"Kiss Me with those Red Lips": Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula Author(s): Christopher Craft Reviewed

work(s): Source: Representations, No. 8 (Autumn, 1984), pp. 107-133 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928560 . Accessed: 26/01/2012 03:25
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CHRISTOPHER

CRAFT

"Kiss Me withThose Red Lips": Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker'sDracula

LE FANU observed in Carmilla(1872) SHERIDAN WHEN JOSEPH that"thevampireis prone to be fascinatedwithan engrossingvehemenceresemblingthe passion of love" and thatvampiricpleasure is heightened"bythe gradclearlythe analogybetween he ual approaches of an artfulcourtship," identified and sexual desire that would prove, under a subsequent Freudian monstrosity 1 accounts for readingsof vampirism.Modern critical stimulus, paradigmatic future both expresses agree thatvampirism of Dracula, forinstance,almostuniversally of the representation and distortsan originallysexual energy.That distortion, betraysthe fundamentalpsydesire under the defensive mask of monstrosity, by chological ambivalence identified Franco Morettiwhen he writesthat "vamof This interfusion pirismis an excellentexample of theidentity desireand fear."2 may of sexual desire and the fear thatthe momentof eroticfulfillment occasion both the centralaction the erasure of the conventionaland integralselfinforms in Dracula and the surcharged emotion of the charactersabout to be kissed by "those red lips."3 So powerful an ambivalence, generatingboth errant erotic indeed an almost scheimpulses and compensatoryanxieties,demands a strict, maticformalmanagementof narrativematerial.In Dracula Stokerborrowsfrom and and Mary Shelley'sFrankenstein Robert Louis Stevenson'sDr Jekyll Mr Hyde a narrativestrategycharacterizedby a predictable,if variable, triple rhythm. and is enterthenentertains invitesor admitsa monster, Each of these textsfirst for tained by monstrosity some extended duration,until in its closing pages it brings.4 expels or repudiates the monsterand all the disruptionthathe/she/it corresponds forelement in this triplerhythm Obviously enough, the first mallyto the text'sbeginningor generativemoment,to its need to produce the while the thirdelement corresponds to the text'sterminalmoment,to monster, its need both to destroythe monsterit has previouslyadmittedand to end the gestures Interposed betweentheseantithetical narrative thathouses the monster. of admissionand expulsion is the gothicnovel'sprolonged middle,5duringwhich the textaffordsitsambivalencea degree of play intended to produce a pleasurable, indeed a thrillinganxiety.Within its extended middle, the gothic novel entertainsits residentdemon-is, indeed, entertainedby it-and the monster,

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now ascendent in its strength, seems for a time potent enough to invert the closure of the text.That threat, "natural"order and overwhelmthe comforting nullified the narrativerequirementthatthe of course, is contained and finally by monsterbe repudiated and the world of normal relations restored; thus, the gestureof expulsion,compensatingforthe originalirruptionof the monstrous, to brings the play of monstrosity its predictable close. This narrativerhythm, enacts sequentially whose tripartite cycleof admission-entertainment-expulsion an essentially simultaneouspsychologicalequivocation,provides aestheticmanagement of the fundamental ambivalence that motivatesthese texts and our reading of them. of methodobviously While such isomorphism narrative and impliesaffinities similarities of among these different texts,it does not argue identity meaning. Dr and However similar Frankenstein, Jekyll Mr Hyde,and Dracula may differbe, bear the impressof authorial, ences neverthelessobtain, and these differences historical, and institutional pressures.This essay thereforeoffersnot a reading in of monstrosity general, but rather an account of Bram Stoker's particular articulationof the vampire metaphor in Dracula, a book whose fundamental about the relationship betweendesireand gender,repeats, an anxiety, equivocation a witha monstrousdifference, pivotalanxietyof late Victorianculture.Jonathan Harker,whose diaryopens the novel,providesDracula's mostprecisearticulation of this anxiety.About to be kissed by the "weird sisters"(64), the incestuous vampiricdaughterswho share Castle Dracula withthe Count, a supine Harker to thrills a double passion: All three had brilliant white thatshonelikepearlsagainst ruby their the teeth, of voluptuouslips.Therewassomething aboutthem that mademe uneasy, longing at the some and in desirethatthey wouldkiss same some time deadly I felt myhearta wicked, fear; burning me with thoseredlips.(51; emphasis added) Immobilizedby the competingimperatives "wickeddesire" and "deadly fear," of that Harker awaitsan eroticfulfillment entailsboth the dissolutionof the boundaries of the self and the thoroughsubversionof conventionalVictoriangender codes, which constrainedthe mobility sexual desire and varietiesof genital of behavior by according to the more active male the rightand responsibility of whilerequiringthe more passivefemaleto "suffer vigorousappetite, and be still." Victorianconventionsof sexual difference, John Ruskin,conciselyformulating providesus witha usefulsynopsis:"The man'spoweris active,progressive, defensive. He is eminentlythe doer, the creator,the discoverer,the defender. His intellect forspeculationand invention;his energyforadventure,forwar,and is for conquest...." Woman, predictablyenough, bears a different burden: "She mustbe enduringly, incorruptibly, good; instinctively, infallibly wise-wise, not forself-development, forself-renunciation.. wise,not withthe narrowness but . 108 REPRESENTATIONS

of insolentand loveless pride, but withthe passionate gentlenessof an infinitely applicable, modestyof service-the true changefulvariable,because infinitely Stoker,whose vampiricwomen exercise a far more dangerous ness of woman."6 "changefulness"than Ruskin imagines,anxiouslyinvertsthisconventionalpatand passivity awaitsa delicious tern,as virile JonathanHarker enjoysa "feminine" penetration froma woman whose demonismis figuredas the powerto penetrate. penetrationand an intenseaversionto A swooningdesire foran overwhelming thatdesire compose the fundamental the demonic potencyempoweredto gratify action and emotion in Dracula. motivating This ambivalence,alwaysexcitedbythe imminenceof thevampirickiss,finds itsmostsensationalrepresentation the image of the Vampire Mouth, the cenin tral and recurringimage of the novel: "There was a deliberatevoluptuousness which was both thrillingand repulsive ... I could see in the moonlightthe moistureshiningon the red tongue as itlapped the whitesharp teeth"(52). That is Harker describingone of the threevampirewomen at Castle Dracula. Here is Dr. Seward'sdescription the Count: "His eyesflamedred withdevilishpassion; of the great nostrilsof the white aquiline nose opened wide and quivered at the edges; and the white sharp teeth, behind the full lips of the blood-dripping mouth,champed togetherlike those of a wild beast" (336). As the primarysite of eroticexperience in Dracula,thismouth equivocates,givingthe lie to the easy with an inviting separation of the masculine and the feminine.Luring at first orifice,a promise of red softness,but deliveringinstead a piercing bone, the vampiremouth fusesand confuseswhatDracula's civilizednemesis,Van Helsing and his Crew of Light,7worksso hard to separate -the gender-based categories of the penetrating and the receptive, to use Van Helsing'slanguage, the comor, plementarycategories of "brave men" and "good women." With its soft flesh barred by hard bone, itsred crossed bywhite,thismouthcompels opposites and and it asks some disturbing questions.Are we contrasts into a frightening unity, male or are we female? Do we have penetratorsor orifices?And if both, what does thatmean? And what about our bodilyfluids,the red and the white?What this are the relationsbetweenblood and semen, milkand blood? Furthermore, of mouth,bespeaking the subversionof the stable and lucid distinctions gender, is the mouth of all vampires,male and female. of Yetwe mustrememberthatthe vampiremouthis first all Dracula's mouth, and that all subsequent versions of it (in Dracula all vampires other than the Count are female)8merelyrepeat as diminishedsimulacrathedesire of theGreat Original, that "fatheror furthererof a new order of beings" (360). Dracula himself, calling his children"myjackals to do mybidding when I want to feed," creation of female surrogates who enact his will and identifiesthe systematic desire (365). This should remind us that the novel's opening anxiety,its first articulationof the vampiricthreat,derives fromDracula's hoveringinterestin "Kiss Me withThose Red Lips" 109

Jonathan Harker; the sexual threat that this novel firstevokes, manipulates, representsis thatDracula willseduce, penetrate,drain sustains,but never finally another male. The suspense and power of Dracula's opening section, of that to prophase of the narrativewhich we have called the invitation monstrosity, sexual ambition.Dracula's desire to fusewith ceeds precisely fromthisunfulfilled a male, most explicitlyevoked when Harker cuts himselfshaving,subtlyand enacted,this thistext.Alwayspostponed and neverdirectly dangerouslysuffuses in seriesofheterosexual displacements. desirefinds evasivefulfillment an important instead by his three desire to vamp Harker is fulfilled Dracula's ungratified because it masks,the permits, vampiricdaughters,whose anatomical femininity silently interdictedhomoeroticembrace between Harker and the Count. Here, in a displacementtypicalboth of thistextand the gender-anxiousculturefrom as whichitarose, an implicitly homoeroticdesire achieves representation a monas strousheterosexuality, a demonic inversionof normal gender relations.Dracula's daughtersofferHarker a feminineformbut a masculine penetration: belowtherangeof mymouth and chin Lowerand lower went head as thelipswent her touchof thelips and seemedto fasten mythroat.... I could feelthesoft, on shivering and on thesupersensitive of mythroat, theharddentsof thetwosharpteeth, skin just and I ecstasy waited-waited touching pausing and there. closedmyeyesin a langorous with beating a heart.(52) of the This moment,constituting text'smostdirectand explicitrepresentation a the male'sdesire to be penetrated,is governed bya double deflection: first, agent of penetrationis nominallyand anatomically(from the mouth down, anyway) female; and second, thisdangerous moment,fusingthe maximumof desire and is the maximum of anxiety, poised preciselyat the brink of penetration.Here the "two sharp teeth," just "touching" and "pausing" there, stop short of the whichwould unsex Harker and towardwhich thistextconstantly transgression aspires and then retreats:the actual penetrationof the male. This momentis interrupted,thispenetrationdenied. Harker's pause at the end of the paragraph ("waited-waited witha beating heart"), which seems to anticipatean imminentpiercing,in factanticipatesnot the completionbut the interruption the scene of penetration.Dracula himselfbreaks into the room, of drives the women away from Harker, and admonishes them: "How dare you touch him,any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbiddenit? here has Back, I tellyou all! This man belongs to me" (53). Dracula's intercession two obvious effects:by interrupting the scene of penetration,it suspends and disperses throughoutthe textthe desire maximizedat the brinkof penetration, and it repeats the threatof a more direct libidinous embrace between Dracula and Harker.Dracula's taunt,"This man belongs to me,"is suggestive enough, but at no point subsequent to this moment does Dracula kiss Harker, preferring 110 REPRESENTATIONS

