Vampires are almost common place in late nineteenth-century literature. The century begins with the popularity of the Byron-inspired Count Ruthven, then Le Fanu’s Carmilla, and closes with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which will be discussed at length. In addition to these well-known texts, European and American vampires are created by Alexandre Dumas (The Vampire of the Carpathian Mountains,” 1849), Robert Louis Stevenson (“Olalla,” 1885), Guy de Maupassant (“The Horla,” 1887), Florence Marryat (Blood of the Vampire, 1897), and Cora Linn Daniels (Sardia: A Story of Love, 1891), which will be examined in this section. Most of the stories just named employ a female vampire, as Mario Perez notes, “In the second half of the nineteenth-century the vampire becomes a woman” (Perez 77).
In both of these late Victorian texts, fears of women’s social and sexual independence are encoded into the vampire narrative. While Stoker is more blatant about his vampiric incarnation of the New Woman and her fatal effect on England’s male population, Daniels’ vampire is used to comment on a self-made woman’s psyche and the effect her own tortured conscious has on her life.
Sardia: A Story of Love was published in 1891 by Cora Linn Daniels, an American author. It is a story of a wedding for convenience and money that turns into true love. It is also a story of upperclass intrigue and deception as the reader is introduced to Sybil Vistoni, the last of a line of Italian aristocracy who has come to America in pursuit of a father for her illegitimate son. Sybil is considered a vampire for two reasons. First, because she is called a vampire both by characters in the novel and the narrator. Second, Sybil embodies the traditional construction of the vamp: “The vamp [is] the dark shadow of the Victorian virtuous woman. She [is] immoral, tainted with powerful, dark sexuality” (Melton 627).
Sybil is a magnificent woman who is not only beautiful, but well studied in the arts of the stage, so she is graceful and communicative in her every action. She has dark features, hair, skin and eyes and “scarlet lips” (Daniels 17, 49). Ralfe cites Sybil as having a “wonderful power” (17) Guy states she is a “fascinating, dangerous, subtle woman” (23). Like Bertha, Sybil’s creation scene must be pieced together from before and after representations of Sybil. Helen remembers Sybil as “never saying an unkind or evil thing of anyone” who served as “our model for grace of manner” (20, 19). This is a very different image from that of the Sybil who now visits. As Stoker’s Lucy reveals herself as a vampire only in sleep, Sybil’s inner self shows through as she drowses:
Her countenance assumed a new expression. All the glow, the enthusiasm, the glamour with which she enchanted her adorers faded out. A cold hard malicious sneer tightened the upper lip; the under lip hung loosely down and rolled outward with so animal a look that Lulu in innocent disgust turned away with a shudder (51).
Sybil is revealed to be a grotesque image of herself, so disgusting, the naive Lulu must look away. As will be the focus of Cave’s “Stragella,” what reveals Sybil’s true nature is her lips and the “animal” look they convey. When Ralfe recalls this image of the Visonti, he marks it as a “strange, horrible expression” (76). Lips, as the evaluation of “Stragella” will explore, often symbolize the female genitalia, paralleling a hungry mouth with a ravenous sexual appetite. If Sybil’s lips mark are her only physical indication of her vampiric nature, then that nature stems from her sexual behavior.
As evidence of Sybil’s creation, Daniels presents the reader with a “before” image of Sybil as remembered by Helen, the current male opinion of Sybil’s power, and the image of the concealed Sybil which becomes apparent while she sleeps. Unlike Brontë, however, Daniels allows her vampire a voice and the reader is privy to several ongoing internal dialogues; one of which concerns Sybil’s meeting and subsequent affair with Julian Savelli. Julian, like Walter and Rochester, puts Sybil on the path to vampirehood.
After they meet, Julian insists that Sybil belongs to him “body and soul,” that he is her “master” (81). Sybil calls Julian a “savage creature” with “flashing eyes” who sweeps her away (81). Julian teaches the young Sybil “his code of existence” which central rule is to “enjoy himself” (86). Julian instructs Sybil on how “[t]o elude, to watch, to risk, to plan, to scheme, and to trust luck” (86). These skills, the traits with which Julian teaches her, marks Sybil now as a vampire. Sybil Visonti feeds from the acquaintances who now surround her. Auerbach notes, “Only when vampires are women do their friends become literal prey” (Our 18).
Unlike most women in Victorian literature who bear illegitimate children, Sybil does not die. Instead, she goes mad. Daniels provides hints of Sybil’s deteriorating mind throughout the novel. In one instance, Sybil remarks to herself, “Good Heavens! Why can’t I keep my thoughts in order? I could once” (Daniels 80). In another moment, the narrator remarks, “[Sybil’s] very mind seemed congealed” indicating that Sybil is unable to think of a lie, or some other excuse, to save her from the confrontation she now faces.
