Suffered from the Night: Queering Stokers Dracula

When beginning a vampire book, you can hardly go wrong with a Lee Thomas story.

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Back to the epistolary form an unsurprising choice, considering the source material for William P. Nothing in this collection seems out of place or lacking in any respect. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: Email required Address never made public.

The after-effect of these intimate moments, the loss of blood enfeebles people. Lucy weakens physically as well as mentally, whereas Mina shows only physical weakness. He argues that most vampire stories pervaded by sexuality are derived unconsciously from such traumatic experiences. Mina feels this inherent force to go to the Count too after her victimization. When Dracula forces her to suck the blood from his bare chest, Mina either has to drink or suffocates. Mina feels unclean and similarly, victims of incest feel shame after their molestation.

He metaphorically rapes her. The girl cannot decide whether the horror she experiences is a product of dreams or reality. Since Lucy gets a taste of vampirism, her longing for blood becomes the centre of her interest. They concentrate only on this pursuit, which wears out these people. They think that if they can fulfill their greedy desire, they will be happy. This is not so. Similarly, sexually deviants often suffer from melancholia, a sense of guilt and solitariness.

In addition, the excessive sexual activity might correspond to satyriasis and nymphomania, both involving moral turpitude.

It is learnt from Westminster Gazette that Lucy seduces little children, although there is no explanation why she haunts only them. The other female vampires also feed their sexual appetite on children. The woman, who is weak, helpless and exposed to physical exploitation, turns into something different. After her virtue is violated, she corrupts those who are weaker than her, the children. Vampirism is contagious, and when infected, the victim becomes the victimizer.

Copulation with the vampire has a touch of necrophilia.

Suffered from the Night: Queering Stoker's Dracula

Necrophilia means sexual intercourse with a dead body, where the possibility of resistance is excluded. Vampires are not dead, but undead, so they are moving objects of desires. Symbolizing forbidden passion, they keep coming back from the dead until they are killed by men of moral conviction. The disability to control desires has proved to be a key motif in the interaction with the vampire. It is at night when the subconscious contents are without control, they come to the surface and gain power over the individual.

Being a somnambulist, Lucy is unable to control herself, and becomes an easy quarry for the count. Similarly, Mina is seduced at night.

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The sexually active women are so hideous that they are described as nymphomaniac, who cannot control their desires. The erotic dead women of the late Victorian art symbolized liberation from temptation. In the first place, this dominance could be maintained in the bedroom. The Victorian woman became an automaton with clear-cut functions, and a penitent for the sin of Eve and of all women.

Meanwhile, her moral advancement was the slogan for being in such a situation. The focus is not on the preoccupation with death, but a desire for absolute control which can be easily achieved on account of the passivity of the partner. In the novel Dracula, the only male vampire is seen to take shape of animals.

Lucy and the other vampiresses do not have animal alter-ego, and it seems to be unnecessary to have one, because of the gender discrimination of the period. Women were thought to be closer to animals than men; the supposed bestiality of their nature connected them to animals. Originally, folkloric vampires were beasts until the revolutionary human-like literary depictions in the Romantic era. It is true, that even at the time they were associated with animals with hidden, nocturnal lifestyle which impersonated their demonic nature. Wolves and bats have become the animal emblems for vampires, just as the cat is strongly connected with witches.

The zoosexual act entails the exploration of the pleasures of bestiality, and animality always refers to the instinctual, more primitive stages of mankind. In this sense, he is father and mother at the same time. Since he is also the lover of the victim, a very strange incentuous relationship can be disclosed.

Vampire love is always incestuous. Sexual intercourse between relatives, thus close blood relations might have repercussions on the mental health of the offspring. Illegitimacy, or more precisely the violation of the sanctity of conjugal motherhood was one of them. There was a surplus of women in the Victorian era.

The others had to earn a living by themselves. It was rather difficult to find a proper job for a woman.

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They received less wages than men even when they did the same work. Amongst the poor one of the opportunities of earning money was to turn to prostitution. A lot of young girls chose the streets to overcome their temporary difficulties. Poverty was definitely one of the reasons to follow this path.

Suffered from the Night: Queering Stoker's Dracula by Steve Berman

Most of these girls had lost one or both of their parents, they were single, local young women and before going onto the streets, they had already had sexual experience Walkovitz Some were forced by circumstances, however, prostitution also offered an independent way of living for girls. Pleasure was acted out in a business-like manner. Being sexually active, prostitutes were in great er danger of venereal diseases and pregnancy.

Prostitutes became easily pregnant, so these mothers were not too attached to their children emotionally. Night is when prostitutes are most active, and this is the time when female vampires stalk at night. Furthermore, Lucy is a somnambulist, she often goes out in a nightdress while sleepwalking. According to the Victorian ethos, loose dress meant loose morals. Obviously, appearance was emphasized in order to attract male clients.

It is important to note that it is the prostitute who seduces while in this case Lucy is being allured by the count. She becomes openly voluptuous. If discovered, her nocturnal dalliance would endanger her reputation. Lucy is engaged to Arthur Holmwood, and her liaison with another man would not be tolerated.

The unfaithful wife not only dishonours herself, but also her husband and her family, not to speak of the possible uncertainty of paternity. Natural instincts and social position are frequent causes of disloyalty in man the husband , whilst the wife is surrounded by many protective influences.

There seems to be allusive harlotry in Lucy and the vampiresses; their nocturnal appearances sexuality is conventionally associated with darkness , their polygamy, their attachment disorders and their seductiveness provide similarities with prostitutes.

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They can be connected with syphilis, so they can represent women with loose morals in terms of prostitution as well. This picture results from the ideal image of the angelic woman where anaesthesia is a key feature. The vampiresses upset the Victorian standards for females, and their sexual activity is depicted in a very negative way. Dracula echoes many threatening aspects of sexuality but order is restored at the end of the novel.

Same-sex desire was a menace to the moral sentiment of the Victorian period, where xenophobia and homophobia were not only projected onto certain groups, but these notions were linked together. Taking the vampiric sexual nature into consideration, it can be stated that there are anatomically heterosexual relations in the novel, homosexuality is not present directly, only metaphorically. Same-sex desires can be found in heterosexual displacements. Though, the character of the vampire represents more than simple homosexual tendencies, namely the fluidity of gender identity in a seemingly rigid gender structure of the Victorian society.

The question of morality is accentuated, although the dominant presence of the patriarchal society is lurking in the background, most conspicuously in the case of the woman: Angelides, Steven, A History of Bisexuality. The University of Chicago Press, Da Capo Press, Thames and Hudson Ltd.

Nina Auerbach and David J. Norton and Company, A Biography of Vlad the Impaler , London: Robert Hale Ltd, Moffat, Yard and Company, Fromm, Erich, The Revision of Psychoanalysis. Westview Press Boulder, University of Illinois Press, Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, Psychopatia Sexualis. The Making of Victorian Sexuality. Oxford University Press,