instead to pump him for his knowledge of English law,custom,and language. whose Dracula, soon departing for England, leaves Harker to the weird sisters, occurs in the dark interof finalpenetration him,impliedbut neverrepresented, space to which Harker'sjournal gives no access. a HereafterDracula will never representso directly male's desire to be penvamps etrated; once in England Dracula, observinga decorous heterosexuality, only women, in particularLucy Westenraand Mina Harker. The novel, nonecontinues theless,does not dismisshomoeroticdesire and threat;ratheritsimply the announcesa deflected and displaceit.Late in thetext, Count himself to diffuse when he admonishes the Crew of Light thus: "My revenge isjust homoeroticism and timeis on myside. Your girlsthatyou begun! I spread it over the centuries, shall be . them all love are mine already; and through youand others yet mine . ." (365; by which "the italicsadded). Here Dracula specifiesthe process of substitution girlsthat you all love" mediate and displace a more directcommunion among designed to counteract males. Van Helsing, who provides for Lucy transfusions the dangerous influenceof the Count, confirmsDracula's declarationof surrobegin, Dracula drains fromLucy's gation; he knows that once the transfusions fromthe veins of the Crew of veins not her blood, but ratherblood transferred Light: "even we four who gave our strengthto Lucy it also is all to him [sic]" is (244). Here, emphatically, another instanceof the heterosexualdisplacement in to elude the boundaries of gender.Everywhere this of a desire mobile enough heterosexual distribution; onlythrough deflected textsuch desireseeksa strangely women may men touch. a of The representation sexualityin Dracula,then,registers powerfulambivof alence in its identification desire and fear. The text releases a sexualityso thatDracula maybe best representedas bat or wolfor mobile and polymorphic upon desire encoded in floatingdust; yet this effortto elude the restrictions traditional conceptionsof gender then constrainsthatdesire througha seriesof in is heterosexualdisplacements.Desire's excursivemobility alwaysfiltered DraIndeed, Dracula throughthe mask of a monstrousor demonic heterosexuality. cula's missionin England is the creationof a race of monstrouswomen,feminine is heterosexuality apodemons equipped withmasculinedevices.This monstrous consequent the because itmasksand deflects anxiety tropaicfortworeasons: first, to a more direct representationof same sex eroticism;and second, because in as imagininga sexuallyaggressivewoman as a demonic penetrator, a usurper of a prerogativebelonging "naturally"to the other gender, itjustifies,as we shall see later,a violentexpulsion of thisdeformed femininity. need both In itsparticularformulation eroticambivalence,in itscontrary of of to to liberateand constraina desire indifferent the prescriptions gender by Dracula mayseem at first idiosuch desire as monstrousheterosexuality, figuring anomalous, merelyneurotic.This is not-thecase. Dracula presentsa syncratic, "Kiss Me withThose Red Lips" 111

if instanceof Victoriananxietyover the potentialflucharacteristic, hyperbolic, idityof gender roles,9and thistext'sdefensivenesstoward the mobile sexuality other late Victorianaccounts it nonethelesswantsto evoke parallels remarkably were said to be, of of same sex eroticism, desire in which the "sexual instincts" correlatedto [the]sexual in the wordsofJohnAddingtonSymonds,"improperly 10 of centuryand the first the organs." During the last decades of the nineteenth sustaineddiscourseabout the varproduced theirfirst Englishwriters twentieth, iabilityof sexual desire, with a special emphasis upon male homoerotic love, whichhad already received indirectand evasive endorsementfromTennysonin "In Memoriam" and from Whitman in the "Calamus" poems. The preferred categorizedand examined such sexual taxonomiclabel under whichthesewriters but not,as we mightanticipate,"homosexuality" rather"sexual inverdesire was encoded betweensocially a a term sion," classificatory involving complexnegotiation unconstrainedby that would seem at first gender norms and a sexual mobility those norms. Central polemical texts contributingto this discourse include in Ethics(1883), and his A Problem ModernEthics in Symonds'sA Problem Greek in originallywritten collaborationwith (1891); Havelock Ellis's Sexual Inversion, Symonds,publishedand suppressed in England in 1897, and laterto be included of as volume 2 of Ellis's Studiesin thePsychology Sex (1901); and Edward CarSex Love (1894) and his The Intermediate (1908). Admittedly penter'sHomogenic polemical and apologetic,these textsargued, withconsiderable circumspection, for the cultural acceptance of desire and behavior hithertocategorized as sin, 1 " explained under the imprecisereligiousterm"sodomy," and repudiated as "the Such texts,urbanelyarguing an extrenon Christianos nominandum."'12 crimeinter to to attempt admitthe inadmissible, give mistposition,representa culture'sfirst the unnamable a local habitationand a name, and as Michel Foucalt has argued, to put sex into discourse.'3 "Those who read these lines will hardlydoubt what passion it is that I am in a to hintingat,"wrote Symonds in the introduction A Problem ModernEthics, Addressed intothePhenomenon SexualInversion, of book whose subtitle-An Inquiry with and to Especially Medical Psychologists Jurists-providesthe OED Supplement itsearliestcitation(1896) for"inversion"in the sexual sense. Symonds'scoy geshas Symonds, ture,his hinthalf-guessed, the forceof a necessarycircumlocution. to devise, and then to revise,a descriptivelanEllis, and Carpenter struggled guage untarnished by the anal implications,by suggestionsof that "circle of and fascinatedlate Victorianculture. extensivecorruption,14 that so terrified Symonds"can hardlyfinda name thatwillnot seem to soil" his text"because the accomplished languages of Europe in the nineteenthcenturyprovide no term withoutimportingsome implifeatureof human psychology for this persistant This need to supple a new term, to cation of disgust,disgrace, vituperation." than clarity. inventan adequate taxonomiclanguage, produced more obscurity 112

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muddle ensued, the new names of theunnameable were legion: A terminological "intermediatesex," "homogenic love," and "sexual inversion," "homosexuality," Until the secpriority. completed forterminological "uranism"all coexistedand probably when the word "homosexuality," ond or thirddecade of thiscentury, because of its medical heritage,took the terminologicalcrown, "sexual inversion"-as word, metaphor,taxonomic category-provided the basic tool with which late Victorians investigated,and constituted,their problematic desire. of for Symonds,more responsiblethanany otherwriter the establishment "inverconsidered sion" as VictorianEngland's preferredterm for same sex eroticism, it a "convenientphrase" "whichdoes not prejudice the matterunder considerhe ation." Going further, naivelyclaimed that "inversion"provided a "neutral has nomenclature"withwhich"the investigator good reason to be satisfied.''l5 ignores the way in whichconSymonds'sclaim of terminologicalneutrality ventionalbeliefsand assumptionsabout gender inhabitboth thelabel "inversion" of and the metaphorbehind it.The exact history the word remainsobscure (the as defines sexual inversiontautologically "the inversionof the OED Supplement citations)but it seems to have been and provides two perfunctory sex instincts" employed firstin English in an anonymous medical review of 1871; Symonds later adopted it to translatethe account of homoeroticdesire offeredby Karl who wrotein the 1860s in GerUlrichs,an "inverted"Hanoverian legal official many "a series of polemical, analytical,theoretical,and apologetic pamphlets" 16 endorsingsame sex eroticism. As Ellis explains it,Ulrichs"regarded uranism, or homosexual love, as a congenital abnormalityby which a female soul had viriliinclusa."'"7 The in become united witha male body-anima muliebris corpore explanationforthisimpropercorrelationof anatomyand desire is, accordingto in Symonds'ssynopsisof Ulrichs in ModernEthics,"to be found in physiology, that obscure department of natural science which deals with the evolution of of "the indeterminate ground-stuff" the sex."18 Nature'sattemptto differentiate foetus-to produce, thatis, not merelythe "male and femaleorgans of procreation" but also the "corresponding male and female appetites"-falls short of complete success: "Nature fails to complete her work regularlyand in every sexual a instance. Having succeeded in differentiating male with full-formed the organs fromthe undecided foetus,she does not alwayseffect proper differbeing in whichresidesthesexual appetite. entiation thatportionof the physical of There remains a female soul in a male body:"Since it holds nature responsible in for the "imperfection the process of development,"this explanation of hoin moeroticdesire has obvious polemicalutility; relievingthe individualof moral for for responsibility his or her anomalous development,itargues first the decrito of minalization thenforthemedicalization inversion. and According thisaccount, deviant or abnormal, cannot then be same sex eroticism, although statistically called unnatural. Inverts or urnings or homosexuals are therefore"abnormal, "Kiss Me withThose Red Lips" 113

