Brides: Voluptuous Devils or Fallen Angels?
The Transgressive Sexuality of Female Vampires and its Subversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula
Introduction From the nineteenth century on, a vampire is by definition a highly erotic creature carrying in itself a strange mixture of nourishment, disease and sexuality, making it so threatening. It feeds on living people through an act of oral sexuality while spreading its own contagious illness. Especially if it is a female, it is highly likely that she would be depicted as a lecherous beast. Throughout the text, dozens of sexualised images can be encountered of both sexes but here the focus is limited to sexuality of vampire women. In this paper, I will analyse how feminine sexuality is conceived of and I will pay special attention to the subversive aspect of female vampiric sexual power in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Vampire -woman – a Fallen Angel? To begin with, one ought to note that there are indeed vampirised women in Dracula, a fact usually forgotten by readers of the novel and often left untouched by critics in connection with this masculine late-Victorian text. However, vampirism of the “weaker sex” is worth investigating especially in this specific repressive Victorian context. Turning women into vampires is seen as an extremely erotic feature because vampire women can be considered the most dreaded kind in this era: fallen women. Fallen women are the total opposite of the spiritual ideal, the “angel in the house” who has no body at all, hence creating what is “often referred to as the virgin/whore dichotomy” (Dionisopoulos and Leah 209). Ladies of pleasure have their bodies only and this makes them sexually attractive and disgusting for men at the same time. With the body in their control, they have a seductive power over men. This sexual power arises when pretty little things are transformed into vampires with their ever-lurking sexuality awakened. At this moment they lose their innocence and become deadly, desirous creatures. In this text, all women are initiated into this distorted sexuality by “Dracula's authorizing kiss, like that of a demonic Prince Charming [which] triggers the release of this latent power and excites in these women sexuality” (Craft 119). Their sexual power over men creates an upheaval in the well-established order of gender roles. Features that have been gendered as male and were previously assigned to men – including power, control, sexual desire and penetration – are now all put in the hands of threatening women by vampirizing them. Their ability to mesmerise men is so great that temptation can only be get rid of if yielded to. With their unleashed and uncontrollable sexual charm they are almost irresistible therefore depriving men of self-discipline and disempowering them. Preys of Beasts In this inverted world, men become the victims, preys of female predators. They are made animals helplessly wriggling in traps. In this sense, a female vampire is a version of Circe who turned men into animals. Nevertheless, it also appears to be a reverse Circe-effect because vampire women are described in animalistic terms as well. When the fair sister is about to kiss Jonathan being on the verge of falling victim to her, she “lick[s] her lips like an animal” (Stoker 52). Thus, as it appears, it is not only men who are animals due to this demonic female sexuality but women as well. In this sense the anti-Circe figure constructing this bestial world is the Count, kissing the ladies into sexually attractive and seductive animals. Whilst animals feed on the others because they need to or else they would die, vampires are not alive but undead so they would not die of hunger. It is only the unstoppable desire of sexual pleasure that they have while being driven by their deadly lusts. This animalistic, instinctive craving needs to be satisfied by sucking out the blood from victims full of life. Vampires also fell prey to a previous animal-like creature and were victims but the cycle of bloodlust cannot be ended, so they need to continue the hunting for carnal quarry for all eternity. Brides of Dracula The “weird sisters” (Stoker 64) are supposedly former preys of the Count, “Dracula as the author of all [the] sorrow” (Stoker 260). Describing the three women as “sisters” suggests blood relations between them, utterly excluding the Count from this unit. Thus, at the first instance, it appears that they are connected to each other only by means of familial ties seemingly ignoring sexuality. However, there is another label that they got outside the novel itself. Though they are never referred to as the “Brides of Dracula” in this text, several adaptations based on this novel use this expression. This could be applied to the sisters as a basic analytic principle especially considering Mina as a wife and Lucy as the fourth “she-vampire” (Green 24). It is worth noting that the term “bride” in itself implies incompleteness. As the Oxford Learner's Dictionaries Online defines it, a bride is: “a woman on her wedding day, or just before or just after it”. Here the focus is limited to the state before the matrimony is concluded since it is not yet completed. According to the moral standards of the age, a decent woman's only intention should be getting married and having a family. Her sexuality is only needed to satisfy her husband's needs and to produce children as long as she is able to. Under no circumstances should she seek for desires of her own or control over others. Their purpose of life as women not being fulfilled, the sisters can be regarded as brides with an implication of an unfinished business that is they are not yet wives. As the process of the wedding is not finished, there is a hole in the system that has to be filled. If they cannot secure the proper ending to their marriage that is the wedding night, they need to substitute the normal and healthy type of sexuality with a distorted one, oral sexuality. Also, there being three brides to Dracula as their one mutual groom, further marital relations are suggested. In this sense, as Green notes, “[t]he promiscuous sharing of a 'partner' underlies” (24) the relationship not only between the sisters and the Count but the one between him and his fourth bride being shared with Arthur. Lucy, the Fourth Bride For Lucy, there is a need for completion as well because she is still an “unravished bride”(Keats) of Arthur when Dracula steals her away. Not yet being a wife, her sexuality is still open, it is not confined as Mina's when she is contaminated. She feels the pollution coming from another man but she eventually cannot be turned into a vampire because she is already a successfully married woman, not a bride. Thus for Mina there is no necessity to close sexuality. However, Lucy's wedding never takes place therefore there is no final stamp, a normal act of love, to