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

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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 identified ual approaches of an artfulcourtship," and sexual desire that would prove, under a subsequent Freudian monstrosity 1 Modern critical accounts forfuture readingsof vampirism. stimulus, paradigmatic 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 Franco Morettiwhen he writesthat "vamchological ambivalence identified of desireand fear."2 This interfusion pirismis an excellentexample of theidentity mayoccasion of sexual desire and the fear thatthe momentof eroticfulfillment 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 Mr Hyde and Robert Louis Stevenson'sDr Jekyll Mary Shelley'sFrankenstein a narrativestrategycharacterizedby a predictable,if variable, triple rhythm. and is enterthenentertains invitesor admitsa monster, Each of these textsfirst for some extended duration,until in its closing pages it tained by monstrosity 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 of course, is contained and finally by the narrativerequirementthatthe monsterbe repudiated and the world of normal relations restored; thus, the gestureof expulsion,compensatingforthe originalirruptionof the monstrous, to its predictable close. This narrativerhythm, brings the play of monstrosity 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 narrative methodobviously While such isomorphism and impliesaffinities similarities of meaning. among these different texts,it does not argue identity Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,and Dracula may However similar Frankenstein, be, differbear the impressof authorial, ences neverthelessobtain, and these differences historical, and institutional pressures.This essay thereforeoffersnot a reading in general, but rather an account of Bram Stoker's particular of monstrosity articulationof the vampire metaphor in Dracula, a book whose fundamental about the relationship betweendesireand gender,repeats, an equivocation anxiety, a pivotalanxietyof late Victorianculture.Jonathan witha monstrousdifference, 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 a double passion: thrills All three had brilliant white thatshonelikepearlsagainst theruby teeth, of their voluptuouslips.Therewassomething aboutthem that mademe uneasy, some longing andat the in myhearta wicked, I felt desirethatthey wouldkiss same time some deadly fear; burning me with thoseredlips.(51; emphasis added) Immobilizedby the competingimperatives of "wickeddesire" and "deadly fear," thatentailsboth the dissolutionof the boundHarker awaitsan eroticfulfillment aries of the self and the thoroughsubversionof conventionalVictoriangender codes, which constrainedthe mobility of sexual desire and varietiesof genital behavior by according to the more active male the rightand responsibility of while vigorousappetite, requiringthe more passivefemaleto "suffer 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 is forspeculationand invention;his energyforadventure,forwar,and for conquest...." Woman, predictablyenough, bears a different burden: "She mustbe enduringly, incorruptibly, good; instinctively, infallibly wise-wise, not forself-development, but forself-renunciation . .. wise,not withthe narrowness 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 awaitsa delicious passivity 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 in the image of the Vampire Mouth, the central 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 of the Count: "His eyesflamedred withdevilishpassion; 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, or,to use Van Helsing'slanguage, the complementarycategories 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 gender, mouth,bespeaking the subversionof the stable and lucid distinctions is the mouth of all vampires,male and female. of all Dracula's mouth, Yetwe mustrememberthatthe vampiremouthis first 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 monstrosity, prophase of the narrativewhich we have called the invitation 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 an important seriesofheterosexual displacements. desirefinds evasivefulfillment 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 a monwhichitarose, an implicitly homoeroticdesire achieves representation as a demonic inversionof normal gender relations.Drastrousheterosexuality, cula's daughtersofferHarker a feminineformbut a masculine penetration: belowtherangeof mymouth and chin Lowerand lower went herhead as thelipswent touchof thelips and seemedto fasten on mythroat.... I could feelthesoft, shivering and theharddentsof thetwosharpteeth, on thesupersensitive skinof mythroat, just and waited-waited I closedmyeyesin a langorous ecstasy touching and pausing there. with a beating heart.