Symonds, abnormal." the beings";theyconstitute classof "thenaturally but natural, "The first thingis to forcepeople makeshis pointsuccinctly: writing Carpenter, to 19 in justification nature." to see thatthe passions in question have their of As an extended psychosexualanalogyto themore palpable reality physical desireprovidedthe English explanationof homoerotic Ulrichs's hermaphroditism, polemicistswith the basic components for their metaphor of inversion,which betweeninsideand outside,between the neverrelinquished idea of a misalignment desire and the body,betweenthe hidden truthof sex and the false sign of anameans "to derivedfromthe Latin verbvertere, turn," tomicalgender.("Inversion," meaning frompathology:"to literally turnin, and the OED citesthe following to doubleness-its insistturn outside in or inside out.") This argument'sintrinsic withinthe individualof two genders, one ence of the simultaneousinscription anatomicaland one not,one visibleand one not-represents an accommodation as betweencontraryimpulses of liberationand constraint, conventionalgender escaped. What thisaccount normsare subtilizedand manipulatedbut neverfully betweenmembers cannot imagine is thatsexual attraction of same sex eroticism of the same gender may be a reasonable and natural articulationof a desire to of indifferent thedistinctions gender,thatdesire is whose excursiveness simply as may not be gendered intrinsically the body is, and thatdesire seeks itsobjects and institutionaccording to a complicatedset of conventionsthatare culturally of ally determined.So radical a reconstitution notionsof desire would probably even to an advanced readingpublicbecause itwould threaten havebeen intolerable sentencefromEllis of the moral priority the heterosexualnorm,as the following suggests: "It must also be pointed out that the argument for acquired or sugthatnormalsexuality also acquired the is involves assertion logically gestedinversion 20 Unable or unwilling deconstruct heterosexual norm,English to the or suggested." accounts of sexual inversioninstead repeat it; desire remains,despite appearand irrevocably heterosexual.A male'sdesire foranothermale, ances, essentially for instance,is from the beginning assumed to be a femininedesire referable sexual but ratherto anotherinvisible virili) not to the gender of the body (corpore Desire, according to this selfcomposed of the opposite gender (animamuliebris). under the regimeof gender-to want explanation,is alwaysalready constituted a male cannot not be a femininedesire, and vice versa-and the body,having ceases to representadequately the invisibletruth become an unreliablesignifier, Thus the of desire, whichitselfnever deviates fromrespectableheterosexuality. of by conventionaldefinitions gender when confronted confusionthatthreatens The body,quite simply, mistaken. is becomes merelyillusory. same sex eroticism of this Significantly, displaced repetition heterosexualgender normscontains of within the undeveloped germ of a radical redefinition Victorianconventions it of assoof femininedesire. The interposition a femininesoul betweenerotically of entailsa certainfeminization desire,since the verysite ciated males inevitably 114
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Implicit (animamuliebris). and source of desire formales is assumed to be feminine of in thisargumentis the submergedacknowledgment the sexuallyindependent refutesthe conventionalassumptionof femwoman,whose eroticempowerment desire of thisnascentredefinition notionsof feminine Nonetheless, inine passivity. Symonds and Ellis did not escape their culture's remained largelyunfulfilled. thisbias. Symonds,whose sexreflect and theirtextspredictably phallocentrism, of pivoted around the "pure & noble faculty underual and aestheticinterests seems to have been largelyunconstanding & expressingmanly perfection,"2' A Ethics,for in cerned with femininesexuality;his seventy-page Problem Greek of investigation" lesbianism.Ellis, onlya two-page"parenthetical instance,offers like Freud, certainlyacknowledged sexual desire in women, but nevertheless accorded to masculine heterosexualdesire an ontologicaland practicalpriority: just as of "The femaleresponds to the stimulation the male at the rightmoment of (Neither the stimulation the warmestdays in spring."22 the tree responds to woman. The did English law want to recognize the sexually self-motivated Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, the of ignored simply statute underwhichOscar Wildewas convicted "grossindecency,' of the possibility erotic behavior between women.) In all of this we may see an anxious defense against recognitionof an independent and activefemininesexA of uality. submergedfearof thefeminization desire precluded thesepolemicists assumptionof an already sexufromfullydeveloping theirown argumentative alized femininesoul. Sexual inversion,then, understands homoeroticdesire as misplaced heterosexualityand configuresits understandingof such desire according to what George Chauncey has called "the heterosexual paradigm,"an analyticalmodel husband/ (masculine/feminine, requiringthatall love repeat the dyadic structure embodied in the heterosexual norm.23Desire betweenanawife,active/passive) of just tomicalmales requires the interposition an invisiblefemininity, as desire This betweenanatomicalfemalesrequiresthe mediationof a hidden masculinity. insistent ideologyof heterosexualmediationand itscorollaryanxietyabout indemobile, returnus to Dracula,whereall desire,however, sexuality pendentfeminine is fixed withina heterosexual mask, where a mobile and hungeringwoman is represented as a monstroususurper of masculine function,and where, as we libidinalor shall see in detail,all eroticcontactsbetweenmales, whetherdirectly through a mediatingfemale, through the thoroughlysublimated,are fulfilled and Stoker'saccount gender.Sexual inversion surrogationof the other,"correct," of vampirism,then, are symmetrical metaphors sharing a fundamentalambivalence. Both discourses, aroused by a desire that wants to elude or flauntthe it conventional prescriptionsof gender, constrain that desire by constituting that leaves conventionalgender codes according to the heterosexual paradigm betweenthe two discourseslies in the particulararticulaintact.The difference "Kiss Me withThose Red Lips" 115

tion of that paradigm. Sexual inversion,especiallyas argued by Symonds and an impulses Ellis,represents urbane and civilizedaccommodationof thecontrary Stoker'svampirism, and altogethermore hysterical of liberationand constraint. and then devises a violent hyperbolic,imagines mobile desire as monstrosity correctionof that desire; in Dracula the vampiricabrogation of gender codes of of inspires a defensivereinscription the stabilizingdistinctions gender. The of of and fixity, siteof thatambivalentinterplay desireand itscorrection, mobility is the text'sprolonged middle, to whichwe now turn. Engendering Gender Our strong againsther feminine. gamewillbe toplayourmasculine -Stoker, THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM The portionof the gothicnovel thatI have called the prolonged middle, during which the text allows the monstera certain dangerous play,corresponds in Dracula to the durationbeginningwiththe Count's arrivalin England back home; thisextended middleconstitutes novel's the and endingwithhis flight elaborates,and explores the prolonged momentof equivocation,as itentertains, very anxieties it must later expel in the formulaicresolutionof the plot. The simply enough, in an extended battle actionwithin thissectionofDracula consists, good and the other between two evidentlymasculine forces,one identifiably identifiably evil,forthe allegiance of a woman (two women actually-Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker nee Murray).24This competitionbetween alternative of potencies has the apparent simplicity a black and whiteopposition. Dracula ravages and impoverishesthese women, Van Helsing's Crew of Light restores and "saves"them.As Dracula conductshis serialassaultsupon Lucy,Van Helsing, in a pretty of respondswitha seriesof defensivetranscounterpoint penetration, fusions; the blood that Dracula takes out Van Helsing then puts back. Dracula, worksalone; Van Helsing entersthislittle isolated and disdainfulof community, and then works through English community, immediatelyassumes authority, surrogates to cement communal bonds. As criticshave noted, this pattern of fathers."The opposition distillsreadilyinto a competitionbetween antithetical yearsago, vampireCount, centuriesold," Maurice Richardsonwrotetwenty-five "is a fatherfigureof huge potency"who competes withVan Helsing, "the good fatherfigure."25 The theme of alternatepaternitiesis, in short,simple,evident, unavoidable. and medical correction This oscillationbetweenvampirictransgression exercises the text'sambivalencetowardthose fundamentaldualisms-life and death, to spiritand flesh,male and female-which have served traditionally constrain and sometimespriest and delimit the excursions of desire. As doctor,lawyer, 116
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("The Host. I broughtit fromAmsterdam.I have an indulgence"), Van Helsing he stands as the protectorof the patriarchalinstitutions so emphaticallyrepredualismshis religionand profession sentsand as the guarantorof the traditional promote and authorize.26 His largestpurpose is to reinscribethe dualities that Dracula would muddle and confuse. Dualities require demarcations,inexorable and ineradicablelinesof separation,but Dracula, as a borderbeingwho abrogates impossible. He is nosferatu,neitherdead demarcations,makes such distinctions of nor alive but somehowboth,mobile frequenter the graveand boudoir,easeful communicantof exclusive realms,and as such as he toyswiththe separation of to and priestalike. critical physician, lawyer, the livingand the dead, a distinction between spiritand His mobilityand metaphoric power deride the distinction dualisms.Potentenough to ignoredeath's anotherof Van Helsing'ssanctified flesh, but is freedomand mobility, thatmobility chained Dracula has a spirit's terminus, to the mostmechanicalof appetites: he and his childrenrise and fallfora drink of This con- or inter-fusion spirit and fornothingelse, fornothingelse matters. and a and appetite, of eternityand sequence, produces a madness of activity a of mania of unceasing desire. Dracula lives an eternity sexual repetition, lurid thatparodies both. wedding of desire and satisfaction But the traditionaldualism most vigorouslydefended by Van Helsing and mostsubtlysubvertedby Dracula is, of course, sexual: the divisionof being into gender,eithermale or female. Indeed, as we have seen, the vampirickissexcites a sexualityso mobile,so insistent, thatit threatensto overwhelmthe distinctions of gender,and the exuberant energywithwhich Van Helsing and the Crew of Light counter Dracula's influencerepresentsthe text'sanxious defense against the verydesire it also seeks to liberate.In counterposingDracula and Van Helsthreatensand protectsthe line of demarcation ing, Stoker'stextsimultaneously divisionof being into gender. This ambivalentneed thatinsures the intelligible to invitethe vampirickiss and then to repudiate it definesexactlythe dynamic of the battlethatconstitutes prolonged middle of thistext.The fieldof this the battle,of thisequivocal competitionforthe rightto definethe possible relations woman. bodyof a somnolent penetrable desireand gender,is theinfinitely between of This interposition a woman between Dracula and Van Helsing should not surpriseus; in England, as in Castle Dracula, a violentwrestlebetweenmales is mediated througha feminineform. enough, The Crew of Light'sconscious conceptionof women is, predictably idealized-the stuffof dreams. Van Helsing's concise descriptionof Mina may serve as a representative example: "She is one of God's women fashionedby His own hand to show us men and otherwomen thatthereis a heaven we can enter, and that its lightcan be here on earth" (226). The impossible idealism of this interattention fromthecomplex and complicitous conceptionof women deflects and representation.Here Van action withinthis sentence of gender, authority, "Kiss Me withThose Red Lips" 117

