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Literature and Culture.
http://www.jstor.org
Victorian
Literature
and Culture
(2005),
33, 487-515.
Printed
in the United
States
of America.
Copyright ? 2005 Cambridge University Press. 1060-1503/05 $9.50
VAMPIRIC AFFINITIES: MINA HARKER
AND THE PARADOX OF FEMININITY
IN BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA
E. Prescott
By Charles
mina harker
awakens
around her, but more pointedly
and
tried to walk in meekness
this perverse seduction in her
After
and Grace
A, Giorgio
from Count Dracula's
vampiric embrace, she asks the men
to deserve such a fate, Iwho have
have
I
"What
done
herself,
all
my days?" (285, ch. 21). As she recounts
righteousness
own words, however,
she contradicts her earlier disavowal:
statements capture
"strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him" (284). These conflicting
the peculiar double bind with which Mina
struggles throughout Bram Stoker's Dracula
(1897). Many critics concentrate on Dracula himself and the men who do battle with him;
interestingly, the novel also develops Mina's complex subjectivity through her unspoken but
paranoid observation, "Madam Mina, our poor,
deep affinity with the vampire. Van Helsing's
dear Madam Mina,
is changing" (319; ch. 24), epitomizes
shifting cultural anxieties at the
comes under
moment when a long-standing
of proper femininity1
ideological
conception
seems
more
natural toMina than her desire to help her
nothing
suspicious attack. Although
an intimate friendship with Lucy Westenra
husband in the public sphere while maintaining
in the private, these familiar roles become estranged by the new taxonomies of deviancy
popularized during the late nineteenth century.
Mina Harker exists on the cusp of culturally overdetermined
boundaries
that were
undergoing extensive revision during the Victorian fin de si?cle. As David Glover has argued,
Stoker's text reveals "a fixation with unfixing the boundaries, with the attractions of liminality,
in order that the lines of demarcation might be all the more strictly controlled"
(48). By
exploring these borders and their effects, Stoker attempts to shore up the seemingly besieged
and national identity. Just as Stoker's other Gothic
manliness,
categories of Englishness,
with
flirt
and
boundaries
of personal identity, his portrayal of Mina
transgress
disruptions
Harker as "a stereotypically
little
Victorian
Miss"
term, "The New
(Sally Ledger's
'good'
Woman"
of
troubles
definition
normative
30)
any simple
femininity. Although Mina would
like to understand herself as the ideal Victorian woman described by Van Helsing, her affinity
with
the vampire
about the "New Woman,"
her
legible through her ambivalence
moments
with
and
the
when
her
uncanny
passionate
Lucy,
friendship
gender performance
comes into question. Following
the methods of sexologists who place such friendships under
gaze,
suspicion, Van Helsing
subjects both Mina and Lucy to an interpretive, disciplinary
looking
for bodily
becomes
stigmata
of degeneracy
as well
487
as tell-tale
transgression
in their letters.
VICTORIANLITERATUREAND CULTURE
488
desperate attempts to disavow her own
Lucy's descent into vampirism as well as Mina's
not
reveal
the
coercive
affinities
power of Victorian
vampiric
only
femininity but also the
a
a
to
in
of
which
different
female agency that
cultural
space
possibility
perform
radically
neither patriarch - Van Helsing nor Dracula - can ultimately control.
"The Least Beautiful
Thing": Mina Harker
and theNew Woman Question
the adventure of
ALTHOUGH MINA MURRAY HARKER plays an integral role throughout
the vampire,
several critics interpret her as
identifying,
tracking, and then destroying
completely
passive. For instance, Sally Ledger presents Mina as "a woman who, firmly
rooted in thematernal paradigm, settles for the 'ideal' of middle-class
Victorian womanhood"
(New Woman
105). By remodeling herself into a "modernised version of the 'angel in the
house,'" Mina "inscribfes] herself within the paradigm of ideal Victorian womanhood
by
acting as a moral guardian of society" (106).2 In contrast, David Glover regards Mina as
"extremely hard to place," both "an unmoored
sign of change as well as a firm attempt
to hold the line against the New Woman"
her own self-representation
(96-97). Because
it is not surprising
self-effacing,
in the criticism of the novel.
that Mina's multifaceted
agency is
She frequently casts herself as the
of etiquette,
the devoted helpmate of Jonathan Harker, and the
shoulder
that
maternal
"manly" men turn to when overcome by emotion. In
compassionate,
fact, Mina likes to present herself as Van Helsing describes her, as one of the "good women
lives and whose
truths may make good
still left to make life happy - good women, whose
lesson for the children that are to be" (182; ch. 14). Yet if we resist this self-presentation
two late-century discourses
the
and place Mina
of disputed femininity,
squarely within
a
more
sense
New Woman
and passionate
much
ambivalent
of
self
becomes
friendship,
is often
annoyingly
frequently downplayed
assistant schoolmistress
legible.
as the only acceptable occupation
for
the home and traditional motherhood
Rejecting
the New Woman
fulfillment and work where none had
women,
actively sought educational
existed before, inmedicine,
nursing, education, and the newly forming Typing Girl pools.3
This mass entry into the public sphere alarmed many, both men and women. As Ledger
was a reaction of the popular press
the dominant discourse of New Womanhood
documents,
won
by bourgeois feminists. To the conservative journalist and novelist
against the advances
bore who threatens civilization with
is a humorless,
Ouida, the New Woman
unwomanly
her over-weening
estimate of her own value
"her fierce vanity, her undigested knowledge,
an
sense
want
In
article titled
of the ridiculous" (615).
1895 Blackwoods
and her fatal
of all
as
New
Woman
overeducated
senselessly
"Tommyrotics," Hugh E. M. Stutfield presents the
and
and ridiculous:
"With her head full of all the 'ologies and 'isms, with sex-problems
no
there
is
space left
heredity, and other gleanings from the surgery and the lecture-room,
or
are
most
in
treatises
for the
for humour, and her novels
sermons,
part merely pamphlets,
as
these works
(836), Stutfield's
(837). Describing
"physiologico-pornographic"
disguise"
and freedom that earned New Woman
of sexual knowledge
is typical of discussions
and Charles
the title of "erotomaniacs." Popularizers of eugenics like Henry Maudsley
of the British Empire:
threatened the well-being
Harper argued that overeducated women
to Harper, "nature, which never contemplated
the production of a learned or a
according
if a mother
muscular woman, will be revenged upon her offspring, and the New Woman,
at all, will be the mother of a New Man, as different,
indeed, from the present race as
article
writers
489
Vampiric Affinities
possible, but how different, the clamorous females of today cannot expect" (qtd. in Ledger,
New Woman
18). Summing up all these cultural anxieties of the fin de si?cle, Mrs. Roy
and the least beautiful thing
Devereux writes, "Life has taken on a strange unloveliness...
in
therein is the New Woman"
1).
Cunningham
(qtd.
image created by the conservative press, late-century feminists
Contrary to themonolithic
and New Woman authors themselves differed widely on their views of who the New Woman
was and what she stood for, especially on questions
Grand would respond to charges of "erotomania"
threat to the race:
of sex. The New Woman novelist Sarah
not women, who are a
that it was men,
First of all is he who
is satisfied with
the
consists
of two sorts of men.
Brotherhood]
[Bawling
as being most
cattle
it is the threat of any strike among his domestic
cow-kind
of woman
convenient;
sort of Bawling
The other
that irritates him into loud and angry protests.
for more
consideration
better
knows
than
of the scum of our sex, who
is he who
is under
the influence
Brother
nothing
The
women
tone
within
him....
of that class
from
them,
range
and
in and out of society, preys upon them or ruins himself
us all by them. Both
the cow-woman
and
judges
of the comprehension
of the Bawling
Brotherhood,
but
for them,
the
takes his whole
scum-woman
the new woman
are well
is a little above
(270-71)
bovine, child-bearing
Preferring prostitutes and loose women on the one hand and mindless,
on the other, the men Grand describes do not have the moral character of the "new
machines
as a way of
and employment
woman," who only desires sexual knowledge
opportunities
on
men.
Influenced
disease
and
by public debates
complete dependence
avoiding venereal
on the Contagious
wrote
Twins to protest
her
novel
The
Diseases
Acts, Grand
Heavenly
woman
to
from
the
married
that "nothing has yet been done
protect
contagion" by diseases
as
Other
New
Woman
in
New
Woman
such
writers, including
113).4
Ledger,
syphilis (qtd.
eroticism and made more radical
George Egerton and Grant Allen, did explore women's
demands about sexual freedom. Still, other female activists distanced themselves from Allen
Garrett Fawcett largely
in particular; as Teresa Mangum
notes, female suffragist Millicent
to the New Woman
of the popular press, claiming that "Mr. Grant
rejected any connection
Allen has never given help by tongue or pen to any practical effort to improve the legal or
In this highly
social status of women. He is not a friend but an enemy" (Married 28-29).
a
that
demanded
the
New
Woman
discursive
battle,
presented
problem
charged, ongoing
was
was
"All
and
that
that she
certain
extensive cultural discussion,
argument,
rethinking:
was dangerous, a threat to the status quo" (Ledger, New Woman 11).
relation to traditional femininity
and the New
The difficulty of interpreting Mina's
for throughout
Woman
is firmly in place well before we read any of her own writings,
travel log Jonathan Harker has constructed his fianc?e as he imagines
his Transylvanian
her. Rambling
through the forbidden sections of Castle Dracula, Harker indulges in a wish
fulfillment of his own chivalric ideal, imagining "some fair lady" who "with much thought
and many blushes" writes "her ill-spelt love letter"; "I determined not to return to-night
to the gloom-haunted
rooms, but to sleep here, where of old ladies had sat and sung and
lived sweet lives whilst their gentle breasts were sad for their menfolk
away in the midst
ch. 3). Of course Harker's
of remorseless wars" (35-36;
languorous fantasy of passive
soon
to
the
of the three sisters of
all-too-active
titillation
vampiric
femininity
gives way
Castle Dracula, recasting Harker himself as an unmanly, passive threat to Victorian gender
VICTORIANLITERATUREAND CULTURE
490
norms.5 But even in the midst of this dreamy seduction his thoughts turn toMina: "It is not
good to note this down, lest some day it should meet Mina's eyes and cause her pain; but it
is the truth" (37). Perhaps most crucially to Harker as he battles to free himself from Castle
some measure of his masculine
Dracula and maintain
identity, the idealized Mina serves as
a stark contrast to the actively sexual vampiric women: "I am alone in the castle with those
awful women. Faugh! Mina is a woman, and there is naught in common. They are devils
these women's monstrosity
of the Pit!" (52; ch. 4). By making
contingent on Mina's purity,
Harker naturalizes her propriety as the limit of the imaginable. Harker's rather desperate
later in the text purity largely parallels Van Helsing's
reading of Mina's
unquestionable
without a clearly defined, passive femininity against which to define himself and his world,
Jonathan Harker crumbles into a nightmare of uncertainty, confusion,
and vampiric "brain
fever."
initial image we form of Mina through her exchange of letters with Lucy, however,
to
tells her "dearest Lucy" that "I have
begins
challenge Harker's chivalric ideal. Mina
with work. The life of an assistant schoolmistress
been simply overwhelmed
is sometimes
The
trying." Along with this job, Mina also mentions her other work activities: learning shorthand,
keeping a journal, and doing "what I see lady journalists do." Mina justifies her eagerness
to work as a desire to help her future husband: "I have been working
very hard lately,
because Iwant to keep up with Jonathan's studies" (53; ch. 5). This proper self-presentation
leads Salli Kline to read Mina's
skills as merely
(135) to help
"up-to-date housekeeping"
her up-to-date husband, yet we can wonder how a lady journalist could possibly help a
solicitor's clerk.6 Mina considers her journal not only a way to help Harker but also an
ascetic
regimen
of
self-improvement:
"I don't
mean
one
of
those
two-pages-to-the-week
diaries, but a sort of journal which I can write inwhenever
with-Sunday-squeezed-in-a-corner
on vacation inWhitby
I feel inclined_[I]t
is really an exercise-book"
(53; ch. 5). While
with Lucy, Mina retires to the picturesque
local cemetery in order to work: "I shall come
and sit here very often myself
and work. Indeed, I am writing now" (62; ch. 6). Here her
one
a
Mr.
local who tells stories toMina and Lucy in very
is
Swales,
topic
hundred-year-old
reconstructs. The loquacious Mr. Swales sets the
broad dialect which Mina meticulously
scene of Dracula's
entry into England via a storm-driven ghost-ship, but more importantly
his presence highlights
the journalistic mixture of texts and voices, recreated by none other
in common with the conservative
than lady journalist Mina.7 Whether Mina has more
them christened
the "New
Sarah Grand, who between
journalist Ouida or the progressive
to work positions her
commitment
Woman"
(Jordan 19-21), can be debated, but Mina's
as something other than Jonathan Harker's passive, chivalric ideal. Despite her disclaimers
an attempt to establish a strong sense
of wifely
represents for Mina
propriety, writing
resonance of the
in this charged historical moment
carries the political
of self, which
New Woman.
