Dr. Seward gives his account of Lucy as a vampire in the passage below:
“And she looked, her eyes blazed with unholy light, and the face became wreathed with a voluptuous smile. Oh, God, how it made me shudder to see it! With a careless motion, she flung to the ground, callous as a devil, the child that up to now she had clutched strenuously to her breast, growling over it as a dog growls over a bone. The child gave a sharp cry, and lay there moaning. There was a cold-bloodedness in the act which wrung a groan from Arthur; when she advanced to him with outstretched arms and a wanton smile, he fell back and hid his face is his hands. She still advanced, however, and with a languorous, voluptuous grace, said: — ‘Come to me, Arthur.’” (225-226)
Dr. Seward does not portray Lucy in a positive light. In fact, he does not say anything favorable about her. He calls her “careless”, “callous”, and “cold-blooded”. He also compares her to the devil and suggests that she is unholy. In addition to describing Lucy in an incredibly negative way, Dr. Seward also describes her as sexual. The word voluptuous gets used twice in this small passage, first to describe a part of her body, her smile, as voluptuous, and secondly to describe her grace. Lucy’s smile is mentioned again later in the passage when Dr. Seward describes it as “wanton”. By describing Lucy as sexual while simultaneously portraying her in a negative light, it suggests that it is unacceptable or incorrect for Lucy to be sexual. Dr. Seward witnesses Lucy feeding on a child, yet what makes him shudder is not this shocking act of vampirism but the fact that Lucy’s smile is “voluptuous”. To Dr. Seward, Lucy as a vampire is horrifying, not because she is killing children or drinking blood, but because she has become more sexual. A sexual woman was seen as dangerous during the time Dracula was written. As stated in Ledger and Luckhurst’s “Reading the Fin de Siècle”, “the New Woman…could mark an apocalyptic warning of the dangers of sexual degeneracy, the abandonment of motherhood, and consequent risk to the racial future of England” (xvii). Lucy, by becoming more sexual, has become one of the degenerates that were feared during the Fin de Siècle.
Another fear that existed during the Fin de Siècle, the fear of the abandonment of motherhood, can be seen in this passage. The description of Lucy “clutching [the child] strenuously to her breast” evokes images of breastfeeding, something tied very closely to motherhood. While breastfeeding nourishes and keeps a baby alive, Lucy is doing the exact opposite of this by sucking blood, and therefore life, out of the baby. Instead of feeding the baby, as a good 19th Century mother is supposed to do, Lucy is feeding on the baby. Lucy tossing aside the baby could be representative of the concept of the abandonment of motherhood. Arthur’s fear over Lucy not demonstrating proper motherly behavior alludes to the fear of the abandonment of motherhood that existed during the Fin de Siècle. Just as Lucy’s sexiness was more terrifying to Dr. Seward than her being an actual vampire, we see Arthur moan not in response to Lucy being a vampire, but in response to Lucy tossing aside the baby. It is not Lucy sucking blood that gives Arthur a reaction, but her rejection of proper mother behavior. Dr. Seward and Arthur’s horror at Lucy’s sexiness and rejection of “motherly behavior” is not individual to Dracula, but rather a cultural fear that is visible in many novels written during the Fin de Siècle.
I thought that it was important that one part of Lucy’s sexual nature is that she is actively displaying sexuality, instead of waiting for a man to initiate sexual contact.
The factor of Lucy preying on children is interesting in the context of her being unfit to be a mother. I hadn’t considered that angle, but it does add to her depiction as a sort of degenerate who goes against the traditional roles of a Victorian woman.