Helsing's exegesis of God's natural textreifiesMina into a stable sign or symbol ("one of God's women") performinga fixedand comfortablefunctionwithina masculine sign system.Having received fromVan Helsing's exegesis her divine impress,Mina signifies both a masculineartistic intention ("fashionedby His own hand") and a definite didacticpurpose ("to show us men and otherwomen" how an to enter heaven), each of which constitutes enormous constraintupon the or symbolthatMina here becomes. Van Helof significative possibilities the sign sing'sreading of Mina, like a dozen other instancesin which his interpretation of the sacred determinesand delimitsthe range of activity permittedto women, encodes woman with a "natural" meaning composed according to the textual imperatives anxious males. Precisely of thiscomplicity betweenmasculineanxiety, and divine textualauthority, a fixedconceptionof femininity-whichmayseem the benignenough in the passage above-will soon be used tojustify destruction of Lucy Westenra, who, havingbeen successfully vamped by Dracula, requires a correctivepenetration.To Arthur'sanxious importunity "Tell me what I am to do," Van Helsing answers: "Take this stakein your lefthand, ready to place the point over the heart, and the hammer in your right.Then when we begin our prayerforthe dead-I shall read him; I have here the book, and the othersshall follow-strike in God's name . . ." (259). Here four males (Van Helsing, Seward, Holmwood, and Quincey Morris) communallyread a masculine text (Van Helsing'smangled English even permitsStokerthe unidiomaticpronominalization of thegenderlesstext:"I shall read him").27 order tojustify fatalcorrection in the of Lucy'sdangerous wandering,her insolentdisregardforthesexual and semiotic constraint encoded in Van Helsing'sexegesis of "God's women." The process by which women are construed as signs determined by the of interpretive imperatives authorizing males had been brilliantly identified some fifty yearsbefore the publicationof Dracula byJohn Stuart Mill in The Subjection "What is now called the natureof women,"Mill writes, an extremely "is ofWomen. artificial thing-the result of forced repression in some directions,unnatural in stimulation others."28 Mill'ssentence,deftly identifying "thenatureof women" as an "artificial" constructformed (and deformed) by "repression"and "uninatural stimulation," quietlyunties the lacings thatbind somethingcalled "woman" to somethingelse called "nature."Mill further suggeststhata correctreading of gender becomes almost impossible,since the natural differencebetween male and female is subject to culturalinterpretation: . . I deny thatanyone knows, ". or can know,the nature of the two sexes, as long as theyhave only been seen in theirpresent relation to one another."Mill'sagnosticismregarding "the nature of the sexes" suggests the societal and institutional quality of all definitions of the natural,definitions whichultimately and conspireto produce "the imaginary conventionalcharacter of women."29 This last phrase, like the whole of Mill's and criticizes authoritarian the understands nexus thatariseswhena deflected essay, 118 REPRESENTATIONS

or transformeddesire ("imaginary"),empowered by a gender-biased societal agreement ("conventional"),imposes itselfupon a person in order to create a "Character" of course functionsin at least three senses: who and "character." superveningscript,and the sign or what one "is,"the role one plays in society's of only withinthe constraints a larger sign system.Van letterthat is intelligible Helsing'sexegesis of "God's women" createsjust such an imaginaryand convenbut the signifimay indeed be feminine, tional character.Mina's body/character solelyby males. As Susan Hardy Aiken and interpreted cation it bears is written such a symbolicsystemtakes "for granted the role of women as has written, passive objects or signs to be manipulated in the grammar of privilegedmale 30 interchanges." of Yet exactlythe passivity thisobject and the ease of thismanipulationare at question in Dracula. Dracula, afterall, kissesthesewomen out of theirpassivity of and so endangers the stability Van Helsing's symbolicsystem.Both the prescriptiveintentionof Van Helsing's exegesis and the emphatic methodology (hypodermicneedle, stake,surgeon'sblade) he employsto insure the durability of of of his interpretation gender suggestthe potentialunreliability Mina as sign, that provokes an anxietywe may call fear of the mediatrix.If, as an instability Van Helsing admits,God's women provide the essentialmediation("the lightcan be here on earth") betweenthe divine but distantpatriarchand his earthlysons, changeable vehicle. If then God's intentionmay be distortedby its potentially withitsfoundwanders,thenVan Helsing'swhole cosmology, woman-as-signifier ing dualisms and supporting texts,collapses. In short,Van Helsing's interpremight tationof Mina, because endangered bytheprolepticfearthathis mediatrix destabilizeand wander, necessarilyimposes an a prioriconstraintupon the sigof nificative possibilities the sign "Mina." Such an authorialgesture,intended to acknowledges forestallthe semioticwandering that Dracula inspires,indirectly woman's dangerous potential.Late in the text,while Dracula is vamping Mina, that"Madam Mina, our poor,dear Madam Van Helsing willadmit,veryuneasily, Mina is changing" (384). The potential for such a change demonstrateswhat amalgam of imprisonment Nina Auerbach has called thiswoman's "mysterious and power.?3' Dracula's authorizingkiss,like thatof a demonic Prince Charming,triggers the release of thislatentpower and excitesin these women a sexualityso mobile, concepdisruptsVan Helsing's compartmental so aggressive,thatit thoroughly Lucy grows"voluptuous"(a word tionof gender.Kissed intoa sudden sexuality,32 used to describe her onlyduringthe vampiricprocess),her lips redden, and she woman's This sexualizationof Lucy,metamorphosing kisseswitha new interest. "sweetness"to "adamantine, heartless cruelty,and [her] purityto voluptuous her suitorsbecause it entailsa reversalor inversion wantonness"(252), terrifies of sexual identity;Lucy, now toothed like the Count, usurps the functionof "Kiss Me withThose Red Lips" 119

thatVan Helsing'smoralizedtaxonomyof gender reservesformales. penetration Dracula, in thus figuringthe sexualization of woman as deformation,parallels exactlysome of the more extreme medical uses of the idea of inversion.Late Victorianaccountsof lesbianism,forinstance,superscribedconventionalgender norms upon sexual relationshipsto whichthose norms were anatomicallyirrelevant.Again theheterosexualnormproved paradigmatic. The female"husband" in such a relationship was understoodto be dominant,appetitive, masculine,and "congenitally inverted";the female "wife"was understood to be quiescent,passive,only "latently" homosexual, and, as Havelock Ellis argued, unmotivatedby genitaldesire.33Extremedeploymentof the heterosexualparadigm approached the ridiculous,as George Chauncey explains: The early of medical case histories lesbians thuspredictably enormous attention paid flow sexualorgans.Severaldoctors to their menstrual and thesizeof their emphasized thattheir at lesbianpatients stoppedmenstruating an earlyage, ifthey beganat all,or had unusually difficult irregular and the sexual periods.They also inspected woman's thatinverts had unusually whichtheysaid the organs,oftenclaiming largeclitorises, inverts used in sexualintercourse a manwouldhispenis.34 as denotes a double anxiety: This rather pathetic hunt for the penis-in-absentia first, that the penis shall not be erased, and if it is erased, that it shall be reinscribedin a perversesimulacrum;and second, thatall desire repeat,even under the duress of deformity, heterosexual norm that the metaphor of inversion the alwaysassumes. Medical professionalshad in factno need to pursue thisfantasized amazon of the clitoris, this"unnatural"penetrator, vigorously, so since Stoker,whose imaginationwas at least deftenough to displace thatdangerous simulacrum to an isomorphic orifice,had by the 1890s already invented her. His sexualized women are men too. Stoker emphasizes the monstrosity implicitin such abrogation of gender codes by inverting favoriteVictorianmaternal function.His New Lady Vama pires feed at first only on small children,workingtheirway up, one assumes, a demonic pleasure thermometer untiltheymayfeed at laston full-bloodedmales. Lucy'sdietaryindiscretions evoke the deepest disgustfromthe Crew of Light: With careless a she motion, flung theground, to callousas a devil, childthat the up to nowshe had clutched strenuously herbreast, to growling overitas a dog growls over a bone.The childgavea sharpcry, laythere and moaning. Therewasa cold-bloodedness intheactwhich wrung groanfrom a Arthur; when advanced himwith she to outstretched armsand a wanton he smile, fellbackand hid hisfacein hishands. She still and advanced, however, with langorous, a voluptuous grace, said: "Cometo me Arthur. Leave thoseothers and cometo me. Myarmsare hungry for you.Come,and wecan resttogether. Come,myhusband, come!"(253-254) Stokerhere givesus a tableau mordant gender inversion:thechild Lucy clutches of to "strenuously her breast"is not being fed,but is being fed upon. Furthermore, 120 REPRESENTATIONS