Mina clearly demonstrates
her awareness of the New Woman
debate, referring to the
New Woman
10.8 In an attempt to help the
directly twice in her journal entry dated August
Lucy overcome her sleepwalking, Mina takes her on a long walk, stopping
hypersensitive
for a "severe tea" along the way: "I believe we should have shocked the 'New Woman' with
to consolidate her
our appetites. Men are more tolerant, bless them!" Although Mina moves
bit of "New Woman" wit by blessing tolerant men, her next invocation of the New Woman
reveals more ambivalence. As she gazes on a sleeping Lucy who "looks, oh, so sweet," she
fell in love with her seeing her only in
thinks about Lucy's new fianc?: "If Mr Holmwood
491
Vampiric Affinities
say if he saw her now"
the drawing-room,
I wonder what he would
turn
to
New
Woman:
the
thoughts
Some
the "New Woman"
of
allowed
to see each
other
condescend
in future
too! There's
some
to accept;
consolation
some day start an idea that men
or accepting.
But I suppose
proposing
she will do the proposing
herself. And a nice
in that. (88-89)
will
writers
asleep
before
her
(88; ch. 8). Again
and women
should
be
the New Woman
won't
she will
of
job
make
it,
Mina tries to strike a derisive tone here, and most critics take her at her word. Yet ifMina,
like the conservative press, sees these women as simply "erotomaniacs" who are obsessed
with improper sexual freedom,
then what consolation would
she take in their proposal?
cannot
from
her
distance
herself
the
she
sentiments
the New Woman
apparent tone,
Despite
a
we
if
writer
like
think
of
Sarah
Grand.
For
Grand
the New Woman
represents, particularly
herself might do the proposing, not because of rampant sexual appetite but to insure that
the man she selects is up to her moral standard. While Grand's "expos? of the underbelly
of male sexuality" (Ledger, New Woman 114) drew many attacks on her as an erotomaniac,
takes on
thoughtful reverie on female proposal
perhaps even by Stoker himself, Mina's
in a cultural climate and in a text that puts such importance on
another valence of meaning
issues of knowledge,
sexual and otherwise.9
In a novel obsessed with the importance of careful note-taking
and accurate recording,
task to "create the knowledge
Mina is the key to the text, for it isMina's
by which Dracula
one
to
to careful
is destroyed"
There
is
Mina's
commitment
(Brennan 4).
only
exception
comes
a
to
at
when
and
time
her
commitment
traditional
is
it
journalism,
wifely femininity
a
in
that
is
in
overdetermined.
learned
Harker
Mina
Budapest,
hospital
heavily
Having just
rushes to his side. Mina's
eyes light up when she sees his notebook, hoping it will explain
his strange disappearance
and illness, but Harker (who supposedly
swear
must
her to wifely
decides
he
ordeal)
ignorance:
"Wilhelmina...
no
secret,
no
you
know,
concealment.
ideas
dear, my
I have
the
trust between
husband
and wife:
nothing
there
should
of his
be
a great shock,
and when
I try to think of what
it is I feel my
if it was all real or the dreaming
I have
of a madman.
You know
had
spin round, and I do not know
had brain fever, and that is to be mad.
head
of
remembers
The
secret
is here,
to share my
Wilhelmina,
willing,
ignorance?
let me know."
but never
(103; ch. 9)
Here
is the book.
and
I do not want
Take
to know
it, and keep
it, read
it_Are
you
it if you will,
not only agrees to share Harker's ignorance but, as Talia Schaffer describes,
turns her
a
a
to
In
into
of
fetish
their
letter
how
Mina
describes
ignorance
object
relationship.
Lucy,
she "took the book from under his pillow, and wrapped it up in white paper, and tied itwith
a little bit of pale blue ribbon which was wound round my neck, and sealed it over the knot
with sealing-wax,
and for my seal I used my wedding ring. Then I kissed it and showed it
to my husband, and told him that I would keep it so, and then it would be an outward and
visible sign for us all our lives that we trusted each other" (104). Where Schaffer reads the
Mina
we can also read it in the terms Harker mentions
in terms of its homoeroticism,10
the seduction of the vampiric women. Although Mina denies she was even
specifically:
the nuns put her mind at
potentially worried that Harker had been with another woman,
ease and she confesses
no
other woman was a cause of
satisfaction when she "knew that
we
we
trouble" (103). If
borrow Grand's terms,
is glad Jonathan has
might say that Mina
journal
VICTORIANLITERATUREAND CULTURE
492
not been cavorting with any "scum-women."
In the context of the Contagious Disease Acts
the chivalric ignorance of the virtuous wife,
the
and Grand's novels, Mina has accepted
even
of Grand's
the desire
for
"cow-woman"
formulation,
provocative
disavowing
even if that knowledge
could infect her with a dangerously
knowledge,
foreign disease,
be it syphilis or vampirism.
tears open the journal and reads it at the
Despite her wifely devotion, however, Mina
first hint of trouble, when Harker sees Dracula in Piccadilly. Not only does she tear up her
as widely as
fetish of ignorance, she soon types it in triplicate to circulate this knowledge
possible. She does indeed read the story of her husband's vampiric seduction and, as Jennifer
for Mina
is
Wicke
playfully points out, may even have authored its more lurid moments,
shorthand, and "What, after all, is the stenographic version of
translating from Harker's
'kiss me with those red lips'[?]" (Wicke 471). True to his earlier prediction, Harker's bit of
vampiric titillation and gender-bending
passivity in Castle Dracula does indeed cause Mina
turns her pain into a kind of purity crusade
pain when she reads it. Yet Mina
sure her wayward husband's
late-Victorian
she makes
feminists;
transgressions
site of public discourse, and that his story will form a crucial kind of knowledge
typical of
become a
to protect
the ignorant in the future.
to knowledge marks her as a problem according to Van Helsing's
Mina's
relationship
model of taxonomy and his falsely idealizing way of describing her: "Ah, that wonderful
Madam Mina! She has man's brain - a brain that a man should have were he much gifted and woman's heart" (232; ch. 18). While Van Helsing offers up his fulsome praise to stroke
sense of propriety, his broken English reflects the gender-based
Mina's
problem she poses
within the text - in this cultural milieu of sexology, the "third sex," and theWoman Question,
Mina cannot cross gendered boundaries with impunity. Whether
she purports to be proper
or not, she must be forced back into her role of proper, submissive femininity. Tellingly, Van
Helsing offers his praise just before he cuts her out of the "little band of men" (373; ch. 27) as
they fight the vampire. Though she has sutured together the journals, all the men (including
Jonathan) agree that, in Seward's words, "Mrs Harker is better out of it" (253; ch. 19). Yet,
as we shall see, this exclusion from knowledge, work, and activity provokes the "devouring
to the New Woman
and
anxiety" (254) that draws the vampire to her. Mina's
relationship
indeed makes her an "unmoored sign of change" (Glover 96), whether she wants
knowledge
to be
or not.
Reading
the Rave: The Cultural Politics
of Passionate
Friendship
idealized purity takes on unexpected valences of meaning
heart, another seemingly
through Van Helsing's
image of her man's brain and woman's
in the cultural context of the
character trait also becomes
straightforward
problematic
Victorian fin de si?cle - Mina's powerful friendship with Lucy. As we might expect, the
men praise Mina and Lucy for their deep friendship, reading it as proof of their mutually
is simply proof of "the
characters. On the surface, such a strong friendship
exemplary
seriousness of one's moral character" (Faderman 151), as it had been during an 1811 libel
case against two schoolmistresses
suspected of a sexual relationship: "A woman who is not
IF STOKER'S PORTRAYALof Mina's
capable of the tenderest feelings and deepest intimacy toward her friend is lacking in an
essential human component"
(Faderman 153).11 In the cultural climate of feminist reform,
and
the essential
and asexuality of
degeneration
sexology,
anxiety, however,
inviolability
493
Vampiric Affinities
female friendship comes under suspicious attack: "the New Woman
in the periodical press of the 1890s rapidly distinguished
herself
are
more
New
While
lesbian
Woman
124).
(Ledger,
relationships
Le
Sheridan
Fanu's
"Carmilla"
(1872),12 the
predecessor,
Joseph
Mina and Lucy can be read through their intimate letters and journals
as she was constructed
as a lesbian prototype"
often read in Dracula's
passionate
friendship of
as a transitional moment
herself would most likely
in the collective understanding
of female friendships. Though Mina
read her friendship as completely natural and innocent, in the ideologically
charged climate
of vampirism and gender slippage it too takes on an uncanny social significance.
Female friendships and their intimacy register as either benign or threatening, depending
on specific cultural anxieties. Lillian Faderman demonstrates
that during the eighteenth and
women
nineteenth
tolerance
for their intimate friendships
century, European
early
enjoyed
due to cultural denial that women experienced
sexual desire: "the sexual potential of love
between decent, healthy women was still unacknowledged
by many seemingly sophisticated
authors: sound women were asexual" (156).13 Paradoxically,
however, such social denial gave
a
women
to
to
class
of
certain
their
intimate
range
explore
friendships with little threat of
outside scrutiny: "for a brief period at the end of the last century, social innocence - or denial about female sexuality, combined with increased economic opportunities
and independence,
women
to make
of middleand upper-class
intimate same-sex
permitted a generation
if not the erotic, center of their lives" (Miller 63). Offering
the emotional,
relationships
an extensive list of same-sex relationships between such women as Eleanor Marx and Olive
Schreiner, Edith Simcox and George Eliot, and Geraldine Jewsbury and Jane Welsh Carlyle
between
among others, Sally Ledger concludes that "Although few of the specific relations...
women...
were self-consciously
lesbian, they were undoubtedly
intimate, and it seems likely
that same-sex love between Victorian women was not, as Margaret Fuller would have it,
always 'purely intellectual and spiritual'" (New Woman 127).
such tolerance was short lived as feminist advances in work and education
Nevertheless,
began to disrupt the gendered binaries of public and private, domestic and professional. No
longer forced to marry for survival and social status, women could exist without men and
without marriage; as Sheila Jeffreys notes, "Emotional relationships between women were
harmless only when women had no chance to be independent of men, and became dangerous
when the possibility
of women avoiding heterosexuality
became a reality" (20). Discussing
sums
the nineteenth-century
American
Sahli
context, Nancy
up this new situation:
As
the
long as women
system
acceptable
however,
each
other
their
threat
to the established
or whatever
spinsters,
aspect of their behavior
a basic
threat
posed
sex over another.
(27)
activities,
as they did for much
of the nineteenth
century, without
threatening
or were
as an
either were
simply
ignored
by men
regarded
and other
women,
Feminists,
college
graduates,
independent
relationships
the female
sphere.
part of
were
a real
hermaphroditic
the one
ships
one
loved
itself,
order,
one might
to control
to condemn
of their other social,
regardless
where
the fundamental
expression
which,
to a system
and one way
them, was
call
these
sexless
their
love
termites,
relation
or economic
political,
of power was
that of
What for decades had been considered normal, benign, even a sign of "true womanhood" was
now rendered pathological
in the wake of the New Woman
and the challenge she posed. In
the interest of pathologizing
in order to render normative, the category of "lesbian identity"
had to be created in order for it to be threatening.
