (for example, Dijkstra, 1986) see the novel as acting out a hatred towards sexually independent women typical of misogynist fin-de-siècle culture. For Stoker—according to this account—women, rather than Dracula, are the central horror in the novel: the vampire is simply the means by which that horror can be realised.

Feminist critics have thus analysed the ways in which women are both unleashed and contained, or constrained, in Dracula. Before she is visited by Dracula, for example, Lucy reveals through her letters to Mina that she already has a sexual ‘appetite’—as if her transformation into a vampire later on simply makes manifest what was privately admitted between friends. In an often-quoted passage, written after she turns down Dr Seward and Quincey's proposals of marriage in favour of Holmwood, Lucy remarks: ‘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’ (Stoker, 1988, 59). For Gail B. Griffin, Lucy is a ‘carnal woman’ who must be—and is—punished (Griffin, 1988, 144). Before her punishment takes place, however, Lucy's ‘heresy’ is acted out in a highly-charged sequence of scenes, when Dr Seward, Arthur Holmwood, Quincey and Van Helsing each transfuse their blood into Lucy's ailing body. Van Helsing makes the connection between the blood transfusions and marriage (and intercourse) clear, remarking on Holmwood's observation that—with his blood inside Lucy's body—she was ‘truly his bride’ (Stoker, 1988, 176). Van Helsing's subsequent comments, made with the kind of hollow laughter we had seen from the vampire women, are particularly revealing:

If so that, then what about the others? Ho, ho! Then this so sweet maid is a polyandrist, and me, with my poor wife dead to me, but alive by Church's law, though no wits, all gone—even I, who am faithful husband to this now no-wife, am bigamist.

(176)

The passage makes the sexual nature of the transfusions explicit: the men each become Lucy's lovers and husbands, pouring their bodily fluids into her. Critics have not commented on Van Helsing's account of his own wife, however. Is she mad? Perhaps like Rochester's wife Bertha in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), who, incidentally, is inscribed at one point as a vampire, a ‘foul German spectre’ (Brontë, 1984, 311). More to the point, has Van Helsing driven her mad? The only other character with ‘no wits’ in the novel is Renfield, who is metonymically connected to Dracula. The passage is one of a small number which gives an insight to life after marriage in the novel: while the husband goes off to kill vampires, the wife remains at home like one of the undead, ‘dead to me, but alive …’.

Mina also confesses to an excess of sexual desire, writing in her journal that she and Lucy, together, ‘would have shocked the “New Woman” with our appetites’ (Stoker, 1988, 88). The ‘New Woman’ was a designation for the late-Victorian feminist—unmarried, sexually independent, career-minded. Thomas Hardy had dealt with this figure through Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure (1895), published two years before Dracula. Elaine Showalter (1990) provides a good account of representations of the ‘New Woman’ in the 1880s and 1890s, noting in particular the misogyny directed towards this figure—categorised as ‘nervous’, anarchic, disruptive. In her journal, Mina shows her familiarity with ‘New Woman’ writers—the literary representation was, by this time, generic—when she thinks, significantly enough, about how attractive Lucy is when she is sleeping:

Some of the ‘New Woman’ writers will some day start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or accepting. But I suppose the New Woman won't condescend in future to accept; she will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will make of it, too! There's some consolation in that.

(Stoker, 1988, 89)

Anne Cranny-Francis argues that Mina always accepts ‘patriarchal ideology’ and remains ‘sexually passive, submissive, receptive’ (Cranny-Francis, 1988, 72). Unlike Roth, who sees both Lucy and Mina as essentially mothers, Cranny-Francis polarises the two heroines through their sexuality: Lucy is ‘sexually aggressive’, while Mina accepts conventional notions of sexual normality. The above passage, however, would seem to complicate matters: Mina can even outdo the ‘New Woman’ in her evocation of female sexual independence. The problem with Cranny-Francis's reading of events in Dracula is that, like Moretti, she relies on a somewhat conventional notion of repression as the fundamental driving force behind events—and this, in turn, relies upon the assumption that ‘patriarchal ideology’ in the novel (which does the repressing) is always coherent. David Glover has shown, however, that ‘patriarchal ideology’ in Dracula is in fact incoherent enough even to be fissured by moments of ‘feminisation’, through Harker's breathless passivity in the scene with the vampire women, or—to give another example—through Van Helsing's unpredictable ‘male hysteria’ (Glover, 1992, 995).