(52) of a the text'smostdirectand explicitrepresentation This moment,constituting the agent male'sdesire to be penetrated,is governed bya double deflection: first, of penetrationis nominallyand anatomically(from the mouth down, anyway) female; and second, thisdangerous moment,fusingthe maximumof desire and is poised preciselyat the brink of penetration.Here the maximum of anxiety, 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 of the scene of penetration.Dracula himselfbreaks into the room, 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 him,impliedbut neverrepresented, finalpenetration space to which Harker'sjournal gives no access. a male's desire to be penHereafterDracula will never representso directly vamps 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 Count himself announcesa deflected and displaceit.Late in thetext, 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, shallyet . . ." (365; them bemine youand others all love are mine already; and through "the by which 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 another instanceof the heterosexualdisplacement (244). Here, emphatically, in this to of a desire mobile enough elude the boundaries of gender.Everywhere heterosexual distribution; onlythrough deflected textsuch desireseeksa strangely women may men touch. a powerfulambivof sexualityin Dracula,then,registers The representation of desire and fear. The text releases a sexualityso alence in its identification 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 Drais alwaysfiltered heterosexualdisplacements.Desire's excursivemobility Indeed, Dracula throughthe mask of a monstrousor demonic heterosexuality. cula's missionin England is the creationof a race of monstrouswomen,feminine is apoheterosexuality demons equipped withmasculinedevices.This monstrous consequent theanxiety because itmasksand deflects tropaicfortworeasons: first, to a more direct representationof same sex eroticism;and second, because in as a usurper of imagininga sexuallyaggressivewoman as a demonic penetrator, a prerogativebelonging "naturally"to the other gender, itjustifies,as we shall see later,a violentexpulsion of thisdeformed femininity. need both In itsparticularformulation of eroticambivalence,in itscontrary of gender by to the prescriptions to liberateand constraina desire indifferent 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 hyperbolic, instanceof Victoriananxietyover the potentialflucharacteristic, idityof gender roles,9and thistext'sdefensivenesstoward the mobile sexuality other late Victorianaccounts it nonethelesswantsto evoke parallels remarkably were said to be, of desire in which the "sexual instincts" of same sex eroticism, correlatedto [the]sexual in the wordsofJohnAddingtonSymonds,"improperly 10During the last decades of the nineteenth of the centuryand the first organs." 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 rather"sexual inver"homosexuality" might anticipate, not, as we desire was encoded betweensocially a complexnegotiation a classificatory terminvolving sion," unconstrainedby that would seem at first gender norms and a sexual mobility those norms. Central polemical texts contributingto this discourse include in ModernEthics Ethics(1883), and his A Problem in Greek Symonds'sA Problem in collaborationwith originallywritten (1891); Havelock Ellis's Sexual Inversion, Symonds,publishedand suppressed in England in 1897, and laterto be included of Sex (1901); and Edward Caras volume 2 of Ellis's Studiesin thePsychology Sex (1908). Admittedly Love (1894) and his The Intermediate penter'sHomogenic polemical and apologetic,these textsargued, withconsiderable circumspection, for the cultural acceptance of desire and behavior hithertocategorized as sin, 1 " and repudiated as "the explained under the imprecisereligiousterm"sodomy," Such texts,urbanelyarguing an extrenonnominandum."'12 Christianos crimeinter to admitthe inadmissible, to give attempt 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 ModernEthics, a to A Problem hintingat,"wrote Symonds in the introduction Addressed intothePhenomenon ofSexualInversion, book whose subtitle-An Inquiry with and Jurists-providesthe OED Supplement toMedical Psychologists Especially itsearliestcitation(1896) for"inversion"in the sexual sense. Symonds'scoy geshas the forceof a necessarycircumlocution. Symonds, ture,his hinthalf-guessed, lana and then to to descriptive revise, Ellis, and Carpenter struggled devise, 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. forterminological completed "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 "inverforthe establishment Symonds,more responsiblethanany otherwriter considered sion" as VictorianEngland's preferredterm for same sex eroticism, it a "convenientphrase" "whichdoes not prejudice the matterunder considerhe naivelyclaimed that "inversion"provided a "neutral ation." Going further, has good reason to be satisfied.''l5 nomenclature"withwhich"the investigator ignores the way in whichconSymonds'sclaim of terminologicalneutrality ventionalbeliefsand assumptionsabout gender inhabitboth thelabel "inversion" of the word remainsobscure (the and the metaphorbehind it.The exact history as "the inversionof the defines sexual inversiontautologically 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 As