Jessica Denzer
Editoral Meditation
It’s incredible how heavy the body can feel. How at times, without moving, the weight of the self can sink so deep into the chair, the bed, the wet dirty ground. Perhaps it’s unfair to begin this idea in an unspoken third person. This implied objectivity, as if the you and I are on the same page, that the reader at large can read these lines and think to themselves, yes, true. At times the body can feel heavy.
Though I am sure there are some who might agree.
Still, it is my body I am talking about. My heavy, weighted body. The body of a woman sinking; legs, arms, head, breasts, stomach, fingers, toes. I subtract my breasts by five pounds each when standing on the scale. My true weight at the doctor’s office, then, is subtracted ten pounds for breasts and 5-10 pounds for shoes and clothes. My shoes, these days, are heavy, chunky soles, lug soles they’re called, which I find both terrifying and amusing. We have come to this, WE WOMEN. We’ve begun to weigh down our shoes. Lugging our own feet around. Though, I must admit, the thick sole and heavy leather of these loafers make my ankles look slender, pretty, delicate. A scandalous pair of ankles atop my masculine presenting shoes. And the nurse does not tell me to take them off, so on the scale they go, along with the rest of me, including my breasts, heavier today than yesterday; scaled pounds – (X+ Y) = a body sans breasts and shoes.
The practice of scaling is a matter of pieces. A pound of flesh, piece by piece, section by section, adding up to penance. To forgiveness. Or justice. Or whatever it is when a debt is owed and called to account. These days, I think a lot in pieces. I think about legs sore from overuse, either unintentional or intentional. Mostly intentional. Mostly me, running and walking and moving at unnecessary speeds, unnecessary distances. I haven’t figured out, yet, how to slow down.
“Your job keeps you on your feet,” my mother says to me. I do not have the heart to tell her that mostly I sit on top a table across from my students, turtle-necked and cross-legged, arms posed just so, Thinkeresque. I don’t tell her that in this repose, ever so sculpted, I ask early twenty somethings if they caught the homoerotic orgasmic desires in Bram Stoker’s most famous novel. Dracula’s first four chapters are dictated entirely by the first of our three primary narrators, Jonathan Harker, who has traveled to Transylvania from England to finalize a real estate deal brokered by his boss. By chapter three, Jonathan has become imprisoned in Dracula’s castle and caught between three beautiful vampy gals, waiting in “languorous ecstasy” for what is very obviously a life-threatening orgy. But Dracula interrupts, breaking up the heterosexual frenzy and complicating the desire.1 “This man belongs to me!” the Count yells, before scooping up his damseled Jonathan and putting him to bed. I wonder what it is like to belong to someone like the Count; to be scooped up by such a man as Dracula; to be carried off to bed, to be put to rest, tucked in, your clothes folded next to you.2 Is it maternal or erotic? Sweet or sexy? Can it be both?
I don’t tell my mom how smutty my classes are. How once we spent a whole class discussing the term anal and its relationship to colonial anxiety. I don’t mention much. I just agree with her, tell her she’s right, my job keeps me on my feet.
The nurse who draws my blood is the same one who took my weight. She asks me if I work out. “Your arms are so nice,” she says. She asks me if I use machines or free weights. I tell her machines. It is a lie. I don’t know how to tell her I obsessively plank during my office hours, throwing in a few yoga moves and squats. I don’t know how to tell her how paranoid I’ve become about pelvic floor strength and correct diaphragmatic breathing. How could I tell her that? She’d think I was crazy.
“Machines,” I say. “I just joined the Y.”
“Such nice veins,” she says, and shoves a needle into my arm. The blood flows into the small plastic tube and floods the vial. So quick. So dark. A piece of me. Or pieces. Oxygenated pieces, flowing out of me. Captured. Sent away.
Dracula, a novel best known for its seductive blood fests, is at heart, a travel novel, a tourist excursion, a narrative about assimilation and adaptation, immigration, science, religion; it’s a novel about Western Civilization, colonization, race, miscegenation, gender, politics, purity, sin, sex, desire. At its core it is ALL these things. It has a very large core. A big beating heart. And it’s about death. Or more accurately the novel is about beating death. About survival. Dracula is a monster and a man who has lived for hundreds of years, dead and undead, an immortal parasite, a gentleman, an aristocrat, a FOUL THING,3 a highly educated and well-spoken polyglot, and a blood thirsty savage who buys his way into to British society. How do you defeat someone like that? How do you win?
The first part of the novel is really about business. The business of real estate, the buying up of land, contracts signed, deeds exchange. Jonathan Harker is a solicitor, after all, on his very first business trip abroad, traveling from England, across the far reaches of Europe, deep into the Carpathian Mountains. And there he will finalize the sales of the various properties our wealthy foreigner has strategically purchased around old London town. He will also function as Dracula’s first victim, though Dracula never tastes Jonathan’s delicious British blood. The novel is very adamant about that. No direct homo-blood-exchanges. Absolutely not. He will suck Jonathan dry of his energy, his knowledge, his mannerisms, his clothes, his sanity. He will trap him within his castle walls and take and take and take until the Count is ready to set sail, dressed in the costume of assimilation, ready to conquer.
And conquer his does. First through the seas, infiltrating the mainland on a ghostly Russian merchant vessel, and then through the body of lovely Lucy Westenra, whose veins he feasts on over the next eight chapters, slowly drawing her out. Edging her bit by bit. And it is Lucy’s body that becomes the first battle between Dracula and the “Crew of Light”,4 a group of men, mostly Lucy’s suitors and Van Helsing, the Amsterdam doctor called in to fight against the pathogen that is Count Dracula.
