Gender Displacements in Dracula

In Christopher Craft’s “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” he speaks to Victorian society’s assignment of gender roles to men and women, and the novel’s displacement of those notions. Craft’s thesis can be found in the first sentence of the first paragraph: “Bram Stoker’s particular articulation of the vampire metaphor in Dracula, a book whose fundamental anxiety, an equivocation about the relationship between desire and gender, repeats, with a monstrous difference, a pivotal anxiety of late Victorian culture” (444).

I found Craft’s depiction of Dracula’s “heterosexual displacements” (446) to be the most interesting, and also most surprising, point of the reading. While most audiences focus on Dracula’s seduction of Lucy and Mina, Craft chooses to focus on the vampire’s relationship with Jonathan, instead. “This should remind us that the novel’s opening anxiety, its first articulation of the vampiric threat, derives from Dracula’s hovering interest in Jonathan Harker; the sexual threat this novel first evokes, manipulates, sustains, but never finally represents is that Dracula will seduce, penetrate, drain another male” (446). While we’ve talked extensively in class about the gender inversion of the male and female characters (the women exhibiting overly sexualized behaviors, while the men become submissive), which Craft does defend later in the reading, I’d never considered a homosexual aspect to Stoker’s argument. “Here, in a displacement typical both of this text and the gender-anxious culture from which it arose, an implicitly homoerotic desire achieves representation as a monstrous heterosexuality, as a demonic inversion of normal gender relations” (446). “The novel, nonetheless, does not dismiss homoerotic desire and threat; rather it simply continues to diffuse and displace it” (447). Craft provides evidence of this assertion, citing Dracula’s reaction to Jonathan cutting himself while shaving – “Dracula’s desire to fuse with a male, most explicitly evolved when Harker cuts himself shaving, subtly and dangerously suffuses this text” (446) – as well as his interruption and reprimand of the three female vampires who attempt to drink Jonathan’s blood – “‘How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me!’” (447). Though Dracula never physically penetrates Jonathan (though an argument could be made for mental penetration), Stoker emphasizes the idea that “only through women may men touch” (448). We see this in the parallel Craft draws between Lucy’s blood and that of the human party. “Dracula drains from Lucy’s veins not her blood, but rather the blood transferred from the veins of the Crew of Light” (447), which includes Van Helsing, Dr. Seward, Arthur and Quincey. I had never considered the argument on homosexuality in the Victorian period before reading this essay. The evidence Craft cites throughout the review, though, I found to be fairly convincing of his argument. This reading also emphasizes the subtlety of the argument to readers; this underlying theme of accepted, yet unspoken of, homosexuality found throughout the novel could also reflect society’s feelings toward and about the subject: benevolent, yet decidedly ignorant.

I also found Craft’s description and implications of the vampire mouth to be interesting, as well. “As the primary site of erotic experience in Dracula, the mouth equivocates, giving the lie to the easy separation of the masculine and the feminine” (445). According to Craft, when humans become vampires, their new identity fuses “brave men” (445) and “good women” (445) into a unisex being. “Indeed, as we have seen, the vampiric kiss excites a sexuality so mobile, so insistent, that it threatens to overwhelm the distinctions of gender” (449). While the female vampires sport long, sharp canines (also phallic in imagery), they also rely on seduction as a powerful manipulation technique (seen in the scene with Jonathan and the three female vampires, as well as Lucy calling out to Arthur after feeding on the child). “Indeed, Dracula’s mission in England is the creation of a monstrous of a race of monstrous women, female demons equipped with masculine devices” (448). The unisex depiction of the female vampire (with both male and female attributes) indicates the demonic nature behind such a creation. It also reinforces the homosexuality connection aforementioned in the reading: “This interposition of a woman between Dracula and Van Helsing should not surprise us; in England, as in Castle Dracula, a violent wrestle between males is mediated through a feminine form” (449).