Ellis explains it, Ulrichs"regarded uranism, endorsingsame sex eroticism. or homosexual love, as a congenital abnormalityby which a female soul had viriliinclusa."'"7 The in corpore become united witha male body-anima muliebris 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 "the indeterminate ground-stuff" 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 male with full-formed instance. Having succeeded in differentiating the proper differorgans fromthe undecided foetus,she does not alwayseffect being in whichresidesthesexual appetite. entiation of thatportionof the physical There remains a female soul in a male body:"Since it holds nature responsible in the process of development,"this explanation of hofor the "imperfection in relievingthe individualof moral moeroticdesire has obvious polemicalutility; forthe decriforhis or her anomalous development,itargues first responsibility to thisaccount, of inversion. minalization and thenforthemedicalization According 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." theclassof "thenaturally beings";theyconstitute but natural, "The first thingis to forcepeople makeshis pointsuccinctly: writing to Carpenter, 19 in nature." justification to see thatthe passions in question have their of physical As an extended psychosexualanalogyto themore palpable reality desireprovidedthe English explanationof homoerotic Ulrichs's hermaphroditism, polemicistswith the basic components for their metaphor of inversion,which betweeninsideand outside,between theidea of a misalignment neverrelinquished desire and the body,betweenthe hidden truthof sex and the false sign of anameans "to turn," derivedfromthe Latin verbvertere, tomicalgender.("Inversion," meaning frompathology:"to literally to turnin, and the OED citesthe following 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 conventionalgender betweencontraryimpulses of liberationand constraint, 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 thedistinctions of gender,thatdesire indifferent is simply whose excursiveness as the body is, and thatdesire seeks itsobjects may not be gendered intrinsically and institutionaccording to a complicatedset of conventionsthatare culturally of notionsof desire would probably ally determined.So radical a reconstitution even to an advanced readingpublicbecause itwould threaten havebeen intolerable sentencefromEllis of the heterosexualnorm,as the following the moral priority suggests: "It must also be pointed out that the argument for acquired or sugthatnormalsexuality theassertion is also acquired involves logically gestedinversion 20 norm,English to deconstruct theheterosexual or suggested." Unable or unwilling 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 gender when confronted by conventionaldefinitions confusionthatthreatens The body,quite simply, is mistaken. becomes merelyillusory. same sex eroticism of heterosexualgender normscontains thisdisplaced repetition Significantly, of Victorianconventions within it the undeveloped germ of a radical redefinition of a femininesoul betweenerotically assoof femininedesire. The interposition of desire,since the verysite entailsa certainfeminization ciated males inevitably 114
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Implicit (animamuliebris). and source of desire formales is assumed to be feminine of the sexuallyindependent in thisargumentis the submergedacknowledgment refutesthe conventionalassumptionof femwoman,whose eroticempowerment desire of notionsof feminine thisnascentredefinition Nonetheless, inine passivity. Symonds and Ellis did not escape their culture's remained largelyunfulfilled. thisbias. Symonds,whose sexreflect and theirtextspredictably phallocentrism, of underpivoted around the "pure & noble faculty ual and aestheticinterests seems to have been largelyunconstanding & expressingmanly perfection,"2' A Problem Ethics,for in Greek cerned with femininesexuality;his seventy-page of lesbianism.Ellis, investigation" 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 male at the rightmoment "The femaleresponds to the stimulation in of the (Neither spring."22 the stimulation warmest days 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 "grossindecency,' ignored simply statute underwhichOscar Wildewas convicted of erotic behavior between women.) In all of this we may see an the possibility anxious defense against recognitionof an independent and activefemininesexA submergedfearof thefeminization of desire precluded thesepolemicists uality. 