Dracula 1033strosity with gender transgression, suggesting that
one reason he is a monster is precisely because he
breaks the gender rules of the Victorian period.
Dracula is also portrayed as a monster because
he influences the women around him to transgress.
According to the prevailing Victorian standards,
women should be passive and asexual, but under
the influence of Dracula, women become precisely
the opposite. One of the three vampire women,
for instance, seduces a reclining Harker, and as he
waits passively for her kiss, the girl “bent over [him],
fairly gloating.” A similar transformation comes over
Lucy, whose “purity” is transformed by Dracula into
“voluptuous wantonness.” In each case, an unladylike
sexual nature is coupled with an antimaternal senti-
ment, reinforcing the portrayal of female gender
transgression. The vampire women dine on a “half-
smothered child,” while Lucy becomes the infamous
“bloofer lady,” stalking children in the Hampstead
area. Under the influence of Dracula, these women
abandon their traditional gender roles, which Stoker
presents as horrifying in itself.
Even the men are affected by Dracula. Dis-
traught over Lucy’s death, Abraham Van Helsing
gives way to a “fit of hysterics,” laughing and crying
uncontrollably, “just as a woman does.” On another
occasion, Lord Godalming grows “quite hysterical,”
grieving for Lucy as he cries like a “wearied child.”
In each case, the men are feminized, their show of
emotion linked to infantilism or hysteria, the later
term being derived from the Latin word for uterus.
The problem for Stoker is the “New Woman,”
the feminist of the 1890s. Mina is a New Woman
and is even considered to have a “man’s brain.”
Stoker portrays the New Woman movement as an
act of gender transgression and, in particular, as a
threat to the patriarchal family structure. A sym-
bol of the New Woman, Dracula undermines this
structure, creating sexual women who hate children
as well as hysterical men who lose control. He ruins
the relationship between Lucy and Arthur Holm-
wood, but in the end he fails to do so with Mina and
Jonathan. The novel concludes with Dracula being
destroyed and Mina and Jonathan celebrating their
first child, the Victorian family structure restored.
Such an ending, however, takes the combined might
of several men, and throughout the novel, much is
made of their “manhood.” In this context, the novel’s
patriarchal orientation is clearly evident. Dracula
had posed a threat to male authority, but the trans-
gressor has been punished, and patriarchal order is
restored.
Mitchell R. LewisnatIonaLISm in Dracula
Bram Stoker’s Dracula attempts to heighten the
horror of the novel’s gender and sexual transgres-
sion by associating it with the East, confirming
and reinforcing contemporary prejudices about the
non-western world. Stoker also links criminality,
violence, and irrationality to the East. In the same
way that he juxtaposes the voluptuous femme fatale
with the angelic woman, he contrasts the East and
the West, specifically England. In fact, the two
juxtapositions reinforce each other. The threat that
transforms good English women into vicious sexual
monsters is specifically coded as an Eastern threat.
Stoker even equates the purity of England with the
purity of English women, and indeed, throughout
the novel, he suggests that the preservation of one
depends on the protection of the other. Conse-
quently, Stoker’s male characters are as concerned
with protecting their women as they are with expel-
ling the foreign Dracula from England. In this way,
Stoker’s concern with gender identity overlaps
with his concern with England’s national identity.
They may, in fact, be identical.
Stoker’s portrayal of the Eastern world begins
with Jonathan Harker’s sense that, as he approaches
Castle Dracula, he is “leaving the West and enter-
ing the East.” He enters a barbaric world for which
there are no “Ordnance Survey maps.” It is a place
of primitive people and wild animals in which order
is breaking down, where “the further East you go
the more unpunctual are the trains.” It is also the
place of gender and sexual transgression. Stoker
suggests, for instance, that the three female vampires
in Castle Dracula transgress the norms for their
gender because they exhibit the active sexuality of
men and because they have no maternal instincts.
They seduce Harker like men seducing a woman,
and they feed on a “half-smothered child.” Stoker
also suggests that Dracula is a homosexual because
of his “love” for Harker. In each case, gender and