Identity Bites: Sexuality and Gender in Dracula
Hannah Lamberg, University of Florida
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) challenges standard Victorian values by incorporating supernatural and gothic elements. Nineteenth century, middle-class England valued women that did not stray from the boundaries created by a primarily masculine-centered society. For example, women were expected not to have an overt sexuality, as well as to stay in and tend to the home, under the eye of their working husbands. Many classic nineteenth century novels use these “fictional” creations in order to depict realistic anxieties, such as a fear of change from these standard sexualities and gender roles of women. Throughout the piece, the only two female characters in the novel, Lucy and Mina, often are represented on opposite sides of the spectrum. Lucy and Mina are foils for each other, so the anxieties associated with identity and selfhood in femininity are shown from multiple perspectives. Dracula shows the transformation of identity and selfhood through the differing depictions of Lucy and Mina as their gender roles and sexualities change throughout the novel.
Lucy and Mina’s differing sexual desires represent the fear of change in a woman’s sexuality, highlighting Dracula as a classic Victorian work addressing selfhood. Lucy is constantly sexualized throughout the novel, even before she turns into a vampire. For example, Lucy writes to Mina describing times from their upbringing detailing instances of sharing a bed and changing together: “Mina, we have told all our secrets to each other since we were children; we have slept together and eaten together….” (Stoker 45). Lucy continues, “I wish I were with you, dear, sitting by the fire undressing, as we used to sit…” (Stoker 45). In the context of this story, the reader is not meant to construe Lucy’s words with a sexual connotation; however, Stoker’s choice to implement this choice of wording cannot be ignored. This can be read as seemingly “risqué” homosexuality in the relationship between Lucy and Mina. The fact that Lucy is the one narrating this point also is significant because she is the figure that poses as an example of hyper-sexuality as the novel progresses. In addition, Lucy voices that she wants to break conventional female sexuality, but then remembers that she is not “allowed” to voice this opinion. Lucy conveys that she is sought after by three men at the beginning of the piece. In a letter to Mina, Lucy relays the stories of her three suitors and feels badly that she cannot marry all three men. “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble? But this is heresy, and I must not say it” (Stoker 48). Here, Lucy is sexualized because she challenges the Victorian standard of a sexually repressed and married woman. This contrast furthers once Dracula turns Lucy into a vampire.
Lucy’s initial forwardness is heightened with her transformation. Any unaccepted thoughts that Lucy had before as a female human are now manifested as a member of the vampire race. It is as if Stoker is arguing that a woman should not be sexually forward and progressive as a human, so when Dracula bites Lucy and she becomes a member of the vampire race, she can be seen to embrace her “true identity.” All of her underlying emotions are reflected through her vampirism, including the vampire kiss and bite. “Indeed, as we have seen, the vampiric kiss excites a sexuality so mobile, so insistent, that it threatens to overwhelm the distinctions of gender…” (Craft 117). Craft discusses the fact that a vampire not only instills fear in the characters of the novel; a vampire kiss can induce a sort of inexplicable pleasure. This blurs the line between fear and arousal because the species line is altered, as well. Lucy goes through the transition of being pure on the surface to being overtly sexualized. This occurs in the graveyard scene in Dracula, in which Lucy is seen as a murderous vampire in front of all of the men. Seward describes in a sexual yet disapproving way: "As she looked, her eyes blazed with unholy light, and the face became wretched with a voluptuous smile. Oh, G-d, how it made me shudder to see it!” (Stoker 160). This is significant because Lucy is described multiple times in this sequence to be stripped of her purity because she is oozing in wantonness and heartlessness.
Here, the fear of an aggressive woman is highlighted because all of the adjectives used to describe Lucy’s new vampiric state are negative and related to an increased sexuality. The men in the graveyard are in pursuit to kill the sexually aggressive woman in Lucy: “That these men are on a sex hunt is borne out from the beginning when Van Helsing tells Dr. Seward that Lucy has become a vampire and then must take the enraged doctor to the cemetery to show him proof” (Wicke 593). Since Lucy is consistently sexualized, she overpowers the fear of an aggressive female sexuality.
