Sexuality and consumption in Keats and Dracula

A link is made in both Keats and Dracula between sexuality and consumption, with love and desire often consuming a person or causing them to be consumed.

Both Keats and Dracula explore the vampiric aspect of sexuality and love (albeit Dracula perhaps more explicitly). The way that the pot of Basil sucks Isabella’s life and sanity away in Keats’ poem ‘Isabella’ can also be seen in the way Lucy is drained by Dracula. Both Isabella and Lucy have sexual desires, with Isabella unable to ‘sleep’ and is ‘sick (with) longing’ while Lucy wants to ‘marry three men’. These desires are perhaps what enables them to be preyed upon so easily, with both effectively going out in the night to find a lover; Lucy while she sleepwalks, Isabella to Lorenzo’s grave. This perhaps paints desire as a weakness, and certainly both women become ‘pale’ and lose the ‘roses’ of their cheeks, showing a loss of vitality and life. Love does not only seem to consume their health, but their beauty and their very womanhood, with the ‘rose’ being not only a sign of beauty, but as a flower it is a feminine symbol. This loss is more evident in Dracula where Lucy becomes like a ‘cat’ or a ‘devil’, juxtaposing with the soft and gentle ‘rose’ she once was, and connoting that sexuality had completely absorbed who she used to be and turned her into a inhuman epitome of evil.

Both are presented as experiencing an unnatural and perverted form of motherhood, indicating their lapse from the traditional roles of women and perhaps indicating the dangers of obsessive sexuality. Isabella’s unhealthy and slightly ridiculous obsession with her pot of basil is portrayed as though it has become a surrogate child for her, and she feeds the head of her dead lover her own bodily fluids (her tears) in the darkness of a round pot, perhaps representing the womb, and how she wishes to rekindle and renew the love she once had. The way that she cradles and strokes the pot is also a maternal image, and it ‘flourishes’ while she ‘withers’, once again connoting the vampiric nature of love, and it consumes not just her body but her mind, taking away all her ‘remembrance(s)’ and senses’ as she ‘forget(s)’ the ‘stars’, the ‘autumn breeze’ and everything else beautiful. Likewise Lucy forgets all that she holds sacred and moral when she turns into a powerful sexual vampire, losing the ‘gentleness’ that once had meant she was held in such high esteem by men, and becoming a ‘devilish mockery of Lucy’s sweet purity’. The ‘pure’ and ‘kind Lucy would never feed from a child, and Stoker makes it clear from the newspaper article that Lucy only feeds from ‘young children’. This utter perversion of morality and particularly motherhood illustrates the dangers of sexuality, with Lucy feeding from children instead of feeding them as her maternal instinct would normally prompt her to, consuming what she would normally feed. Perhaps the fact that her blood has been sucked away by Dracula has sucked away her personality and morals, leaving her just a husk of what she once was: incomplete and able to be filled a new with what is other and wrong.

Similarly Isabella has her living human love replaced with an intoxicatingly strong and luscious basil plant that ‘smells more balmy than its peers’, uses her sensual reaction to it to manipulate her and control her, as she tries to regain the strong sensual pleasures she enjoyed with her living love, of his ‘voice’ and his ‘gentle hand’. In both instances, the feelings of love or sexuality these women had are turned into something dangerous and sinister, and profoundly change both women for the worse. Perhaps both Stoker and Keats are warning of the dangers of sexuality and love, particularly when it is given by the wrong people, but Keas focuses more on love as an obsessive and consuming force whereas Stoker focuses on sexuality’s ability to corrupt and consume what once was.