Day: October 2, 2023

Cristopher Craft talks about gender, sexuality, and the breakdown of patriarchal customs in his essay “Kiss Me with Those Red Lips.”
These are all topics which can be examined through the lens of Dracula but sexuality, specifically homosexuality/homosocialism, is a topic which is shown through different relationships in the novel. In my analysis of the relationship between Dracula and Jonathon Harker, there is an obvious line which is being towed between homosexuality and homosocialism. Before delving into the specifics of their interactions, it is important to note that the main representation of a “sexual action” in this novel is through the sucking of blood. Craft questions, “Are we male or are we female? Do we have penetrations or orifices? What are the relations between blood and semen, milk and blood? Furthermore, this mouth…is the mouth of all vampires, male and female” (Craft 446). These questions blur the line of the difference between sex as we know it and the sucking of blood as another form of sex. Craft is showcasing that with Dracula and vampires, the transfer of bodily fluids regardless of what it is, represents a sexual action.

Although the only transfer of blood happens between Dracula and Mina/Lucy, subsequently Lucy and the children, there are moments where blood comes into play for Dracula and Jonathon. Jonathon states, “at that instant I saw that the cut had bled a little, and the blood was trickling over my chin…When the Count saw my face, his eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury, and he suddenly made a grab at my throat” (Stoker 23). In this moment, the Count is tempted by Jonathon’s blood and with the grab of his throat, almost close to completing the action of sucking his blood. Although this attempt is stopped because of Jonathon’s use of the crucifix, it is interesting to note that this could be Stoker’s way of stopping the interaction from becoming homoerotic. At the same time, there wasn’t any hesitation with Dracula sucks Lucy and Mina’s blood. There seems to be a clear directive of the blood sucking actions between man and woman throughout the novel as Jonathon is almost attacked by the three lady vampires under Dracula. Yet Dracula intervenes during this instance saying, “How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it?…This man belongs to me! (Stoker 34). This possessiveness over Jonathon is another piece of evidence towards the possible homoeroticism between them. Because of the patriarchal traditions at the time, the vampires sucking Jonathon’s blood would be the “natural” transaction but Dracula stops this which promotes the idea that he wants to suck his blood himself.

Even when Dracula drinks Lucy’s blood it is noted that he is actually drinking the blood transferred from the Crew of Light. Craft continues to challenge the understanding of sexuality in Dracula when he states, “another instance of the heterosexual displacement of a desire mobile enough to elude the boundaries of gender…only through women may men touch” (Craft 448). Even though by the end of the novel, there is no distinct sexual interaction between two men through blood, there is ample evidence showcasing the underlying homoeroticism. Craft’s text challenged the usual convention of heterosexuality and brought about a new perspective which Dracula can be seen through in order to understand how homosexuality can be placed in literature during this time.

“Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!” (Stoker 25). This is one of Dracula’s first comments to Johnathan Harker, provoking unease from the Englishman. However, from a non-Vitorian perspective, there is nothing inherently evil about Dracula’s wistful appreciation of the wolves’ wild beauty. In her article “Dracula: The Unseen Face in the Mirror,” Carol A. Senf alleges that the epistolary format of the novel unfairly maligns its titular vampire, giving too much responsibility to the biased Victorian narrators. “The problem, however, is that these perfectly ordinary people are confronted with the extraordinary character of Dracula… [Stoker] adds a number of humanizing touches to make Dracula appear noble and vulnerable as well as demonic and threatening; and it becomes difficult to determine whether he is a hideous bloodsucker whose touch breeds death or a lonely and silent figure who is hunted and persecuted” (Senf 424). Almost in answer to Senf’s concerns are the works of Anne Rice: Interview with a Vampire and its sequel The Vampire Lestat. The format of the first book directly opposes Dracula’s structure, as it is framed as an interview from the vampire’s point of view, one that the vampire himself acknowledges as an opportunity that he desperately needs.

People are good at inventing their own forms of evil. As Rice’s more self-aware vampire describes his irritation at a priest’s “’immediate and shallow carping about the devil; his refusal to even entertain the idea that sanctity had passed so close,’” he points out that, “‘People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil.,’” because, ‘”Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult’” (Interview 13). To Van Helsing, bastion of civilization, Dracula is most valuable as a surmountable symbol of the evil that must be hunted. Rather than putting energy into masking and policing their own desires, “Becoming like Dracula, they too would be laws unto themselves—primitive, violent, irrational—with nothing to justify their actions except the force of their desires. No longer would they need to rationalize their ‘preying on the bodies and souls of their loved ones’ by concealing their lust for power under the rubric of religion, their love of violence under the names of imperialism and progress, their sexual desires within an elaborate courtship ritual.” (Senf 428) Best of all, the opposing force of Dracula’s greater Ultimate Evil validates the “lesser evil” that the team hunting Dracula falls victim to. Dracula then becomes purely evil in the narrative because that is what the narrators require from him. Johnathan quickly forgets Dracula’s sad, quite assertion that “’I, too, can love’” (Stoker 46); he learns to ignore any evidence of a soul.