VICTORIANLITERATUREAND CULTURE
494
Reacting against this perceived threat, conservative writers in the periodical press linked
and the dandy, as potential disruptors of the
together two disparate figures, the New Woman
status quo. All who deviated from gendered norms received vitriolic charges of breaking
essential gender codes. Eliza Lynn Linton attacked male supporters of the "Wild Women"
as being just as unmasculine
as these women are unfeminine:
"The less lovely the thing, the
more ardently it is celebrated by the men whose main endeavor in this direction is to destroy
the old ideals, and to substitute for the beautiful woman of history and fiction the swaggering
Wild Women
of the present craze. The truth is simply this - the unsexed woman pleases
the unsexed man" (461). While
female suffragists and decadent writers like Oscar Wilde did
see themselves as allies, and in fact attacked each other in the press,14 the
not necessarily
popular press grouped them together in an attempt to contain and parody their potentially
similar disruptions of essentializing
gender norms. As Martha Vicinus notes, such labeling
could have a strong political effect: "When women
appeared to be stepping outside their
as
were
social
role, they
sexually variant, a label that was easy for
preconceived
pigeonholed
(62).
journalists to use during periods of feminist militancy"
Another potent political voice offering explanations
for these disruptions came from the
new
scientific community. A
medical model,
the sexology of Karl Westphal,
Richard von
and Havelock Ellis, like Cesare Lombroso's
criminal anthropology,
read the
Krafft-Ebing,
in "the deviations found in the general conformation
of the body" (Ellis
signs of degeneracy
289).15 As George Chauncey explains, the Victorian gender/sex
sign system defined "sound"
women as completely
feminine and "sound" men as masculine;
"sexual inversion" focused
less on an object of desire and more on a perceived
inversion of one's social and gender
role. To locate the signs of deviance, Ellis identified male inverts through their physical and
behavioral
signs: "there is a distinctly general, though not universal,
tendency for sexual
or physical constitution,
inverts to approach the feminine type, either in psychic disposition
or both" (287). More problematic,
bodies frustrated
however, was the fact that women's
this
type
of
reading
strategy.
Ellis
observes
that,
"we
are
accustomed
to
a much
greater
familiarity and intimacy between women than men, and we are less apt to suspect the existence
nature of these intimate
of any abnormal passion"
(204). He also notes the ambiguous
a
considerable
alliances:
"conventional
intimacy
degree of physical
propriety recognizes
between girls, thus at once encouraging
and cloaking the manifestations
of homosexuality"
if a woman felt a high degree of sexual attraction for another
(218). Even more perplexing,
to realize her affection was sexual
she
lacked
the
woman,
language and social understanding
(204).16 As Chauncey describes this social and sexual conundrum, "in the context of female
if women
there was no place for lesbianism as itwas currently understood:
passionlessness,
to the advances of men, how could they possibly
could not respond with sexual enthusiasm
stimulate
sexual excitement
for each other?" (118).
the
Nevertheless,
sought to identify sexual inversion inwomen, downplaying
sexologists
these women's physical
sexual potential of women's
intimate friendships and foregrounding
inverted women from the "perverts" appearance and social behavior. Dividing
congenitally
Ellis found a "more or less distinct
those who could be swayed one direction or the other
women.
trace of masculinity"
in
The more reactionary Krafft
inverted
(222)
congenitally
to
the
of
traditional
female social roles, to cross
linked
"lesbianism
rejection
Ebing directly
to
New
the
and
'masculine'
traits"
Woman
129). Under
dressing
psychological
(Ledger,
or
even
unfeminine
careful and politically
invested eye of the sexologist,
behavior,
any
could now be classified as
behavior that had long been viewed as completely
acceptable,
495
Vampiric Affinities
transitioned from being
By the early twentieth century, female friendships
pathological.
as sick.
to medicalized
tolerated, even encouraged,
(Ellis 204), female homosexuality
Regarded as "a vice of modern refined civilization"
was especially fostered in those sites which kept women
in constant association. While Ellis
refrained from claiming that feminism caused lesbianism, he does associate sites of feminist
colleges and political clubs with a higher rate of sexual inversion: "I
activity like women's
can directly cause
do not say that these unquestionable
influences of modern movements
sexual inversion, though they may indirectly, in so far as they promote hereditary neurosis;
but they develop
the germs of it" (qtd. in Ledger, New Woman
130). The expansion of
women
and
in
for
the
latter
half of the nineteenth
educational
young
girls
opportunities
women
new
arenas
come together for
in
and
which
could
young
century provided
girls
a common purpose outside of traditional home-life.
As Neil Miller
notes, "One aspect
an
on
had
of the women's
that
the
of these
college
clearly
impact
experience
prevalence
'
was
the
nonsexual
romantic
crushes,
(but perhaps not?),
relationships
smashing,'
presumably
that flourished in closed same-sex environments"
(60). Stumped by the lack of overt bodily
signs of deviant sexuality on the female body, sexologists
sought data for their assertions
in all-girl schools, interviewing
and
ex-schoolgirls
reading their letters to expose aberrant
tendencies.
to Ellis's
informants (former schoolgirls who often were themselves once
According
a
on"
female
friend), hardly anyone was free from a "rave," another term for these
"gone
soon fall a victim to the fashion, which
romantic friendships:
"Any fresh student would
there might be a lull in the general
rather points to the fact that it is infectious. Sometimes
an
more
or
an epidemic form" (377). Usually
to
in
less
of
after
interval
reappear
raving, only
between an older girl and a younger one, but sometimes affecting teachers as well, raves
allowed
these girls and women
to experience
a kind of sexuality
outside
of a heterosexual
space:
of two girls there is more
taken in close
great pleasure
likely to be a sexual element,
being
one another
and hugging.
and frequent
When
kissing
parted,
long letters are written,
often daily;
of love, etc_Their
various
emotional
they are full of affectionate
expressions
feelings
are described
to each other. (Ellis 378-79)
in every minute
detail
In the case
contact
with
Ellis's informant notes, the duration of raves extended beyond schoolgirl life
Occasionally,
the
despite
girls' introduction to male society: "These friendships are often found among
who
have
left school and have every liberty, even among girls who have had numerous
girls
flirtations with the opposite sex, who cannot be accused of inversion, and who have all the
feminine and domestic characteristics"
(379). Ellis notes several raves lasting well into later
life, holding out the potential for a life outside of the Victorian norm.
Set in this overdetermined
cultural moment,
the friendship between Mina and Lucy
serves as a site of suspicious redefinition. Stoker's novel of identification and recuperation
subjects the writing of Lucy and Mina as well as their bodies to a rigorous interpretive gaze.
Nancy Sahli describes "the fall" (when passionate friendship came under attack) by reading
intimate letters passed between female friends. She addresses the problem of language these women did not have the same terminology we have today - yet finds "a high degree
of emotional,
sensual, and even sexual content" (18) in their relationships
through their
notes
were
letters.
She
that
whereas
from
letters
the
1860s
and
70s
sometimes
expressive
VICTORIANLITERATUREAND CULTURE
496
"After the early 1870's, however, this type of letter becomes
increasingly
overtly passionate,
self-conscious
scarce, and those that do exist convey the impression of being rhetorically
rather than innocently emotional in their language" (19). We find this level of self-conscious
in the novel,
intimacy inMina and Lucy's letters. The only true intimate writing exchanged
these letters mark Lucy as an effusive, silly schoolgirl and sexually excessive New Woman.
in light of the self-conscious
theatrical
However,
veiling used by female friends, Lucy's
- "I love
avowals of her pleasure of being engaged to Arthur Holmwood
him, I love him,
I love him!" (55; ch. 5) - ring oddly flat when she relegates him to a second postscript:
- I needn't
tell you of number three, need I?" (59). Lucy is
"Oh, about number three
not indiscriminately
sexual; she shows remarkably little interest in or passion for the man
her mother has chosen to be her husband.17 She is much more affected by Quincey Morris,
whom she kisses, and the vampirically
seductive Count, who kisses her. Lucy's most effusive
moments
of pleasure, however, are not directed at any of her male suitors. Whether
thanking
of kisses" (105;
Mina for her "sweet letter" (55) or sending her "Oceans of love and millions
she
connection
is undoubtedly with her dear friend. When
ch. 9), Lucy's most passionate
as we used to sit" (55;
writes, "I wish I were with you, dear, sitting by the fire undressing,
ch. 5), she captures the intimacy of the rave relationship. Ellis describes one rave relating
how her friend "liked to see me with my hair down and would rest her head on my shoulder,
this homoerotic
if I were partially undressed"
(372).18 Despite
charge, Lucy and
especially
Mina remain unself-conscious
as sexual but as an idealized
about the nature of their friendship,
valuing
their intimacy not
connection.
tone. Unlike Lucy's
Mina responds to Lucy's affectionate
letters with a more muted
letters and journals are a chance to work, to practice with ascetic
"Oceans of love," Mina's
the skills of the lady journalist. However, Mina's
reticence suggests her own
self-discipline
in this rave. While Mina and Lucy seem to have been friends since
coded participation
childhood, Mina acts as mentor and teacher to Lucy as well as to her students at her etiquette
school.
As
Ellis
notes,
teachers
and
older
students
often
became
the
beloved
object
of
a
rave, playing a restrained but still erotically charged role in the relationship. Martha Vicinus
suggests that due to the public surroundings of the school, those involved in a rave developed
to express their affection: "The secret sharing of a
techniques
symbolic communication
a
a
in
became
world
major source of pleasure; it affirmed the love, while
public
place
private
never removing it from the realm of self-discipline"
letters and journals reflect
(51). Mina's
a code of intimate expression, based on "symbolic acts and symbolic conversations"
(50).
"I
In her first letter to Lucy, Mina expresses her desire to be with her friend symbolically:
am longing to be with you, and by the sea, where we can walk together freely and build
our castles in the air" (53; ch. 5). This ethereal imagery creates a safe imaginary space
itself
and heterosexuality
the homoerotic potential of this intimacy. Marriage
an eroticized
As Ellis's source recalls her
topic of intimate communication.
about sex were rampant among the schoolgirls:
she reveals that discussions
experiences,
"The majority of the girls are entirely ignorant of all sexual matters, and understand nothing
whatever about them. But they do wonder about them and talk about them constantly, more
especially when they have a 'rave,' which seems to point to some subtle connection between
become a frequent
the two" (378). For Mina and Lucy as well, marriage and heterosexuality
in
ch.
whether
hands
of
conversation;
6) or cuddling in
(67;
cemetery
Whitby
holding
topic
bed and discussing what happens after marriage
(92; ch. 8), the marriage
trope becomes a
that displaces
could become
powerful
marker
of intimacy between
these passionate
friends. Coded
into propriety
rather
Vampiric Affinities
497
as inversion, such desire could be sublimated into the most idealized form
than pathologized
of female friendship.
Vicinus
further argues that such sublimated desire through self-denial
of physical
it tied into the model of moral
It is
self-restraint.
intimacy was all the sweeter because
in letters and journals, since the older women
difficult to locate rave recipients' affections
that they had fanned, sometimes using them to enhance their
the emotions
"downplayed
own self-image publicly and privately" (54). The rave relationship became an opportunity
as well as a chance to impart such lessons to the younger
to express one's self-constraint
a
means
of expressing
love within the boarding-school
world"
girl: "self-control became
key
(45). The older women could "break their silence through letters of advice, consolation and
love" (55-56), a practice Mina exercises with her motherly advice. In a letter informing Lucy
of her marriage to Harker, she presents herself as an object lesson of wifely duty:
Lucy
you
came
dear,
have
from
do you know
been
and
why
are, very
the schoolroom
I tell you all this? It is not only because
it is all sweet to me, but because
to me.
to be your friend and guide when
It was my privilege
you
to prepare
for the world
of life. I want you to see now, and with the eyes of
dear
a very happy wife, whither
life you too may be all happy
duty has led me; so that in your own married
as I am. My dear, please Almighty
a long day of sunshine,
with
God, your life may be all it promises:
no harsh wind,
no forgetting
no
no
I
must
not
distrust.
wish
you
duty,
pain, for that can never be; but
as happy as I am now. (104; ch. 9)
I do hope you will be always
This
letter ostensibly presents the "pedantic, irritatingly didactic, know-it-all Mina" (Kline
"for you can't go on for some years teaching
133) at her most
irritating and pedantic,
to
and
other
without
the pedantry of it biting into yourself a bit"
decorum
etiquette
girls
(168; ch. 13). Although presenting herself as a very proper woman here, Mina emphatically
refers to the space of the rave. Taking on the voice of the motherly, experienced
teacher, Mina
instructs Lucy on exactly what good womanhood
entails: marriage,
self-effacement,
duty,
even the terms of this propriety speak the possible transgressive potential of
pain. However,
the rave - by invoking the schoolroom, Mina harks back to a connection
that many women
felt to be much more fulfilling than marriage. As she gives her dear friend these words of
and love, the act of giving advice itself takes on a different charge,
advice, consolation,
their relationship even as it poses as an ideal lesson in proper conduct. Mina's
continuing
rigid self-restraint, sacrificing her friendship though still continuing to value it, functions as
self-instruction,
perfecting her character in the societal terms available to her.