A week after my first appointment, I am sitting in the doctor’s office again. More blood work. More needles. I sit with my left fist clenched; my arm tightly wrapped with a rubber band. The nurse, a different nurse from the last appointment, tells me proudly that she never hurts anyone; but one should avoid using absolute language. There is always an exception and today, that exception is me. I look away and cannot help but flinch. I can hear the disappointment in her tone when she says sorry. Weakling, I imagine her thinking, can’t even stand the sight of her own blood. Can’t even handle a tiny little needle. Fair enough, I think. It’s true. I don’t like the needle.
She pulls the needle out and tells me to hold the cotton to my arm. I do as I am told. Quickly, I glance at the two vials on the metal table beside me. Deep rusty red, iron darkness. Thick and sticky. More pieces.
“All set,” she says as she slips a band aid over the tiny hole in my arm.
Before staked-vampire-Lucy expels blood out of her body in orgasmic proportions,5 a much cleaner, more controlled, and clinical blood exchange occurs. In four separate moments of “medical necessity”, filtering through four different men, including himself, Professor Van Helsing injects weak, drained Lucy with morphine and performs the very new, very unrefined act of blood transfusions.6 As with almost anything in the text, it is easy to see the blood transfusions as sexual in nature. Plenty of scholarship covers the repressed and latent desires in Stoker’s characters, especially those who succumb to vampiric seduction, most notably Jonathan Harker and Lucy Westenra. In Frances Ford Coppola’s film, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Lucy is played by ever-sensual Sadie Frost, cleavage out even before the gloriously campy Dracula-cum-ridiculous-wolf/creature-fucking scene. I often show these scenes to my students, not because they are good representations, but rather because they are extreme exaggerations (nuance be damned!) of what is taking place in the novel: a Victorian fantasy played out on the body of a subtly sexualized Lucy. This isn’t to say that Coppola’s interpretation has no merit. A little more than half the novel is a battle over Lucy’s body, her feminized body, her sexualized body, her “de-racinated”7 body, the attempted “re-racination” of her body, and later the gang banging via-staking of “that Thing […] that bore her shape”, that “Foul Thing,” that must be executed/fucked out of Lucy-as-vessel in order to return her, fully and completely, though dead, to bloody purity.8
But the blood transfusions are just a different representation of the same thing. Clinical, cold, controlled penetration. And they fail. Fail royally. A royal failure. Lucy gets filled up with one man’s blood and hands it over to another; lets the Monster Count back in, opens her veins, and cums for him.
In the widely taught essay “Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula,” anthropologist John Allen Stevenson discusses the blood transfusions as sexual exchanges orchestrated and carried out by Van Helsingin and Lucy’s three Western suitors as an attempt to “re-racinate” Lucy with the “Britishness” that has been drained out of her through copulation-bloodletting with our vampy villain. Late Victorians, and the majority of the Western World, especially those whose power played a large hand in the colonization and enslavement of half the globe, had a deeply racist notion of anatomy.9 A notion defined by Western white supremacy, deployed through a paternalistic-militarized structure of colonial dominance, and justified by the logically feeble but all together enduring notion of Divine Right.
Lucy’s identity, then, drained through sexual exchange suggests that her body is less the body of a uniquely individual person, and more a vessel for a racial identity and its perpetuation. In the year 1897, it was commonly believed that blood and semen were essentially the same, suggesting that blood’s properties relating to identity and procreation were of the same essence as seminal fluid. Therefore, the passing of one’s blood to another would have both the symbolic and literal effect as spermatic fertilization. Of course, the mysteries of the female reproductive system and the egg’s role in genetic composition and chromosomal inheritance was not widely understood10 and the discovery of DNA as the harbinger of genetic traits wouldn’t even enter the conversation until the late 1920’s. Instead, the Victorians relied on blood, on that rusty dark substance, infused with the masculine power of pollination. All blood, then, was spermatic; women’s blood was father’s sperm until it became husband’s sperm.
But for Lucy, however, there is no father. Her father, long dead, is mentioned only once, and only to identify the root of her sleepwalking.11 Her mother, too, is weak and sick, unable to keep her house in order, leaving Lucy vulnerable. Against the Count, then, there is only the Professor and three “good brave men,” all possible husbands, all rising12 to the occasion, spending nearly 40 pages drugging Lucy with morphine and pumping their blood into her unconscious body. Arthur, her fiancé, the noblest of them all (a literal aristocrat on the verge of inheriting his father’s estate, fortune, and title), is the first, proclaiming he would give his last drop. “You are a man, and it is a man we want,” Van Helsing tells him, ushering Arthur into the room and instructing him to take off his clothes (113). What follows is a kind of “medical mating ritual,” choreographed by the old doctor, who drugs the young object of affection before guiding the lover to a kiss. The kiss, a symbol of the marriage ceremony, allows for the penetration of the phallic needle and the transmission of Arthur’s blood into Lucy’s body, impregnating her with his identity under the watchful eye of medical authority. But this isn’t enough. Only two and a half pages later, Van Helsing and Dr. Seward find their patient weak once more and in desperate need of blood. But where did Arthur’s “blood so pure”13 go?
