{"id":710,"date":"2018-10-14T13:06:46","date_gmt":"2018-10-14T17:06:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/?p=710"},"modified":"2018-10-14T13:06:46","modified_gmt":"2018-10-14T17:06:46","slug":"bloodthirsty-resistance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/2018\/10\/14\/bloodthirsty-resistance\/","title":{"rendered":"Bloodthirsty Resistance"},"content":{"rendered":"

While there are many passages in Dracula\u00a0<\/em>that are filled with sexual undertones, the section where Mina describes the Count forcing her to drink his blood is one that comes across as very explicitly sexual.\u00a0 Mina states, \u201cWhen 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\u201d (307).\u00a0 Blood has many different meanings within the novel, yet in this scene the most obvious interpretation of it seems to be semen.\u00a0 This scene reads as very sexually violent and nonconsensual especially with the use of words such as, \u201cseized,\u201d \u201cpressed,\u201d and \u201csuffocate.\u201d\u00a0 Dracula is forcing Mina to become a vampire but making her drink his own blood, in a way he is converting, or corrupting her.\u00a0 Throughout the novel, both Mina and Lucy are described as pure, innocent, and wholesome beings.\u00a0 In this particular moment, Dracula can be seen as someone disrupting Mina\u2019s purity and innocence especially when Mina herself cannot even bear to tell the men that she was forced to swallow some of Dracula\u2019s blood.\u00a0 By doing this, Dracula has permanently violated and altered Mina and she can no longer be perceived as virtuous, innocent, or entirely human.<\/p>\n

Carol Senf\u2019s article \u201cDracula: The Unseen Face in the Mirror\u201d focuses on how the main English characters and Dracula are similar rather than different.\u00a0 She brings up the point that the novel never includes a chapter told from Dracula\u2019s perspective and she questions the belief that Dracula is the only villain in the story.\u00a0Senf particularly analyzes Dracula\u2019s role as a sexual threat and what his thirst for blood can be interpreted as.\u00a0In the scene above, it appears that Dracula is a violent individual who wants to corrupt the pure, innocent human body with blood, which in this instance seems to represent either semen or some kind of poison.\u00a0 Senf writes, \u201chis thirst for blood and the manner in which he satisfies this thirst can be interpreted as sexual desire which fails to observe any of society\u2019s attempts to control it\u201d (428).\u00a0 The scene above does express Dracula\u2019s sexual desire because he wants Mina to drink his blood that is coming out of the wound in his chest, which he opened himself.\u00a0Dracula himself does not want to drink his own blood, but instead wants to convert Mina to a vampire so that she too will share this sexual desire and thirst for blood, which is such a stark deviation from her purity.\u00a0 Dracula uses his thirst for blood as an act of defiance and particularly in the scene with Mina, uses her as a mechanism for blatantly destroying the societal norms that Mina so clearly embodies.\u00a0 Senf\u2019s challenge that Dracula may not be the only villain in the novel is also on display here because he himself is not drinking human blood, Mina is.\u00a0 If Dracula uses his sexual desire to combat a society that condemns his sexuality, then maybe he is not the true villain and those who support such a society are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While there are many passages in Dracula\u00a0that are filled with sexual undertones, the section where Mina describes the Count forcing her to drink his blood is one that comes across as very explicitly sexual.\u00a0 Mina states, \u201cWhen the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and … Continue reading Bloodthirsty Resistance<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3874,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125359],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2018-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3874"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}