Author: Famine

In Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti, Laura becomes entranced by the goblin men’s “Plump unpeck’d cherries, / Melons and raspberries,” to the point where she has to have them, despite having no money to buy them. She tells them that “all my gold is on the furze,” meaning she is so poor that the only thing close enough to gold in her household is the yellow flowers that grow in her yard. But the goblin men seem only more excited by this statement, and insist that she “buy… with a golden curl” from her head.

The reason why becomes clear when considering historical context. The Victorians were rather obsessed with the concept of the state of someones body reflecting their morality: somebody with a whole, undamaged body was pure and of good character, while one with missing limbs or scars was not. Through this lens, Laura giving away a strand of her hair to buy fruit destroys her purity and corrupts her character.

Furthermore, the text of Laura trading a piece of her body in return for the fruits of the goblin men is rife with sexual innuendo. It is said that Laura “suck’d until her lips were sore” at the fruit. If the fruits are the penises of the goblin men, and Laura is trading her body to suck the fruit, then this poem is intrinsically a story about prostitution. By performing these acts, Laura is no longer within the lines of society and social norms. She, an unmarried woman, has solicited sex with multiple men. Has bought sex with her body. One only needs to look at the fate of Jeanie, a former buyer from the goblin market, who slowly wasted away without the fruits of the goblin men until she died. Even worse, by eating the fruits, Jeanie is so unpure that no flowers will grow on her grave. This is the fate Laura narrowly avoids.

Goblin Market is a poem about the dangers of sex outside of marriage. The goblins take a piece of the girl and likely use it to grow their “Plump unpeck’d cherries, / Melons and raspberries,” all metaphors for desirable, virginal parts of a woman, and the cycle begins again while the previous girl wastes away.

 

Time and time again Van Helsing and the other male characters in Dracula keep extremely important information from the women in their lives. The first example is John Seward arranging Van Helsing to attend to Lucy’s illness, while specifically not arousing “any suspicion in Mrs. Westerna.” While Seward and Van Helsing have good intentions by keeping the details of Lucy’s illness from her, since Mrs. Westerna’s heart being weak enough that “a shock to her would mean sudden death,” the lack of information spells disaster later in the book when Mrs. Westerna throws out the garlic flowers Van Helsing left in Lucy’s room. Without the garlic flowers that bar Dracula from entering, Lucy is vulnerable once more to blood loss via vampire, and perishes shortly after. Even further, the “shock” which kills Mrs. Westerna involves Dracula, with him commanding a wolf crash through the window.

Even after this negligence kills Mrs. Westerna and Lucy, Van Helsing seems ready to repeat the same experience with Mina. Van Helsing’s opinion that Mina may have “her heart… fail her in so much or many horrors,” is especially foolish since Mina was already involved in the investigation, having already read Jonathan’s diary and compiled all the documents pertaining to Dracula. She shows no signs of having had any more troubles of the heart than her male companions. Moreover, she has been and continues to be extremely useful on the logistics side of tracking down Dracula. By shutting Mina out of the Dracula investigation, the men are actively shooting themselves in the foot twofold– losing both such a logistical powerhouse, and leaving Mina vulnerable to Dracula’s attentions without her being able to recognize the signs of what is happening to her. 

From this evidence, I believe that this book has a great fear of women: specifically women with any form of power, and this reflects the anxieties of the time period where female gender norms were shifting and changing without men being able to control it. By keeping the women of Dracula uninformed, they stay controllable, though they are also able to be controlled by other men like Dracula himself. Only by becoming fully informed and empowered do women become monstrous.

“This man belongs to me!” Dracula shouts at the three vampire maids in defense of Jonathan. But this defense isn’t done out of kindness or love, even though Dracula admits “Yes, I too can love,” while looking directly at Jonathan. It’s defense because Jonathan is Dracula’s possession. He belongs to Dracula, and he clarifies that this ownership will be transferred to the three maids after Dracula leaves for England. The possessiveness, the intense gregariousness he displays when for Jonathan alone when he first arrives– all of these are hall marks of “Dark Romance” novels, in which the main character, usually a woman, is captured by a dangerous or cruel man who makes her fall in love with him. The reason why these stories are so popular, especially among woman, is because  minority groups for whom desire is vilified often can only safely feel desire through forms of art where the character they identify with has no choice. Without autonomy, you aren’t sinful for your desire: it is happening to you, instead of you pursuing it.

This is a strange angle for the book to take since Jonathan Harker has very little similarities to the usual protagonists of that genre: he is a man, happily engaged to the woman of his dreams, and certainly doesn’t fall in love with Dracula. But if we look at Dracula with the context of Bram Stoker likely being a queer man, the dissonant becomes more clear.

I believe Stoker is purposely making Dracula subtextually queer, both to explore his own desires safely in fiction, and also to push his creepiness that much farther. In this Dark Romance novels the dangerous man always has the most power in the relationship, which is portrayed as attractive, but in Dracula, the trope is taken more realistically. Jonathan is trapped, powerless, completely reliant on Dracula who tells him little and terrifies him daily. Nothing about it is hot.

