Dracula and Faustine: Blood, Sex, Masculinity

One common theme in A.C Swinburne’s poetry is blood and gore, and particularly how it relates to sexuality. The intertwinement of violence and sex is in some way related to power, but the exact nature of that relation is convoluted and debated. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this partnership is epitomized and similarly undeniable. While reading Swinburne’s poetry, particularly the poem “Faustine”, the conceptions of violence and sex put forth in Dracula are further fortified by imagery of penetration, bodily fluids (especially blood), and even death. It also represents masculinity and the necessity of men for the continued survival of women.

In Dracula, a team of pure-bred, noble Englishmen set out to defeat a gender-norm-defying, blood-sucking vampire. Blood is the pinnacle of the sex-violence dynamic present throughout the novel. It represents a commodity (as food for Dracula), pain, masculinity, a sacramental marriage bond, and maybe importantly, sex, semen, and violation.

Blood representing masculinity and protection is in regards to when the team of noble men need to save the weak women (Lucy and Mina Harker) with their blood. Van Helsing especially voices this sentiment when he says, “A brave man’s blood is the best thing on this earth when a woman is in trouble. You’re a man, and no mistake. Well. The devil make work against us for all he’s worth, but God sends us men when we want them” (160).

This conception is similarly echoed in Swinburne’s “Faustine”. The heroine (or anti-heroine?) of the poem seems to be a succubus-type creature that feeds on men. While in this poem the genders of the blood-feeding monsters are reversed, the themes stay the same. “She loved the games men played with death,/ Where death must win; As though the slain man’s blood and breath/ Revived Faustine” (65-68). In both of these works of literature, whose authors lived around the same time period, (Stoker lived from 1847-1912, Swinburne from 1837-1909), the nature of blood and gender reflects the same aspects.

In addition to representing masculinity, blood represents lust, sex, and violation. In Dracula, being bitten by a vampire means the vampire physically penetrated you, and your blood, or fluid, is now inside of them. This is inherently non-consensual, depicting a kind of violation. This theme culminated is Dracula’s biting Mina Harker. “Her face was ghastly, with a pallor which was accentuated by the blood which smeared her lips and cheeks and chin; from her throat trickled a thin stream of blood. Then she put before her face her poor crushed hands, which bore on their whiteness the red mark of the Count’s terrible grip, and from behind them came a low desolate wail with make the terrible scream seem only the quick expression of endless grief” (301).

In Swinburne’s poetry, blood mostly represents the lustfulness of sex without the violation aspect, although one could argue that the necrophilia aspects present could be a similar type of violation. When I read “Faustine”, however, I could not help but think of the vampiric features of it. The lustful nature of blood is especially reflected in this passage, “She drank the steaming drift and dust/ Blown off of the scene; Blood could not ease the bitter lust/ That galled Faustine” (73-76). Swinburne’s poetry and Stoker’s Dracula have strikingly similar underlying themes, that relate the each other in similar ways. Why might this be? Perhaps something about the nature of repression and societal conventions at the time could have been an influence. Violence and sex were both sort of “taboo” subjects that were not supposed to be talked about in polite society in England. This could have guided the two subjects to interact with each other in a way that we see in the literature of that time period.

Time and Mind-Altering Substances

The Picture of Dorian Gray is all about youth and retaining youthful beauty–but underneath, it is about wanting to be able to freeze time: to exist as you are, unchanged, forever. The novel has a dream-like quality and a strange sense of being both hyper-aware of time passing and also a-temporal, or out of the linear fashion of time itself, as we know it. As Dorian begins to become more and more aware of his own soul’s corruption—and his everlasting beauty—he loses his empathy altogether. Killing his one-time friend and creator of the painting that allows him to retain his visual youth and beauty did not weigh terribly on his conscience, nor was it some sort of cathartic release. Dorian is simply apathetic about the whole thing. He systematically removes of the body and all traces of Basil’s existence from his life. His overall impression of the ordeal was that it was pretty bad that there was “a dead thing” in his room upstairs next to his portrait. The actual murder itself does not resonate much with his conscience—until he sees the portrait and realizes the effect the murder had on his own soul. Still, after the fact, Dorian is not much bothered by the fact that he is now a killer, and seeks out other things to busy himself with. One thing that struck me particularly was the chapter about the opium dens.

