Craft’s thesis boils down to “a swooning desire for an
overwhelming position and an intense aversion to the demonic potency empowered
to gratify that desire compose the fundamental motivating action and emotion in
Dracula” (445). He discusses extensively the relationships between Dracula and
other men and how they are all mediated through women—the vampire sisters,
Lucy, and Mina. What would be otherwise obviously homoerotic is made less so by
the degree of separation created by the presence of a woman. The “weird sisters,”
whose attack on Jonathan is overtly sexual, are all products and extensions of
Dracula himself, suggesting that their desire to consume Jonathan is also
Dracula’s desire. The Count himself drinks the blood of Arthur, Seward, Van
Helsing, and Quincey through the common vessel of Lucy Westenra.
Craft also goes on to discuss the way that the text implies
some conflation of various bodily fluids, including blood, semen, and breast milk,
and as a result some blurring of gender and sexual function. Dracula functions
in many ways as a mother, able to create new life, while he effectively
feminizes Jonathan and turns good Victorian women into sexually voracious penetrators
of men. The author of this article effectively backs up his claims with quotes
from both the novel and texts which provide relevant historical context. By
incorporating information about Victorian sexuality and sexual anxieties, Craft
establishes that his analysis is based in something more than an overenthusiastically
Freudian reading of the text.
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