A number of critics have suggested that, at any rate, Stoker enables us to see ‘patriarchal ideology’ acting itself out in Dracula—and by seeing it, we are allowed to critique it, determine its limits, comprehend its ‘lack of moral vision’ (Senf, 1988, 96), its vulnerability (Byers, 1988, 150), and so on. Cranny-Francis also allows for this kind of recognition; her claim, however, is that ‘the socially/psychologically/politically repressive apparatus of late-nineteenth-century British bourgeois ideology’ is powerful enough to ‘resolve’ or ‘neutralise’ whatever contradictions have been raised along the way (Cranny-Francis, 1988, 78). My own view is that although the novel does resolve itself to some degree at the end, there are crucial spaces in the text—such as the perverse scenes discussed above—in which irresolution and ambiguity (or, indeed, ‘queerness’) prevail. Mina herself may be one of these unresolved or ambiguous ‘spaces’: she can be maternal (as Roth has it), passive and submissive (as Cranny-Francis reads her) and yet also sexually independent and ‘in touch’ with feminist thinking. Furthermore, as noted above, she shares the most intimate moment with Dracula himself—a moment she repudiates soon afterwards in front of Van Helsing and the others, certainly, but which also allows her to feel (as no other character does) ‘pity’ for the vampire whose blood she has tasted and who she is now helping to destroy.

MINA, WRITING AND MASS TECHNOLOGY

William Veeder begins his excellent Foreword to Margaret L. Carter's collection of essays, Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics (1988), by wondering where academic criticism of the novel will go next—in the 1990s. He locates three possible areas of study for Dracula critics: the political context, including the novel's connections to imperialism and racism and its representations of class differences; psychoanalytic and feminist approaches, … and close studies of the novel's form, paying particular attention to textual ‘details’. This third area of study would be particularly important to the on-going history of this novel's canonisation. Veeder himself takes it up by turning our attention to a number of minor characters in Dracula, usually ignored by critics—looking at how they problematise reader's assumptions about relationships. … Veeder draws attention to Mrs Canon and Mrs Westenra, two more ‘bad mothers’ in the novel, wondering why it is, for example, that Mrs Westenra (whose health declines, with Lucy's, at the arrival of Dracula) removes the garlic from Lucy's room (Stoker, 1988, 133)—and why, when she sees the head of a wolf at Lucy's window, does she accidentally-on-purpose strip the wreath of flowers away from her daughter's neck (143)? Lucy is quite literally oppressed by her mother in this latter scene; so much so, that Veeder is led to consider whether Mrs Westenra is ‘unconsciously in league with Dracula’ (Veeder, 1988, xiv).

Veeder points to another aspect of family life in Dracula which is also worth noting: all the fathers or father-figures—Mr Hawkins, Lord Godalming, Mr Westenra, Mr Swales—die relatively early in the novel. In the light of this, it is difficult to talk about ‘patriarchy’; indeed, the vulnerability of the Crew of Light is heightened precisely because there are no fathers urging them on, as there was in ‘Carmilla’. Harker, for example, ‘begins to doubt himself’ after Mr Hawkins's death (Stoker, 1988, 157)—and not for the first time. Of course, in some of the readings outlined above, Dracula himself is a father-figure—the ‘evil father’ or ‘primal father’—in which case, the novel acts out a battle against ‘patriarchy’ by a group of men we might, as the novel goes on, better designate as ‘paternal’: less threatening, more able to negotiate with women, even to draw on their skills. It may be that the Crew of Light are ‘patriarchal’ with Lucy and ‘paternal’ with Mina. Certainly, some profound changes take place in male-female relations as the novel shifts its focus from one woman to the other.