Although
seemingly unaware of the disruptive potential of their friendship, Mina and
still deploy tactics that veil their impulses. Mina's
and Lucy's
letters and journals
As
produce a series of narrative confessions
presented as both normal and destabilizing.
Marjorie Howes points out, Lucy's seemingly
inappropriate sexual desire is expressed in a
series of retractions and corrections of her expression of heterosexual
desire (104). These
corrections, however, as Howes observes, also function as the suppression of homoerotic
desire, as when Lucy claims, "I know now what I would do if I were a man and wanted to
make a girl love me. No, I don't" (57; ch. 5). Imagining herself in the position of a man
retracts her statement.
desiring a woman, Lucy catches her transgression and immediately
Lucy
also has such moments
of correction, though more muted. In her initial letter to Lucy,
Mina writes, "It must be so nice to see strange countries. Iwonder if we -1 mean Jonathan
and I - shall ever see them together" (53-54). As slight as this ambiguity may seem, Mina,
Mina
VICTORIANLITERATUREAND CULTURE
498
like Lucy, sees the need to correct her expression of desire, for "we" could mean Lucy and
herself. This pattern of self-correction,
seemingly banal enough, contributes to a homosocial
to
to hold oneself up to a normative
confess is simultaneously
community of shame inwhich
as
that standard
this judgment, "[b]y no longer
standard, naturalizing
normality. Through
a
a
the confession
test, but rather
making
sign" (Foucault 67), the subject not only accepts
as
truth but also internalizes
it as the socially validated code of conduct.19
the judgment
Yet to speak that which should not be spoken, to acknowledge
the potential for doing that
should not be done, also allows for possible resistance. The potential of the passionate
in the cultural climate of the New Woman,
is that a woman
female friendship, especially
not that she would,
could decide to live outside of standardized Victorian gender codes
and
but that she might. The gendered doctrines of separate spheres - female domesticity
male superiority - begin to show strain under this potential disruption. Lucy's and Mina's
moments
of transgression, whether a simple slip of the tongue or a kiss from the vampire,
move their friendship further from the tolerated space of the romantic friendship and closer
which
to the sign of gender
that must
slippage
be repulsed,
the vampire.
"A Certain Affinity to theMonstrous": Van Helsing,
and the Cruel Art of Discipline
the Scapegoat,
and more popular
CONTRASTING REALIST NEW WOMEN NOVELS with more melodramatic
and sensation fiction of the nineteenth
contends that by
century, Teresa Mangum
life
and
the
minutia
of
rather
than
Victorian
focusing on the
everyday
marriage,
showing
of
and
Gothic
fallen
fantasies
women,
heroines,
"[victimized
terrifyingly
extraordinary
feminine murderesses"
(Married 12), realist women writers sought to deal directly with
divorced
issues of the day. Yet Gothic novels are not necessarily
the social and political
Gothic
from the political.
investments
and
David Glover
his
Gothic
highlights
fantasies
and
the strong connections
between
Stoker's
adventure
is essential
to
stories:
"it
political
see
that
the
that animate these novels are inextricably bound up with the most deeply rooted
to work and her
relationship
facing late Victorian culture" (15). Whereas Mina's
deep friendship with Lucy could very well be the focus of a realist New Woman novel, it is
the deep affinity she feels with the Count, and the constant self-scrutiny demanded by Van
that makes this narrative of subject formation particularly Gothic. Count Dracula,
Helsing,
much like Mary Shelley's
creature, is the perfect monster because of the sheer number of
anxieties collapsed into his transgressive body and seductive embrace.20 The incursion of the
into proper
social indoctrination
monstrous
vampire brings to the surface issues of Mina's
cloaking them as "just" a Gothic romance.
femininity while simultaneously
anxieties
dilemmas
and
In conjunction with this monstrous
threat, Stoker introduces a cultural physician
detective who can diagnose and destroy it.As doctor, scientist, and psychiatrist, Van Helsing
secret essence - the body of
at his disposal to read Dracula's
has all the forms of knowledge
- that must be
to
the investigators, and successfully
properly named, fully known
vampirism
removed. Along with vampiric transgression, Van Helsing
constantly reads both Lucy and
and
sciences of degeneration
Mina, as well as the men in the text, through the normative
form
sexology. Suspecting vampirism from the start, Van Helsing depends on a Gramscian
of degeneration
and science with that of old
of common sense that combines knowledge
world folklore to make credible what the "nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance"
(35; ch. 3) characters will
not admit as a possibility.
Van Helsing's
invincible
intellect
is
499
Vampiric Affinities
so impressive because he, like Cesare Lombroso
to construct
between science and other discourses
this
common
and Max Nordau,
a way of knowing
can draw connections
that meets the needs of
sense.21
The German ex-patriot Max Nordau explores the ever-widening
circle of degeneration
in his wildly popular study Degeneration,
in
in
1895, just two years before
published
English
mentor
his
the publication o?Dracula.
teacher
and
Lombroso, Nordau argues that
Following
not only the modernized
of
trains
and
European lifestyle
pollution but also art and literature
can adversely affect an increasingly
enervated bourgeoisie.
Nordau
seeks to identify and
society: "Such is the treatment of the disease
vilify this degenerate element in European
as
of the age which I hold to be efficacious: Characterization
of the leading degenerates
as
to
their
and
of
imitators
enemies
diseased; unmasking
mentally
stigmatizing
society;
cautioning the public against the lies of these parasites" (560). The highly charismatic yet
and Wilde,
reflect their
literature, including Zola, Nietzsche,
egoistic artists of decadent
in their writing. Nordau's
task in his vast tome of criticism
is to identify the
pathology
artistic stigmata of degeneration
in these otherwise appealing and seductive figures - the
fate of European nations depends on proper detection and destruction of these threatening,
enervating
degenerates.
Through his invocation of science, Nordau is able to gain up-to-date credibility for his
particularly suspicious way of looking at the world, but we can see his work, and by extension
as well, as the production of scapegoats for a society that saw itself as under
Van Helsing's
attack and in decline. In his study The Scapegoat, Ren? Girard establishes a way of reading
context of "the very specific imagination of people who crave violence":
the psychosocial
text we are reading
in a real persecution
described
has its roots
from the perspective
of the
are convinced
The perspective
the persecutors
is inevitably
since
that their
persecutors.
deceptive
is justified;
violence
themselves
and therefore
have guilty victims,
they consider
judges,
they must
for the certainty
is to some degree
of being right encourages
them to
reliable,
yet their perspective
The
hide
nothing
of their massacres.
(6)
Told at moments
of massive
crisis, like the plague or other threats to an entire community,
person or body of
scapegoat stories place some moral crime within a socially marginalized
or
to
and
then
seek
the
these
people
purify
community by exiling
"guilty" outsiders:
killing
are chosen not for the crimes
of but for the victim's
[T]he victims
they are accused
signs that they bear,
for everything
that suggests
their guilty relationship
with
the crisis;...
the import of the operation
is
to lay the responsibility
on it by destroying
for the crisis on the victims
and to exert an influence
these
victims
or at least banishing
them
from
the community
they "pollute."
(24)
With these scapegoats destroyed,
the community
itself is cleansed, ensuring that normality
will return without further suffering.
can be summed up in
These crucial signs of guilt, of crimes against the community,
one word: monstrosity.
terror
the
of
results not from its
Yet, paradoxically,
monstrosity
nature
to
alien
but
from
similarities
the
itself: "[Monsters]
completely
disturbing
community
a
of
consist
of
elements
borrowed
combination
from
various
always
existing forms and
result
brought together in the monster, which then claim an independent identity." Monsters
from the "dizzying" effects of disintegrating
in times of crisis and also attempts
perception
VICTORIANLITERATUREAND CULTURE
500
to regain control of it: "A monster is an unstable hallucination
that, in retrospect, crystallizes
to
the
fact
it
is
remembered
in a world
into stable forms, owing
that
that has regained
a
are
to
create
The
chosen
useful
traits
that
monster,
then, are always
stability" (Girard 33).
- the
announce
are
driven
of
that
its
difference
monstrosity
signs
ideologically
physical
those of the moral
"Moral monstrosity,
by
signs of normality that demand reinstantiation:
to
monstrous
results of some
contrast, actualizes the tendency of all persecutors
project the
onto some poor unfortunate who, by being infirm or
calamity or public or private misfortune
a foreigner, suggests a certain affinity to the monstrous"
(34). Rather than being an external,
alien contaminant,
monsters
are often
instead insiders comprised of "Physical and moral
(35).
heaped together inmyths that justify the persecution"
this connection of the familiar and the foreign, Kathleen
Spencer analyzes
Exploring
both Lucy and the Count as the scapegoat figures of the novel. Following Girard, she explains
that "what all sacrificial victims have in common is that they must recognizably belong to the
incapable of fully participating
community, but must at the same time be somehow marginal,
in the social bond" (209). Besides reading Lucy's letters toMina, Van Helsing reads her body
as well, a part of his quest to identify the "true nature" of the vampire. Lucy's condition, the
newest example of Dracula 's circle of corruption, must speak the simple truth of vampirism
the quest of the novel is to recognize
these stigmata and
with every word and motion;
the threat. Through her excessive emotion and sexual desire, Lucy is positioned
exterminate
monstrosity...
normativity and thus draws the vampire to her. Lucy's vampiric seduction
all manifestations
of her excess, intensifying her subversive desires
represents
metaphorically
threat of the vampire. Like Lombroso,
for her other suitors and Mina into the encroaching
Van Helsing
reads the signs of Lucy's impending degeneration by the signs of her body. Her
"ghastly, chalkily pale" face (118; ch. 10), "the pale gums drawn back from the teeth, which
thus looked positively
longer and sharper than usual" (150; ch. 12), and most importantly the
on
marks
her
neck
all serve as the stigmata of her vampirism. Through his "common
fang
idealizes
sense" identification of the vampire, Van Helsing dooms Lucy but simultaneously
the "little band of men" to
the social order. He must convince
her in order to naturalize
"In death Lucy becomes again the
sacrifice Lucy in order to cleanse the male community:
angel she had been in life; she also becomes a bond between three rivals, where in life she
could only have been a source of division"
(Spencer 212). Monster Lucy with her fangs
must
be staked back into passivity not just to save her soul but to
titillation
and voluptuous
community her sexuality brought into crisis.22
salvage the homosocial
in this "othering" ritual of border identification slips into similarity, however,
Difference
its expulsion is supposed
ensuring the scapegoat will in fact continue to haunt the community
outside Victorian
to cleanse. The allure of the vampire, the titillating attraction/repulsion
all the characters feel,
a
in the novel.
not
within
each
of
the
characters
contamination
is
based
is
but instead
foreign
notes that
man
to
woman
Girard
has
the
into
the
and
Each
vampiric.
fatally slip
propensity
- so too can the
not only foreigners and those obviously
outside can become
scapegoats
ultimately attract collective destruction at
"marginal insider" (18): "Extreme characteristics
some time or other, extremes not just of wealth or poverty, but also of success and failure,
vice and virtue, the ability to please and to displease"
(19). To be
beauty and ugliness,
a
can
as
woman
at risk. Just
also
marked
pure, innocent, and virtuous
put young
excessively
as Van Helsing must render Lucy as completely demonic, he must present Mina as perfectly
good: "She is one of God's women fashioned by His own hand to show us men and other
women
that there is a heaven where
we
can enter, and that its light can be here on earth"
Vampiric Affinities
501
in Lucy and
(185; ch. 14). By reading Mina's purity as stringently as he reads degeneracy
to
the
the Count, Van Helsing
recuperate
attempts
possible disruption posed by her "man's
brain" and "woman's heart" (232; ch. 18). But Mina herself, through a series of journal
entries that foreground her propriety, reveals her own "certain affinity with the monstrous"
(Girard 34), the vampiric affinities that position her as another potential scapegoat within the
text of Dracula.
