Horrorand Eroticism: Bram Stoker'sdracula
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Horror and Eroticism: Bram Stoker’sDracula Gregory Kershner Interim Senior Assistant Dean, New College Adjunct Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Languages Whitby Abbey, the place that inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula. Copyright istock.com. Photo by Kelvin Wakefield. he menace of the vampire identity, unleashing experience from the a late 19th-century feeling that some is that — and this is partly orthodoxy of Victorian mores. It is with gigantic evil was gnawing away at what makes Dracula such eroticism in nosferatu that the Victorian self-confidence. The evil that a unique horror contraries of sexuality and horror are haunts Stoker’s work most persistently is masterpiece — it works on visibly conjoined, where Gothic horror, the desire for sex: Tus from the inside, taking over our disclosed in sacrificial bloodsucking, bodies, “infecting” our deepest desires becomes linked to the abyss of I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but with the lust of sexuality and iniquity. eroticism. Stoker’s Dracula exemplifies looked out and saw perfectly under In Dracula, it is the rupture of the the link between horror and eroticism. the lashes. The fair girl went on her bourgeois world that yields the extreme knees, and bent over me, fairly limitlessness of anguished ecstasy. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published May gloating. There was a deliberate Torment and anguish reveal the 26, 1897, is steeped in fin-de-siècle voluptuousness which was both yawning gap in which subject and decadence. The sexually charged thrilling and repulsive, and as she object, vampire and victim, are vampire is essential to the anxiety-ridden arched her neck she actually licked dissolved. It is the identity of fabric of Dracula. One distinctive Gothic her lips like an animal, till I could contraries, divine ecstasy and its theme in Dracula is the threatening see in the moonlight the moisture opposite, extreme horror, that erodes nature of evil itself. The novel registered shining on the scarlet lips and on the 26 HOFSTRA horizons fall 2006 red tongue as it lapped the white basis of this “unknowing,” the “fissure” sharp teeth. Lower and lower went around which sexual discourse in Stoker’s Dracula her head as the lips went below the Dracula attempts to close, sexuality range on my mouth and chin and becomes the pivotal theme of the novel. exemplifies seemed about to fasten on my throat. Dracula’s violent bloodsucking can Then she paused, and I could hear easily be read as an obsessive substitute the link between the churning sound of her tongue as for sexual gratification. When Van it licked her teeth and lips, and could Helsing (the professor and vampire horror and feel the hot breath on my neck. Then hunter) finally convinces Holmwood the skin of my throat began to tingle (Lucy Westenra’s true love) that the eroticism. as one’s flesh does when the hand woman he was to have married is a that is to tickle it approaches nosferatu — an un-dead vampire nearer—nearer. I could feel the soft, preying on the blood of the living — body shook and quivered and twisted shivering touch of the lips on the the sexually thwarted young lord does in wild contortions; the sharp white supersensitive skin of my throat, and not hesitate: teeth champed together till the lips the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just were cut, and the mouth was smeared touching and pausing there. I closed Arthur placed the point over the with a crimson foam. But Arthur my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and heart, and as I looked I could see its never faltered. He looked like a waited—waited with beating heart. dint in the white flesh. Then he struck figure of Thor as his untrembling arm (pp. 45-6) with all his might. rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, The dreadful pleasure experienced by The Thing in the coffin writhed; and whilst the blood from the pierced Jonathan Harker (the above passage’s a hideous, blood-curdling screech heart welled and spurted up around narrator and Dracula’s private real came from the opened red lips. The it. (p. 230) estate agent), punctures not only the “repressive hypothesis” (the process by which, according to Freud, an unacceptable impulse is rendered unconscious), but also the liberationist fallacy that, after lingering in the shadows of repression, sexuality emerges in the clear light of Victorian social discourse. The mode of ecstasy and enjoyment described here is essentially outside Victorian society as it has been conventionally understood. The relationship between Victorian discourse and its outside changes significantly as ecstatic and extreme experience are gathered under the rubric of “sexuality.” Exceeding articulate speech and understanding, vampires disclose an “unknowing” or