Seward, Lucy’s personal doctor and rejected lover (paternalistic erotica?), wastes no time in offering up his own. It’s interesting how Stoker orders the information here, how Seward—our somewhat nerdy doctor and the first of Lucy’s suitors to receive a rejection—is next in line to pick up where Arthur left off, or perhaps more accurately, attempt to succeed where Arthur has failed. Seward is a middle-class work-acholic; he is nervous, anxious, and arguably the least eligible of the three bachelors—Arthur is rich with a title, and Quincey is rich and sexy. Seward exhibits a hint of sadism when working with his patient, and during his proposal to Lucy he “kept playing with a lancet in a way that made [Lucy] want to scream” (56). The lancet is a fine detail, one my students often skip over. I make them go back. I want them to see Dr. John Seward playing with a knife in front of a woman whose execution he will later witness and narrate in glorious detail. To say Seward loves Lucy with a violent passion is not untrue, but to say only that would be to deny the great care he takes in repressing anything that transgresses his sense of control, the order of himself. His entire schtick is his utter reliance of “rationalism,” which, for Stoker, boils down to sexual, physical, and emotional repression fed through extreme production anxiety.14
But at the moment of Lucy’s second transfusion, in desperate need of blood, Seward finds himself in the position of lover-hero: Young, blood-full, British, and—most importantly—present, in the room, with ready veins. Seward roles up his sleeve as Van Helsing instructs and follows through the same mating ritual as his friend Arthur had before. But Seward has the advantage over Arthur in the sense that Arthur cannot narrate his own ritual with Lucy, leaving Seward as the one to give all the details (120). And here, Seward gives us the full account of his blood-giving, stating, “No man knows till he experiences it, what is it to feel his own life-blood drawn away into the veins of the woman he loves” (120). Van Helsing, of course, being the match-making doctor and leader of the troop, knows to stop Seward before he gives too much of himself over, before he impregnates Lucy more than is “medically necessary”:
The Professor watched me critically. ‘That will do,’ he said.
‘Already? I remonstrated. ‘You took a great deal more from Art.’
To which he smiled a sad sort of smile as he replied: —
‘He is her lover, her fiancé…’ (121)
The Professor then demands a code of silence, forcing Seward not to tell Arthur of the transfusion. A silence the Professor will demand of himself and Quincey, as well. All four men required, three in secret, and Lucy takes each one in silence and then hands it over to Dracula, letting him feast on the seminal fluids of British masculinity. Sucking it up like ambrosia.
Blood sucking, then, is just as homoerotic as it is heteroerotic. The Count penetrates the body of feminine Lucy in order to suck up all the sweet blood-sperm he can get. Sweet British sperm. Pure white British identity, red and white cells, blood on virginal bedclothes, dripping from the fair skin of Lucy, or later, the plump mouth of Mina Harker. Women’s bodies are both spaces to conquer and vessels to empty and fill. Blood as cocktail for our foreign monster becomes the inverted fear of reverse colonization, of reverse sexual-racial dominance, since all dominance is inherently sexual, a mode of control, a mode of mounting, fucking, holding one down underneath the pulse of a cock.
Blood in Dracula, then, is identity through sexual control, both over others and over oneself. Quite possibly most importantly blood is control over oneself. Perhaps this is why it’s so tasty to our far-east foreign monster, this potential loss of control, this giving way to hysterical violent frenzy of passion. When seeing vampire-Lucy emerge in the cemetery, moments before Van Helsing instructs Arthur to plunge his thick pointy stake into her writhing wet body, Seward tells us “had she then to be killed, I could have done it with a savage delight” (197). Always wanting to be first, always wanting to stick his frenzied stake in her before anyone else, Seward’s advantage of narration doesn’t allow him the position of devirginizing-revirginizing force (that will always be Arthur); but the desire is there, and in the face of Lucy as vampire, Lucy as fully sexual being, this desire is out of control, it is violent, it is ‘savage.’ Is there anything more terrifying to a colonial imperialist power than to be out of control? To be savage? To be the FOUL THING?
It’s 1897 after all, and borders and boundaries have begun to dissolve: national boundaries, racial boundaries, gender boundaries, boundaries between humans and animals, humans and machines. Control is slipping. It is almost non-existent. We are a stone’s throw away from WWI, the most mechanized war to be fought on a global scale, from which writers like Kafka and then eventually T.S. Eliot, Joyce, and Woolf will emerge. Out of WWI we will find ourselves in the belly of modernism, and from there we will turn around with both disillusionment and illusion, man as insect, man as war, human being as meaning and meaninglessness. And then we will spend the next hundred years tirelessly inventing machine after machine, structure after structure, cage after cage, to give us some semblance of control, to live in this grand illusion. Never again, we say to ourselves, Never again, we repeat over and over, not seeing the Again and Again and Again. Convincing ourselves that we don’t see the machines being dropped from high places, light mechanical drones exploding from far away. Convincing ourselves that we are in control.
I scroll through my iCal, typing emails, slipping from one Zoom call to the next – my arms bruised from my own bloodlettings, dark marks of purple and blue resting like flowers in the soft creases of my joints. I haven’t showered in several days, caught in the grind of mid-semester grading. I am unclean. FOUL. I can smell the foulness emanating from me. I put my hand on my abdomen and feel the monster inside me. The being I’ve been growing over the last 25 weeks. The reason for all these bloodlettings. In the abstract, it is easy to think about pregnancy as vampiric. In a medical sense, it is, in fact, an act of blood sucking, life draining, leaching, a parasitic aristocrat languorously feeding off my resources.
The placenta is a magical thing, an organ formed newly in the body, external from the baby, but of the baby, a new foreign body made of stem cells from the blastocyst. Medical texts, when outlining the process of the blastocyst’s attachment to the uterine wall, will often use the word “invasion.” A quick word search in several articles published through the National Institute of Health: National Library of Medicine shows the words “invasive” and “invade” over 50 times. The article, “Human Trophoblast Invasion and Spiral Artery Transformation,” states “During early human pregnancy extravillous cytotrophoblasts invade the uterus”15 and the article “Traditional and New Routes of Trophoblast Invasion and Their Implications for Pregnancy Diseases,” refers to the cells’ actions as “early invasion,” and “initial invasion.” I love this idea of the early invasion. The initial take-over. The first move on the battlefield. Quiet, quick, maybe a tiny pinch, a slight discomfort. Some might not even feel the takeover. Some might not even know.