Stoker's novel represents issues of discipline not just through Van Helsing's
knowing
in reaction to that gaze. Lucy's
character construction
gaze but also through Mina's
and destruction
function as cautionary examples for Mina. She learns not
transformation
only that vampires and transgression must be brutally brought into line but also what can
happen to anyone outside the Victorian codes of normalcy. Stoker's vampire story, especially
its lurid description of Lucy's staking, shows what can happen to a woman who transgresses
strict gender codes, but just as important is the way Mina attempts to re-constitute
her
woman
to
in
Mina
the
this
reaction
with
the
man's
Harker,
proper
normality
discipline.23
is actually the most dangerous nascent vampire in the text because what makes
intelligence,
her an exceptionally
proper woman is also what links her to the vampire. She works diligently,
in a Victorian society that overvalues work, to be helpful to her husband; she works tirelessly
to inculcate propriety to her students and her friend as an assistant schoolmistress;
she works
to transcribe and collate the knowledge
by which Dracula will be destroyed. Yet
efficiently
her virtuoso performance of proper femininity now draws suspicion upon her, and no matter
how hard she tries to prove herself proper, she can never be proper enough. Eliza Lynn
to be "quiet workers who content
Linton leaves open the possibility
for "good" women
- work that
a
kind
with
work
of
themselves
doing good
non-glaring
merely advances our
are
in
and
all
with
whom
is
certain directions,
that raises
it
associated_These
knowledge
women
who
of
the
feminine activities pure and sweet" (462). While Linton
keep the world
here claims that the right kind of female intellectual labor can be both feminine and useful,
we have to wonder exactly how such a thing would be possible ?
how can Mina be an active
woman
without becoming Grand's "cow-woman"?
How can she prove both
"non-glaring"
her ability and her propriety when all signs of activity are read as proof of deviance? This
paradox of femininity makes Mina a potential threat, especially when emphasized
by the
presence of the vampire.
Stoker's text draws strong affinities between Mina and Count Dracula, either through
triangulation across an attractive female body or through direct contact, but these moments
of vampiric affinity are often self-consciously
obscured by Mina's
self
overly fastidious
as
sees
the
of
initial
On
Mina
her
in
friend
proper lady.
presentation
night
Lucy's
vamping,
the cemetery atWhitby:
"it seemed to me as though something dark stood behind the seat
where the white figure shone, and bent over it.What
it was, whether man or beast, I could
not tell" (90; ch. 8). For Lucy, this intercourse with Dracula
is figured as an exaggerated
to marry three men at once, willing
fulfillment of her earlier sexual curiosity. Longing
to
kiss a rejected suitor, perhaps even feeling desire for her passionate friend, Lucy here enjoys
a displaced
and fulfilling. At the same time, Mina's
sexuality as both monstrous
thoughts
are most concerned with issues of propriety. Recording
her own na?vet? in her journalistic
account of the night, Mina attempts to guess Lucy's destination from her (lack of) clothing.
about Lucy's
reputation as well as her own, she shows herself daubing mud
Worrying
on her feet to avoid attention. While
such details may seem proof of her own inherently
even
and
these
proper
overtly, even obtrusively, proper visions of her
prudish character,
VICTORIANLITERATUREAND CULTURE
502
as her sense of
that Mina has internalized her social discipline
demonstrate
this emphasis on propriety, however, she simultaneously
self.24 Despite
places herself in a
As
Mina
into
her
markedly
vampiric position.
gathers Lucy
protective embrace, she fears
that she is the one who has pricked her dear friend: "I fastened the shawl at her throat with a
big safety-pin; but Imust have been clumsy in my anxiety and pinched or pricked her with
it, for by-and-by, when her breathing became quieter, she put her hand to her throat again
and moaned"
the overtones of this scene are decidedly heterosexual,
it begins to
(91). While
own conduct
shape a connection
between Mina
and Dracula
that becomes more pronounced
the
throughout
novel.
Mina's
and Harker
connection
discover
in another
the Count is accentuated
in
of
the vampire
the heart
London:
with
textual moment
when
she
at a very beautiful
outside Galliano's
hat, sitting in a victoria
girl, in a big cart-wheel
looking
I felt Jonathan
clutch my arm so tight that he hurt me, and he said under his breath: "My God!"
I am always
for I fear that some nervous
fit may upset him again; so I turned
about Jonathan,
anxious
to him quickly,
him.
it was
that disturbed
and asked him what
I was
when
He
was
gazed
very
at a tall,
out as, half
seemed
pale, and his eyes
bulging
thin man, with a beaky nose and black moustache
in terror
and half
and pointed
in amazement,
he
was
also
who
beard,
observing the pretty girl. (168-69; ch. 13)
the moment's
the text emphasizes
gender disruption (Jonathan's passivity as a return
in
brain
Mina
the
unusual
role of protector),
it also connects Mina directly
of his
fever,
are looking at precisely
the same object of beauty.
with the vampire - she and Dracula
own
as
is
marked
Mina's
While
the Count
benign, admiring gaze becomes
clearly
predatory,
In
of
social
climate
the
earlier
nineteenth
the
uncanny.
century, Mina's
un-pathologizing
a
not
in
would
fall
under
admiration
society committed
Nordau-esque
scrutiny;
scopophilic
and sexual deviance, however, her benign
to unearthing and destroying hidden morbidity
of quiet enjoyment,
gaze draws suspicion. Mina's moment
unself-consciously
viewing a
woman as an object of beauty, becomes marked as threatening with the Count's unexpected
While
entrance.
of New Woman
frustration comes on the heels of her most
ultimate moment
the
to tracking the vampire. As she types, collates, and distributes
contribution
text
she
becomes
of
that
make
the
of
and
other
bits
Dracula,
up
writing
journals, letters,
the lady journalist she has longed to be all along. Her abilities as a lady journalist, and the
praise of her man's brain and
foresight of typing up Harker's journal, lead to Van Helsing's
to cut
she reveals here lead Van Helsing
woman's
heart. Yet the New Woman propensities
and vampire hunting:
her out of the loop of knowledge
Mina's
substantial
Madam
that wonderful
much
and woman's
gifted
Ah,
Mina!
She
has man's
brain
-
a brain
that a man
should
have
were
he
of help to
that woman
up to now fortune has made
that she run a risk
this so terrible affair. It is not good
she must not have to do with
us; after to-night
so great. We men
are determined
to destroy
but it is no
this monster;
nay, are we not pledged?
so
so
a
woman.
not
in
and
if
her
heart
fail
her
much
for
Even
she
be
horrors;
harmed,
many
may
part
and in sleep, from her dreams. And,
she may
suffer
from her nerves,
and hereafter
both in waking,
is a young
besides,
she
time,
if not now.
(232;
heart_Friend
woman
ch.
18)
and not
John,
so long married;
there may
be other
things
to think
of some
Vampiric Affinities
503
Seward "agreed heartily" (232) with this decision, as do all the men, and it is not hard to
see why. Against
the active mind and helpful typewriter of this proper "New Woman," Van
raises
the
specter of motherhood.
Although Mina has mentioned motherhood
only
Helsing
once (when Holmwood
is sobbing on her shoulder for poor dead Lucy), the threat of failing
to be a good mother
is already coercive enough to force her back into domestic passivity.
After she plays secretary one last time as Van Helsing dictates his lesson on vampirism, Mina
is effectively ostracized from the group:
"And
now
to have
time. We
the more
to us
is the end until all be well. You are too precious
this night
shall tell you all in good
you no more must
part to-night,
question. We
are men,
be our star and our hope,
and we shall act all
and are able to bear; but you must
such as we are."
free that you are not in the danger,
for you, Madam
such risk. When
Mina,
we
and the other men reduce the
concern, Van Helsing
Acting under the aegis of paternalistic
to
New
Woman
the
level
of
future
child - they
mother, and helpless
proper
inspiration,
in waiting,
the perfect mother of the children
have effectively
reduced her to a cow-woman
to break out in open rebellion, Mina chafes under this chivalric
that are to be. Unwilling
protection: "though itwas a bitter pill for me to swallow, I could say nothing, save to accept
their chivalrous care of me" (239; ch. 18).
and march off to Carfax Abbey, Mina has no choice but
As the men arm themselves
to retire to her bedroom. While
she casts her discontent as care for the men she loves, her
is obvious as she notes her "devouring anxiety"
frustration at being cut off from knowledge
she lashes out at Jonathan
(254; ch. 19). In her snappish journal entry the next morning,
in Castle Dracula by
for withholding
his
arousal
information, peevishly
recalling
vampiric
some
to
think
me!...
from
"But
that
he
Well,
writing,
keeps anything
day Jonathan will tell
me all; and lest it should ever be that he should think for a moment
that I kept anything
from him, I still keep my journal as usual" (254). And of course what she records is her own
it as such. It is no mistake
initial vamping,
that this is the
though she does not recognize
when Dracula comes to her. Cut off from the New Woman knowledge
she craves,
overcome
to
from
her
Mina
calls
friend,
avenge
prevented
helping
passionate
by emotion,
the vampire to her just as the sexually provocative Lucy had done earlier in the text.25 Forced
into passivity by the codes of propriety she has attempted to rewrite to allow for her own
activity, she now indeed gives in to paternalistic dictates, but in a way that Van Helsing and
Jonathan Harker could never have predicted. As the vampire materializes
in front of her,
"some leaden lethargy seemed to chain my limbs and even my will. I lay still and endured;
that was all" (255). Even as the men congratulate
themselves for protecting Mina,
she has
moment
her first direct experience of real transgression,
rendering their ideal of passive femininity
uncanny.
completely
The vampiric sex scene between Mina and Dracula acts as amanifestation
of the unfixing
of gender boundaries, a making
literal of the indeterminacy of the paradox of femininity. A
middle-class
girl who wanted to be helpful to her husband and have job skills of her own,
Mina
tried to combine active work and Victorian propriety; a young woman and teacher
who has lost her friend and prot?g?e to the most terrible of deaths, Mina only wanted
to
have an intimate relationship
that she sees as completely natural. Yet under the suspicious
gaze of Van Helsing
and the cultural
imperatives
of degeneration
theory, all her attempts
VICTORIANLITERATUREAND CULTURE
504
at self-fashioning
have become
describes the scene:
embodied
in the monstrous
form of the vampire.
Seward
as though
his face flushed,
and breathing
heavily
lay Jonathan Harker,
near
was
the
of
the
bed
outwards
the
white-clad
Kneeling
edge
facing
figure of his
a
was
wife.
her
stood
thin
clad
in
face
turned
from
but
the instant
side
black.
His
man,
us,
tall,
By
we saw it we all recognized
the Count
in every way, even to the scar on his forehead. With
his left
hand he held both Mrs Harker's
them away with her arms at full tension;
his right
hands, keeping
On
the bed beside
the window
in a stupor.
on
hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. (279; ch. 21)
This displaced vampire scene shows us not penetration of the neck as we expect, but rather
Mina sucking on the breast of the Count, creating further gender confusion. Christopher Craft
has identified the "vampire mouth" as "the central and recurring image of the novel" (109), an
unstable sign of transgressive sexuality, signaling misplaced
appetite, penetration that is not
it
Blood
and
is
the
site
of
invoking
strictly penile.
sucking
generative,
complete confusion,
all gender codes simultaneously. Whereas
the men may have been somewhat ready to finally
this vampire mouth at work, what they witness
instead is even more confusing
witness
of
the all-too-human mouth of their "star and hope." Like Harker's desperate comparison
the "devils of the Pit" to his completely pure and innocent Mina, this forced realization of the
affinities between the vampire mouth and the human make themoment even more monstrous.
the misplaced
It is the presence of the familiar within the monstrous,
quality of this floating
so
scene only as sadistic
can
that
it
Nor
read
this
of
makes
uncanny.
anxiety,
they
signifier
- the
rests
to
of
the
in
the
the
rape
exactly
myth's own terms:
key
recognizing
appeal
vampire
the vampire is about seduction and intent, not force and rape. Mina is actively participating,
and reluctantly admits her own complicity:
"strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him"
defies
all
it is a vertiginous moment
ch.
This
familiar categories;
(284,
21).26
primal image
It represents a moment
of ideological
that requires yet frustrates definition.
indeterminacy
both Seward and Mina recount the scene,
that must be recuperated but cannot. Tellingly,
and Mina's
vainly attempting to bring it back into familiar categories. Yet indeterminacy,
vampiric affinity with the Count, continues to circulate throughout the rest of the novel.
of the New Woman
and the newly pathologized
In the disorienting
cultural milieu
of
familiar model
the point where
the seemingly
friendship, Mina marks
becomes
estranged as other. Although Mina has internalized a heterosexual
as the only acceptable
space within her society, the incursion of the vampire
performance
his
into question. Despite
of femininity
radically calls any straightforward understanding
uncanny effects, Count Dracula represents a threat that is paradoxically
posed as stabilizing.
force of the charismatic and desirable
is deeply afraid of the contaminating
While Nordau
his task is to identify and destroy their alien threat.27 Van Helsing's
pursuit
degenerates,
of the vampire, and especially his diagnosis of the Count as "child-brain"
(337; ch. 25),
the contaminating
functions in a similar way, safely determining
presence and removing it
forever, making the body politic of England clean once more for "the children that are to be"
passionate
womanhood
for Van Helsing
and
(182; ch. 14). The threat of Lucy and Mina is much more problematic
the ideology he represents. While he can stake Lucy into his idea of proper female conduct,
is changing" (319;
and he can tell Seward "Madame Mina, our poor, dear Madame Mina,
the real threat of vampiric Mina is that she is always
ch. 24) to mark her as contaminated,
already
a bit vampiric
to start with. Mina's
"devouring
anxiety,"
and its intensification
into
505
Vampiric Affinities
the "vampire mouth," serves as the text's essential disruption, sparking endless discourse and
reinscription of the vampire but also ensuring that this threat will continue to circulate past
the end of the text.
