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.

How are women represented in the first 100 pages of Dracula?

Bram Stoker explores Victorian values and fears through his representation of women in Dracula, showing both harlots and housewives to warn of the potential dangers that women could pose if they forget their rightful place in society.

The first woman who is allowed to speak in the novel is ‘a cheery-looking elderly woman in the usual peasant dress’, who is maternal and kind. Similarly Mina is presented as motherly and caring, the epitome of the ‘angle in the house’ through her care for Lucy and the old fisherman, and both Mina and the Old Woman ask many questions of those they want to care for, with the ‘old lady’ asking Johnathan if he ‘know(s) what day it is’ and Mina asking Mr Swales whether all the ‘tombstones can be wrong’. Both women show interest in men who are vulnerable, with Jonathan about to go to Dracula’s castle and Mr Swales being a hundred year old fisherman who dies a few pages later, fulfilling their traditional roles of caring for and showing interest in the menfolk around them. The ways in which the two women do so is very different, with the old Lady ignoring Jonathan’s wishes and giving him a crucifix for his ‘mother’s sake’ connoting an universal instinct to protect in women, while Mina asks questions of Mr Swales, making him feel valued. This maternal instinct stands in stark contrast with Dracula’s three brides, who despite being his brides have no children, and Stoker presents them as being the incarnation of all evil. Stoker uses the sound of a ‘half-smothered child’ to ignite righteous anger and horror within his readership, with the word ‘child’ connoting all that is innocent and pure whilst also emphasizing the unnaturalness of the brides as they are anti-maternal and inhuman. The difference between the care and love shown by the human, motherly characters and the uncaring beastial vampire characters perhaps indicates that Stoker feels that if women are not conforming to their traditional roles of care-givers  they are not human, and the rejection of their maternal instinct is the worst crime they could possibly commit, and the role of mother and child bearer is a god given one – anything else is a perversion of nature.

Stoker goes on to further represent women who deviate from Victorian ideas of sexuality as terrifying and inhuman. This is represented primarily through Dracula’s vampire brides, whose constant ‘hard soulless laughter’ as they are about to suck Jonathan’s blood and as they are pulled back by Dracula mark them out as unwomanly, with the word ‘hard’ highlighting their complete oppositeness to Mina and Lucy’s softness, and their ‘laughter’ could perhaps connote a link between violence and love, or a fetish, both of which would be appalling ideas to the Victorians. The fact they have power over Jonathan initially would also have been frightening, and the ‘hard sharp dents of two sharp teeth’ are not only scary because he is about to be bitten, but also because they could be an image of penetration. The reversal of females penetrating males sets them up as powerful sexual women, and the fact that Jonathan is ‘waiting’ makes him the passive one where it would normally be the female. This could perhaps relate to Freud’s theory of castration anxiety as the male is not penetrating the female, and this could suggest female dominance, and a reversal of what the Victorians saw as the natural order. The fact that there are three brides also emphasizes their dominance as they gang up on Jonathan, however he is completely passive and doesn’t try to fight them off, with the fact that he is in a ‘languorous ecstasy’ perhaps suggesting that he welcomes this, or could hark back to the biblical story of original sin, with the female corrupting the innocent male. Furthermore, the fact that Dracula ‘grasps’ and ‘draws’ one of the brides neck back could indicate the need for punishment of these sexual women, and that a male figure must intervene and put them back in their place, using violence if he has to. Stoker leaves no room for sympathy with the brides despite the fact they are obviously not loved by Dracula, because they feed on a child they are presented as cruel, animalistic and the antithesis of all that is good, suggesting that if women are allowed to be powerful, especially sexually, the consequences will be catastrophic.

Stoker’s representation of women with sexual desires as whores would be very familiar to his Victorian audience, and he foreshadows both Lucy’s and Mina’s experiences with Dracula through their interactions with males, with Lucy wishing that she could ‘marry three men’ and Mina ‘open(ing) her arms unthinkingly’ to Arthur Holmwood. That Lucy wishes she could marry three men makes  her a polygamist foreshadows later on in the book where she receives the blood of four different men, three of whom are not her fiancé, and the fact that she never marries Arthur is perhaps why Stoker allows her to be fully turned into a vampire, while married Mina is saved and doesn’t receive any blood transfusions which Arthur says feel like marriage. Perhaps this is also why Mina is forced to drink Dracula’s blood, and it could be argued that Dracula is fulfilling Lucy’s repressed desires that she has already expressed. That Lucy wants ‘three husbands’ could also reflect Dracula’s ‘three brides’, suggesting that perhaps Lucy was ripe for corruption, and the fact that she is so ‘sweet’ and ‘pretty’ could perhaps make it even more terrifying that she has such suppressed desires underneath. Also if blood transfusions are a metaphor for sex as above, then Lucy effectively is a whore as she shares the blood of four men and has her blood sucked by Dracula, in which case she deserves punishment and perhaps this is why she dies. The fact that women’s sexual desires should be suppressed is also shown through the pure monstrosity of the three brides, as their freedom has made them ‘cruel’ and ‘soulless’, with Bram Stoker issuing a clear warning that women should continue to suppress any impure desires.

Through Stoker’s contrast of whores and motherly figures, he illustrates Victorian fears of female sexuality, depicting the sexually free brides as terrifying and monstrous, whilst Mina and the Old Lady are presented sympathetically. Lucy is perhaps the bridge between the two categories, for whilst she is ‘sweet’ she also has suppressed desires of polygamy, so perhaps Stoker’s representation of Lucy is a warning to maintain the status quo, and the male dominance over women is necessary to preserve social order and Victorian morality.