by requiring that the child be discarded that the husband may be embraced, thatappetite Stokerprovides a littleemblem of thisnovel'sanxious protestation in a woman ("My arms are hungryfor you") is a diabolic ("callous as a devil") but of inversion naturalorder,and of the novel'sfantastic futilehope thatmaternityand sexualitybe divorced. withwhich Lucy flauntsthe encasementsof gender The aggressivemobility as defensiveactivity, these men norms generates in the Crew of Light a terrific the witha series of pointed instruments, line of demarcation race to reinscribe, of which enables the definition gender. To save Lucy from the mobilizationof desire,Van Helsing and the Crew of LightcounteractDracula's subversiveseries of penetrationswitha more conventionalseries of theirown, that sequence of transfusions intendedto provide Lucy withthe "braveman'sblood" which"is the best thingon earth when a woman is in trouble" (180). There are in fact four which begin with Arthur,who as Lucy's accepted suitor has the transfusions, and include Lucy'sother two suitors(Dr. Seward, Quincey infusion, rightof first Morris)and Van Helsing himself.One of the establishedobservationsof Dracula is criticism thatthese therapeuticpenetrationsrepresentdisplaced marital(and of martial) penetrations;indeed, the text is emphatic about this substitution Arthurfeels as if he transfusion, medical for sexual penetration.Afterthe first and Lucy "had been reallymarriedand thatshe was his wifein the sightof God" (209); and Van Helsing, afterhis donation, calls himselfa "bigamist"and Lucy in "thisso sweet maid . . . a polyandrist"(211-212). These transfusions, short, in for are sexual (blood substitutes semen here)35and constitute, Nina Auerbach's superb phrase, "the mostconvincingepithalamiumsin the novel.36 anxious reassertionof the conrepresentthe text'sfirst These transfusions ventionallymasculine prerogativeof penetration;as Van Helsing tells Arthur "You are a man and it is a man we want" (148). before the firsttransfusion, excited by Dracula's kiss,Van Helsing's penCounteringthe dangerous mobility appropriate to his sense of her gender etrations restoreto Lucy both the stillness and "the regular breathingof healthysleep,"a necessarycorrectionof the loud thatthe Count inspires.This repet"stertorous" breathing,the animal snorting, itivecontest(penetration,withdrawal;penetration,infusion),itselfan image of Dracula'sambivalentneed to evoke and then to repudiate the fluidpleasures of penetrablebody vampiricappetite,continuesto be waged upon Lucy'sinfinitely until Van Helsing exhausts his store of "brave men,"whose generous giftsof blood, however efficacious,fail finallyto save Lucy from the mobilizationof desire. enervate a masculine But even the loss of this much blood does not finally as the Crew of Light's,especiallywhen it stands in the energy as indefatigable service of a traditionof "good women whose lives and whose truthsmay make good lesson [sic]forthe childrenthatare to be" (222). In the name of those good "Kiss Me withThose Red Lips" 12

women and futurechildren(verymuch the same childrenwhose throatsLucy is Van Helsing willrepeat,withan added emphasis,his assertion now penetrating), that penetrationis a masculine prerogative.His logic of correctivepenetration demands an escalation,as the failureof the hypodermicneedle necessitatesthe stake.A woman is betterstillthan mobile,betterdead than sexual: and Arthur tookthestakeand thehammer, whenonce his mindwas seton action and began Van Helsing openedhismissal nor hishandsnevertrembled evenquivered. overthe as placedthepoint and I followed wellas wecould.Arthur toread,and Quincey with his all Then he struck flesh. and as I lookedI couldsee itsdintin thewhite heart, might. screech camefrom and blood-curdling writhed; a hideous, The Thingin thecoffin the in and twisted wildcontortions; theopened red lips.The bodyshookand quivered till teethchampedtogether thelips werecut and themouthwas smeared sharpwhite of He never faltered. lookedlikethefigure Thoras his foam.ButArthur with crimson a stake, arm deeperand deeperthemercy-bearing whilst driving untrembling roseand fell, and spurted aroundit.His facewasset,and heartwelled the up thebloodfrom pierced so of seemedto shinethrough thesight it gaveus courage, thatour voices it; highduty vault. the seemedto ringthrough little ceased of and And thenthewrithing quivering thebodybecameless,and theteeth The terrible wasover. task (258-259) it and thefaceto quiver. Finally laystill. tochamp, Here is the novel's real-and the woman's only-climax, its most violent and moment,displaced roughlyto the middle of the book, so that the misogynistic sexual threatmay be repeated but its ultimatesuccess denied: Dracula will not win Mina, second in his series of English seductions.The murderousphallicism of of thispassage clearlypunishes Lucy forher transgression Van Helsing'sgender code, as she finallyreceives a penetrationadequate to insure her future quiescence. Violence against the sexual woman here is intense,sensuallyimagined, ferociousin its detail. Note, for instance,the terribledimple, the "dint in the whiteflesh," thatrecallsJonathanHarker'sswoon at Castle Dracula ("I could just touchingand pausing there") feel ... the hard dents of the two sharp teeth, and anticipatesthe technicolor consummationof the next paragraph. That parathercompletesVan Helsing'spenetrative graph,maskingmurderas "highduty," One mightquestion deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake." apy by "driving by a mercythisdestructive, thisfatal,but Van Helsing'sactions,alwayssanctified manage to "restoreLucy by the patriarchaltextualtradition signified "his missal," correction to us as a holy and not an unholy memory"(258). This enthusiastic of Lucy's monstrosity provides the Crew of Light witha double reassurance: it exorcises the threatof a mobile and hungering femininesexuality, effectively and it countersthe homoeroticism latentin the vampiricthreatby reinscribing (upon Lucy's chest) the line dividing the male who penetratesand the woman who receives. By discipliningLucy and restoringeach gender to its "proper"

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programcompensatesforthe threatof genVan Helsing'spacification function, implicitin the vampirickiss. der indefinition the driving "roundwooden (Arthur of The vigorand enormity thispenetration which is "some two and a half or three inches thickand about three feet stake," long,"resembles"the figureof Thor") do not bespeak merelyStoker'spersonal about anxietybut suggest as well a whole culture'suncertainty or idiosyncratic of the fluidity gender roles. Consider,for instance,the followingpassage from of Ellis's contemporaneous Studiesin thePsychology Sex. Ellis, writingon "The Mechanism of Detumescence" (i.e., ejaculation), employs a figure that Stoker would have recognized as his own: on is Tumescence thepiling of the to linked tumescence. is Detumescence normally is the whence lighted torch flame out is fuel;detumescence theleaping of thedevouring is to The generation generation. wholeprocess doubleyet of lifeto be handedon from by to a intotheearth theraising it by analogous that which pileis driven single; is exactly which fallson thehead of thepile. In tumescence weight and theletting of a heavy go the in accumulated; theactofdetumescence woundup and force theorganism slowly is is instrument driven the is accumulated force letgo and byitsliberation sperm-bearing home.37 Both Stokerand Ellis need to imagine so homelyan occurrence as penile peneor trationas an event of mythic, at least seismographic,proportions.Ellis's pile maydwarfeven the powerful"sperm-bearing driver, representing instrument," theychannel but Stoker's alreadyoutsized member, both servea similarfunction: and finally "liberate"a tremendous"accumulated force"that itselfrepresentsa Ellis,employinga Darwinian principleof interintention. or trans- supra-natural reads woman's body (much as we have seen pretationto explain that intention, as Van Helsing do) as a natural sign-or, perhaps better, a sign of nature'soverridingreproductiveintention: the have alreadysuggested, as doubtthat, one or twowriters There can be little fertilis its that influence on thesideofeffective to owesitsdevelopment thefact hymen aged,or by female immature, to of It ization. is an obstacle theimpregnation theyoung which marks an of force is ofthat expression admiration feeble males.Thehymenthus anatomical exampleof theintimate it So in choice a mate. regarded, is an interesting of the female her added) (italics selection.38 is basedon natural matter which in sexualselection really Here, as evolutionaryteleologysupplants divine etiologyand as Darwin's texts assume the primacyVan Helsing would reservefor God's, natural selection,not becomes the interpretive principlegoverningnature's God's original intention, a text.As a sign or "anatomicalexpression"withinthattext,the hymensignifies woman's presumablynatural "admirationof force" and her invitationto "the hostile to "immature, Woman's body, structurally sperm-bearinginstrument." Lucy'sbody,too, fertilization." aged, or feeble males,"simplybegs for "effective of her admirationof reassures the Crew of Light withan anatomicalexpression