Rice’s contribution flips the script and forces the narrative to truly follow and learn about the vampire. The darkness and foreignness that the vampire inherently represents cannot be pushed to the side. Even narrator of Rice’s Interview with the Vampire has a distinct accent which the interviewer placed but couldn’t mark (Interview 5). Even after centuries, the vampire is still the eternal wanderer, or as Dracula puts it, the eternal stranger: “’Well I know, that did I move and speak in your London, none there are who would not know me for a stranger… a stranger in a strange land, he is no one; men know him not—and to know not is to care not for”’” (Stoker 27). And despite Johnathan’s reassurance that Dracula “’speak[s] English excellently!’” his first assessment of Dracula’s accent is to record the impression: “excellent English, but with a strange intonation,” (Stoker 22), revealing that he does indeed consciously mark Dracula’s otherness. As an outsider, these characters can safely be eternally shunned, as Lestat describes: “’You sense my loneliness… my bitterness at being shut out of life. My bitterness that I’m evil, that I don’t deserve to be loved and yet I need love hungrily. My horror that I can never reveal myself to mortals’” (The 310). This speech does not describe someone who is evil: it describes someone who has been told that he is evil. He believes himself to be evil, unworthy of love, and unable to connect with humanity, and yet his desire for love and bitterness at being shut out proves the opposite. He is still just as much a person. He, too, can love.

Dracula explores various aspects of good and evil in unique ways. Carol Senf, in an article titled “Dracula: The Unseen Face in the Mirror,” argues that the people who vow to destroy Dracula at any cost are not much different from him in terms of their behavior. 

Senf’s main argument that Dracula revolves around the similarities and differences between good and evil reveals a lot about the characters’ actions. Using this interpretation, it is clear that while the main characters, especially Mina and Quincey, aim to destroy Dracula in the name of good, they perpetrate many of the same actions that he does. For example, Senf argues that “Lucy’s death might just as easily be attributed to the blood transfusions,” yet Dracula is blamed for Lucy’s death (425). She also argues that “Mina acknowledges her complicity in the affair with Dracula by admitting that she did not want to prevent his advances” (425). Her ultimate conclusion, therefore, is that by pledging to destroy Dracula by any means necessary without even concrete evidence of his wrong-doing, and resorting to illegal actions to do so, puts the main characters on the same moral level as Dracula himself. This argument certainly has support in the novel. For example, Van Helsing suggests that “…if we can so treat the Count’s body, it will soon after fall into dust. In such case there would be no evidence against us, in case any suspicion of murder were aroused” (Stoker 313). The fact that erasing evidence was considered necessary lends support to the idea that the main characters knew that they were in fact committing at least some form of crime by destroying Dracula. Their complicity and moral grayness are further supported by the fact that the only comparable crime to what they were doing was murder. In this way, Senf’s article highlights some of the moral hypocrisy of a group of people who plot to kill a person or person-like creature in the name of good. 

However, Senf’s argument overlooks a few key aspects of the nature of Dracula that somewhat undermine her analysis. For example, while stuck in Dracula’s castle, Jonathan sees a woman outside yelling “Monster, give me back my child!” (41). She is then attacked by a group of wolves. The obvious logical conclusion here is that Dracula killed her child and then sent wolves to kill her. This event continues in various iterations throughout the story, where Dracula attacks innocent people and anyone who stands in his way. By the end of the novel, Dracula has killed countless people himself and through his other servants like Lucy. The group of main characters then commits their only murder to destroy the creature who has taken countless lives. While Senf is correct that Dracula is “tried, convicted, and sentenced by men…who give him no opportunity to explain his actions,” the main characters clearly didn’t view it that way (Senf 425). Mina writes in her journal “But to fail here, is not mere life or death. It is that we become as him, that we henceforward become foul things of the night like him, without heart or conscience, preying on the bodies and the souls of those we love best” (223). Mina, Jonathan, and their friends felt a moral imperative to destroy Dracula before he could hurt any more people. Dracula was a threat that needed to be destroyed, like an aggressive animal that needs to be put down, not a person who also has feelings. One could argue that this makes them more morally repugnant because they don’t care about this creature that clearly has some human-like emotion, but in the end, they only wanted to destroy what could have been an even more dangerous threat if they’d waited and tried to get Dracula to “explain his actions.”