“To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul.’ Yes, that was the secret. He had often tried it, and would try it again now. There were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion—dens of horror, where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new” (189). Dorian is determined to forget, to pause time, to escape, at least for a little while, what he has done, what has happened to him and what he has caused. This reminded me of the poem by Arthur Symons, “The Absinthe Drinker”. In this poem, the speaker also feels the need to lose himself for a little while, although he knows that grim reality will inevitably come back just like the tides come back to the shores. He uses absinthe, a mind-altering, hallucinogen drink, to erase whatever troubles he has, and rocks away on a “dreamy and indifferent tide”, similar to Dorian’s use of opium to dull his pain and the marring of his own soul.

Putting both of these literary works into a greater theme, we can read into the need to stop time as part of the anxiety of modernity at the fin de siècle. Inevitably, the new age is coming, and there is no stopping it. It must be faced, just as Dorian must eventually face his sins and the Absinthe Drinker must face problems as well. But for the time being, we can pretend, or fool ourselves, into enjoying this time of false peace.

High Church, Low Church, and Purity

Throughout Dracula, religion and faith has proved to be greatly comforting to the “good” characters. The novel has been set up in such a way that the band of good Christians fighting Dracula employ civilized religion for their side, against the spooky mysticism of Dracula and Transylvania. In this way, “good versus evil” has also been ascribed to this binary, the idea that mysticism or superstition is something that needs to be defeated. By looking at the “Longman Anthology” text in comparison to Stoker’s Dracula, we can further analyze the role of religion in the text.

With any text, we can further understand the tensions between the pages of a story by studying the historical events going on at that time, and gain further insight into the author’s psychology. The “Longman Anthology” presents a sort of divide in the English Church in the Victorian age between “High Church” and “Low Church”. High Church consisted of the more mystical, not strictly Bible-based religious practices such as candle burning or incense burning. Low Church was an emerging oppositional faction within the Church of England that was “Anti-Catholic, Bible-oriented, concerned with humanitarian issues, and focused on the salvation of individual souls within a rigid framework of Christian conduct” (1056). This new faction was known as Evangelicalism; they disagreed with what they saw as frivolous Church practices in favor of frugality. “Gothic revival architecture, the burning of altar candles and incense, the resplendent vestments of the clergy— all these were aspects of a religious apprehension of sensuous beauty and mysticism that had not been seen in England since before the Reformation. This “High Church” aestheticism came into direct and ongoing conflict with “Low Church” sobriety” (1056). We can see Realism battle Mysticism when it comes to religion in Dracula.

Religion and faith are embodied in the forms of our Dracula-fighters, and we can imagine the picture of the “ideal Christian woman” being Mina Harker. She is constantly talking to and thanking God, dedicating her work to Him, and after she is turned, and the scar from the wafer seared into her forehead, it devastates her. “As he had placed the Wafer on Mina’s forehead, it had seared it— had burned into the flesh as though it has been a piece of white-hot metal. My poor darling’s brain told her the significance of the fact as quickly as her nerves received the pain of it” (Stoker, 316). It is the symbol of her rejection from God, who has always been the ultimate comfort for her. A tangible mark of being no longer pure, no longer even completely human, is the worst thing for Mina, worse even than the fact of being a vampire itself, and is supposed to be the biggest fear for any God-fearing good Christian woman. “Unclean! Unclean! Even the Almighty shuns my polluted flesh! I must bear this mark of shame upon my forehead until the Judgement Day” (Stoker, 316). Since Dracula’s attack of her was so reminiscent of a rape scene, this echoes of a woman’s rape causing her to lose her virginity, and in her eyes, her purity. No matter how good and pure the woman is, she could not help or prevent being attacked. “…so far as symbols went, she with all her goodness and purity and faith, was outcast from God” (328). However, at the end of this book, Dracula is killed and Mina’s purity is restored, something that cannot be done for rape survivors.

Dracula, Anxiety, and Imperialism

While reading the first two chapters of Dracula, I noticed that some of the biggest themes brought up in the Ledger and Luckhurst introduction to the Fin de Siècle were echoed in the sentiments of the protagonist, Englishman Jonathan Harker. We can see the balance between anxious dread and nervous excitement at the turn of the century paralleled in Harker’s language about visiting Count Dracula in Transylvania. I also noticed a definite fixation with England as a nucleus of refined and polite society, and detached wonder with the “queer” people of the Carpathians.