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force.Once fatally staked,Lucy is restoredto "the so sweetthatwas."Dr. Seward describesthe change: we Therein thecoffin no longer foulThingthat had so dreadedand grown lay the to to was to hatethat work herdestruction yielded theone bestentitled it,butLucy the of with faceof unequalled her sweetness purity....One and as we had seenherin herlife, was overthewasted faceand form the calmthat likesunshine and all wefelt that holy lay wasto reignforever.(259) token and symbol thecalmthat of onlyan earthly This post-penetrative peace39 denotes not merely the final immobilizationof of but also the correspondingstabilization the dangerous signifier Lucy's body, whose wanderinghad so threatenedVan Helsing'sgendercode. Here a masculine that interpretive community ("One and all we felt")reassertsthe semioticfixity allows Lucy to functionas the "earthlytoken and symbol"of eternal beatitude, of the heaven we can enter.We may say thatthislast penetrationis doubly efficacious: in a single strokeboth the sexual and the textualneeds of the Crew of satisfaction. Light finda sufficient Despite itsplacementin the middle of the text,thisscene, whichsuccessfully of pacifiesLucy and demonstratesso emphaticallythe efficacy the technology to Van Helsing employs to correctvampirism, corresponds formally the scene of expulsion, which usually signals the end of the gothic narrative. Here, of of course, thisscene signalsnot the end of the storybut the continuation it,since Dracula willnow repeat his assaulton anotherwoman. Such displacementof the scene of expulsion requires explanation. Obviouslythisdisplacementsubserves the text'sanxietyabout the direct representationof eroticismbetween males: between so a could notrepresent explicitly violent Stokersimply phallicinterchange the Crew of Light and Dracula. In a by now familiarheterosexual mediation, Lucy receives the phallic correctionthat Dracula deserves. Indeed, the actual expulsion of the Count at novel'send is a disappointinganticlimax.Two rather knifestrokessufficeto dispatch him, as Dracula simplyforgetsthe perfunctory elaborate ritualof correctionthatvampirismpreviouslyrequired. And the disby placementof thisscene performsat least two other functions:first, establishof technology, reassures it ing earlythe ultimateefficacy Van Helsing'scorrective everyone-Stoker, his characters,the reader-that vampirismmay indeed be may be vanquished, that its sexual threat,however powerful and intriguing, and second, in doing so, in establishing thisreassurance,it permitsthe expelled; textto prolong and repeat its flirtation withvampirism, ambivalentpetition its of that sexual threat.In short,the displacementof the scene of expulsion provides a heterosexual locale for Van Helsing's demonstrationof compensatory phallicism, while it also extends the durationof the text'sambivalentplay. withmonstrosity, duringwhich Mina is This extensionof the text'sflirtation seduced into vampirism, threatenedby but not finally includes the novel'sonly

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explicitscene of vampiricseduction. Important enough to be twicepresented, the first Seward as spectatorand thenby Mina as participant, scene occurs in by the Harkerbedroom,whereDracula seduces Mina while"on thebed layJonathan Harker, his face flushed and breathingheavilyas if in a stupor."The Crew of Light burstsinto the room; the voice is Dr. Seward's: her with arms themaway hands,keeping hand he heldbothMrs.Harker's With left his her forcing facedown her his handgripped bythebackoftheneck, at fulltension; right trickled with stream was blood,and a thin on hisbosom.Her white nightdress smeared of barebreast, which shown historn-open was dress.The attitude the by downtheman's nose intoa saucerof milkto a resemblance a childforcing kitten's to twohad a terrible (336) compelitto drink. In thisinitiation scene Dracula compels Mina intothe pleasure of vampiricappecollapse, where male titeand introducesher to a worldwhere gender distinctions For terribly. Mina's drinkingis double here, and femalebodilyfluidsintermingle and a lurid nursing.That thisis a both a "symbolicact of enforced fellation"40 of scene of enforcedfellation made even clearerby Mina's own description the is scene a few pages later; she adds the graphic detail of the "spurt": and withhis long sharpnailsopened a veinin his Withthathe pulledopen his shirt, them breast. Whenthebloodbegantospurt out,he tookmyhandsinone ofhis,holding so to the tight, with otherseizedmyneckand pressedmymouth thewound, thatI and someof the-Oh, myGod,myGod! WhathaveI done? or must either suffocate swallow (343) placed: Mina'sverbalejaculationsupplants That "Oh, myGod, myGod!" is deftly the Count's liquid one, leaving the fluidunnamed and encouraging us to voice the substitution thatthe textimplies-this blood is semen too. But thisscene of fellationis thoroughly displaced. We are at the Count's breast,encouraged once whiteforred, as blood becomes milk:"the attitudeof the two again to substitute nose intoa saucer of milk." a had a terribleresemblanceto a child forcing kitten's of and displacemententails a confusionof Dracula's Such fluidity substitution as or of functions, Dracula sexual identity, an interfusion masculineand feminine here becomes a lurid mother offeringnot a breast but an open and bleeding wound. But if the Count's sexualityis double, then the open wound maybe yet another displacement (the reader of Dracula must be as mobile as the Count himself).We are back in the genitalregion,thistimea woman's,and we have the suggestionof a bleeding vagina. The image of red and voluptuouslips,withtheir of slow trickle blood, has, of course, alwaysharbored thispotential. We may read thisscene, in whichanatomical displacementsand the confluence of blood, milk,and semen forcefully erase the demarcationseparatingthe of as masculineand the feminine, Dracula'smostexplicitrepresentation the anxietiesexcited by the vampirickiss.Here Dracula definesmostclearlyvampirism's

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this Significantly, scene is postponed untillate in threatof gender indefinition. of the text. Indeed, thisis Dracula's last great moment,his finaldemonstration dangerous potency;afterthis,he willvamp no one. The novel,havingpresented most explicitlyits deepest anxiety,its fear of gender dissolution,now moves mechanicallyto repudiate that fear. Aftera hundred rather tedious pages of Draculaperfunctorily expels theCount. The worldof "natural" pursuitand flight, gender relationsis happilyrestored,or at least seems to be. A Final Dissolution If my last sentence ends with an equivocation, it is because Dracula does so as well; the reader should leave this novel witha troubled sense of the difference betweenthe forcesof darknessand the forcesof light.Of course the to plot of Dracula,by grantingultimatevictory Van Helsing and a dustydeath to the simplistic the Count, emphaticallyratifies opposition of competingconceptionsof forceand desire, but even a briefreflection upon the details of the war thiscomforting schema.A perversemirroring occurs, of penetrations complicates as puncture for puncture the Doctor equals the Count. Van Helsing's doubled first morphineinjectionthatimmobilizesthe woman and then the penetrations, the infusionof masculine fluid,repeat Dracula's spatiallydoubled penetrations of Lucy's neck. And that morphine injection,which subdues the woman and the Count's strangehypnoticpower; curiouslyimitates improvesher receptivity, both men preferto immobilizea woman before riskinga penetration.41 Moreover, each penetrationannounces through its displacementthis same sense of danger.Dracula entersat the neck,Van Helsing at the limb;each evades available orificesand refuses to submit to the dangers of vaginal contact. The shared displacement is telling: to make your own holes is an ultimatearrogance, an of assertionof penetrativeprowessthatnonethelessacknowledges,in the flight power imagined to inhabitwoman's available openits evasion, the threatening ings. Woman'sbody readilyaccommodates masculine fear and desire, whether directlylibidinal or culturallyrefined. We may say that Van Helsing and his tradition have polished teethintohypodermicneedles, a culturalrefinement that masksviolationas healing. Van Helsing himself, calling his medical instruments "the ghastlyparaphernalia of our beneficialtrade,"employs an adjectival oxythat moron (ghastly/beneficial) itselfglosses the troubled relationshipbetween paternalismand violence (146). The medical professionlicenses the power to and penetrate,devises a delicate instrumentation, definescanons of procedure, withits insistent while the religioustradition, idealizationof women, encodes a on of restriction the mobility desire (who penetrateswhom) and then licenses a tremendouspunishmentforthe violationof the code.

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But it is all penetrativeenergy,whetherre-fangedor refined,and it is all of articulations the of libidinal; the two strategies penetrationare but different force.Dracula certainlyproblematizes,if it does not quite erase, same primitive a the line of separation signifying meaningfuldifferencebetween Van Helsing of and the Count. In other words, the text itself,in its imagisticidentification Dracula and the Crew of Light, in its ambivalentpropensityto subvertits own desire; vampiric domesticates withand finally sympathizes differences, fundamental observed, always comes home. Such textual the uncanny,as Freud brilliantly irony, composed of simultaneousbut contraryimpulses to establishand subvert between violence and culture,between desire and the fundamentaldifferences its sublimations,recalls Freud's late speculations on the troubled relationship betweenthe id and the superego (or ego ideal). In the two briefpassages below, Id, takenfromhis late workTheEgo and the Freud complicatesthe differentiation the betweenthe id and its unexpected effluent, superego: into of the Thereare twopathsbywhich contents theid can penetrate theego. The leadsbywayof theego ideal. one is direct, other the And: it be of of of control, morality,may saidoftheid that Fromthepoint view instinctual thatit and of thesuper-ego to itis totally of non-moral, theego thatitstrives be moral, and can be supermoral thenbecomeas cruelas onlytheid can be.42 It is so easy to rememberthe id as a risingenergy and the superego as a suppressiveone, thatwe forgetFreud'ssubtlerargument.These passages,eschewing as too facile the simple opposition of the id and superego, suggest instead that energy. the id and the superego are variantarticulationsof the same primitive We are already familiarwith the "two paths by which the contents of the id as penetratethe ego." "The one is direct," Dracula's penetrationsare directand unembarrassed, and the other,leading "by way of the ego ideal," recalls Van Helsing's way of repressionand sublimation.In providingan indirectpath for of the "contents the id" and in being "as cruel as onlythe id can be,"the superego maybe said to be, in the words of Leo Bersani, "the id whichhas become itsown of mirror."43 This mutual reflectivity the id and superego, of course, constitutes as mostdisturbing features, JonathanHarker,standingbefore one of vampirism's his shaving glass, learns early in the novel: "This time there could be no error, for the man was close to me, and I could see him over my shoulder. But there of was no reflection himin the mirror!The whole room behind me was displayed; but there was no sign of a man in it, except myself"(37). The meaning of this littlevisual allegory should be clear enough: Dracula need cast no reflection because his presence, already established in Harker's image, would be simply A indeed, is no one "exceptmyself." dangerous sameness redundant;the monster,