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 in norm.23 anaheterosexual between embodied the Desire wife,active/passive) of an invisiblefemininity, just as desire tomicalmales requires the interposition 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 conventional codes leaves gender 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 urbane and civilizedaccommodationof thecontrary impulses Ellis,represents 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 the stabilizingdistinctions of gender. The inspires a defensivereinscription of desireand itscorrection, of mobility and fixity, siteof thatambivalentinterplay 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 thenovel's 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 a black and whiteopposition. Dracula potencies has the apparent simplicity 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 penetration, respondswitha seriesof defensivetranscounterpoint 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 constrain spiritand flesh,male and female-which have served traditionally 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 so emphaticallyreprestands as the protectorof the patriarchalinstitutions dualismshis 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 the graveand boudoir,easeful nor alive but somehowboth,mobile frequenter communicantof exclusive realms,and as such as he toyswiththe separation of to physician, and priestalike. critical 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 thatmobility is chained freedomand mobility, Dracula has a spirit's terminus, to the mostmechanicalof appetites: he and his childrenrise and fallfora drink of spirit This con- or inter-fusion and fornothingelse, fornothingelse matters. and a and appetite, of eternityand sequence, produces a madness of activity a lurid of sexual repetition, mania of unceasing desire. Dracula lives an eternity 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 the prolonged middle of thistext.The fieldof this battle,of thisequivocal competitionforthe rightto definethe possible relations woman. bodyof a somnolent penetrable desireand gender,is theinfinitely between of a woman between Dracula and Van Helsing should not This interposition 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 enormous constraintupon the to enter heaven), each of which constitutes or of the sign symbolthatMina here becomes. Van Helsignificative possibilities 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 of anxious males. Precisely thiscomplicity betweenmasculineanxiety, and a fixedconceptionof femininity-whichmayseem divine textualauthority, the destruction benignenough in the passage above-will soon be used tojustify 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 in order tojustify the fatalcorrection 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 authorizing interpretive imperatives 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, "is an extremely ofWomen. artificial thing-the result of forced repression in some directions,unnatural in others."28 stimulation 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 theauthoritarian 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 a larger sign system.Van only withinthe constraints 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 thisobject and the ease of thismanipulationare Yet exactlythe passivity at question in Dracula. Dracula, afterall, kissesthesewomen out of theirpassivity of Van Helsing's symbolicsystem.Both the preand so endangers the stability scriptiveintentionof Van Helsing's exegesis and the emphatic methodology (hypodermicneedle, stake,surgeon'sblade) he employsto insure the durability of Mina as sign, of gender suggestthe potentialunreliability of his interpretation 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 the sign "Mina." Such an authorialgesture,intended to nificative possibilities 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 oflesbians medical case histories thuspredictably attention paidenormous flow sexualorgans.Severaldoctors to their menstrual and thesizeof their emphasized thattheir at an earlyage, ifthey lesbianpatients stoppedmenstruating beganat all,or had unusually difficult and irregular thewoman's sexual periods.They also inspected thatinverts had unusually whichtheysaid the organs,oftenclaiming largeclitorises, inverts used in sexualintercourse as a manwouldhispenis.34 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, the heterosexual norm that the metaphor of inversion alwaysassumes. Medical professionalshad in factno need to pursue thisfantasized amazon of the clitoris, this"unnatural"penetrator, so vigorously, 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 a favoriteVictorianmaternal function.His New Lady Vampires 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 a careless she flung motion, to theground, callousas a devil, thechildthat up to nowshe had clutched strenuously to herbreast, growling overitas a dog growls over a bone.The childgavea sharpcry, and laythere moaning. Therewasa cold-bloodedness intheactwhich wrung a groanfrom Arthur; when sheadvanced tohimwith outstretched armsand a wanton he fellbackand hid hisfacein hishands. smile, She still and with advanced, however, a langorous, 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 of gender inversion:thechild Lucy clutches to her breast"is not being fed,but is being fed upon. Furthermore, "strenuously 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 futilehope thatmaterof naturalorder,and of the novel'sfantastic inversion nityand sexualitybe divorced. withwhich Lucy flauntsthe encasementsof