Several critics have—directly or indirectly—responded to Veeder's challenge, drawing all three specified areas of study together to provide sophisticated readings of events in the novel. These readings generally centre on Mina who, far from being dismissed as ‘passive’ or ‘maternal’, is retrieved as—among other things—a figure for modernity, the most modern character in the novel. In her article ‘Writing and Biting in Dracula’ (1990), Rebecca A. Pope⁴ turns away from Cranny-Francis's ‘repressive hypothesis’—which had seen ‘patriarchy’ in the novel as coherent, and had accordingly read events through its supposedly dominant voice—to account for the novel instead in Bakhtinian terms, as a patchwork of voices and textualities which play off against one another. In short, the novel is ‘polyphonic’: there is, as I have already noted, not one dominant voice running through it, but many voices. Pope turns to the word ‘vamp’, which has two meanings in the OED: an alluring woman who exploits men, and—interestingly enough—a ‘patched-up article’ or improvised (usually musical) piece. The latter meaning might well describe the novel itself, with its ‘spectacular array of speakers and genres’ and ‘flaunted textuality’, bringing together ‘so many languages, literal and metaphorical—“languages” of gender, class, and ethnicity’ (Pope, 1990, 199, 200).

Pope focusses on what Lucy and Mina have to say in the novel—in particular, what they have to say to each other. Lucy's letters to Mina, imparting intimate ‘secrets’ (Stoker, 1988, 55), are an example of writing by women for women. They evoke ‘wish-formations’ which transgress male prohibitions (such as the desire to marry three men). Her letters also connect her to previously ‘misread’ women in literature, such as Desdemona—it is interesting in this context that she compares her American suitor, Quincey Morris, to Othello (57). Pope also comments on the scene where Harker—in the ‘comforting’ room in Dracula's castle—imagines how, long ago, blushing women would write love-letters to their men-folk. For Pope, Harker thinks his own modern mode of writing has displaced ‘female passion’—but it returns with a vengeance soon afterwards, with the vampire women. The scene is important in the context of Pope's reading of the novel, since she claims that Dracula calls up a ‘tradition’ of women writers (Mina's ‘New Woman’ writers, for example) which constantly destabilises ‘patriarchy’. Mina is particularly important here, a textual ‘knitter and weaver’ in the tradition of Arachne and—when she is silenced, excluded from the Crew of Light—Philomela. Nevertheless, her ‘vamping’—where, with her typewriter and copying facilities, she records everything and arranges it ‘in chronological order’ (Stoker, 1988, 255)—enables disparate documents (for example, Dr Seward's phonograph) to ‘speak’, and even to say more than they might otherwise have meant to (but still, perhaps, not enough). At the same time, however, her own writings are overseen by Van Helsing: women are under surveillance in this novel, ‘marked’ by them (although the men may ‘misread’ what they see). But the relationship is, as I have suggested, always unstable; at the very least, the dialogue between women's writing and men's writing enables Stoker to display—rather than to conceal—‘the strategies patriarchy uses to sustain itself’ (Pope, 1990, 210). Men do have the final word in the novel, cohering as a group through ‘little Quincey’ and through Mina's closing domestication. But the ‘Bakhtinian framework’ in Dracula should by now have made us ‘suspicious of master discourses and “final words”’ (214): the end of the novel is particularly fragile in this respect, not least because it is—as I have suggested in Chapter 1 with regard to Harker's closing disclaimer about the ‘authenticity’ of the documents—by no means secure about its status as writing.