Dracula invades through the sea. Under the cover of a storm, the waves crashing against the cliffs of Whitby, Dracula’s ship is brought in, docked and secured by the kind seamen16 of this Northeastern coastal town. But the ship is empty, no bodies in sight, except for a dead man tied to the mast, and an “immense dog” that leaps from the ship deck and disappears into the night (76). It is noted. Strange. A tiny pinch. The townspeople search for the dog, wanting to feed it, wanting to give it shelter. “A good deal of interest was abroad concerning the dog which landed when the ship struck,” writes the unnamed correspondent from ‘The Dailygraph,’ newspaper clipping Mina Harker née Mina Murray cuts out and slips into her diary, “and more than a few of the members of the S.P.C.A.,17 which is very strong in Whitby, have tried to befriend the animal,” (78). So kind these people are, so open. Come in sweet dog! We will feed you, give you warmth and pets! Here boy, good boy! But the dog does not show. It has all but disappeared. The initial invasion complete.
I often don’t have enough time with my students to spend on this section about the dog. We must focus on other things, the blood, the sex, the constant reference to light and dark, the INVASION of the OTHER in all its gory and grotesque and lovely details. I let the students gravitate where they will, landing often on the most penetrative and obscene parts. I teach them the terms New Woman and True Woman, id, ego, and super ego, reverse colonization, and they throw these words around like rice at a wedding, tearing the text apart with their teeth. But this moment with the dog stays with me. The dog is, of course, Dracula in a bestial form. Animal. Hungry. Rabid. There are so many obvious reads here, so many ways to see our Eastern Other as inhuman. Still, it’s a dog. Man’s best friend. A big old pooch. And the townspeople think the same.
Come here boy, good boy, come here!
I imagine myself wandering the open spaces of Whitby, a bag of treats in hand, some peanut butter, calling out. “Hey buddy,” I say, “c’mon. Wanna treat? Here puppy, I’ve got peanut butter.” And I’d do it, too. My entire childhood was spent wandering the neighborhood, picking up cats, luring dogs, collecting a menagerie of fury friends. In my adulthood, I have to resist the urge every time I see an animal unaccompanied, even for a moment. A cat running across the street, a dog off leash bounding up the block. “Whose dog is that?” I think to myself or say out loud moments before seeing an obvious owner. “Whose dog is that?” functioning as code for “Come here, puppy. I’ve got peanut butter!”
I love the people of Whitby for searching for the dog. I love that the town has a strong Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals membership, that it lets the animals in. But that’s the point, isn’t it? That they let the animal in. They invite him to the shore, they open their homes to him, offer him food, shelter, kindness. These are good English Church People after all. They know their verses. “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me,”18 Jesus says, “…just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” Why couldn’t Jesus be the dog? The least of us? The stranger. Or any stranger? Anyone in need. Anyone who needed a bit of food and water, a home, some clothes to wear?
But that’s the trouble. The stranger. Anyone. It could be ANYONE. How could we be so kind to let just anyone in? Any old dog? Any old immense dog.
In Coppola’s version, Dracula is depicted as an enormous bestial monster. There is no mistaking this creature for a cute little pooch. One does not imagine the S.P.C.A. searching the cliffs with peanut butter cooing out “c’mere boy.” No matter what the liberals might have you believe, this dog man is no puppy. In perhaps one of the most ridiculous and absurd depictions of bestiality, werewolfed Dracula successfully invades Whitby, and makes a b-line for Lucy Westenra’s body, humping and grunting the whole way through. Lucy, of course, dressed in the world’s most impractical red nightgown, is writhing in ecstasy under her furry lover, orgasming wildly. The beast is literally in her.19
Compared to the innocent potential of a large dog (think Clifford, think Carl, think “Where the Red Fern Grows”), Coppola’s over-the-top imagery loses the nuance and so misses the point. The novel’s depiction of a generic “immense” dog leaves room for the imagination. It suggests that the dog might be big, yes, but it could be friendly, in need. The invocation of S.P.C.A. suggests that animals, including dogs, are viewed by Whitby, and a large part of Victorian England, as creatures worth protecting. That like other living, breathing beings, they are worthy of love and care, or at the very least, the basic rights to the necessities required to live. It doesn’t matter to the townspeople that the dog came from a poorly kept ship, that he has no kin, that he has traveled on rocky waters, crossed boarders, and arrived with nothing. What matters is that he is alive, and like “one of the least,” potentially in need of help. If Coppola’s version had leaped off that ship, it would have been shot down immediately. But it isn’t Coppola’s version. It is Stoker’s version, and Stoker’s version is unassuming, possibly even cute, but just as, if not more dangerous. For under the mask of need, there is a monster.
Or at least that’s what I’ve been hearing lately. In the news, on the T.V. and social media reels, repeated by people across the country. We’ve become too soft, they say; We have been too nice, too kind; We’ve been tricked, manipulated; We’ve been stupid. These immigrants, these dogs, these monsters. They have slipped in undetected, taken advantage of our social welfare, drained our system, taken our jobs, raped our women.