Conclusion: Mina
s Vampiric Affinities
HERSELF never fully embraces the transgressive desire of the vampire. Through her
and the Englishmen
in the same codes Van Helsing
value, she
self-fashioning
to
to
with
the
Count.
Yet
her
assist the
her
attempts
affinity
constantly attempts
downplay
men and to purify herself continue to mark her connection
to the vampire. In her role as
MlNA
insistent
but also feels
she not only consoles Harker and Arthur Holmwood
comforter,
as
one
as
to
hunted
is the Count"
"I
for Dracula:
suppose
pity anything
ought
compassion
she
makes
her
connection
men's
hatred
of
the
(226; ch. 17). Reacting
vampire,
against the
to him explicit:
maternal
"That
poor
to him
dear -1
too,
soul who
though
have been
case of all.
is the saddest
has wrought
all this misery
not hold your hands from his destruction,"
[she
that...
all this long, long day of it
perhaps...
thinking
it may
[...]
You must
be pitiful
"Just
think, my
says...]
some
day...
I too may
need such pity." (305; ch. 23)
telling is her desire to render herself dead. By instructing the men to read the death
to become "real dead" like
she
rite,
gives herself over to their patriarchal control, wishing
as
the
ultimate
reads
this
Anne
request
complicity
proof of Mina's
Lucy.
Cranny-Francis
"In her acceptance of patriarchal ideology Mina asks that, if she
with her own oppression:
transgresses patriarchal norms by becoming
sexually assertive, the men should return her
to normality - rendering her sexually passive, submissive, receptive" (72). Yet such passive
- we must ask
"normality" is only possible through another aggressive act of self-fashioning
who else wanders the earth despite being dead, who else is a threat, who else do the men seek
Most
via a scapegoating
ritual. Mina here renders herself un-dead even more assuredly
than her growing fangs mark her as such.
As Van Helsing and Mina draw close to Castle Dracula during the novel's adventure-story
the three vampiric wo
is forced to recognize her growing vampirism. When
finale, Mina
men appear at their campsite, Van Helsing
turns to mystical defenses. Mina, however, feels
little fear: "Fear for me\ Why fear for me? None safer in all the world from them than I am"
(363; ch. 27). The vampire women also recognize this affinity, calling to her as a sister. Ulti
mately Mina refuses this invitation, rejecting vampiric desire even as the unclean mark on her
to disavow
forehead clears with Dracula's death. But despite this seeming rejection, the text of Dracula
keeps the radical potential of the vampire in play. If read according to a male-dominant,
functions as a successful
teleological plotline of adventure and simple expulsion, Dracula
deviant
insiders and monstrous
and
identifies
narrative
that
scapegoat
safely
efficiently
outsiders in order to cleanse the men's society and remove the mark of sin from Mina's fore
head. Things might look different, however, if we question exactly how successful Stoker's
in Gothic
strategy really is or, better, how a scapegoat function, especially
scapegoating
can
more
its
anxieties
than
raises
literature, necessarily
"predictable" ending
possibly control.
David Punter suggests that Gothic fiction is not primarily about the refixing of troubled
access to the denied
boundaries but rather about the production of "a 'negative psychology,'
506
VICTORIANLITERATUREAND CULTURE
than jumping straight from an existent situation
hopes and aspirations of a culture_Rather
to a projection of its opposite, Gothic takes us on a tour through the labyrinthine corridors of
repression, gives us glimpses of the skeletons of dead desires and makes them move again"
as a straightforward,
(409). We cannot see a Gothic narrative like Dracula
teleological
instead, the various temptations, attractions, threats,
production of normative femininity
and punishments
all work together, and in excess, to form a new picture of
prohibitions,
normative femininity
that is produced precisely by trying to somehow move outside it. An
to Punter, "Gothic
excellent example isMina's passionate friendship with Lucy. According
- on the
or unconsciously
writers work - consciously
for it is on
fringe of the acceptable,
this borderland that fear resides. In the best works, the two sides of the border are grafted
on to each other...
displaying on one side the contours of reality, the detail and structure of
everyday life, on the other the shadowy realm of myth, the lineaments of the unacceptable"
- the
In Mina's
(409-10).
friendship we see a "Gothicized"
boundary of the acceptable
and pathologized.
The shadowy
friendship itself is equally accepted, socially encouraged,
threat of lesbian desire emerges to disrupt the asexual, idealized
and only dimly understood
a male chaperon. Dracula himself
friendship of two women who share a house without
emerges as the literalization of this paradox, not because Mina and Lucy are lesbians but as
a safely monstrous
to demarcate and make
face for a new fear, a "monster of prohibition"
monstrous
a new social transgression.
Following
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen,
the borders
of prohibition
of the possible,
its grotesque
[T]he monster
polices
interdicting
through
a
some
monster
behaviors
and
is
in
this
double
actions,
narrative,
way
envaluing
body
others_Every
came to be and another,
two living stories: one that describes
how the monster
its testimony,
detailing
use the monster
serves. The monster
to demarcate
that
what
cultural
of prohibition
exists
the bonds
that system of relations
together
not - must not
be crossed.
(13)
hold
we
call
culture,
to call horrid
attention
to the borders
that can
As we see, and as Mina herself sees, the penalty for giving in to this new desire is not only
to become newly monstrous
oneself but to be hunted, attacked, and brought violently back
into normativity
seductive embrace, and the fangs
through any means necessary. Dracula's
to purify the
his kiss results in, mark both the Count and Lucy as the scapegoats necessary
community of men, and of women, of potential threats to the dominant social system.
are not only prohibitive,
Monsters
they are also infinitely attractive. By representing the
promise of sexuality forbidden to Lucy by her mother and the marriage market, Dracula
presents an attractive if taboo model of sexual freedom. But as we have seen, he is also
attractive to Mina not because of sex per se but because of Mina's own vexed relationship
to knowledge. Due to Van Helsing's
repeated efforts to infantilize her through paternalistic
itself has become taboo for Mina: "tabooed objects are those to which
injunction, knowledge
one in which
we summon up not a simple emotional
the mind
reaction but a dialectical
oscillates between attraction and repulsion, worship and condemnation"
(Punter 410). In his
attempts to protect Mina and mystify his own "common sense" knowledge, Van Helsing has
rendered knowledge
itself taboo for Mina. And even more paradoxically,
proper femininity
of
itself has become unclear - all she wants is to help her husband, to solve the mystery
to her friend, and to feel that her work as lady journalist is useful. Yet
what happened
of
in the context of Van Helsing's
press's pillorying
suspicious gaze and the conservative
as the great threat to society, Mina's
self image has become a site of
the New Woman
507
Vampiric Affinities
sex. Now
"emotional ambivalence"
(Punter 410), not unlike Lucy's taste for extra-marital
as well as sexual potential, Dracula has become even more
both a site of tabooed knowledge
attractive to his next victim: "This corporal fluidity, this simultaneity of anxiety and desire,
ensures that the monster will always dangerously
entice" (Cohen 19). Comprised of all Van
worries
and
all
of
Lucy's
longings and desires, and all of Mina's
Helsing's
prohibitions,
and
Dracula
has become the perfect monster of the
ambitions,
"devouring anxiety,"
musings,
Victorian
fin de si?cle.
is a fundamental
the cultural work a monster
gap between
performs and the
as amonster
monster
novel
allows.
the
form
of
the
Gothic
message
By creating
of prohibition and often literalizing the threat that the human who transgresses will indeed
are not only enforced,
be treated as a monster as well, cultural imperatives of normativity
are
as
to
live
else
becomes unthinkable.
naturalized
the
viable
way
only
they
anything
Whereas
the Gothic narrative demands closure, it also requires that the closure fail to contain
is also always the
the transgressions
the story has put into play. The monster of prohibition
monster of attraction, a figure with whom we identify, a site of attractive/repulsive
desire.
There
the narrative
The text is compelling precisely because the formation of monsters,
and thus the ideological
definition of what counts as human, is a never-ending
performative process.28 Encouraged
to enact the privileged
both consciously
and subconsciously
scripts of normative identity as
the only thinkable mode of being, the subject must always exist precariously
close to falling
into the realm of the abject, or, inmore Gothic terms, the monstrous. Gothic novels gain their
- that the
this ideological paradox
natural, the only thinkable way
power by investigating
to gain credibility and to give it form. But as Fred Botting
of existing, needs the monstrous
it seeks to uphold:
reveals, playing with monsters
always subverts the same boundaries
Constructed
monster
also
as a figure of transgression,
to disclose
internal
begins
an other
that marks
contradictions
within
out
the boundaries
discursive
of discourse,
the
frameworks_Monsters
are
to remain
in a fixed
inherent
instabilities:
thus produced
space of
by and also reveal
refusing
or to be contained
a
at the margins
of any one position,
they pose
permanently
shifting
of significant
transformations.
The excess
that is constructed
and produce
the possibility
challenge
exclusion
by various
positions
in order
to define
their
limits
also works
upon
and within
them,
inhabiting
and
undermining the fixity of their boundaries. (26-27)
are always
Because monsters
outside of normativity,
the constitutive
the scapegoats
constructed of society's devouring anxieties, they can never safely be tucked away. Revenants
and the outside
always return because the "human" is always a category under reconstruction,
must be constantly re-articulated so the inside can imagine itself as stable, viable, natural.
Mina Harker represents exactly this paradox as she attempts to survive Dracula's
invasion
and seduction - and Van Helsing's
ritual
of
scapegoat
community
cleansing. Through his
sciences of degeneration
and sexology, Van Helsing proves Dracula and Lucy are monsters
of prohibition,
legitimizing his violence to reaffirm his own ideology as the natural one. And
this scapegoat ritual seems concluded:
through the mythic quality of Dracula's destruction,
once Mina's
scar clears, normativity
is reaffirmed. The journal entry that concludes
the
this same conclusion.
In this final
novel, written by Jonathan Harker, seeks to emphasize
note, Harker reports that seven years later all is well. The adventurers have returned to
as tourists to go "over the old ground" again (373; ch. 27). The whole scene
Transylvania
seems rather antiseptic - the old threat of danger is clean and pure, a safe place for the
VICTORIANLITERATUREAND CULTURE
508
to revisit. He and Mina have a son, whom they have named for the dead Quincey
assure propriety; Mina's
new marriages,
This child, and Seward and Holmwood's
as
to
attests
of
the
and patriarchy. And
silent
mother
presence
reinscription
homosociality
the fact that they have no real "proof" for the contents of the journal - "nothing but amass of
to have happened. Normativity
(374) makes the story seem too unbelievable
type-writing"
seems restored without a hitch, symbolized by silent, maternal Mina holding her child.
Yet things are not really this tidy. Harker's note reveals that Dracula's
power is still
new tourism
which
he
The
that
the
societal
anxieties
circulate.
still
manifest,
represents
finds an indelible reminder of vampiric threat Castle Dracula has not changed a bit. Most
tourists
Morris.
though, is the very presence of Mina's
typewriting. Not only does the evidence
disturbing,
still exist despite Harker's denial, it retains the form that gives Mina her power and identity.
even if Harker refuses to acknowledge
is still discernible,
it.
The mark of the New Woman
Harker would make of Mina and the entire story what Van Helsing once called her, a "good
lesson for the children that are to be" (182; ch. 14). The final words of the novel, from Van
in a children's tale: "This boy
recuperation as a model
Helsing of course, complete Mina's
is. Already he knows her
will some day know what a brave a gallant woman his mother
sweetness and loving care; later on he will understand how some men so loved her, that they
to combat Harker or Van Helsing within
did dare much for her sake" (374; ch. 27). Unable
Harker's note, silent Mina seems indeed to be contained inside a standard Victorian position.
The apparent stability of this final note, however, is framed by the opening note of the novel.