The reading of Dracula which sees it as a ‘patchwork’ of voices, or ‘discourses’, is extended in two fascinating articles, Jennifer Wicke's ‘Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media’ (1992) and Friedrich Kittler's ‘Dracula's Legacy’ (1989). The latter article has already been mentioned in Chapter 1. The key issue for these critics is precisely the kind of anxiety Harker expresses over ‘authenticity’, an anxiety (not entirely unrelated to Copjec's use of the term) which is seen as appropriately modern. Wicke's title comes out of her interest in Mina's professionalisation as a typist and stenographer, skills which modernise Mina, who already has a career as an assistant schoolmistress (Stoker, 1988, 55). In fact, Mina is embedded in modern technological forms. She is, among other things, a ‘train fiend’, memorising railway schedules. Later, she expresses her gratitude to ‘the man who invented the “Traveller's” typewriter’ (350), which she uses to record all that happens as the Crew of Light pursue Dracula back to Transylvania. Mina also learns how to use Dr Seward's phonograph, producing typewritten transcriptions by listening to the phonographic cylinders—and thus enabling Seward and the others to access information efficiently. With her Remington typewriter's ‘Manifold’ function, she can make up to three copies, a fact that is crucial to the Crew of Light's cause when Dracula burns the phonographic cylinders and what he assumes is the only copy of Mina's manuscript. She is certainly very different to Harker's archaic fantasy of blushing women writing ‘ill-spelt’ love-letters to their husbands! This may in fact explain why Mina never actually becomes a vampire—she has, as it were, an alternative profession. Kittler puts her modernity into context, noting that Remington brought the first mass-produced typewriter onto the market in 1871 (Kittler, 1989, 155). By the early 1880s, a ‘bureaucratic revolution’ had taken place which tied transcription and copying skills to the professionalisation—even, the ‘emancipation’—of women (155-6). Van Helsing praises Mina at one point for her ‘man's brain’ (Stoker, 1988, 234), as if, through her various modern skills, she crosses gender boundaries (her ‘heart’, however, remains for Van Helsing resolutely female). Kittler makes a similar point—elaborating on Pope's view of Mina as both a ‘weaver’ of texts and as textually ‘marked’ by the men around her—by noting that women's entry into the age of mechanical reproduction did away with conventional male/female divisions:

machines remove from the two sexes the symbols which distinguish them. In earlier times, needles created woven materials in the hands of women, and quills in the hands of authors created another form of weaving called text. Women who gladly became the paper for these scriptorial quills, were called mothers. Women who preferred to speak themselves were called overly sensitive or hysterical. But after the symbol of male productivity was replaced by a machine, and this machine was taken over by a woman, the production of texts had to forfeit its wonderful heterosexuality.

(Kittler, 1989, 161-2)

It is Mina's work, of course, which gives rise to Harker's closing anxiety: ‘there is hardly one authentic document! nothing but a mass of typewriting’ (Stoker, 1988, 378). In the context of Kittler's argument, Harker may be expressing an anxiety about the loss of his (‘authentic’) masculinity in a ‘new age’ of mechanised textual (re)production. Nevertheless, it is difficult to agree that, through her role as a secretary to the Crew of Light, Mina somehow transcends her inscribed femininity. I would say that gender roles are destabilised here, but not done away with altogether. Kittler's conclusion, that Dracula is essentially ‘the written account of our bureaucratisation’ (164), simply ignores the relentless gendering that feminist critics have rightly drawn attention to. This can have banal consequences in an otherwise exhilarating sequence of arguments—for example, he reads the scene where Mina sucks the blood from Dracula's bosom as indicating ‘nothing more than the flow of information’ (167). Although they are both influenced by Lacan, Kittler's reading of this scene is about as far away from Joan Copjec's—discussed in the previous chapter—as it is possible to be! On the whole, he sees Mina as petty-bourgeois, utilising modern ‘weapons’ to reduce the threat of the Other through ‘the gathering of information’ (162). But this account effaces the perverse forces of desire at work in the novel; it simply replaces one ‘repressive hypothesis’ (the conventionally feminist view that ‘patriarchal ideology’ wins the day) with another.