After Lucy is bitten by Dracula, she goes through a brief period of extreme wellness before she begins her descent. She writes in a letter addressed to Mina “I have an appetite like a cormorant, am full of life, and sleep well.” Later in the letter she states, “Arthur says I’m getting fat” (101). In Stevenson’s essay, he remarks “the sexuality and reproduction of the vampire is simultaneously different and a parodic mirror” (142). In other words, while we know Lucy is not actually pregnant with a human child, the simulated sexual encounter with Dracula has left her in a state of pregnancy, one in which she is both “full of life” and on the verge of losing it. Her human death, too, is described in a similar duality, reflecting Stevenson’s assertion that reproduction is both “different and a parodic mirror”; Lucy’s last non-monster moments simulate both the act of birth and the act of orgasm. To complicated it more, the birthing of Lucy-as-vampire, requires the death of Lucy-as-human. In this moment the mother and the child merge, as does life and death, forming the “foul thing of the night.” This merging, or what Stevenson calls deracinating, is an act of successful colonizing, in which Lucy’s body, raped to orgasm (an obviously problematic depiction) and drained of her Britishness, rises as the undead woman-child of Dracula, not as powerful as the Count, but powerful enough to deny her former British suitors (her tribe) not only rights over her body and her life, but rights over their own bodies and their own lives. In “The Occidental Tourist: ‘Dracula’ and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization,”20 scholar Stephen Arata defines Dracula as a reverse colonization fantasy. He writes:
Late-Victorian fiction in particular is saturated with the sense that the entire nation—as a race of people, as a political and imperial force, as a social and cultural power—was in irretrievable decline […] Dracula enacts the period’s most important and pervasive narrative of decline, a narrative of reverse colonization. Versions of this story recur with remarkable frequency in both fiction and nonfiction texts throughout the last decades of the century. In whatever guise, this narrative expresses both fear and guilt. The fear is that what has been represented as the ‘civilized’ world is on the point of being colonized by ‘primitive’ forces […] a terrifying reversal has occurred: the colonizer finds himself in the position of the colonized, the exploiter becomes exploited, the victimizer victimized. Such fears are linked to a perceived decline – racial, moral, spiritual – which makes the nation vulnerable to attack from more vigorous, ‘primitive’ peoples. But fantasies of reverse colonization are more than products of geopolitical fears. They are also responses to cultural guilt. In the marauding invasive Other, British Culture sees its own imperial practices mirrored back in monstrous forms. (622-23)
It’s interesting to think about Lucy as both colonized and colonizer. Arata argues “That Dracula propagates his race solely through the bodies of women suggests an affinity, or even an identity, between vampiric sexuality and female sexuality” (632). If we take Arata’s argument regarding reverse colonization to full account, then we must consider the female body under British hegemonic patriarchy as an exploited body, one used for its resources in order to strengthen and propagate the body politic of masculine England. The fact that her body can be colonized by the Other and then be reborn as the colonizer, a “voluptuous”21 being who works to conquer and exploit the body and mind of her male suitors suggests a deeper and more complicated fear within the system of exploitation and colonization. Lucy-as-vampire is both an external and an internal threat, an internal threat that can be awakened and empowered by the external. Brought to life, full life, through communion with the outsider; one that might look like assault to the unsuspecting Mina, who interrupts Dracula’s attack on Lucy, but one to the critical observer as ecstatic, orgasmic frenzy. One that looks like freedom. “ARE WE PAYING ATTENTION?” the text cries out to us, “Do we see what could happen? If we give up control? Let them in? Those immense dogs!”
My monster kicks me from the inside as I type these words. I’ve seen his little legs in the ultrasound. He loves showing them off. Strong, perfect, muscular legs. Legs that will eventually walk, run, kick, skip. Move him out of and away from me. Move him into the world. So much of the conversation about immigration is about these kinds of legs. These legs inside me that I am choosing to grow in my body over a span of 40 weeks. My choice to carry this monster, whose father, though not undocumented, is also not American, and from an area of the world particularly targeted by current American politics. Our marriage, my greatest love story, is not unburdened by the realities of volatile U.S. immigration policies. It has been discussed among the interns of Senator Chuck Schumer and those of former president Joseph Biden, and has been approved (thus far) by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State. And now, in a climate of chaos, I spend my afternoons calmly explaining to my 10-year-old stepson why we will not be traveling this summer to visit his grandparents, why we won’t be traveling at all.
“Because it is not safe,” I tell him.
“Why not?” he asks.
You try explaining this kind of “unsafe” to a 10-year-old with a green card without causing severe panic.
And then there is this perfect baby waiting to be born. Pieces of my husband combined with pieces of me, equal contributions, red and white cells, swirling inside me, growing into a whole person. How will I explain the world to this baby? How will I explain all the choices we made to bring him about? How will I explain that, in moments of frenzied ecstasy, I chose his father and made a life with him? How this kind of union, or this kind of life, is one that transgresses the structures of power defined by historical hegemony, defined by the machines of colonialism, the destructive guise of control?
When existing in hierarchies of power that are defined by the negation of others, one cannot separate the others of negation entirely. What I mean is, the boundaries between the negated are blurred, intertwined, working to define and so potentially defile the standard. What I mean is, that the need to control the feminine is just as necessary as the need to control non-whiteness in relation to supremacy. What I mean is, if we really get down to the heart of it, the fear of all this chaos, what we’re talking about is not the fear that they will TAKE our women, but that our women might go willingly. What I mean is, if women are given a choice, we might not like their choices.
After Mina Harker is attacked by Dracula, she professes her desire to die, if need be. The ultimate sacrifice would be performed, she hopes, by one man “who loved me, who would save me such a pain, and so desperate an effort” (270). This death, she concludes, would be necessary if signs of her transformation suggest her switch in loyalty away from the “Good Brave Men” and toward the Count. A few chapters later, she reiterates this sentiment, pleading with her husband to euthanize her, her willingness to die framed as duty to her husband and the men who define her identity as woman. “Think dear,” she tells Harker, “that there have been times when brave men have killed their wives and womenkind, to keep them from falling into the hands of the enemy” (307).
