The following post will accompany a special Gothic reading group session to be held on Thursday 2 March at the University of Sheffield, and led by Sophie Barber. If you would like to join us to discuss Dracula, Victorians, and sexuality, email Sheffield Gothic for more details, and remember – we don’t bite…much!
It
seems to be a common misconception that the Victorians did not discuss sex;
when we consider our Victorian predecessors, we may be inclined to think of
them as somewhat uptight and frigid. However, if we take a look at some of the
literature of the period, especially that which concerns vampires, we start to
see a society far more obsessed with sex than they ostensibly let on. As Nina
Auberach explains in her seminal work Our
Vampires, Ourselves every generation creates the vampire it needs as a form
of catharsis.[i]
For the Victorians, this vampire
functioned as way to talk about sex without fear of public censor.
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| Bela Lugosi as Dracula |
I
think the best example of such coded discussions of sex can be found in Bram
Stoker’s Dracula. Whether Stoker
constructed his novel with sexuality as his primary focus is debatable; but the
fate of those who exemplify non-normative sexual behaviour - such as multiple
partners or female sexual agency - is suitably severe that even a Victorian
readership aware of such imagery would be pleased by the appropriate
punishments dished out to the ‘morally degenerate’ characters. Lucy must be
purified after she has been infected by vampirism, because she has reclaimed
her ownsexual agency, which goes against the Victorian expectation that males
bear sexual responsibility. She is described as having turned to ‘voluptuous
wantonness’ and attempts to entice her husband to the grave with her. Of
course, her husband and his band of helpers must now reclaim their sexual
responsibility and proceed to stake her, returning her back to a state of
sweetness and purity – even if she is dead. The perversion of vampirism is now
undone.
Lucy’s
staking is perhaps one of the most sexually loaded sequences in the novel: it
is a perverse reimagining of the wedding night. Clive Leatherdale notes that
the stake shares ‘psychological connotations as a phallic symbol’ because it
sadistically imitates the bodily penetration of a penis.[ii] Arthur drives ‘deeper and deeper the mercy
baring stake’ as his undead bride’s body shakes and twists in ‘wild
contortions’. This destruction of the vampire is accompanied by a
quasi-orgasmic state, echoing a perhaps painful loss of virginity that Lucy
never achieved in her human life. Imagery of blood ‘welling and spurting’
around her heart as she is penetrated with the stake represents the bloody
deflowering of a bride, and is perhaps one of the most explicitly sexual
references in the text.
 |
| Lucy moments before she is staked |
Dracula
himself is loaded with potent sexuality, and encounters with the undead have a
clear sexual subtext by Stoker’s conflation of vampire bites and ‘kisses’. When
the Count attacks Mina she is in bed, and if we read such a passage in light of
the symbolic value of blood as semen, the attack becomes explicitly about
fellatio. Mina is described ‘kneeling over the edge of the bed’ as blood begins
to ‘spurt out’. And of course, blood does not spurt. Mina becomes obsessed at
an oral level, rubbing her lips as if to ‘cleanse them from pollution’ after
she swallows an unknown substance. This, coupled with Stoker’s analogy of a
child forcing a kitten to drink milk, makes it easy to see beneath the vampire
subterfuge.
Because
vampires primarily operate at night, and the Count puts his victims into a
trancelike state, it is easy to see the novel as an examination of sexual
self-repression. Moral and sexual transgressions are relegated to the sphere of
darkness and so associated with dark forces. It is also interesting to note
that even the sexual subtext seems to adhere to Victorian standards of
acceptability – all sex imagery is explicitly heterosexual. Although the
vampire may offer a way for authors and readers to covertly explore certain
sexual fantasies it is important to remember that these, for Stoker’s Victorian
audience at least, didn’t ever stray from traditional conceptions of sex.
Sophie
Barber is a third year undergraduate student at the University of Sheffield,
with an interest in the Gothic, the Victorians, and Vampires. When not researching
Victorian Vampires, Sophie performs her own Gothic Transformations.