Wicke, however, maintains the connection in Dracula between modern forms of mass production and female desire. Like Kittler, she notes that—by incorporating such things as stenography and typewriting and copying—the novel thematises ‘the bureaucratisation of writing’ (Wicke, 1992, 471). But other forms of mass production, or mass circulation, are brought into play. The novel includes a number of newspaper reports, often collected by Mina and included in her journal. It becomes clear that the novel's action actually depends upon such examples of ‘mass-produced testimony’ (474), which Wicke sees as just as authentic and authoritative as any other ‘voice’ in the text.⁵ The Westminster Gazette's account of the ‘bloofer lady’, for example, alerts the Crew of Light to Lucy's afterlife: her ‘tabloidisation’ (474) is necessary for events to go forward. The various newspaper reports help to realise the ‘narrative patchwork’ effect which Pope had earlier described (Wicke also uses this term); the democratisation of ‘voices’ in Dracula comes about precisely because of the various mass medias the novel pulls together.

But because it is a novel, Dracula represents those mass medias ‘hysterically’, and it does this primarily by associating them with women. Wicke's train of association here recalls Andreas Huyssen's argument in his essay ‘Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other’, mentioned briefly in Chapter 2. Rather than looking at mass (re)production, as Kittler had, Wicke's account of mass cultural forms focusses on consumption. The consumer of mass culture is, as Huyssen had noted, feminised—represented from the masculine, ‘modernist’ perspective as passive or submissive, vulnerable to mass culture, and yet shown also to possess an ‘appetite’ that can never be satiated. Consumption in the novel is an obsession which leads to madness, as illustrated in the novel through the lunatic Renfield. Or rather, it leads to vampirism: the ‘icon’ for consumerism here is, of course, Dracula himself. He ‘comprises the techniques of consumption’ (Wicke, 1992, 475), working through the most receptive characters—Lucy, in particular—who, like Renfield, become obsessive, deranged, uncontrollable (both Lucy and Renfield are ritualistically killed, in not dissimilar ways). An ‘ancient’ monster is thus used to signify the dangers of the modern world; Stoker's novel is really coming to grips with the latter, rather than the former. Wicke charts Dracula's metaphorical connection to the various mass cultural forms present in the novel (mechanised forms of reproduction—Dracula also replicates, producing copies of himself; the photographic image—Harker uses a Kodak; the telegraph; consumable mass medias and so on), drawing out their shared ‘protean’ features and highlighting their ability to ‘circulate’ freely. Indeed, she echoes Marx's equally ‘hysterical’ characterisation of mass media, noted in Chapter 1, as driven by ‘irresistible forces’ to spread relentlessly across the globe. But this internationalisation hides the true destination of mass cultural forms: the home. In this kind of representation, vampiric mass medias enter the domestic scene, and women invariably let them in, surrendering to their overwhelming powers of seduction: ‘The vampire yokes himself to the feminine because the mass cultural creeps in on little female feet, invades the home and turns it inside out …’ (479).

Wicke emphasises the different treatment given to Lucy and Mina in the novel. When Mina is ‘vamped’, the ‘textual investment shifts’ (484). Whereas Lucy's ‘appetite’ was her main feature—making her a passive consumer, acted on rather than acting—Mina's mode of consumption is, paradoxically, more productive. The perverse scene with Dracula perhaps testifies to this: more than Lucy, she is engaged in vampirism, consciously reciprocating (whereas Lucy is always taken in her sleep). She becomes, as the novel goes on, ‘more and more the author of the text’ (485), collating texts, coordinating events, giving out information. Perhaps her hypnosis by Van Helsing towards the end of the novel would seem to argue against this reading. After all, hypnosis usually involves the female patient's subjection to the male doctor, where he literally places her under his control. Freud and Breuer had seen hypnosis as the means by which the hysterical woman relays information—which she does not ‘know’—to someone who is able to transform it into knowledge. That is, it reproduces the polarisation of passive female and active, knowing male, which would see the latter as authorial, rather than the former.⁶