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tooth,stake,and hypodermicneedle, it would seem, all waitsbehind difference: share a point. would seem, in one of This blendingor interfusion fundamentaldifferences my argument.We have, afterall, respect at least, to contradictthe progress of Van Helsing's strategy, subserving establishedthatthe Crew of Light'spenetrative ideology of gender and his heterosexual account of desire, countersjust such of with emphatic inscriptions sexual difference.Nonetheless, this interfusions quietlyerases itsown its purposive heterosexuality, despite penetrativestrategy, its fundamentaldifferences, own explicitassumptionsof gender and desire. It thatdesire forconnectionamong males is both expressed in would seem at first as and constrainedby a traditionalarticulationof such fraternalaffection, represented in this text'sblaring theme of heroic or chivalricmale bonding. The a by obvious male bonding in Dracula is precipitated action-a good fight, proud Dedicated to a falselyexalted conception of woman, men ethic,a great victory. their"great the to combine fraternally fulfill collective"highduty"thatmotivates Van Helsing, alwaysthe ungrammaticalexegete, provides the apt quest" (261). of analogy: "Thus we are ministers God's own wish.... He have allowed us to of redeem one soul already,and we go out as the old knights the Cross to redeem withinan more" (381). Van Helsing'schivalricanalogy establishesthisfraternity both moral rectitudeand adherence to the limiimpeccable lineage signifying tationupon desire thatthistraditionencodes and enforces. a Yet beneath this screen or mask of authorized fraternity more libidinal bonding occurs as male fluids find a protected pooling place in the body of a which,while they woman. We return,fora last time,to those serial transfusions women,"actuallyenable the otherwiseinconpretendto serve and protect"good of ceivableinterfusion theblood thatis semen too. Here displacement(a woman's body) and sublimation(these are medical penetrations)permitthe unpermitted, to just as in gang rape men share theirsemen in a location displaced sufficiently a more directunion. Repeating its subversivesugdivertthe anxietyexcited by gestionthattherefinedmoralconceptionsof Van Helsing'sCrew of Lightexpress an obliquelyan excursivelibidinalenergy, energymuch like the Count's,Dracula to again employsan apparentlyrigorousheterosexuality representanxious desire for a less conventionalcommunion.The parallel here to Dracula's taunt("Your girlsthatyou all love are mine already; and throughthemyou . .. shall be mine") is inescapable; in each case Lucy,the woman in the middle, connectslibidinous males. Here, as in the Victorian metaphor of sexual inversion,an interposed difference-an image of manipulable femininity-mediates and deflects an otherwiseunacceptable appetite forsameness. Men touchingwomen touch each other,and desire discoversitselfto be more fluidthan the Crew of Light would consciouslyallow.

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is Indeed, so insistent thistextto establishthispatternof heterosexualmediation that it repeats the patternon its finalpage. Jonathan Harker,writingin a postscriptthat compensates clearly for his assumption at Castle Dracula of a announces the text'slast efficacious penetration: "feminine"passivity, of the and the happiness someof us Sevenyearsago we all wentthrough flames; It well the sincethenis,we think, worth painweendured. is an addedjoy to Minaand to died. His is me thatour boy'sbirthday thesame day as thaton whichQuinceyMorris spirit passed has belief thatsomeof our bravefriend's the mother holds,I know, secret but bandof mentogether; we call him all intohim.His bundleof nameslinks our little Quincey. (449) of As offspring Jonathanand Mina Harker,LittleQuincey,whose introduction the represents seemingly so late in the narrativeinsureshis emblematicfunction, of restorationof "natural" order and especially the rectification conventional genesis is, obviouslyenough, heterosexual,but Stoker's gender roles. His official prose quietlysuggestsan alternativepaternity:"His bundle of names links all This is the fantasychild of those sexualized our littleband of men together." son of an illicitand nearly invisiblehomosexual union. This sugtransfusions, constitutes text's and this last by gestion,reinforced the precedingpun of "spirit," subtlestarticulationof its "secretbelief" that "a brave man's blood" may metaBut the real curiosity here is the novel's spirit." morphose into"our brave friend's refused sexuof last-minute displacement,its substitution Mina, who ultimately alization by Dracula, for Lucy,who was sexualized, vigorouslypenetrated,and consequentlydestroyed.We maysay thatLittleQuincey was luridlyconceived in relocated to the purer body of Mina the veins of Lucy Westenraand then deftly that Harker. Here, in the last of its many displacements,Dracula insists,first, of all "monstrous" desire in women and, successfulfiliation impliesthe expulsion be, second, thatall desire, howevermobile and omnivorousit maysecretly must thatalone defined the Victorian subject itselfto the heterosexualconfiguration sense of the normal. In this regard, Stoker'sfable, howeverhyperbolicits anxof ieties,representshis age. As we have seen, even polemicists same sex eroticism like Symonds and Ellis could not imagine such desire withoutrepeatingwithin theirmetaphor of sexual inversionthe basic structureof the heterosexual paradigm. Victorian culture'sanxiety about desire's potential indifferenceto the a and a preof prescriptions gender produces everywhere predictablerepetition in dictabledisplacement:the heterosexualnorm repeats itself a mediatingimage of femininity-theCount's vampiricdaughters,Ulrichs'sand Symonds'sanima Lucy Westenra'spenetrable body-that displaces a more direct commuliebris, munion among males. Desire, despite its propensityto wander,stayshome and The resultin Dracula heterosexualand familialdefinition. retainsan essentially lurid: child is a child whose conceptionis curiouslyimmaculate,yetdisturbingly

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Van Helsing'sprophecyof "the violations.LittleQuincey,fulfilling of his fathers' children that are to be," may be the text'semblem of a restorednatural order, aspect too. He is the unacknowledged son of has its unofficial but his paternity the Crew of Light'sdisplaced homoeroticunion, and his name, linkingthe "little remembersthatsecretgenesis. band of men together," quietly)

Notes
in 1. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla, TheBestGhost Stories ofJ.S. Le Fanu (New York, in whichappeared first Le Fanu'sIn 1964), p. 337; thisnovella of lesbian vampirism, A GlassDarkly (1872), predatesDracula by twenty-five years. 2. Franco Moretti, SignsTaken Wonders for (Thetford, 1983), p. 100. 3. Brain Stoker, Dracula (New York,1979), p. 51. All further references Dracula appear to withinthe essay in parentheses. 4. The paradigmaticinstanceof thistriplerhythm Mary Shelley'sFrankenstein,text is a that creates-bit by bit, and stitchby stitch-its residentdemon, then equips that demon witha powerfulMiltonicvoice withwhichto petitionboth itscreatorand the drivesitsmonsterto polar isolationand suicide. Stevenson's novel'sreaders,and finally Dr.Jekyll Mr.Hyderepeats the pattern:HenryJekyll's and chemicalinvitation Hyde to corresponds to the gesture of admission; the serial alternationof contrarypersonthe ambivalentplay of the prolonged middle; and Jekyll's alitiesconstitutes suicide, whichexpels both the monsterand himself, corresponds to the gestureof expulsion. 5. Readers of Tzvetan Todorov'sTheFantastic (Ithaca, 1975) willrecognizethatmyargument about the gothic text'sextended middle derives in part fromhis idea thatthe fiction a durationcharacterizedby readerlysuspenis essentialconditionof fantastic 6. John Ruskin,Sesameand Lilies (New York, 1974), pp. 59-60. 7. This group of crusaders includes Van Helsing himself,Dr. John Seward, Arthur Holmwood, Quincey Morris,and laterJonathan Harker; the titleCrew of Light is mine, but I have taken mycue fromStoker: Lucy,lux,light. 8. Renfield,whose "zoophagy" precedes Dracula's arrivalin England and who is never vamped by Dracula, is no exception to thisrule. 9. The complicationof gender roles in Dracula has of course been recognized in the criticism.See, for instance, Stephanie Demetrakopoulos, "Feminism, Sex Role Exchanges, and Other Subliminal Fantasies in Brain Stoker'sDracula," Frontiers, 2 (1977), pp. 104-113. Demetrakopoulos writes:"These two figuresI have traced so and also as violator-brutalizer-reflect polarfar-the male as passive rape victim the ized sex roles and the excessiveneeds thispolarizingengendered in Victorianculture. Goldfarbrecountsthe brothelsthatcatered to masochists, sadists,and homosexuals. The latteraspect of sexualityobviouslydid not interestStoker...." I agree withthe first sentence here and, as this essay should make clear, emphaticallydisagree with the last. 10. John Addington Symonds,A Problem ModernEthics(London, 1906), p. 74. in 11. The semanticimprecisionof the word "sodomy" is best explained byJohn Boswell, and Social Christianity, Tolerance, Homosexuality (Chicago, 1980), pp. 91-116. "Sodomy,"
sion of certainty.

