some thoughts after reading Dracula

There is a moment in Dracula where Lucy Westenra asks why a girl can't marry three men. I underlined it because, first of all, girl.

She has just received three marriage proposals in one day, which is a ridiculous enough situation on its own, and she is genuinely upset that accepting one means hurting the other two. Then she writes to Mina, “Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?”

It is funny. It is also one of those lines that becomes much more interesting once you know what happens to her. Because Lucy does eventually get all three men. Just not in the way she meant. By the time she is dying, Arthur, Seward, and Quincey have all participated in trying to save her, and the book gets strangely intimate about it. Lucy receives blood transfusions from multiple men. Van Helsing even jokes about what Arthur would think if he knew that other men's blood had entered Lucy's veins, because Arthur considers his own transfusion almost equivalent to marriage.

So Lucy can't marry three men. But apparently she can have all of their blood inside her body. Victorian literature is so normal. And I think this is where Lucy starts becoming much more interesting than simply “the woman who gets turned into a vampire.”

Before Dracula gets to her, Lucy is basically everything a Victorian woman is supposed to be. She is beautiful, gentle, affectionate, innocent, and wanted. Very wanted. Three separate men look at her and see someone they could marry. Even when she makes that little comment about wanting three husbands, it comes wrapped in sweetness and guilt. She doesn't want three men because she is sexually insatiable. She doesn't want to hurt anybody. Her desire is harmless. Then Dracula changes her, and suddenly the book cannot stop telling us how sexual she is. The difference is almost jarring.

After death, Lucy is still beautiful, but it is no longer the right kind of beauty. Her sweetness becomes something described as “voluptuous.” Her mouth becomes especially important. Her lips are red. Her teeth are sharp. Her body becomes inviting in a way that the living Lucy never was allowed to be. And when Arthur approaches her tomb, Lucy doesn't behave like the woman who once waited for him to propose. She asks him to come to her. That seems small until you realize how completely the direction of desire has reversed.

Before, men pursue Lucy. After, Lucy pursues men. Before, Lucy is looked at. After, Lucy looks back. Before, men want her body. After, she wants theirs. And that Lucy is monstrous.

Obviously, there is a slight problem with making Lucy a poster girl for female sexual liberation, which is that she is also murdering children. I cannot defend my client on all charges. But that actually makes Stoker's choices more interesting to me. Vampirism could have been represented through violence alone. Lucy could simply have become cruel or bloodthirsty. Instead, her transformation is also intensely sexual. Her appetite for blood and her sexual appetite almost blur into the same thing. Her hunger is what makes her frightening. And Lucy isn't the only woman in the book for whom sexuality becomes tangled up with monstrosity.

Jonathan Harker encounters Dracula's three female vampires long before Lucy transforms, and his reaction to them might be one of the strangest and most revealing scenes in the entire book. He is terrified of them. He also desperately wants them. He watches one of the women approach him and describes feeling both fear and desire. He knows something is wrong. He knows he should resist. And still, part of him waits for her to kiss him. That matters. The female vampires aren't frightening because they are sexually undesirable. They are frightening because they are sexually irresistible.

There would be nothing particularly complicated about Jonathan running away from an ugly monster trying to eat him. What makes the scene uncomfortable is that he wants what is dangerous to him. And suddenly I started wondering whether the sexually aggressive woman in Dracula is frightening because of what she might do to men or because of what men might discover about themselves around her. Because the women are not passive objects of male desire anymore. They initiate. They approach Jonathan. They look at his body. They talk about kissing him. They decide what they want to do to him while he lies there almost helpless. The normal sexual script has been flipped. And Jonathan is both attracted to it and horrified by his attraction.

That feels important when the book was published in 1897.

Victorian Britain had extremely specific ideas about respectable femininity, even while the reality of Victorian life was obviously much messier than the stereotype we inherited. The ideal woman was supposed to be modest, sexually restrained, domestic, maternal. Female desire existed, obviously, because Victorian women were human beings and not decorative lamps, but respectable womanhood depended heavily on controlling how that desire could be expressed.

At the same time, those expectations were already being challenged. The late nineteenth century had the so-called “New Woman”: educated women, women seeking independence, women questioning marriage and motherhood, women riding bicycles; which apparently caused an absurd amount of cultural panic... women wanting lives that weren't completely organized around husbands and children.

And then Dracula arrives.

I don't think it is an accident that Mina actually mentions the New Woman. Lucy even jokes that maybe someday women will be the ones proposing to men. That tiny joke sounds almost prophetic once she becomes a vampire, because vampire Lucy basically does become the woman who approaches the man. Except the book turns that reversal into horror. There is another part of Lucy's transformation that I find even more interesting: she doesn't only stop being sexually passive. She stops being maternal. The living Lucy is gentle and nurturing. The undead Lucy preys on children. That is such a specific inversion of Victorian femininity that it almost feels like Stoker is checking boxes. She is sexually aggressive. She is hungry. She is independent of male control. She is anti-maternal. She takes instead of gives.