vacuum of sense; and Edvard Munch: Vampire. Lithograph, 1895. the heart of this experience delineates a © 2006 The Munch Museum/The Munch-Ellingsen Group /Artists Rights limit of Victorian culture. Thus, on the Society (ARS), NY. fall 2006 HOFSTRA horizons 27 The motivation for destroying Dracula exceeds both objectivity and is the fear that he will multiply, subjectivity with glimpses of an One distinctive threatening the survival of Victorian unknown infinity. That this is so is no England. Professor Van Helsing’s fear doubt an effect of a particular cultural Gothic theme is that, if allowed to survive, Count conjunction: a new representation of Dracula will reign as “the father or woman was emerging in the final furtherer of a new order of beings, decades of the 19th century. This in Dracula is whose road must lead through Death, representation, for the famed hypnotist not Life” (p. 322). Charcot and his contemporaries, took the threatening the shape of the female criminal. Stoker In both passages, the intensity of the almost certainly talked to Charcot and nature of experience invests the encounter with mentions him in Dracula (“And of the mystico-philosophical significance course then you understand how it act, evil itself. of “eroticism,” reversing the veiled and can follow the mind of the great pornographic flickerings of Dracula. In Charcot — alas that he is no more! — the eroticism of Dracula, the object of into the very soul of the patient that he desire radiates with a nocturnal influence,” p. 204). It was the “female brilliance that reduces the vampire to ecstatic” and hysteric that culminates in nothing but the infinite movement of the character of Mina herself: desire itself. In the ecstatic movement beyond individual experience, a I was bewildered, and, strangely movement of consumption by an enough, I did not want to hinder him. unattainable, impossible object of I suppose it is part of the horrible desire, Mina Murry (Jonathan Harker’s curse that such is, when his touch is erstwhile fiancée and vampire ingénue) on his victim. And oh, my God, my comes to understand the truth of God, pity me! He placed his reeking Dracula’s revelation: he is evil and lips upon my throat! (...) I felt my divine. She notes in her journal on the strength fading away, and I was in a night of Dracula’s visit: “Was it indeed half swoon. How long this horrible some such spiritual guidance that was thing lasted I know not; but it seemed coming to me in my sleep?” (p. 276). that a long time must have passed Dracula entered Mina’s bedroom, while before he took his foul, awful, Jonathan slept, told Mina that she was sneering mouth away. I saw it drip to become “flesh of my flesh, blood on with the fresh blood.” (p. 306) my blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful wine-press for a while; and shall be Mina, in Victorian England, assumes later on my companion and my helper” the intermediary function of a (pp. 306-07). The non-sense of the discredited femininity, the impossible unknowing that manifests itself in object between finite sensuality and swooning intoxication, or ecstasy’s infinity that in terms of the vampire flight, also drives her eroticism, habitus guarantees erotic excess. Mina’s dissociating it from the impulses of proximity to the divine is manifested in Image of a hysteric under hypnosis natural animality or sexuality. her jouissance of submitting to at Salpêtrière, France. Bram Stoker Dracula’s bloodthirsty desires. was familiar with Charcot’s studies on hysteria. It is Mina and Lucy (longtime friend of Mina Murry) who assume roles in the Mina’s encounter with Dracula novel where the object of desire exemplifies the joys, anguish and 28 HOFSTRA horizons fall 2006 what tricks our morality; on the contrary, it demands a dreams play on us, “hyper-morality.” In relation to the and how Freudian notion of economy (the conveniently we can distribution of libido in the psyche), imagine.) The mist abjection is an effect of cultural systems grew thicker and of rejection, prohibition and taboo. The thicker, and I could inner experience of vampirism is bound see now how it came up with the transgression that defines in, for I could see it both the limits of human productivity in like smoke—or with Lucy and Mina and their particular the white energy of relation to it. Where Victorian culture boiling water— recoils in horror from the undead, decay, pouring in, not filth and sexuality, vampirism restores through the window, its homogeneous limits and binds but through the individuals to its service, creating an joinings of the door. autonomous totality. Dracula’s (. .) Things began to transgression of boundaries turns, whirl through my thereby, on abjected forms of Victorian brain just as the behavior, those that are animal, sexual cloudy column was and taboo. Reassuring his Victorian whirling in the room, contemporaries in the triumph of and through it all morality, Dr.