While Lucy may be the symbol for this fear of a sexually aggressive woman in Dracula, the actual portrayal of this anxiety is done at the hands of Dracula, himself. Specifically, Dracula instills a fear of change from the customary Victorian society of stagnant women by passing on his bloodlust to those he turns. “Gothic sexuality, furthermore, manifests itself as a kind of technology, a productive force which transforms the blood of the native into the lust of the other—as an economy which unites the threat of the foreign and perverse within a single monstrous body” (Halberstam 345). This quote serves to explain the role reversal in the vampiric transformation: the somewhat innocent Lucy is bitten by Dracula and grows to have the same bloodlust as her creator. This fear of sexuality is not just apparent in Lucy’s transformation. Dracula’s means of reproduction is inherently a sexual act. To turn Lucy into a vampire, there has to be a blood exchange between both of them. “Dracula is a perverse and multiple figure because he transforms pure and virginal women into seductresses, produces sexuality through their willing bodies. The transformations of Lucy (and Mina) stress an urgent sexual appetite…” (Halberstam 344). Dracula is not only able to strip Lucy of her virgin state; he is able to plague her with his intense sexual desire. All of the women that Dracula turns exhibit this heightened sexuality, which both shows the fear and inexplicable excitement of an aggressive female character, highlighting Dracula as a nineteenth century work addressing female sexual identity.
Conversely, Mina is not sought after by multiple men, showing a non-sexual female figure. This not only lessens her sexual appeal; it allows most of the aggressive sexuality to be exhibited by Lucy. Arguably, Lucy maintains the major focus of female sexuality throughout the novel. Also, Mina is shown to only to be with one man, Jonathan, throughout the novel. She begins the novel engaged to Jonathan and ends the novel married to him with a child. Furthermore, Mina is only as sexual as a repressed and motherly, Victorian woman should have been at the time. She caters to the working men in the novel without flirting with them as Lucy is shown to do. “Mina represents a maternal sexuality as she nurtures and caters to the brave Englishmen who are fighting for her honor and body. The foreign sexuality that confronts these women is defined in opposition to ‘normal’ sexual functions; this forces the reader to annex ‘natural’ and native sexuality” (Halberstam 335). Here, her controlled and “feminine” sexuality acts as a tool to express her accepted gender role portrayal. Mina is consistently portrayed as the epitome of a nineteenth century, Victorian woman: working for her husband and being sexually repressed.
The way in which Stoker characterizes Lucy and Mina shows the fear of change from the standard female gender roles of nineteenth century England, in addition to sexuality. Stoker challenges the female gender archetype by pitting Lucy and Mina against each other in their developments. Specifically, Mina is portrayed as a working woman, only under the care and watch of her soon-to-be-husband, Jonathan Harker. Mina writes in a letter to Lucy, “I have been working very hard lately, because I want to keep up with Jonathan’s studies, and I have been practising shorthand very assiduously. When we are married I shall be able to be useful to Jonathan, and if I can stenograph well enough I can take down what he wants to say…” (Stoker 44). This excerpt from Mina’s letter explains that her aspiration to learn how to use a typewriter and be an “assistant schoolmistress” is fueled by her desire to help Jonathan. Mina is admired for her innocence, as Van Helsing describes Mina, “She is one of G-d’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” (Stoker 206). Lucy, on the other hand, is described by her physical beauty, not her innocent nature. After her transformation, Lucy is able to excite the men around her, as her overt sexual nature is displayed and her gender role is changed, too.
Lucy’s sense of motherhood is challenged after her transition into a vampire, as well. The reproductive abilities and the motherly impulses of the vampire differ from that of humans. Women in nineteenth century Britain were expected to bear children, but the vampire race challenges this assertion. “It is eminently notable, then, that male but not female vampires reproduce; Lucy and the three female vampires in Transylvania feed from children but do not create vampire children. Dracula alone reproduces his form” (Halberstam 345). Moreover, Lucy’s sense of reproduction is not only challenged, her sense of motherhood is reversed. She no longer can bear children, as Dracula is the “bearer” of the vampire race. As well, she feeds on an innocent child at the graveyard. “With a careless motion, she flung to the ground, callous as a devil, the child that up to now she had clutched strenuously to her breast, growling over it as a dog growls over a bone. The child gave a sharp cry, and lay there moaning…” (Stoker 160). Following this sequence of events, Arthur groans in agony at this perversion of Lucy. “Stoker emphasizes the monstrosity implicit in such abrogation of gender codes by inverting a favorite Victorian maternal function. His New Lady Vampires feed at first only on small children, working their way up, one assumes, a demonic pleasure thermometer until they may feed at last on full-blooded men” (Craft 120). Instead of caring for the child, Lucy feeds from its flesh. This complete role-reversal of Lucy’s motherly instincts represents the fear of a non-motherly woman within nineteenth century Britain. As Stoker characterizes Mina as the ideal nineteenth century woman, Lucy is shown to break the sexually repressed and motherly female figure present at the time of the novel. Because of this fear of change from gender roles, these two women suffer different ends.