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from notes Boswell, "has connoted in various times and various places everything ordinaryheterosexualintercoursein an atypicalpositionto oral sexual contactwith animals" (93). 12. This is the traditionalChristiancircumlocutionby which sodomy was both named and unnamed, both specifiedin speech and specifiedas unspeakable. It is the phrase, Weeks,"withwhichSir Robert Peel forboreto mentionsodomy according to Jeffrey Out (London, 1977), p. 14. in Parliament," quoted in Weeks,Coming of (New York, 1980). My argumentagrees with 13. Michel Foucault,TheHistory Sexuality Foucault'sassertionthat"the techniquesof power exercised over sex have not obeyed a principleof rigorous selection,but ratherone of disseminationand implantation of polymorphoussexualities" (12). Presumablymembers of the same gender have been copulating togetherfor uncounted centuries,but the invertand homosexual century. were not inventeduntilthe ninteenth afterthe 14. I cite this phrase, spoken by Mr.JusticeWills to Oscar Wilde immediately latter'sconvictionunder the Labouchfre Amendmentto the Criminal Law AmendmentAct of 1885, as an oblique referenceto the orificethatso threatenedthe hom(only ophobic Victorianimagination;thatWilde was neveraccused of anal intercourse were charged against him) seems to me to oral copulation and mutual masturbation of confirm,rather than to undermine this interpretation the phrase. Wills'sentire sentence reads: "And that you, Wilde, have been the centre of a circle of extensive corruptionof the most hideous kind among young men, it is equally impossibleto doubt"; quoted in H. MontgomeryHyde, The TrialsofOscarWilde(New York, 1962), p. 272. The Labouchere Amendment,sometimescalled the blackmailer'scharter, punished "any act of gross indecency"between males, whetherin public or private, withtwo years'imprisonment and hard labor. Symonds,Ellis,and Carpenter argued for strenuously the repeal of thislaw. in p. 15. Symonds,A Problem ModernEthics, 3. 16. Ibid., p. 84. To my knowledge, the earliest English instance of "inversion"in this fromTheJournalofMental specificsense is the phrase "Inverted Sexual Proclivity" Science(October, 1871), where it is used anonymouslyto translateCarl Westphal's the neologismdie contrdre Sexualempfindung, term thatwould dominate German disI course on same gender eroticism. have not yetbeen able to date precisely Symonds's first of "inversion." use volume 2 of Studies thePsychology Sex (Philadelin of 17. Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion, phia, 1906), p. 1. 18. This and the two subsequent quotations are fromSymonds'sModernEthics,pp. 86, 90, and 85 respectively. of 19. Symonds'sletterto Carpenter,December 29, 1893, in The Letters JohnAddington volume 3, eds. H. M. Shueller and R. L. Peters(Detroit, 1969), p. 799; also Symonds, quoted in Weeks,p. 54. 20. Ellis, SexualInversion, 182. p. volume 2, p. 169. 21. Symonds in Letters, 22. Ellis, quoted in Weeks,p. 92. 23. George Chauncey,Jr.,"From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality:Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Deviance," Salamagundi,58-59 (1982), pp. 114-146. 24. This bifurcationof woman is one of the text'smost evident features,as criticsof Dracula have been quick to notice.See Phyllis Roth,"SuddenlySexual Womenin Brain

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study 27 Stoker's Dracula,"Literature Psychology, (1977), p. 117, and her full-length and (Boston, 1982). Roth, in an argumentthat emphasizes the pre-Oedipal BramStoker are essentiallythe same figure:the Mother. Dracula is, in fact,the same storytold twicewithdifferent outcomes" Perhaps the most extensivethematicanalysisof this splitin Stoker'srepresentation womenis Carol A. Senf's"Dracula:Stoker'sResponse of 26 to the New Woman,"Victorian Studies, (1982), pp. 33-39, which sees thissplit as Stoker's"ambivalentreactionto a topical phenomenon-the New Woman." 166 25. Maurice Richardson,"The Psychoanalysis GhostStories," of TheTwentieth Century, (1959), p. 427-428. 26. On thispoint see Demetrakopoulos,p. 104. 27. In this instanceat least Van Helsing has an excuse for his ungrammaticalusage; in (Bible) is masculine. Dutch, Van Helsing's nativetongue, the noun bijbel in 28. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection Women Essayson Sex Equality,ed. Alice Rossi of (Chicago, 1970), p. 148. 29. Ibid., p. 187. PMLA, and PoeticDiscoursein TheSubjection Women," of 30. Susan Hardy Aiken,"Scripture 98 (1983), p. 354. Demon,(Cambridge, 1982), p. 11. 31. Nina Auerbach, Woman and the 32. Roth, "Suddenly Sexual Women,"p. 116. of 33. An adequate analysisof theideologicaland politicalimplications the terminological shiftfrom "inversion"to "homosexuality"is simplybeyond the scope of this essay, in and the problem is furthercomplicated by a certain imprecisionor fluidity the of Ellis used the word employment these writers an already unstableterminology. by and Carpenter, of citingthe evidentbastardy any term "homosexuality" under protest compounded of one Greek and one Latin root, preferred the word "homogenic" However, a provisional if oversimplifieddiscriminationbetween "inversion" and Ellis argued, consistsin "sex"homosexuality" maybe useful: "true"sexual inversion, towardpersons of the same sex" ual instinct turned byinborn constitutional abnormality (Sexual Inversion, 1; italicsadded), whereas homosexualitymay referto same sex p. de or eroticism perv(faute mieux), intentionally generatedby spurious,circumstantial whose "abnorThe pivotalissue here is willor choice: the "true"invert, erse causality. mality"is biologicallydetermined and therefore"natural,"does not choose his/her desire but is instead chosen by it; the latent or spurious homosexual, on the other hand, does indeed choose a sexual object of the same gender. Such a taxonomic distinction confusion) representsa polemical and politicalcom(or, perhaps better, at promisethatallows,potentially least,forthe medicalizationof congenitalinversion I of and the criminalization willful homosexuality. repeat the cautionthatmydescripof tion here entails a necessary oversimplification a terminologicalmuddle. For a more complete and particularanalysissee Chauncey,pp. 114-146; for the applicaof pp. bility such a taxonomyto lesbian relationshipssee Ellis, SexualInversion, 131141. 34. Chauncey,p. 132. 35. The symbolicinterchangeability blood and semen in vampirismwas identified of as (London, 1931), p. 119: "in the early as 1931 by ErnestJones in On TheNightmare unconscious mind blood is commonlyan equivalent forsemen.... 36. Auerbach, p. 22. in 37. Havelock Ellis,EroticSymbolism, volume 5 of Studies thePsychology Sex (Philadelof phia, 1906), p. 142.
element in Dracula, makes a similar point: ". . . one recognizes that Lucy and Mina

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38. Ibid., 140. reads Lucy'scountenance at thismomentas "a thankyou note" forthe 39. Roth correctly correctivepenetration;"Suddenly Sexual Women,"p. 116. 40. C. E Bentley,"The Monster in the Bedroom: Sexual Symbolismin Brain Stoker's 22 and Dracula,"Literature Psychology, (1972), p. 30. Ellis, for of 41. Stoker'sconfiguration hypnotismand anaesthesia is not idiosyncratic. instance,writingat exactly this time, conjoins hypnosis and anaesthesia as almost identical phenomena and subsumes them under a single taxonomic category: "We may use the term 'hypnoticphenomena' as a convenientexpression to include not in sleep, or hypnotism the narrowsense merelythe conditionof artificially-produced of the term,but all those groups of psychicphenomena which are characterizedby of a decreased controlof the highernervouscentres,and increased activity the lower The qualitythatdeterminesmembershipin this"convenient"taxonomyis, centres." of to put mattersbaldly,ap elvis pumped up by the "increased activity the lower relationship betweenthe centres'" explains the antithetical Ellis,in an earlierfootnote, "higher" and "lower" centers: The persons best adapted to propagate the race are those withthe large pelves,and as the pelvis is the seat of the greatcentresof sexual emotion the developmentof the pelvis and its nervous and vascular supply involves the greaterheightening the sexual emotions.At the same timethe greateractivity of of the cerebralcentresenables them to subordinateand utiliseto theirown ends the active sexual emotions,so thatreproductionis checked and the balance increasingly of to some extent restored" The pelvic superiority women, necessitatedby an evoimperative(betterbabies withbiggerheads require broader pelves),implies lutionary sexualitythat must be a corresponding danger-an engorged and hypersensitive of actively"checked" by the "activity the cerebral centres"so that "balance" may be "to some extentrestored:"Hypnotismand anaesthesia threatenexactlythisdelicate balance, and especiallyso in women because "the lower centresin women are more rebelliousto controlthan thoseof men,and more readilybroughtintoaction."Anaesit thesiology, would seem, is not withoutits attendantdangers: "Thus chloroform, possess the propertyof ether,nitrousoxide, cocaine, and possiblyotheranaesthetics, excitingthe sexual emotions.Womenare especiallyliable to theseerotichallucinations during anaesthesia, and it has sometimesbeen almost impossibleto convince them thattheirsubjectivesensationshave had no objectivecause. Those who have to administer anaestheticsare well aware of the risks they may thus incur."Ellis's besieged stands here as a male like Stoker'smastermonsterand his monstermaster, physician, a whose empowermentanxiouslyreflects prior endangerment.What if thiswoman's lower centers should take the opportunity-to use another of Ellis's phrases-"of in indulging an orgy"?Dracula'skiss,Van Helsing'sneedle and stake,and Ellis's"higher and controlthe articulationof femininedesire centres"all seek to modify, constrain, (But, it mightbe counter-argued,Dracula comes preciselyto excitesuch an orgy,not to constrainone. Yes, but withan importantqualification:Dracula's kiss,because it of authorizesonly repetitions itself, clearlyarticulatesthe destinyof femininedesire; Lucy will only do what Dracula has done before.) Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman I (New York, 1904), pp. 299, 73, 316, and 313 respectively. have used the fourth edition appeared in England in 1895. edition; the first Id 42. Sigmund Freud, TheEgo and the (New York, 1960), pp. 44-45. 43. Leo Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud(Berkeley,1977), p. 92.

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