gender The aggressivemobility as these men defensiveactivity, norms generates in the Crew of Light a terrific the line of demarcation witha series of pointed instruments, race to reinscribe, of gender. To save Lucy from the mobilizationof which enables the definition 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 thatthese therapeuticpenetrationsrepresentdisplaced marital(and criticism 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 short, "thisso sweet maid . . . a polyandrist"(211-212). These transfusions, in Nina Auerbach's forsemen here)35and constitute, are sexual (blood substitutes 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 it stands in the when of as the Crew especially Light's, 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 whenonce his mindwas seton action Arthur tookthestakeand thehammer, and began Van Helsing openedhismissal norevenquivered. hishandsnevertrembled overthe as wellas wecould.Arthur placedthepoint and I followed toread,and Quincey with all his Then he struck flesh. and as I lookedI couldsee itsdintin thewhite heart, might. screech camefrom and a hideous, blood-curdling writhed; The Thingin thecoffin the in wildcontortions; and twisted theopened red lips.The bodyshookand quivered tillthelips werecut and themouthwas smeared teethchampedtogether sharpwhite ofThoras his He lookedlikethefigure never faltered. foam.ButArthur with a crimson whilst stake, armroseand fell, deeperand deeperthemercy-bearing driving untrembling and spurted heartwelled thepierced up aroundit.His facewasset,and thebloodfrom so thatour voices of it gaveus courage, seemedto shinethrough it; thesight highduty vault. thelittle seemedto ringthrough ceased of thebodybecameless,and theteeth and quivering And thenthewrithing The terrible taskwasover. (258-259) itlaystill. and thefaceto quiver. Finally 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 Van Helsing'sgenof thispassage clearlypunishes Lucy forher transgression der 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 "his missal," the patriarchaltextualtradition signified 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"roundwooden driving (Arthur of thispenetration The vigorand enormity 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 gender roles. Consider,for instance,the followingpassage from the fluidity of Sex. Ellis, writingon "The Ellis's contemporaneous Studiesin thePsychology Mechanism of Detumescence" (i.e., ejaculation), employs a figure that Stoker would have recognized as his own: on of the is thepiling Tumescence to tumescence. linked is normally Detumescence is lighted thetorch whence flame outof thedevouring is theleaping fuel;detumescence is doubleyet to generation. The wholeprocess generation of lifeto be handedon from bytheraising to that a pileis driven intotheearth itis exactly bywhich analogous single; which fallson thehead of thepile. In tumescence weight and theletting go of a heavy the in theactofdetumescence accumulated; woundup and force theorganism is slowly is driven instrument thesperm-bearing is letgo and byitsliberation accumulated force home.37 Both Stokerand Ellis need to imagine so homelyan occurrence as penile peneor at least seismographic,proportions.Ellis's pile trationas an event of mythic, maydwarfeven the powerful"sperm-bearing driver, representing instrument," theychannel but both servea similarfunction: Stoker's alreadyoutsized member, and finally "liberate"a tremendous"accumulated force"that itselfrepresentsa Ellis,employinga Darwinian principleof interintention. or supra-natural transreads woman's body (much as we have seen pretationto explain that intention, as a sign of nature'soverVan Helsing do) as a natural sign-or, perhaps better, ridingreproductiveintention: the have alreadysuggested, as one or twowriters doubtthat, There can be little fertilis on thesideofeffective itsinfluence that to thefact owesitsdevelopment hymen aged,or byimmature, female to theimpregnation of theyoung It is an obstacle ization. which marks an anatomical admiration of force is thus ofthat expression feeble males.Thehymen exampleof theintimate itis an interesting So regarded, inher choice ofa mate. the female added) (italics selection.38 is really basedon natural matter in which sexualselection 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 had so dreadedand grown Therein thecoffin layno longer thefoulThingthat totheone bestentitled toit,butLucy wasyielded to hatethat thework ofherdestruction with herfaceof unequalled sweetness and purity....One as we had seenherin herlife, was overthewasted faceand form theholy calmthat and all wefelt that laylikesunshine wasto reignforever.