Yet, in the hypnosis scene in Dracula, Mina is by no means under Van Helsing's control—quite the opposite. She is in possession of events, speaking of what she sees to Van Helsing—who is otherwise ignorant of Dracula's whereabouts. For Kittler, Mina's hypnosis is another metaphorical representation of a modern technology: relaying back images of Dracula's ship, she works like a ‘sensor or radio transmitter’ (Kittler, 1989, 169), turning noise (since she cannot see anything) into information. Wicke's point, however, has more to do with Mina's active role in the novel: the hypnosis scene shows her to be ‘productive in her consumptive possession’ (Wicke, 1992, 486), responsible, ultimately, for guiding the others to Dracula. That is, Mina is ‘the consumed woman whose consumption is a mode of knowledge’ (486). This is not to say, in opposition to a critic like Cranny-Francis, that Mina is therefore subversive to ‘patriarchal domination’—not least because, for Wicke, ‘there is no definable patriarchy available’ in the novel (487). Rather, it is to show that—through Mina—the novel traces a more complicated relationship between consumption and production than had hitherto been noted.

Wicke had taken Mina as, increasingly, a figure for the author in the novel; the novel, we might note, describes Dracula himself as ‘the author of all this’ (Stoker, 1988, 217). Wicke's claim, however, presents problems for her argument about the democratisation of ‘voices’ in Dracula—where, as an indication of its modernness, no single author-figure is privileged over any other, and where authority and authenticity are dispersed rather than concentrated. I would rather see Mina as a figure for the reader, or rather, as a hybrid figure who comes to confuse the two together. This chapter began by noting that readers, while consuming this novel, have nevertheless also produced it in various ways. In this ‘new age’, consumption is never just consumption; it always entails the production of new knowledges, new interpretations, new texts. The ‘investment’ here is mutual. To use Harker's words, an ‘ever-widening circle’ (Stoker, 1988, 51) of consumed and consuming texts is produced, and—as far as Dracula itself is concerned—there is still no sign that it is coming to an end. Indeed, it is difficult not to invoke the novel's own metaphor of vampirism in this respect; Wicke herself does this by noting that Dracula's evocation of mass culture's seductive ‘embrace’ has ensured its own entry into the vampirish domain of mass cultural forms—where production and consumption have become inseparable. The novel is ‘like’ a vampire in that it folds the productive author and the consuming reader into each other; the ‘perversity’ of Dracula lies precisely in the mingling of their fluids.

Notes

1. Christopher Frayling argues persuasively that ‘Dracula's Guest’ is a ‘freestanding story’, rather than a discarded earlier chapter from the novel. Certainly there is little connection between events in the story and events in the novel. See Frayling (1991, 351-3), for an account of ‘Dracula's Guest’, which was not published until 1914.

2. See Leatherdale (1985, 59, 88), for an account of the influence of Le Fanu's ‘Carmilla’ on Stoker—who had originally set Dracula in Styria.

3. Van Helsing may have ejaculated prematurely, in Jennifer Wicke's reading of an earlier scene (Wicke, 1992, 483). The novel describes him leaning over Lucy's coffin, holding his candle ‘so … that the sperm dropped in white patches which congealed as they touched the metal’ (Stoker, 1988, 197). The reference is to sperm whale oil—but the sexual aspects of the description cannot go unnoticed.

4. I am grateful to Ken Ruthven for drawing my attention to this article.

5. Jim Collins gives a different reading, arguing that ‘the act of writing and compiling a manuscript’ is privileged in Dracula over and above any other kind of testimony: see Collins (1989, 87-9). For Collins, those other testimonies each ‘fall miserably short’ of the truth; writing, by contrast, not only accounts for the strange events, but enables the authors to survive them. The novel thus legitimates itself as a novel, while other modes of reportage are discredited. Collins's argument, however, does not notice the problem of authenticity in the novel—which is bound up with the very means by which writing in the ‘new age’ is produced. The point is that ‘writing’ is no longer what it was; even when the novel closes, there is still the remaining anxiety that nothing in the text can be verified.

6. For a good account of hypnosis and Freudian psychoanalysis, see Borch-Jacobsen (1989, 92-110).