Dracula is a foreign character invading the familiar, good British Empire, and the queer subtext makes him even more foreign, his infiltration even more serious. The discord between what readers expect from these tropes, and what follows, makes the horror all the more impactful.

“Instead of making friends and exchanging visits with our neighbors, who had at first been overjoyed to see a Roylott of Stoke Moran back in the old family seat, he shut himself up in the house, and seldom came out save to indulge in ferocious quarrels with who might cross his path. Violence of temper approaching mania has been hereditary in the men of the family, and in my stepfather’s case it had, I believe, been intensified by his long residence in the tropics” (The Speckled Band, p134).

The character of Dr. Grimesby Roylott on the surface looks like a mess of contradictions with the social norms of Victorian Britain. He’s the last heir to an old and once wealthy family which has withered down to just him. He’s a gentlemen, a landowner (a gentleman), and a doctor. In any other story, these would be qualities of a protagonist that will bring their fallen family back to prosperity with a steady hand. Furthermore, all of these titles are either high on the social status hierarchy or because of serious education (which requires money), and in Victorian Britain, a moral aspect is applied to where you are on the class hierarchy. The higher class you are, the ‘better’ you are as a person, a thought process which still lives today, though transplanted to amount of money instead of family name. By these standards, Dr. Roylott should be a polite, upstanding, good man, and this set up of what he should be is precisely why the reality of him– violent, wandering, antisocial– is so jarring.

What I want to specifically dig into is the way that Miss Stoner, the I’m quoting, blames her stepfather’s extraordinary violence on him having lived in India for many years. It is important to note that Miss Stoner and her sister were born in India and had never been to Britain until they moved there with their stepfather and mother years later– and yet Miss Stoner doesn’t see herself as tainted by “the tropics” in the way Dr. Roylott is.

My thought is that Miss Stoner suggests that Dr. Roylott has “mania,” from living in India because it is an easier, more gentle excuse for his behavior. To admit that he is simply a cruel man who wants power over others is a much more difficult thing to accuse a man than madness if he is from such a distinguished family. Madness is easier to forgive, because the mad person is not in control of themselves.

When we first meet him in the story, he threatens Holmes and bends a firepoker with his bare hands as an intimidation tactic, and I cannot see these actions as anything other than planned and rational. Dr. Roylott wants to be able to do whatever he wants and so he has cultivated a reputation of mad and violent man so that no one can get in the way of his decisions. He reaps fear in people, and uses that to control them.

It is important to note that Dr. Roylott’s purposeful building of a erratic reputation wouldn’t work if he was not in the position he is currently in. If he was poor, or lacking in land, or female, this apparent madness would not be tolerated. He would have been removed to a madhouse. But he is in the perfect position of authority to be violent without fear of consequences: he surely knows all the expectations he is subverting and he is purposely taking advantage of them.

 

“In spite of Miss Alicia’s undisguised contempt for her step-mother’s childishness and frivolity, Lucy was better loved and more admired than the baronet’s daughter. That very childishness had a charm which few could resist. The innocence and candor of an infant beamed in Lady Audley’s fair face, and shone out of her large and liquid blue eyes. The rosy lips, the delicate nose, the profusion of fair ringlets, all contributed to preserve to her a beauty the character of extreme youth and freshness. She owned to twenty years of age, but it was hard to believe her more than seventeen…. her fragile figure… was as girlish as if she had but just left the nursery” (Chapter 7 of Volume One, page 55). 

Lucy Audley is time and time again through the novel described as beautiful, beguiling, and charming. And the way in which she is described as beautiful is always in terms of fragility and extreme youth. The two are so interconnected to each other in the text that one comes to the realization that is not just that Lucy Audley is a beautiful woman who looks like a child– she is beautiful because she looks like a child. 

This turns her marriage to Sir Michael into an equal partnership where both gain benefits (Michael gets to marry the woman he loves, and Lucy gets to be financially supported beyond her wildest dreams) into something more sickening. Michael is a man wrapped completely around his wife’s finger, catering to her every whim no matter how bizarre or how quickly she changes her mind. One only needs to look at how she switches between kicking Robert out of the house and begging to have him visit again to see that she is a mercurial woman: another aspect associated with childhood. But what concerns me about the relationship Michael and Lucy have is that Michael’s behavior completely supports her leaning into this childlike mindset, and he seems to find it attractive. All of these traits which are so connected to childhood– the indecisive nature, the fragility, the youthful glowing face– are precisely what draws him to her and results in him falling in love with her. I frankly find it disturbing. Lucy might be a legal adult and not actually a child, but Michael is still a complete creep about it. 

It could be said that part of why Alicia has lost such favor with her father after he marries Lucy is that Lucy is not just taking the place of a wife but also supplanting Alicia’s role as Michael’s daughter. Michael is shown in the chapter where he proposes to Lucy that he is a very lonely man– he has been a widower for over fifteen years, and his daughter is now a grown woman, with all the independence that entails. Furthermore someday Alicia will depart from Michael’s household when she marries. She doesn’t need him anymore. And Lucy does.