Contrary to the prim and proper society that most individuals call to mind when they think of England in the Victorian Era, Bram Stoker’s Dracula presents a vision of the time dominated by anxieties of hypersexualized women and the dangers it presented to otherwise accepted norms. Such a depiction is greatly odds with established gendered orthodoxy, as conventional customs dictate that the man is to be the aggressor, penetrator, perpetrator, etc. Females, on the other hand, are generally expected to be much more submissive. The fact that Dracula flips this on its head in more than one occasion, then, must have some significance. In fact, what if the reason the novel inverts these expectations is because sex is being used as a metaphor for the change in gendered power relations that occurred during the Era?
We’ve all heard the Oscar Wilde quote that “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” I find this to be particularly applicable to the situations found in the novel. First, we have already established that much of the novel is clearly readable as sex through subtext. We have already discussed that penetration of the fangs and of the stake can be read as sexual penetration, blood is semen, etc., and this would fulfill the former component of the Wilde quote. As to the latter half, Christopher Craft wrote in “’Kiss Me with those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” that during Jonathan Harker’s encounter with the three vampire women he “enjoys a ‘feminine’ passivity and awaits a delicious penetration from a woman” (109). Later on, in Chapter 21, we find Mina Harker being the aggressor, albeit coerced, when she is actively sucking the blood of Count Dracula (300). Between these two scenes, I would argue that the latter half of the Wilde quote is being validated. In the first instance, Jonathan is clearly rendered submissive to the women. In the second, Mina is fulfilling the active sexual role usually assigned to men. What do they have in common? They both have women maintaining power over the men in that moment, a phenomenon that so clearly worried real life Victorian men at the time. Thus, in this novel, inversion of sexual roles is clearly used as a tool and a mirror to explore the larger inversion of power taking place at the time.