Stevenson identifies Mina’s desire to die as a problem not of “salvation from the loathsome embraces” of the foreigner, but a problem of “loyalty: the danger is not that she will be captured but that she will go willingly” (139). Stevenson calls Dracula the great “social adulterer, whose purpose is nothing if not to turn good Englishwomen […] away from their own kind and customs” (139; 140).
Obviously human relationships are more complicated than this gross oversimplification of Hegemony and the Other. Structures of supremacy thrive on simple narratives: us v. them, good v. evil, men v. women, civilization v. barbarism, black v. white, West v. East. We human beings, however, are complicated creatures. We continue to complicate those exact simplified conditions, disrupting the narrative of power. Edging, bit by bit, defining and redefining what is human and what is monster.
History is on the side of the un-simple human being in this regard. The narrative moves on a pendulum of disruption, constantly thwarting, overturning, or progressing away from the established standard. There will always be a revolution waiting in the wings. Not to suggest that it is easy. It’s certainly not easy. People do not die or become imprisoned for the easy. But it is constantly happening, this disruption, this push. It is always there under the surface. There is always a bomb plot in the wings. There was in 1897, there is now. People will surprise you, how quickly they will take to the streets, light things on fire, quietly make monsters.
And so, we move, back and forth, disruption, eruption, slowly towards something, whatever that something is, forward or backward. Or perhaps forward is an illusion. I’ve spent far too many pages, after all, discussing a novel that is over 100 years old. I spent over a span of a several months composing this essay either in my head or on the page, thinking about the comparative anxieties of 1897 and 2025. And perhaps this is a meditation only for myself. Perhaps this is all just about me. A way for me to talk about myself, my own body, my machine, my blood, my monster. But isn’t that what writing is? What art is? It’s all about the self until it stops being just about the self; until something flips; something connects, invades, a tiny pinch. So, I keep writing, keep going towards something. Forward into the illusion.
And I feel the stretch of my skin as it grows underneath the push of this monster. A ready-made expansion. My organs moving upward and backward, out of the way. Everything feels bigger today than yesterday. Time, whatever it might be, is going somewhere, minute by minute through a constant progression of growth. Life, death, life. A cycle I suppose. Lucy as human birthing out the self as vampire. Widening the girth of possibility.
“It is unsafe to travel out of the country,” I tell my stepson. “We don’t know if they’ll let us come back.”
Backward is also an illusion. Perhaps we are not moving at all. Or perhaps I’m wrong about revolution. Perhaps we’re all just stuck in oscillation, circling around and around, mirroring and mimicking what we think is progression, what we think of as ourselves, projecting a reflection out into the world, while in the meantime we hover in the darkness, sipping on our own blood. Vampires can’t be seen in the mirror, after all. It’s all a trick of light.
That’s a bit dramatic, isn’t it? Pointing out our own vampiric tendencies. But that’s how the story is told, isn’t it? The state of Motherhood? Life in general! At least that’s how it is presented. The frame from which we view the tableau. In Dracula, Lucy’s impregnation-reproduction is literally a vampiric attack, and Mina’s attack and eventual salvation results in the birth of an actual child. In both these cases, the blood sucking and the life-making result in a change of identity, whether it be the identity of the vampire, or the identity of the mother. For Mina, this change moves her from active and necessary participant within the social body to the domestic role of mother that takes hold seven years after her humanity is restored. In the final page of the novel, Jonathan Harker resumes as primary narrator. Harker spends most of the novel in decline, described by his wife and others often as “thin and pale and weak-looking,” who sleeps through much of his wedding, his marriage, and most importantly the Count’s ravaging attack on his wife.22 But in the last chapters of the story, he suddenly revitalizes, emerging as masculine executioner, whose “impetuosity, and manifest singleness of his purpose, seemed to overawe those in front of him; instinctively they cowered aside and let him pass. In an instant he had jumped upon the cart, and, with a strength that seemed incredible, raised the great box, and flung it over the wheel to the ground” (349).
In only a matter of pages, Jonathan Harker—Dracula’s first victim, a weakened nervous wreck, gray haired and haggard as he is by the emasculation of the Other—nonetheless parts a sea of Dracula minions, leaps into the air like Wolverine, and kills the Count with the blow of his Kukri knife.23 Beyond this being one of the more anti-climactic endings of any horror novel I’ve ever read, the absurdity of the set-up suggest that in order to defeat the primal Other, Jonathan must embody the primal Other; he must for a brief but necessary moment become the super/subhuman brute masculine man, filled with a single purpose of destruction. There is no sign of the S.P.C.A. on these mountains. Just pure force.
But the novel doesn’t end here. Thank goodness! We have the privilege of a short note, added by Jonathan, seven years later, writing from a place of safety and civility. Here, the order of information matters. We learn first, before anything else, that Mina is now the mother of a boy whose “birthday is the same day as that on which Quincey Morris died,” (351) which, though not mentioned, is also the same day that Dracula was executed since the execution of Dracula results in the death of Quincey (note: both sex gods of the novel die on the same day). Dracula’s death also results in the death of Mina’s emerging vampiric identity and the rebirth of her British femininity, marked by the disappearance of the physical symbols of Dracula’s defilement.24 Seven years later, Mina is mother to a child who may or may not be seven-years-old, who carries the names of all the men who participated in the destruction of our foreign Other, and so who saved Mina from her own monstrousness; however, he goes by Quincey, the hottest and most seductive of the bunch, foreign himself, and now dead as a doorknob. Lots to unpack, obviously.
But you can focus on all that later. You can go back and read the book, draw your own conclusions. What I want to focus on comes a bit further down on the page in Jonathan’s little note. Now man enough to invade his wife’s uterus and implant at least one successful blastocyst, Harker writes, “all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document! Nothing but a mass of typewriting […] We could hardly ask anyone, even did we wish to, to accept these as proofs of so wild a story” (351).