(259) token and symbol of thecalmthat onlyan earthly This post-penetrative peace39 denotes not merely the final immobilizationof of the dangerous signifier but the also Lucy's body, correspondingstabilization 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 the technology pacifiesLucy and demonstratesso emphaticallythe efficacy to the scene Van Helsing employs to correctvampirism, corresponds formally of expulsion, which usually signals the end of the gothic narrative. Here, of of it,since course, thisscene signalsnot the end of the storybut the continuation 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 explicitly a violent could notrepresent 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 establishplacementof thisscene performsat least two other functions:first, of Van Helsing'scorrective technology, it reassures ing earlythe ultimateefficacy everyone-Stoker, his characters,the reader-that vampirismmay indeed be may be vanquished, that its sexual threat,however powerful and intriguing, so, in in and doing this establishing reassurance,it permitsthe expelled; second, textto prolong and repeat its flirtation withvampirism, its ambivalentpetition 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 scene occurs in first by Seward as spectatorand thenby Mina as participant, 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: herarms with themaway hands,keeping hand he heldbothMrs.Harker's With hisleft herfacedown forcing herbythebackoftheneck, hisright handgripped at fulltension; trickled with stream was smeared blood,and a thin on hisbosom.Her white nightdress of the barebreast, which wasshown dress.The attitude byhistorn-open downtheman's nose intoa saucerof milkto a kitten's resemblance to a childforcing 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 Mina's drinkingis double here, terribly. and femalebodilyfluidsintermingle and a lurid nursing.That thisis a both a "symbolicact of enforced fellation"40 of the scene of enforcedfellation is made even clearerby Mina's own description 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 thatI to thewound, theotherseizedmyneckand pressedmymouth tight, and with someof the-Oh, myGod,myGod! WhathaveI done? or swallow must either suffocate (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 kitten's had a terribleresemblanceto a child forcing of substitution and displacemententails a confusionof Dracula's Such fluidity as Dracula or an interfusion of masculineand feminine functions, sexual identity, 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 blood, has, of course, alwaysharbored thispotential. slow trickle We may read thisscene, in whichanatomical displacementsand the confluence of blood, milk,and semen forcefully erase the demarcationseparatingthe of the anxas Dracula'smostexplicitrepresentation masculineand the feminine, ietiesexcited by the vampirickiss.Here Dracula definesmostclearlyvampirism's

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this scene is postponed untillate in Significantly, 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 Van Helsing and a dustydeath to plot of Dracula,by grantingultimatevictory 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 the morphineinjectionthatimmobilizesthe woman and then 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 itselfglosses the troubled relationshipbetween moron (ghastly/beneficial) paternalismand violence (146). The medical professionlicenses the power to and definescanons of procedure, penetrate,devises a delicate instrumentation, withits insistent while the religioustradition, idealizationof women, encodes a on the mobility of desire (who penetrateswhom) and then licenses a restriction tremendouspunishmentforthe violationof the code.

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But it is all penetrativeenergy,whetherre-fangedor refined,and it is all of the articulations of penetrationare but different libidinal; the two strategies force.Dracula certainlyproblematizes,if it does not quite erase, same primitive a meaningfuldifferencebetween Van Helsing the line of separation signifying 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, Freud complicatesthe differentiation takenfromhis late workTheEgo and the the superego: betweenthe id and its unexpected effluent, intotheego. The oftheid can penetrate thecontents Thereare twopathsbywhich leadsbywayof theego ideal. one is direct, theother And: itmay be saidoftheid that ofmorality, ofview ofinstinctual control, Fromthepoint thatit and of thesuper-ego to be moral, itis totally of theego thatitstrives non-moral, and thenbecomeas cruelas onlytheid can be.42 can be supermoral 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 Dracula's penetrationsare directand penetratethe ego." "The one is direct," 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 id" and in being "as cruel as onlythe id can be,"the superego the "contents maybe said to be, in the words of Leo Bersani, "the id whichhas become itsown of the id and superego, of course, constitutes mirror."43 This mutual reflectivity as JonathanHarker,standingbefore mostdisturbing features, 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 himin the mirror!The whole room behind me was displayed; was no reflection 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 dangerous sameness indeed, is no one "exceptmyself." 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 fundamentaldifferences This blendingor interfusion We have, afterall, my argument. 