Basically, somebody assembled the Victorian nightmare woman in a laboratory.

And then the men have to destroy her.

The scene where they kill Lucy is genuinely disturbing when you stop reading it purely as vampire hunting. Arthur drives a stake through the body of the woman he was supposed to marry while the other men watch. Her body moves. Blood comes from her mouth. Then, once the vampire Lucy is gone, her face becomes peaceful again. The men recognize their Lucy. The sweet Lucy. The pure Lucy. The woman they loved has returned only after the hungry version of her has been violently destroyed. That imagery is hard to ignore. And then there is Mina.

Mina is interesting because she gives us another kind of woman entirely. She is smart. Extremely smart, actually. She types, organizes information, studies train schedules, helps assemble the documents that essentially become the novel we are reading. The men constantly praise her intelligence. But they praise it in a very specific way. Van Helsing famously describes her as having a “man's brain” and a woman's heart. Which is such an insane compliment when you think about it.

She can be intelligent, rational, technologically capable, organized; all qualities coded masculine, but the book reassures us that underneath all that dangerous competence she still possesses the proper feminine heart.

Mina can stretch the boundaries of womanhood without completely threatening them. Lucy crosses them. And Lucy becomes a monster. That contrast makes me think the fear in Dracula isn't simply female sexuality. It is female appetite without male supervision. Sex is only one version of appetite. The female vampires want things. They want blood. They want bodies. They want pleasure. They approach men instead of waiting for men to approach them. They don't particularly care about marriage or motherhood or being considered respectable. They consume.

And maybe that's why vampires were such a perfect monster for these anxieties. Vampirism is literally desire without satisfaction. You drink and eventually become thirsty again. There is never enough. The vampire is appetite with no endpoint.

Put that appetite inside a woman in 1897 and suddenly you have something culturally terrifying.

Which brings me to the question I originally couldn't stop thinking about:

Why are female vampires always so sexy?

Because they still are.

More than a century after Dracula, we keep imagining female vampires as beautiful, seductive women. They rarely lumber toward you like zombies. They lure you in. Their sexuality is part of the weapon.

And I think Dracula helped establish something that vampire stories have been playing with ever since: the fear isn't simply that the woman will kill you. The fear is that you will want her to come closer. That's what happens to Jonathan. The monster exposes his own desire. And maybe that was part of what Victorian men were afraid of. Not simply women having sex. Women choosing, initiating, wanting various men, existing outside motherhood, whose desire couldn't be neatly contained inside marriage. Women capable of making respectable men desire things they were supposed to resist.

There is something almost convenient about calling that woman monstrous. If she is the monster, then you don't have to examine why you wanted her. And this is where I finally get uncomfortable making fun of the Victorians, because I don't think we're nearly as removed from them as we'd like to believe. Obviously women today have freedoms Lucy couldn't have imagined. Pretending otherwise would be ridiculous. Women can choose whether to marry, whether to have children, whom to sleep with, whether to pursue someone, whether to leave someone. Female desire can be talked about openly in a way Victorian respectability didn't allow. But I think the vocabulary changed faster than the discomfort did.

Same strange fascination with determining whether a woman has wanted too much.

And I don't stand completely outside of that. That's probably the part I find hardest to admit. I have my own judgments about sex. I have my own ideas about intimacy and what it means. I don't personally understand every version of sexual liberation, and I don't think I need to. There are things other women are comfortable with that I wouldn't be comfortable doing myself. There are also times when my emotional reaction happens before my intellectual one. I can believe that a woman's sexual history doesn't determine her worth and still understand jealousy. I can believe women should be free to sleep with whoever they want and personally not want casual sex. I can believe nobody should be shamed for their sexuality while still believing sex can be deeply intimate and consequential. Those things don't actually have to contradict each other.

Maybe sexual freedom was never supposed to mean that everyone should want the same things. Maybe it simply means that women finally get to be the ones doing the wanting or not wanting.

Which brings me back to Lucy. I don't think Dracula is secretly a feminist story about a sexually liberated woman being punished by the patriarchy. That feels too easy, and honestly a little boring. Lucy becomes an actual predator. Dracula violates people. Vampirism in this book is connected to disease, invasion, religion, death, blood, sex, and probably a dozen Victorian anxieties tangled together. But I do think the kind of woman Stoker chooses to make monstrous tells us something.

Living Lucy is beautiful because men desire her. Undead Lucy is terrifying because she desires them back. And that's the difference I couldn't stop noticing. The Victorian fear wasn't simply that women might become sexual. Women had always been sexual. It was that women might become the authors of their own desire. That they might choose instead of being chosen. That they might want without apologizing for wanting. That they might look at a man the way men had always been allowed to look at them. And more than a century later, I don't think we've completely figured out what to do with that woman either. We just stopped calling her a vampire.

from the nightstand: Dracula, Bram Stoker (1897)