Anxious is the primary term I would use to characterize Harker. These first two chapters are set up as him leaving comfortable, sophisticated England and venturing forth into unknown, barbaric, uncivilized territory (even though, of course, we know that people do live there— he is not “discovering” this land). This gives him a vague sense of fear and nervousness, of which he cannot completely describe, “I do not know, but I am not feeling nearly as easy in my mind as usual.” (11) “I waited with a sick feeling of suspense” (18). According to Ledger and Luckhurst, this is reminiscent of the general feelings of anxiety towards the new century; not quite knowing what is to come, but knowing that it is uncomfortable and something you must get accustomed to.

Additionally, Harker’s language reflects Ledger and Luckhurst’s point that “popular culture of the time was fascinated by exotic, imperial terrors— fantasies of reverse invasions by the French or Germans, the stirring of mummies in the British Museum as Egypt and the Sudan were annexed, the evil genius of Fu Manchu and the ‘yellow peril’ as trade routes in the Far East were contested.” (xvi) Harker constantly remarks on the strangeness of the people he sees in the Carpathians, and their differences both from other groups in the region and from good, ol’ pure England. He describes it as sort of a hectic melting pot of strange, Gothic figures that incite in him quiet terror throughout the first two chapters. This “othering” language comes up again and again. He begins with random insensitive racially charged comments like “it seems to me that the further East you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?” (8),  which evolve into psychologically deeper digressions: “The time I waited seemed endless, and I felt doubts and fears crowding upon me. What sort of place had I come to, and among what kind of people? What sort of grim adventure was it on which I had embarked?” (21). The longer Harker stays in the Carpathians, the novelty wears off, and he grows fearful, not because of anything particularly frightening in the traditional sense, but because of the odd, anxious feeling the place and the people give him.

Moreau as a Narcissistic God-Like Figure

I find the character of Doctor Moreau extremely interesting, because he has an entire island, medical background, and plenty of resources at his disposal, and he chooses to create a society completely borne from pain, proclaiming it as means to the ends of science and knowledge. Studying Moreau’s language when he explains his experiments to Prendick is very revealing. At first read, we can somewhat understand Moreau’s motivations and potentially view him as a scientific man who is simply above menial human emotions such as compassion for animals. But if we look more closely at his speech, he reveals himself to be extremely narcissistic, and quite frankly, evil.

Moreau claims that he just wishes to advance the practice of vivisection for its usefulness to the scientific community. But looking at his word choice, we can see that he wants to make vivisection his, he wants it to be his legacy. “And yet this extraordinary branch of knowledge has never been sought as an end, and systematically, by modern investigators, until I took it up!…I was the first man to take up this question armed with antiseptic surgery, and with a really scientific knowledge of the laws of growth.” (53). Moreau is stressing to Prendick how he was the first one to really investigate into vivisection, and all the scientific knowledge that he has to do it with. Moreau wants the credit for all the pain and suffering he has caused on his island. This is reminiscent of the Ledger and Luckhurst introduction to the Fin de Siècle, when they discuss the anxiety of the century’s moving on, and where that leaves the people of the 1890’s. People wanted to be remembered, to leave a legacy. For Moreau, creating human beings to worship him as God was the way to do it.

Moreau claims to have chosen the human form as a model “by chance” (54) but this is clearly insincere. Moreau was making creatures in his own image, playing God. He instilled a religious law in the Beast People in order to control them, to make them more human-like, and also so that they would continue to worship him like humans do to God. Animals don’t do that. Moreau’s language when talking to Prendick indicates that he believes that his way is the only way of intelligent people, and any other mode of thinking he dismisses immediately. After he says that the main difference between a man and a monkey is the larynx, Prendick narrates “In this I failed to agree with him, but with a certain incivility he declined to notice my objection. He repeated that the thing was so, and continued his account of his work.” (54) Only a page later, he uses the same dismissive tone with regards to religion: “Then I am a religious man, Prendick, as every sane man must be. It may be I fancy I have seen more of the ways of this world’s Maker than you- for I have sought his laws, in my way, all my life, while you, I understand, have been collecting butterflies.” (55) This reminded me of the “Longman’s Anthology” section on the “Age of Empire”. Britain, specifically Queen Victoria, at this time felt it was its duty as “more advanced, superior” people to essentially force the British way of life on people around the world. Their duty was to spread their culture on more “savage” people, the same way Moreau forced the Beast People to be like him. Moreau is at once both removed from society, and the complete embodiment of British society.