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 sexual difference.Nonetheless, this with emphatic inscriptions interfusions quietlyerases itsown its despite purposive heterosexuality, penetrativestrategy, its own explicitassumptionsof gender and desire. It fundamentaldifferences, thatdesire forconnectionamong males is both expressed in would seem at first as repand constrainedby a traditionalarticulationof such fraternalaffection, resented in this text'sblaring theme of heroic or chivalricmale bonding. The a proud by action-a good fight, obvious male bonding in Dracula is precipitated Dedicated to a falselyexalted conception of woman, men ethic,a great victory. their"great the collective"highduty"thatmotivates to fulfill combine fraternally the apt provides exegete, the ungrammatical always Van Helsing, quest" (261). of God's own wish.... He have allowed us to analogy: "Thus we are ministers of the Cross to redeem redeem one soul already,and we go out as the old knights withinan more" (381). Van Helsing'schivalricanalogy establishesthisfraternity both moral rectitudeand adherence to the limiimpeccable lineage signifying tationupon desire thatthistraditionencodes and enforces. a more libidinal Yet beneath this screen or mask of authorized fraternity 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 otherwiseinconthe enable women," actually pretendto serve and protect"good of theblood thatis semen too. Here displacement(a woman's ceivableinterfusion body) and sublimation(these are medical penetrations)permitthe unpermitted, to just as in gang rape men share theirsemen in a location displaced sufficiently sugits subversive union. Repeating a more direct divertthe anxietyexcited by gestionthattherefinedmoralconceptionsof Van Helsing'sCrew of Lightexpress an energymuch like the Count's,Dracula obliquelyan excursivelibidinalenergy, to representanxious desire again employsan apparentlyrigorousheterosexuality 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 thistextto establishthispatternof heterosexualmediaIndeed, so insistent tion 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 someof us theflames; and the happiness Sevenyearsago we all wentthrough It is an addedjoy to Minaand to wellworth thepainweendured. sincethenis,we think, died. His is thesame day as thaton whichQuinceyMorris me thatour boy'sbirthday spirit has passed belief thatsomeof our bravefriend's thesecret mother holds,I know, butwe call him bandof mentogether; all our little intohim.His bundleof nameslinks Quincey. (449) of Jonathanand Mina Harker,LittleQuincey,whose introduction As offspring the represents seemingly so late in the narrativeinsureshis emblematicfunction, of conventional restorationof "natural" order and especially the rectification 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 thistext's lastand by the precedingpun of "spirit," gestion,reinforced 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 Mina, who ultimately last-minute displacement,its substitution 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, in women of all "monstrous" desire and, successfulfiliation impliesthe expulsion be, must second, thatall desire, howevermobile and omnivorousit maysecretly thatalone defined the Victorian subject itselfto the heterosexualconfiguration sense of the normal. In this regard, Stoker'sfable, howeverhyperbolicits anxof same sex eroticism ieties,representshis age. As we have seen, even polemicists 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 predictablerepetition and a preof gender produces everywhere prescriptions in a mediatingimage dictabledisplacement:the heterosexualnorm repeats itself 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 TheBestGhost 1. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla, Stories ofJ.S. Le Fanu (New York, in Le Fanu'sIn whichappeared first 1964), p. 337; thisnovella of lesbian vampirism, A GlassDarkly (1872), predatesDracula by twenty-five years. 2. Franco Moretti, SignsTaken for Wonders (Thetford, 1983), p. 100. 3. Brain Stoker, Dracula (New York,1979), p. 51. All further references toDracula appear withinthe essay in parentheses. 4. The paradigmaticinstanceof thistriplerhythm is Mary Shelley'sFrankenstein, a text 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 and Mr.Hyderepeats the pattern:HenryJekyll's chemicalinvitation to Hyde 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 is a durationcharacterizedby readerlysuspenessentialconditionof 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 far-the male as passive rape victim the polarized 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 in ModernEthics(London, 1906), p. 74. 11. The semanticimprecisionof the word "sodomy" is best explained byJohn Boswell, and Homosexuality Social Tolerance, Christianity, (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 ofSexuality (New York, 1980). My argumentagrees with 13. Michel Foucault,TheHistory 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 the phrase. Wills'sentire confirm,rather than to undermine this interpretation 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 the repeal of thislaw. strenuously in ModernEthics, p. 3. 