Both Mina and Lucy are punished in their own ways at the end of the novel, yet their fates differ in relation to the fear of change associated with each of the two women. Mina is shown as the angel woman that is wrongfully bitten by a vampire. Lucy, on the other hand, is portrayed as a fallen woman that must be staked to be saved. Both women receive their own forms of redemption that are symbolic of the duality of women during this time period: one woman is returned to her pure state and bears a child, while the other’s soul is purified only after being killed. First, Mina’s fate ends much more peacefully than that of Lucy. She has a similar transitory period to that of Lucy, even reversing the roles of motherhood. She cares for the men in the novel by day, attempting to vanquish Dracula’s horrid essence once and for all. By night, she is shown slurping blood from Dracula’s chest. “With his left hand he held both Mrs. Harker’s hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare breast which was shown by his torn-open dress” (Stoker 212). Dracula is even able to infect and influence Mina, despite her consistent senses of sexual purity and motherly behavior. While this perversion of gender roles does occur, Mina is able to not fully turn into a vampire. She eventually recovers from the vampire curse and ends the novel married to Jonathan. They bear a child together, named Quincey, in honor of the five men that helped to try and save Lucy. Mina is the second woman in the novel to be bitten by Dracula, so she represents a fallen woman that can be returned to her pure state alive.
Conversely, Lucy represents another form of a fallen woman that can only be redeemed by being staked. Stoker uses Lucy’s death as a means of showing what figuratively happens to women who broke the female standard of a sexually repressed and motherly figure of a nineteenth century woman. Furthermore, once Lucy is turned into a vampire, her mere existence challenges the Victorian ideals that a woman should be sexually repressed and work in the home as a motherly figure. “In the novel’s (and Victorian Britain’s) sexual economy, female sexuality has only one legitimate function, as Lucy’s desire is, female sexuality becomes monstrous” (Arata 632). Once Lucy becomes sexually aggressive and forward from her vampiric transformation, she does not fit within the accepted boundaries of a Victorian woman that uses sex to bear children. Because of these anxieties, Stoker writes the only action that would be well-received by readers during this time period: he stakes her and returns Lucy to her pure state. “Lucy is no longer recognizable as the virginal English woman who has been engaged to marry Lord Godalming and the group takes a certain delight in staking her body, decapitating her, and stuffing her mouth with garlic” (Halberstam 345). Ultimately, it is this fear of stepping out of the bounds of covert sexuality and motherhood that leads to Lucy’s violent demise. While Mina serves as the fallen women saved alive, Lucy acts as the example of the fallen woman that is rightfully killed to be saved. Because of their differing fates of redemption, Dracula serves to depict the anxieties of women stepping outside of the confines of the nineteenth century morals, making this a standard nineteenth century novel.
In Dracula, Stoker characterizes Mina and Lucy on opposite sides of the Victorian values spectrum, showing the fear of change in sexualities and gender roles of a nineteenth century woman. Women were expected to not have an overt sexuality and act as a motherly figure, working in the home. The vampire represents a change in the Victorian woman. Mina is shown to be an angelic-like Victorian woman, being sexually repressed and motherly. Because of this, she ends the novel married to Jonathan with a child. Her form of redemption is more peaceful than that of Lucy. Moreover, Lucy is characterized as a sexually aggressive and non-motherly figure, especially after her complete transition into a vampire. After these changes, she fails to fit within the accepted limitations of a nineteenth century, Victorian woman. Because of this, Lucy’s form of redemption is different; she is a fallen woman that can only be saved by being staked in the heart, freeing her from her vampirism and her non-Victorian, female values. Ultimately, Dracula functions as a classic nineteenth century novel because the piece unravels the fear of change in sexuality and gender roles through the Stoker’s differing depictions of selfhood of Lucy and Mina through their sexual desires, gender roles, and means of redemption . These anxieties reflected in Dracula show that in Victorian society, change really does bite.
Works Cited
Arata, D. Stephen. “The Occidental Tourist: ‘Dracula’ and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization.” Victorian Studies, vol. 33, no. 4, 1990, pp. 621-645. JSTOR.
Craft, Christopher. “‘Kiss Me with those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Representations, no. 8, 1984, pp. 107-133. JSTOR.
Dracula. “Dracula.” Dracula and Other Horror Classics, by Bram Stoker, Barnes & Noble, 2013, pp. 1–282.
Halberstam, Judith. “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula.’” Victorian Studies, vol. 36, no. 3, 1993, pp. 333-352. JSTOR.
Wicke, Jennifer. “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media.” ELH, vol. 59, no. 2, 1992, pp. 467-493. JSTOR.
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Hannah is a fourth-year student at the University of Florida, graduating this spring with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in English. She is a U Matter, We Care Ambassador and Public Relations Coordinator, the Historian for the English Society, and on the Public Relations Team of Relay for Life. In the fall, she will be attending the University of Miami School of Law. Today, she is presenting on Identity and Selfhood in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
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