This note asks us to believe the story as factual and unbiased:
How
in sequence will be made
clear in the writing
of them. All needless
these papers have been placed
so that a history
at variance
have been eliminated,
with
of the latter
almost
the possibilities
no statement
is throughout
of past events wherein
belief may
stand forth as simple
fact. There
matters
day
memory
within
are exactly
may err, for all the records chosen
contemporary,
them, (xxx)
of those who made
the range of knowledge
given
from
the standpoints
and
into the text of
This note, stressing the accuracy of the written record Mina has compiled
warns
to
dismiss
the
valuable
belief"
that
Dracula,
knowledge
might try
against "latter-day
it stresses that
contained within. Like Mina's
journal entry after her initial vamping,
or problematic
for Van Helsing's
is present in the text, even if it is unseemly
everything
men try to make
or
matter
No
how
the
conclusion.
Harker's
gaze
stabilizing
normalizing
this final image of too
Dracula simply prohibition, his attraction remains and overwhelms
neat propriety.
This paradox of monstrosity,
then, is also the paradox of femininity. The idealized proper
- Harker's chivalric
"star and hope," Eliza Lynn Linton's "non
Van
ideal,
Helsing's
lady
- is
an
as
Just as Drac
much
worker"
glaring
just
impossible being as the vampire-as-monster.
in too pure a form, neither can Mina
is constituted
ula cannot exist because his monstrosity
30)
'good' little Victorian Miss" exist (Ledger, "The New Woman"
as-"stereotypically
no woman
could ever possibly measure
up to the stereotype. Failure is assured. Unless
version of
"star and hope," unless she can be a self-reflective
Mina can pass as Van Helsing's
and play that role perfectly, she can be read as monster and justifiably
Linton's "cow-woman"
exterminated. Thus we get no final comment from Mina on her married life, whether she is
indeed truly the happy wife and mother Harker makes her out to be. Indeed, Mina isn't even
- Van
is the one who has
the one holding her child as her maternal bliss is described
Helsing
509
Vampiric Affinities
"our boy on his knees" (374; ch. 27). We must rely on Harker for the image of wedded and
maternal bliss, but Mina's journal has amply exposed the danger of taking Harker at his word.
Thus we have reached an impasse - Van Helsing's
internalization
suspicious gaze, Mina's
of that gaze as the true limit of the thinkable (for to think otherwise
is to reveal monstrosity
- a full
infinite attractiveness. Mina's
and to court destruction),
but also Dracula's
story
record of her New Woman
affinities, her problematic
friendship with Lucy, the desirability
of a monster, and her overacted propriety - will be passed on to her child. Mina has indeed
become a "lesson for the children that are to be." Yet if we take seriously the complexity of
this ambivalent text, with all its devouring anxiety and vampiric affinities in place, what her
lessons will teach may not be as secure as Van Helsing might like to think.
and University
Southern Vermont College
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
NOTES
We
like to thank David
would
for reading,
proofreading,
their valuable
and rigorous
and support of Sarah Doig,
A. H. Hirsch,
Julia Saville,
Gretchen
and Mary Ann Giorgio
has benefited
from
Soderlund,
and critiquing
various
drafts of this article. The
as we have benefited
and
insights
suggestions,
Lori DuBois,
Eric Fisher,
and Jeff Harshbarger
article
from
during
the understanding
the many
years of
its composition.
and Armstrong
and influentially
both have argued persuasively
that the image of the "proper
in conduct
and domestic
circulated
books
fiction
the way women
viewed
lady" that was
shaped
themselves
the late eighteenth
and nineteenth
centuries.
during
that Dracula
the contradictions
within
argues
Similarly,
"reproduces
Cranny-Francis
fictionally
1. Poovey
2.
bourgeois
a threat
attributes
and
ideology
to the male
then
or neutralizes
resolves
the passive,
which
suggest
order,
feminine
them"
(64). Whereas
Lucy
represents
vampiric
as a kind of patriarchal
"the
patsy:
are progressively
assertiveness
appropriated
Mina
functions
to Mina
power,
given
ability,
around her. Her intelligence
is seen as a masculine
access
to women;
it is not naturally
available
while
the men
by
gained
woman
of male
by a display
physical,
in the text to suggest
is nothing
is averted
submission.
Kline
There
even
intellectual
any kind
to which
attribute
she has
somehow
the potential
threat of the intelligent
and sexual dominance
and of female
in the
of belief
'New Woman'"
(72).
character:
"Mina
is not
any complexity
completely
rejecting
a sentimental
at all. She is an age-old
male chauvinist's
really dual-faceted
fantasy figure, an archetype,
in every single aspect of her character"
dream
(130).
toMangum,
3. According
"After the passage
of the Married Women's
Acts of 1882 and 1891
Property
women
women
more
of
earned
their
middle-class
moved
income,
guaranteed
possession
confidently
as teachers, nurses, midwives,
into the workforce
and journalists"
Similar
clerks, writers,
(Married!).
goes
advances
many
were
new
made
5.
Sarah
Woman
(New Woman
Sarah
Grand
(111-18),
were
1898,
novels
the New
80,000
and
Woman
and Senfs
notes:
all
girls
the
"During
committed
over
1880s
1870s,
to high academic
the age of twelve were
an erotic
subversion
see Mangum's
discussion
Ledger's
politics,
Novel,
introduction
In his highly
influential
article "Kiss Me with
threat to Victorian
"Immobilized
gender norms:
awaits
'deadly fear,' Harker
of the self and the thorough
founded,
and
1890s
standards,
attending
17).
Grand's
and
as Ledger
for women,
for girls
teachers.
By
secondary
and trained
schools"
secondary
4. For discussions
of
The New
in education
schools
examinations
Militant:
in Mina's
further,
Those
fulfillment
to The Heavenly
Red Lips," Craft
Married,
reveals
Harker's
of
by the competing
imperatives
that entails both the dissolution
of conventional
Victorian
gender
codes,
and
Middlebrow,
of The Heavenly
Twins.
Twins
passivity
'wicked desire'
of
which
in
as a
and
the boundaries
constrained
510
VICTORIANLITERATUREAND CULTURE
to the more
the mobility
of sexual desire and varieties
of genital
behavior
by according
the right and responsibility
of vigorous
while
the more
appetite,
requiring
active
to
female
passive
male
'suffer
and be still"'(108).
6. Fleissner
a compelling
answer
to the question
of Mina's
labor by placing
of nineteenth-century
clerical work
for women.
Fleissner
offers
historical
1870s
her
discourse
toWorld
up
"women's
disavowal
and
increasingly
I, women
War
clerical
was
work
alarm.
becoming
gained
not
simply
economic
and social
increasing
a historical
to which
scandal
in the developing
that from the
reveals
as secretaries:
acceptance
citizens
responded
with
In the period
was composed,
was
rather, typewriting
during which Dracula
as part of an acceptable
viewed
narrative
of a middle-class
woman's
life. The
as a position
a woman
be one of how secretarial
work gets figured
from which
then, would
question,
can go home again - to become
we
the idealized mother
an excellent
While
Fleissner
offers
historical
discussion
see Mina
on that final
become
of
the emergence
this compelling
social
(419).
page"
the feminization
of
of
on how
she does not fully comment
narrative
with
work,
competed
the equally
narrative
of the pathologized
New Woman
worker.
She also downplays
Mina's
powerful
as thinker and writer,
for Van Helsing,
and even
Seward,
agency
casting her as simply a stenographer
as stenography
to see Mina's
not simply
Dracula
himself.
It is crucial
work
from male
but
bosses,
also as an ambivalent
claim to identity based on her creative work as a journalist
and her "devouring
clerical
(Stoker
anxiety"
7. As Wicke
notes
254;
of
19) at being
ch.
dialect
journalistic
the modern
in Dracula:
to highlight
the loquacious
transcribing
works
of Dracula.
*
standard'
The
attention.
According
on journalism
as much
to be
as adding
to anyone's
of the zookeeper
of the habits
knowledge
serves
as a theater
for the staging
of class differences
when
its
page
can erupt with
the quoted,
of lower-class
modes
of
vigorous
orality
English
(475).
speech"
8. The question
of Stoker's
the knowledge
she collects.
in the novel,
this emphasis
seems
"the point
of the article
included
dialect
newspaper
written
cut off from
other
Dracula
to Ledger,
and
its relation
Stoker,
like many
to the New
male
Woman
has
extensive
received
on the Woman
writers
critical
is part of the
is
sexuality
Question,
as "daughters
the New Women
of decadence"
whose
backlash,
presenting
a "degenerate
which must be extinguished"
aberration
Woman
focuses
Whereas
(New
100).
Ledger
sisters" as New Women,
Johnson
that Mina's
argues
solely on Lucy and the three "weird
relationship
conservative
as well
to work,
Women.
that Mina
traditional
as Lucy's
to sex, constitute
sufficient
for considering
both as New
grounds
relationship
In perhaps
the most
influential
article on the New Woman
in Dracula,
Senf acknowledges
some of the characteristics
to
shares
of New Womanhood
but stresses
her commitment
womanhood:
the independence
and intelligence
[T]he second half [of the novel] centers on a woman who combines
often associated with the New Woman with traditional femininity - Mina Harker....
That she is not a
- the
can be seen in her criticism of the New Woman writers, her choice of profession
New Woman
as
for
their
New Woman writers favored such nontraditional
and
business
medicine,
nursing,
professions
to marry and her subsequent relationship with her husband, her desire to nurture
heroines - her decision
and protect children, and - most clearly - her response to Dracula himself.
(45-46)
we
While
the best
we
agree with
Senfs
of the traditional
re-examine
most
that Stoker "tries to show
analysis
he creates
the heroine
the new when
final
and
of Senfs
criteria
that distance
Mina
from
of a problematic
the boundary
her performance
identity unfixes
gender
and decadence.
the social milieu
of sexology,
degeneration,
to New Woman
later novels
but he argues
9. Glover
links Stoker's
fiction,
how
their
and devices,
tropes
revisionist
conclusions"
reworking
of Grand's
them
the women's
-
the New Woman,
movement
Mina
Harker"
focusing
of femininity
that "Stoker
and pressing
of Otto Weineger.
turning
against
influenced
(106) that are strongly
by the work
Twins
in his novel The Man
The Heavenly
(1905),
can combine
women
that modern
of Dracula
see Glover
instead
(49),
on
as part of
redeployed
home
sharply
For Stoker's
109-15.
511
Vampiric Affinities
10. Discussing
homosexual
Harker's
journal
is dressed
affair
bridal
his
or monstrous
and
itmakes
desire
heterosexual
as she disseminates
colors
because
of
it, Schaffer
writes
"The
that
record
of
a
a heterosexual
comes when
real escape
from the closet
relationship_His
no difference"
Harker's
(405). Whether
journal reveals homosexual
a large difference
for
(or both), we can see that it does indeed make
to all who will
sexual history
read it.
of a girls' boarding
Woods
and Miss
Jane Pirie,
sued
school, Miss Marianne
Dame Helen
for libel. Dame Gordon's
who was born in India, the
Gordon
Cumming
granddaughter,
man
child of an English
and an Indian woman,
told her that these two schoolmistresses
"engaged
in 'improper
and criminal
conduct'"
the girl shared a bed with
(Faderman
147). As was customary,
Mina
11.
secret
of
to look just like a
wedding,
Harker's
her
"his
and
wishes:
fully accepts
ignorance
his wife never blames him for his past
his homosexual
in the pastel
that Mina
argues
gift" (405). Schaffer
fear and impotence
evaporate
actually
secret does not affect his heterosexual
he reveals
treatment
and Mina's
two mistresses
In 1811
she
Pirie;
bed:
her husband's
that "she had been kept from sleeping
told her grandmother
come
of the night Miss Woods
would
into their
Pirie's
climb
side,
confirmed
on
the story,
Pirie,
top of Miss
and Dame
Gordon
shake
and
on
passed
the bed"
the
room,
(148). Miss
in her
goings-on
into bed on Miss
strange
by
In the middle
get
Munro,
Woods'
to all parents
information
of
bed-mate,
the girls
at the
school.Woods and Pirie claimed that "they had no notion" (147) of the impropriety with which they
were
charged.
