1034 stoker, Bram
sexual transgression is associated with a specific
geographical area, the East. Consequently, Harker
thinks that he wants to flee “from this cursed spot,
from this cursed land, where the devil and his chil-
dren still walk with earthly feet.” In this passage,
Stoker clearly contrasts the West and the East. Not
surprisingly, it is preceded by a passage in which
Stoker contrasts Mina, the true woman, with “those
awful women” in the castle, between whom “there
is nought in common.” In this way, nationality is
linked with gender and sexuality.
Stoker’s primary concern, however, is not with
the East as an evil place of transgression but with
Easterners immigrating to England and threatening
to compromise the country’s national identity. The
Eastern threat is not outside England but inside it,
eroding from within its identity and values, and it is
not only within the borders of the country but also
within the self. This aspect of the novel is evident
in the portrayal of Dracula. Stoker presents him as
a London immigrant who is attempting to learn
English from a number of books, magazines, and
newspapers, “all relating to England and English
life and customs and manners.” As Dracula explains
to Harker, “I long to go through the crowded streets
of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the
whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its
change, its death, and all that makes it what it is.”
The thought of Dracula in London horrifies Harker,
who imagines him “amongst its teeming millions,
satiat[ing] his lust for blood, and creat[ing] a new
and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten
on the helpless.”
Harker envisions Dracula transforming the
English people into monsters. Later, in Lon-
don, Dracula says to Harker and the others, “My
revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries,
and time is on my side. Your girls that you all
love are mine already; and through them you and
others shall yet be mine—my creatures, to do my
bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed.”
In such passages, Stoker indicates that the East is
now an internal threat to England, and once again
he links Englishness to women. Dracula plans to
undermine England’s national identity through
compromising the purity of English women. The
initial result, as seen in Lucy, is an interesting
psychological condition in which the other is no
longer a place but a part of the self, confirming the
French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s famous assertion
“Je est un autre” (“I is another”).
Mitchell R. LewisSex and SexuaLIty in Dracula
Bram Stoker’s Dracula addresses the subject of sex
and sexuality in its portrayal of women. In fact,
Stoker’s novel portrays female sexuality as a horrify-
ing threat to male authority. In Dracula, the proper
woman is pure, angelic, and—most of all—pas-
sive. When a woman’s sexual instincts come into
play, especially outside the context of marriage and
procreation, then Stoker portrays her as unclean,
impure, and monstrous. Dracula himself is Stoker’s
indirect way of representing female sexuality because
he is the one who causes pure women to transform
into voluptuous vampires. Consequently, the efforts
of the male characters to kill Dracula are really
efforts to subordinate female sexuality to the Vic-
torian institution of heterosexual marriage, in which
women primarily play the prescribed roles of wife
and mother. It is also an effort to save the embattled
masculinity of the male characters.
The contrasting of angelic purity and monstrous
sexuality is evident in the portrayal of Lucy. Under
the influence of Dracula, Lucy undergoes a “strange
change” in which her natural “angelic beauty” is
debased by an appalling expression of “voluptuous”
sexuality. Lucy vacillates between monstrosity and
purity until her death, when she is completely
transformed into a sexual vampire. At this stage
she also becomes criminally antimaternal, with
Stoker portraying female sexuality as a threat to
motherhood. Lucy then preys on innocent children,
becoming known as “The Kensington Horror,” “the
Stabbing Woman,” and finally “the bloofer lady.”
When Van Helsing and the other men find Lucy
preying on “a fair-haired child,” they are appalled by
her transformation. As Dr. Seward explains, “[W ]e
recognized the features of Lucy Westenra . . . but yet
how changed. The sweetness was turned to adaman-
tine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous
wantonness.”
Stoker underscores Lucy’s monstrous feminin-
ity by comparing her wrinkled brows to “the coils