15. Symonds,A Problem 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 term thatwould dominate German disneologismdie contrdre Sexualempfindung, I have not yetbeen able to date precisely course on same gender eroticism. Symonds's first use of "inversion." volume 2 of Studies in thePsychology ofSex (Philadel17. Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion, phia, 1906), p. 1. 18. This and the two subsequent quotations are fromSymonds'sModernEthics,pp. 86, 90, and 85 respectively. ofJohnAddington 19. Symonds'sletterto Carpenter,December 29, 1893, in The Letters volume 3, eds. H. M. Shueller and R. L. Peters(Detroit, 1969), p. 799; also Symonds, quoted in Weeks,p. 54. 20. Ellis, SexualInversion, p. 182. 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 (1977), p. 117, and her full-length Stoker's Dracula,"Literature and Psychology, (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 of womenis Carol A. Senf's"Dracula:Stoker'sResponse 26 (1982), pp. 33-39, which sees thissplit as to the New Woman,"Victorian Studies, Stoker's"ambivalentreactionto a topical phenomenon-the New Woman." 166 25. Maurice Richardson,"The Psychoanalysis of GhostStories," 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 Essayson Sex Equality,ed. Alice Rossi 28. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (Chicago, 1970), p. 148. 29. Ibid., p. 187. PMLA, and PoeticDiscoursein TheSubjection ofWomen," 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 the terminological 33. An adequate analysisof theideologicaland politicalimplications shiftfrom "inversion"to "homosexuality"is simplybeyond the scope of this essay, in the and the problem is furthercomplicated by a certain imprecisionor fluidity of an already unstableterminology. Ellis used the word employment by these writers and Carpenter, of any term citingthe evidentbastardy "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, p. 1; italicsadded), whereas homosexualitymay referto same sex de mieux), or intentionally eroticism perv(faute 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 least,forthe medicalizationof congenitalinversion promisethatallows,potentially I repeat the cautionthatmydescripof willful and the criminalization homosexuality. of a terminologicalmuddle. For a tion here entails a necessary oversimplification more complete and particularanalysissee Chauncey,pp. 114-146; for the applicaof such a taxonomyto lesbian relationshipssee Ellis, SexualInversion, pp. 131bility 141. 34. Chauncey,p. 132. 35. The symbolicinterchangeability of blood and semen in vampirismwas identified 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 thePsychology 37. Havelock Ellis,EroticSymbolism, volume 5 of Studies ofSex (Philadelphia, 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 (1972), p. 30. and Psychology, Dracula,"Literature Ellis, for of hypnotismand anaesthesia is not idiosyncratic. 41. Stoker'sconfiguration 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 the narrowsense sleep, or hypnotism merelythe conditionof artificially-produced of the term,but all those groups of psychicphenomena which are characterizedby of the lower a decreased controlof the highernervouscentres,and increased activity The qualitythatdeterminesmembershipin this"convenient"taxonomyis, centres." of the lower to put mattersbaldly,ap elvis pumped up by the "increased activity 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 of the sexual emotions.At the same timethe greateractivity of the cerebralcentresenables them to subordinateand utiliseto theirown ends the active sexual emotions,so thatreproductionis checked and the balance increasingly of women, necessitatedby an evoto some extent restored" The pelvic superiority imperative(betterbabies withbiggerheads require broader pelves),implies lutionary sexualitythat must be a corresponding danger-an engorged and hypersensitive of the cerebral centres"so that "balance" may be actively"checked" by the "activity "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 would seem, is not withoutits attendantdangers: "Thus chloroform, thesiology, 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 prior endangerment.What if thiswoman's whose empowermentanxiouslyreflects lower centers should take the opportunity-to use another of Ellis's phrases-"of in an orgy"?Dracula'skiss,Van Helsing'sneedle and stake,and Ellis's"higher indulging 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 itself, authorizesonly repetitions clearlyarticulatesthe destinyof femininedesire; Lucy will only do what Dracula has done before.) Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman I have used the fourth (New York, 1904), pp. 299, 73, 316, and 313 respectively. edition appeared in England in 1895. edition; the first Id (New York, 1960), pp. 44-45. 42. Sigmund Freud, TheEgo and the 43. Leo Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud(Berkeley,1977), p. 92.

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