Now, this whole book is epistolary. It switches between the POV’s of Jonathan, Mina, and Dr. Seward, with Mina’s often proving the most informative and plot-driven of the three. She’s our Sherlock, after all, who puts it all together. And she literally does put it all together. The “mass of typewriting” is her typewriting, her compilation, her authorial project. And yet, at the very end of the book, after all the bloodletting and executions, our one active woman, our one true hero, is finished playing in public. Birth has changed her. It has sucked out her old identity, let it flow out through the act of seminal penetration, allowed for the invasion to take place, and replaced her with a new Mina. A mother. MOTHER MINA. Unspeaking Mina. The blastocyst did its job well. The invasion complete.
Horror loves the mother. Whether it is the monstrous mother, the victim mother, or the clueless mother, so often horror places the uterus at the center of female stories.25 Birth is a grotesque act, after all. A foreign body growing inside another, tearing out in a midst of chaos, blood, and shit. It’s violent, really; horrific. And so is sex, I suppose. Sensual, wet disorder. All senses and no logic. Just want. In their purest form, sex and birth remind us of how little control we have over ourselves. How control, time, order, are all a fantasy. Civilization is not real. Us and the Other are not real. We are all monsters, in the end, just bodies. There is no such thing as identity in the middle of an orgasm. There is no such thing as the self when one life tears open another. Perhaps that is true freedom. That is the threat. The strange place we go when we give completely over, when we find ourselves in this strange sensuality of doubleness, of both oneness and nothingness, of removing the self through pain and pleasure.
It is not lost on me that the word “other” is a part of the word “mother.” And while that is a cheap play on words, an obvious observation, the death of the feminine through the emergence of the mother, whether she be monstrous or not, is no mistake. The framing reminds us of the need to identify, to define through negation. Mother negates femininity, negates sexuality, negates an individual self. Or at least that is what we are led to believe. Negation is a powerful tool to control what is dangerous. To control what is radical.
YOUR LIFE IS NO LONGER YOUR OWN. Mothers are reminded this over and over again. And perhaps that’s true. But is anyone’s life ever truly their own? These identities projected onto the body like external organs, like machines, robotics of the self, weighing us down, bloating us and draining. Fat, heavy flesh. Tell me again who we are? What are we fighting for? Who is Us and who is THEY. Do I not make sense? Have I sucked you dry?
The nurse sticks the needle in me again.
“This is the last time we’ll have to take this much blood,” she tells me. O-negative, she reminds me a little later. Hostile blood type. The baby invades. My blood will fight back.
“You will have to take a shot,” I am told. So that my body will accept the invasion. Lay down its arms. Offer itself up to the monster.
Endnotes
- For the entirety of this essay, I will be citing the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Oxford World’s Classics. New York: Oxford University Press. 2011. Print. ↩︎ - Jonathan recounts the final events from the night before, writing in his diary, “I awoke in my own bed. If it be that I had not dreamt, the Count must have carried me here. I tried to satisfy myself on the subject, but could not arrive at any unquestionable result. To be sure, there were certain small evidences, such as my clothes were folded and laid by in a manner which was not my habit” (40). ↩︎
- In the novel, vampires are referred to as foul throughout the novel, most notably by John Seward when remarking on Lucy’s transformation into one (201). ↩︎
- This is Van Helsing’s most common group term for the four male characters: Jonathan Harker, John Seward, Arthur Holmwood, and Quincey P. Morris, who are accompanied by Mina Harker. Another group title is coined by Mina Harker when she exclaims, “Oh, thank God for good brave men!” (289). ↩︎
- In Coppola’s film, Lucy is shown vomiting blood, and body expels enormous amounts of blood during her staking/beheading. In Mel Brook’s wild deviation and hilarious depiction of the famous Count’s conquest, Dracula: Dead and Loving It, the staking of Lucy takes up over two minutes, depicting an entirely blood soaked Harker overwhelmed in an fountainesque gushing of blood, crying out “Oh God, there’s so much blood!” while Mel Brooks as Van Helsing hides safely and cleanly behind a column, shouting out, “She just ate!” and later, “We should have put newspaper down.” ↩︎
- According to the Red Cross, the first three human blood groups were not discovered until four years after Dracula was published, in 1901. Blood type compatibility won’t be suggested until 1907, which will lead to the first successful blood transfusion using crossmatching. Anticoagulants are not developed until 1914, and Rh blood groups won’t be discovered until 1939. ↩︎
- From John Allen Stevenson’s essay “Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula.” PMLA, vol. 103, no. 2, March 1988. Pp. 139-149. ↩︎
- The first major defeat by the Western heroes against the Eastern vampire threat is the loss of beloved Lucy Westenra, who emerges as a vampy blood sucking seductress. An early depiction of what would become a femme fatal archetype, Lucy’s sexuality is overtly dangerous in her vampire state, aligning her new and foreign identity with sexual deviance and promiscuity, counter to the idealized Victorian concept of the “True Woman.” This sexualized state is proof of Dracula’s successful defilement of Lucy, which must be reversed by just as brutal (if not more violent) penetration of the stake into her body, which “writhed […] shook and quivered” (201). John Allen Stevenson writes “And when the posse of racial purity hammers the stake through Lucy’s heart, that merciful penetration which undoes the undead, the transformation is a return to her former state of desexualization: the “foul Thing” with its “voluptuous mouth” and its “carnal and unspiritual appearance” disappears, replaced with “Lucy as we had seen her in her life, with her face of unequalled sweetness and purity.” Stevenson argues that this is a moment of desexualization, but I would like to suggest that the staking represents another form of sexualization, one framed within the context of necessity and which literally “fucks” the monster out of her, leaving her racially pure, but sexually spoiled, and thus unfit for living salvation in the form of resurrection (unlike Mina whose living humanity is returned to her). John Seward recounts Lucy’s final form in his diary, describing her “as we had seen her in life, with her face of unequalled sweetness and purity. True that there was there, as we had seen them in life, the traces of care and pain and waste; but they were dear to us, for they marked her truth to what we knew” (202). “Care and pain and waste” possibly referring to the defilement both of Dracula, as well as the required penetrative blood transfusions, and the ultimate and most violent act of staking, which leaves her body ravaged, or “wasted” by all men Lucy interacts with in the book. ↩︎