In 1819
the House
not
imagine
Englishwomen
that Miss
Cumming,
having
accusation
would
of Lords
what
doing
been
in favor
Lord
(148).
of Woods
accused
Cumming
in the lascivious
raised
in Britain"
stir
judged
Miss
as well
as their investment
to the charges,
in an asexual
woman
was capable
of such action, he said. 'There is not
no
had
East,
Justice-Clerk
and Pirie,
them
of:
"The
idea of
for
they
too could
judges
suggested
the horror
such an
summed
reaction
up the Lords'
Hope
"No British
image of English
femininity:
a prostitute
are
so blasted
as these women
certain of the purity of the women
whom
he knew
Cumming.'
intimately,
Being
of respectable
'I have no more
of the purity of these women
birth.
of the
suspicion
for a
he stated,
'than I have of my own wife'"
147-53
(150). See Faderman
guilt of the pursuers,'
full discussion
of this court case and the Lords'
judgment.
described
he was
by Miss
convinced
number
of critics address
the lesbian potential
of Le Fanu's
vampire
an example
evil" narratives,
of late-nineteenth-century
"lesbian
holding
Heller
draws out the intimate connections
between
Carmilla
and Laura's
12. A
as the ambiguity
of the story's ending.
Signorotti
text but argues
that Dracula
closes down whatever
13. Moore
a powerful
asserts
simply
offers
critique
female
of Faderman's
sees
it
considers
story. Faderman
up a threat to be destroyed.
as well
growing
subjectivity,
as a potentially
lesbian
positive
text opens up.
that
of same-sex
friendships,
arguing
"Carmilla"
Le Fanu's
potential
consideration
were
what was at
often accepted
rather than analyzing
friendships
in this acceptance.
Moore
the
instead asks, "What were
the histories,
the ideological
functions,
effects
of the harmless
and the failures
of these assertions
and sexless
female
(9) In
friendships?"
our consideration
rather than simply asserting
that Mina
of Dracula,
and Lucy "are" passionate
friends
Faderman
stake
or that they "are" lesbians, we seek to draw out the
of Mina
functions
and ideological
implications
and Lucy's
within
this
cultural
discourse
of
Also,
positioning
friendship.
highly
complex
passionate
see the special
in depth the question
of
issue of Nineteenth-Century
Context
(2001), which
explores
women's
14. Ledger
codes"
and
friendships
notes
that because
(New Woman
was perceived
the dandy undermined
Woman
deemed
to be crucial
observe,
there were
themselves
political
aesthetic
lesbian
sexuality;
the New Woman
this
issue was
and
the dandy
associated
was completed.
Victorian
sexual
"Whilst
the New
95), they were
press:
lumped
together
by the conservative
as a direct threat to classic Victorian
and
the decadent
definitions
of femininity,
the Victorians'
valorisation
of a robust, muscular
brand of British masculinity
to the maintenance
of the British
between
sharp differences
to be natural
allies"
(Ledger, New
New Woman
after our essay
published
"both overtly
challenged
writers
with
like Sarah Grand
Oscar Wilde
Empire"
the New Woman
(94). Yet
and
Woman
94). As Mangum
tried to distance
themselves
and other Decadents.
Despite
as both Ledger
and Mangum
who "did not perceive
the dandy
self-consciously
explains,
from the art-for-art's-sake
their different
political
platforms,
VICTORIANLITERATUREAND CULTURE
512
actual
and consumers
"critics
however,
tended to collapse
the New
as degenerates"
types
together
or as fictional
writers
Woman
and
-
the Decadent
("Style Wars"
whether
as
49).
15. Krafft-Ebing inPsychopathia Sexualis ( 1886) and Ellis inSexual Inversion ( 1897) construct elaborate
taxonomies
on the style of work Lombroso
in his Criminal
Man
drawing
developed
of
Decadent
combines
both theories,
the
(1895)
Degeneration
deviancy
reading
Ellis
the
their artistic works
and onto their bodies. While
and later Freud discredit
of difference,
Nordau's
(1876).
artists
through
of degeneration,
concept
Foucault.
by
For
excellent
a large part
it plays
discussions
the cultural
of
in the criminalization
of
see Gilman,
of degeneration,
politics
as discussed
the homosexual
Arata,
Greenslade,
and Pick.
16. Noting
erotic
Women
that, "The New
relations
with
the end
of
other women"
the fin de
of
(New Woman
131), Ledger
their problematic
and pronouncements,
methodology
to women.
articulate
their attraction
17. Mrs.
Westenra,
she has
seems
Lucy's mother,
left all of her wealth
to be
si?cle
opened
in control
her
to describe
the language
their
the
that
suggests
despite
sexologists,
to
up a discursive
space for lesbians
hadn't
life. As we
of her daughter's
solicitor's
death,
wishes)
(against
not to marry
this man. Through
should she decide
Lucy
impoverished
into the heterosexual
her daughter's
See
passage
regime of marriage.
18. While
FitzGerald
that Mina
and Lucy's
mutual
confession
argues
to Arthur
inheritance
Johnson,
offers
learn after Lucy's
Holm
wood,
the mother
leaving
insures
Life"
(28-29).
a "quasi-sexual
(42), she downplays
"Dual
them
to be enjoyed most
in circumstances
of physical
pleasure...
intimacy"
something
nature of their friendship.
the potentially
homoerotic
as a technology
"The truth
the social function
of confession
of subject formation:
19. Foucault
outlines
did not reside
in the subject who,
formed.
It was
would
reveal
it wholly
solely
by confessing,
in two
constituted
reach
completion
the forgiving
master,
function"
hermeneutic
20.
Dracula's
social
sexuality.
the human:
in the one who
to itself,
but incomplete,
blind
stages: present
in the one who assimilated
and recorded
it_The
the judge
who
or acquitted;
condemned
it could only
spoke,
listened was not simply
the master
of truth. His was a
one who
he was
(66-67).
are
significations
Yet
his monstrosity,
"The self-evident
as
nearly
following
nature of
infinite
Halberstam's
the
'human'
as
his
infamous
perverse
polymorphously
to the formulation
of
is essential
theory,
or
as the destruction
in Gothic
is constructed
Because
allows us a peek at the construction
of the other....
of its readability,
monstrosity
inscription
out of the raw materials
of otherness
of racial undesirability,
class definition,
ties, sexual
family
not
what
is
and gender
The
human,
monster,
therefore,
produces
by
embodying
perversity,
instability.
as a discursive
the human
21.
For
effect"
a discussion
chapter
Like
of the ideological
on the Wilde
trials).
so much
complex
theorists
else
inDracula,
(45).
function
Stoker's
to Mina.
its relation
through
of degeneration:
"The Count
common
of Gramscian
invocation
of Lombroso
is a criminal
see Arata
(14-19,
and his
and Nordau
becomes
unexpectedly
names
these two
who
Helsing,
would
Lombroso
Nordau
and
type.
not Van
it is Mina,
Indeed,
sense,
and of criminal
so classify him, and qua criminal he is of imperfectly formedmind" (337; ch. 25). Although Mina, and
seems
to invoke Nordau
Stoker,
by extension
that Mina,
with all her New Woman
wits about
to note
it is essential
here,
approvingly
rebuke Van Helsing
in order to quietly
Van
discourse.
Just prior to her statement,
and Lombroso
her, names
them
her knowledge
of current psychological
displaying
as a psychologist
has
assumed
knows
this criminology
that
Seward
theory but that pure, good
Helsing
not Seward,
not but once"
Madame
Mina
is ignorant,
"For crime touch you not
(336). Yet it isMina,
by
as a "child-brain"
More
of Dracula
the significance
of Van Helsing's
degenerate.
diagnosis
she hesitates
isMina's
"man-brain."
than the vampire's
"child-brain,"
however,
Although
if I seem egotistical"
her knowledge,
that "you will
forgive me
demurely
requesting
even
asks Seward
Van
she cannot
resist asserting
her intellect.
(338),
Helsing
though
Significantly,
ends with Mina
to write
to share with
the other men,
the chapter
about
this realization
up notes
who
grasps
dangerous
to display
513
Vampiric Affinities
her
employing
versation.
22.
to record
typewriter
"all
she brought
since
the MS.
to us"
(339),
this con
including
-
in the novel
his overstated
Dracula
himself.
Despite
to the Englishmen:
because
he is uncannily
similar
"he
terrifying
his enemies
in several
he is (or once was) human,
he is European,
he is
important ways:
will"
and has a most
Stoker has Harker
(213). When
say "he would
intelligent
powerful
a wonderful
than a joke. The scapegoated
must
solicitor"
Dracula
(31; ch. 3), it is more
also
Spencer
locates
another
is most
Dracula
differences,
resembles
extremely
have made
scapegoat
be killed by the combined efforts of the "little band of men" (373; ch. 27) - only when this particular
can masculinist,
is exorcised
demon
heterosexist
normativity
pass
again
as unproblematically
"natural."
23.
in her
has explored
this phenomenon
Sedgwick
an identity
As
the homosexual
becomes
a way
becomes
paradigm),
homophobia
via a paradoxical
ascertain
whether
to ascertain
able
exertion
(88-89).
of
codes
cipline.
24. Wicke
is not
that he
or
of physical
a collection
than
to regulate
sins
in Between
panic
or acts
the persecution
of the few
through
men be unable
must
to
homosexual
only
no
man
must
but
be
violence,
homophobic
"Not
identity:
the objects
of 'random'
are not)
(that his bonds
a relatively
small
and filiation"
In this way,
homosexual.
rules great reaches
of behavior
potentially
and imagined
for breaking
self-scrutiny
punishment
a potential
(89) renders
every person
"blackmailability"
Through
legal
constant
conduct,
societal
Men.
(the Foucauldian
compulsion
the normative
object
of dis
an interesting
as she "daubs her feet with mud,
of Mina's
reading
self-presentation
in the night can alert any sleepy voyeur who
of white
foot or ankle twinkling
reflection
out a window"
In the context
of Mina's
shorthand
(480-81).
looking
journal, we as readers
offers
so that no
be
might
are implicated
in this voyeurism
enmired.
as
will
even
be underscored
text
the
The
earth-bound,
thoroughly
earthiness
scandal
in her hour
us
"presents
occurs
of
for
intense
subliminally
the reader's
decorum"
us as readers and herself.
for two voyeurs:
self-image
as exceedingly
to her own mind's-eye
and she must present
herself
as "earth-bound"
to penetrate
and imagines
herself
her friend's
of propriety
Mina's
recognize
escape
of
the many
of homosexual
uncertainty
they are to be
of homosexual
discussion
rather
her
with
the
eyes
alone,
(481).
She
image of a Mina
so that Mina's
In fact Mina
presents
her
is her own
proper
here,
audience,
primary
as she marks
herself
are supposed
to
neck herself. We
to both Lucy and Dracula
but we also see her connections
that
propriety,
at key moments
This pattern will
continue
control.
the rest of the
throughout
fastidious
authorial
novel.
25.
sex and work,
of the New Woman,
Johnson
between
aspects
troubling
implicitly
splits up the most
at one point calls a 'dual life' - a life of
what Van Helsing
and Mina:
"each woman
Lucy
develops
to her society
conscious
and willing
and yet also a life of largely
subconscious
rebellion
conformity
it. In the case of each woman,
Dracula
her inner rebelliousness,
and its crisis
symbolizes
against
coincides
26.
her commerce
this key
Spencer
analyzes
her blood,
but also her will
reader,
Victorian
as Mina
27. As
and
this might
lessen
the crime,
curable,
re-citation
beings,
desire
(21).
between
He
since
reassured
they
but for Victorians
than
rather
sexual
desire
that
activity
under Dracula's
is the true source
of danger;
and
attentions"
(217).
a xenophobic
source of comfort
for the criminologists
cause
the bourgeoisie
that these instabilities
all had one common
from
the outside,
from
the atavistic,
infertile,
childlike
mind
of
our sense of subjectivity
the ways
is constructed
explores
by a process
and socially
validated
of normativity:
codes
"This exclusionary
matrix
are formed
thus requires
the simultaneous
of a domain
of abject
production
are not yet 'subjects,'
to the domain
but who
form the constitutive
outside
of the
of dominant
subjects
those who
came
and rape: "Dracula
not only
has drained
seducer
than rapist. For a modern
terms, more
have been infinitely worse.
seduction
In
would
seduction
is, in sexual
she experiences
is actually
this thought
recognizes,
"Nordau
sexologists:
by which
Dracula"
to resist.
the degenerate"
(475).
In Bodies
that Matter
Butler
of
with
distinction
it is sexual
theory,
herself makes
clear,
S?der
and were
28.
with
VICTORIANLITERATUREAND CULTURE
514
zones
of social
and 'uninhabitable'
'unlivable'
here precisely
those
The abject designates
subject.
are nevertheless
do not enjoy
the status of the subject,
life which
by those who
populated
densely
to circumscribe
of the
the domain
is required
the sign of the 'unlivable'
but whose
living under
subject" (3).
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