validate her marriage. She becomes an eternal, undead and haunting fiancée to Arthur – and in my reading to the Count as well – until Arthur finalises the procedure. He, her former fiancé, is the only person entitled to kill the “Bloofer Lady” that has become of Lucy after her transformation. He must put everything back in order and Lucy can rest peacefully as a proper dead wife in her tomb. This redemption of Lucy’s soul could also be read as a symbolic and finally fulfilled act of love, in a really distorted way. As “Arthur took the stake and the hammer, [...] and placed the point over the heart” (Stoker 258) it seems as if he was now initiating Lucy back into the normal way of sexuality, between husband and wife, as it ought to be. Then, “[t]he Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips” (Stoker 258) as a metaphor indicating that Lucy has lost her virginity as Arthur’s “untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake” (Stoker 258). “Finally it lay still” (Stoker 259) and Lucy became the lovely girl “as [they] had seen her in her life, with her face of unequalled sweetness and purity” (Stoker 259). She eventually is got rid of her corruption and it seems that by ”disciplining Lucy and restoring each gender to its 'proper' function” (Craft 122) from now on, everything is going to be as it should be. “The Thing” (Stoker 192) needed to be killed to restore the order of Victorian society. This deed of Athur's can also be seen as a gendered punishment for his bride's disobedient behaviour as a woman. Lucy, “The Thing” who Wanted too Much “The Thing” (Stoker 192) is also a telling name attached to Lucy after her metamorphosis. When she becomes a blood-thirsty, voluptuous creature she cannot have her own name, she needs a new one that describes her in terms other than humanity. On the other hand, before she turns into a vampire with excessive needs, she has already had desires that went further than they were supposed to. She could hardly refuse the two acceptable suitors and even if it was only for a moment, she did toy with the opportunity of marrying them all, betraying the codes of proper femininity. In addition, the first time she encounters Dracula she is sitting “half reclining with her head lying over the back of the seat” (Stoker 113), making herself exposed to any kind of danger and putting her life in jeopardy. After his kiss, she feels no shame for what is being done to her but she experiences absolute pleasure that she has never had before. She is “[k]issed into a sudden sexuality” [and] Lucy grows 'voluptuous' (a word used to describe her only during the vampiric process), her lips redden, and she kisses with a new interest” (Craft 119). She is not even conscious about what is happening to her, she only tastes the sick satisfaction Dracula contaminated her with. She does not resist at all, she unconsciously embraces the Count's perverted sexual act, making her the worst kind of woman. It is at this point that she loses her innocence and she becomes utterly fallen, Dracula’s next bride. She had untameable desires and a demonic urge to experience sexuality, now she is doomed to a sinful vampiric end. Even lying on her deathbed she calls for Arthur to come to her and kiss her. Her transformation has happened already and she, too yearned to cause the physical and moral fall of another person.
Whose Power and Desire is it anyway?
Finally, interestingly enough, although female sexuality seems to be transgressive, violent and subversive, femininity is only able to cross its gender encoded boundaries to a certain extent. Owing to their femininity on the one hand, females can only have unnatural evil power and on the other hand they cannot have it by definition, it needs to be given to them by a male. They are not the source of the demonic energy, as they do not obtain it originally but “[t]he driving power [...], is [...] the Count himself” (Green 25) as “the pervading and promiscuous centre of power and sexual 'disease' in the novel” (Green 26). Since all the vampire women's sexual force seems to come from the omnipotent Dracula, they enact his sexuality and with it his desires and wishes. “The she- vampires act as they do because of their previous contact with the Count, to whom they are subject” (Green 25) as they are only distorted projected images of him. They do have power to capture ordinary men but they are inferior to the one that their power originates from. As his sexual servants, they just try to fulfil their lord's perverted reproductive desire instead of having their own passions and pleasures. After creating his monsters, Dracula as a potential God-like figure would lean back and watch them infecting other men. In fact, he would like to use a series of heterosexual relationships as paraphernalia to carry out his own homosexual interaction. Ultimately, the subverted sexuality of vampire females is only applied as a heterosexual tool to aim at a homosexual goal.
Devils used as Angels
Ironically, “the female vampire, […] a masculine, predatory wom[a]n” (Halberstam 605) who means “challenges to patriarchal sexual authority” (Williams 90) in this sense is only used as an ordinary woman to satisfy his lord's needs. Thus, even female aggressors are used to maintain the traditional gender roles that is women should serve men. It is also worth noting that “the sisters” do not have individual, distinguishing names allocated to them properly in the text. It appears that as an unidentified female crowd they belong to their master and their seductive capability is utilised merely in order to taint male mortals. They are regarded as a nameless and united instrument whose only function is to mediate sexuality between males. This power structure duly undermines the seemingly huge and overwhelming power of blood-thirsty femmes fatales and it looks like the (real) power behind the throne comes ultimately and unquestionably from men, most specifically from the Count.
Conclusion
All things taken into account, the potency of female vampires is considered a serious threat to males because it turns the conventions of both genders upside down. With the eroticised female bodies, Stoker awakens many fears and anxieties of the Victorian era and incorporates them in the text in a radically distorted way. The obvious anomalies of the age could be explored through the image of the vampire woman who “illustrate[s] an alternate sexuality that must be suppressed in order to preserve the patriarchal codes of sexual normalcy” (Williams 90). Accordingly, by the end of the essay it turns out that the previously feared female power is not that severe a peril in a male- dominated society, proving to have unsurpassable boundaries. Dracula, being the core of power, succeeds in making his “she-devils” perform their imposed duty as if they were angels in the castle. Bibliography
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