- Throughout the 1800’s, it was a commonly held belief that there were distinct anatomical differences between races. Scientific discussions developed and endorsed by prominent scientists, especially in England, centered around the notion that human improvement required the recognition of racial anatomical differences, leading to various problematic scientific practices that aligned criminal behavior and human decline to physical anatomy and race. Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, and a central figure in the eugenics movement, defined eugenics as “the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally.” Segregating blood and organs based on race wasn’t discontinued by the Red Cross, one of the largest humanitarian medical organizations in the world, until 1948. ↩︎
- The discovery of chromosomal contributions between sperm and egg was first documented in Theador Boveri’s Cell Studies, composed between 1887 and 1890. In his research he did identify the equal contribution between sperm and egg. While it is possible that Stoker would have been aware of these findings, Boveri didn’t finalize his theories until 1900, which coincided with Walter Sutton’s independent discovery of chromosomal inheritance, which drew the same conclusions, resulting in the title Boveri-Sutton Theory of chromosomal inheritance. Dracula was published in 1987, four years before the finalization of the Boveri-Sutton Theory. ↩︎
- Sleepwalking was often identified as a symptom of hysteria and thought to only occur in women and children. For it to be a trait of her absent-dead father suggests not only a physical degeneration (weak-link) in the family line, but also a mental-moral degeneration, since it is his sleepwalking, defined as gender-transgressive (gender and sexuality were heavily conflated by the Victorians), that Lucy inherits. ↩︎
- Erection pun intended. ↩︎
- Van Helsing when describing our noble Arthur to Seward, states, “He is so young and strong and of blood so pure that we need not defibrinate it” (115), suggesting that aristocratic blood is so perfect that it is excluded from needing the new but necessary medical practice of making sure the blood does not clot. ↩︎
- After being rejected by Lucy, who chooses his close friend Arthur Holmwood instead, Seward drowns himself work, writing in his diary, “Oh Lucy, Lucy, I cannot be angry with you, nor can I be angry with my friend whose happiness is yours; but I must only wait on hopeless and work. Work! Work!” (69). ↩︎
- Carter AM, Enders AC, Pijnenborg R. “The role of invasive trophoblast in implantation and placentation of primates.” Phil. Trans. R. Soc.
Huppertz B. “Traditional and New Routes of Trophoblast Invasion and Their Implications for Pregnancy Diseases.”
Lyall F, Bulmer JN, Kelly H, Duffie E, Robson SC. “Human trophoblast invasion and spiral artery transformation: the role of nitric oxide.” Am J Pathol. 1999 Apr;154(4):1105-14. ↩︎ - The play on words is not lost on me. ↩︎
- Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, founded in England in 1824. ↩︎
- Matthew 25:35-36, 40-41. ↩︎
- Though, interestingly, not doggie style. ↩︎
- Arata, Stephen A. “The Occidental Tourist: ‘Dracula’ and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization.” Victorian Studies, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Summer, 1990), pp. 621-645. ↩︎
- Voluptuous is a word often used to describe female vampires in the novel and can be interpreted through both common definitions; 1) curvaceous and sexually attractive, 2) relating to or characterized by luxury or sensual pleasure. In other words, we can see the female vampire as both a rather busty sexual object and a being who exudes unnecessary and excessive pleasure. Her sexuality serves no purpose, and her luxurious destruction is wasteful. ↩︎
- p98, p99, p161, p266-267. ↩︎
- A kukri knife originates in the Indian subcontinent. Jonathan’s ownership and use of this knife, mentioned for the first time in the final moments of the novel, links him directly to British militarized imperialism, particularly the colonization of India, arguably England’s most profitable and successful conquest. ↩︎
- Symbols of Dracula’s defilement include a very physical red burn mark caused by Van Helsing pressing a holy wafer on her forehead. This symbol mirrors the red mark on Dracula’s forehead caused by Jonathan’s pathetic attempt to bash his head in with a shovel while the Count slept. ↩︎
- Other examples of monstrous mothers in fiction include Cathy Ames in East of Eden, Rosemary in Rosemary’s Baby (book and film), Elenor Vance’s ghostly mother in The Haunting of Hill House, Mrs. White in Carrie (book and film), Norma Bates in Psycho, Mrs. Voorhees from Friday the 13th, Mrs. Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate. If you google “books about evil mothers” the number of results alone will astound you. ↩︎
Jessica Denzer received her B.A. in English Literature from Fordham University and her M.F.A. in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College. She is a researcher in residence at the New York Public Library and writes fiction and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, and she supplies a range of editorial contributions to Indirect Books, L’Esprit Literary Review, and Four Way Review. She is currently working on a novel and a collection of essays.
Photo Credit: John Kehoe is a photographer and poet based in Ottawa, Canada. His work often explores themes of atmosphere, memory, and the interplay between natural and built environments. He holds a BA and MA in English Literature, and has produced a book of photographs of Ottawa in support of a local Dementia society. His instagram is: www.instagram.com/johntheobscure
L'Esprit Literary Review 