The final blow to Sybil’s sanity occurs when she kills Julian because he will not marry her. Sybil’s madness is not exposed in its entirety until, after witnessing her child call Helen mother, she strikes Helen, knocking baby Ralfe into the snow. The assembled crowd, the narrator informs the reader, concludes, “they were but confirmed in the opinion that Sybil Visonti was hopelessly insane” (291). It is this insanity which removes Sybil from the Fielding’s home. A doctor pronounces Sybil “a maniac, dangerous, and incurable” and removes her to an asylum where she will be “properly restrained” (296). Though Sybil does not die a mortal death as far as the novel is concerned, she is successfully removed, incapacitated, and punished. At this moment, the cycle of the madwoman vampire confined and silenced starts all over. Un like Brontë, however, Daniels’ makes sure there is just reasoning behind the condemnation.
Sybil is referred to as a vampire on three specific occasions; one of those being by the author herself by way of a chapter title. Before Sybil is ever present in the text, Guy warns Lulu, “‘She is a vampire!. . . She eats one up body and soul’” (25). Guy, in a later conversation with Lulu, likens Sybil to the spider they are watching which has wound its threads around a bee and is about to make it an afternoon meal “‘If they cover the true soul of themselves with an outward show how of sweet manners and professed goodness, underneath is working the real nature if the spider’” (138). That “nature” is, of course, to eat one up, “body and soul.”
Lulu reiterates the opinion that Sybil is a vampire after a sexual encounter with her in a bedchamber. The scene’s intimacy is reticent of the relationship between Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Laura. Lulu, despite an “intrinsic distrust” feels a “strange attraction” toward Sybil (60). Lulu watches Sybil undress and Lulu’s cheeks draw a brighter color and a “certain unnatural light” comes into her eyes (62). Sybil begins to explain to Lulu how the art of the stage enhances Sybil’s own powers of persuasion. What then follows is a decidedly erotic scene as Sybil clasps Lulu in a “magnetic embrace” and places “soft, clinging kisses” on Lulu’s forehead and “hot, flushed cheeks,” declaring, “‘Beautiful innocent, how thy lovely youth appeals to me!’” (65, 66). Lulu succumbs to Sybil’s embrace with an expression of a “filmy haze in her eyes” and she loses “all power of reasoning” (66). Just as she is about to kiss Sybil, Lulu remembers Guy’s warning and suddenly comes to her senses, crying, “‘I can’t endure women’s kisses . . . Miss Visonti, I will not be so kissed!’” (66).
There is more at stake for Lulu than simply falling under Sybil’s influence. It is not the discussions of innocence and virtue, or how Sybil can, as Lulu so concisely puts it, “‘make any one love you whom you please” that makes her protest, rather, it is because Lulu will not be kissed by a woman. In a moment, though, Sybil has convinced Lulu she is simply an admirer of Lulu’s beauty and that Sybil “‘could not help it’” (66) Lulu then lifts “up those warm red lips which a moment before she had angrily withdrawn, and suffered the Visonti to take her fill of their fragrant loveliness” (66). Sybil remarks of Lulu’s innocence as she exits, “‘How good it is to renew myself in you’” (68). Lulu says nothing, but remarks as she closes the bedroom door, “‘Charlie Vane was right: she is a vampire’” (68). This scene marks the beginning of Sybil feeding from Lulu. Although no blood is exchanged, the effect that Sybil has on Lulu is explicitly vampiric. Sybil-as-vampire is sexually aggressive, deceitful, and parasitic.
In the chapter titled “A Vampire” (pages 178-186), Daniels presents the reader with the effects Sybil has on the innocent. The tone of this scene, like this one in Sybil’s bedroom, is overtly sexual and Sybil is flagrantly seductive. The chapter opens with the image of two women walking on the front lawn being watched by Guy. Lulu is half embraced by Sybil’s arm and the narrator remarks that Lulu’s face is “unusually pale” with the exception of “two bright hectic spots” on her cheeks (178). The narrator concludes, “She was no longer the gay, merry, light-hearted, laughing Lulu” (179). Once Guy realizes what is happening, he approaches the couple and demands, “‘Lulu, I want you’” (180). Sybil responds by drawing her arm more closely around Lulu “with a sort of possessive pressure and looking softly into her eyes” slowly moves Lulu away from Guy. Guy tries again, “‘Lulu, I want you” [author's italics], but Sybil does not let go of Lulu, nor does Lulu behave as though she has even heard Guy. Guy leaves. Like Stoker’s vampire sisters, Sybil is able to create a homosocial environment. Contrary to the sisters, however, Sybil seems to seek out a homosocial environment not because it is Sybil’s preferred sanctuary, but her preferred hunting ground. Lulu is a chosen victim rather than chosen company.
The narrator informs the reader that Sybil is so appealing because she makes Lulu understand “the charm of being sought—sought persistently, patiently, humbly.” Sybil tells her, “‘I will hang on until you love me whether you want me or not’” (181). This is no sisterly love. Daniels makes it quite clear, though perhaps in an overall subtle manner, that this is a sexual love. Sybil proposes, “‘Let us prove to ourselves of to none others that there can exist between two women a love, holy, pure, exalted, which no change of circumstance can alter. . .’” (182). Lulu replies by springing into Sybil’s arms and “seal[ing] the compact with a long, clinging kiss, the first that she had voluntarily tendered to her woman-lover” (182).
To reinforce the image of a woman-lover, Daniels juxtaposes Lulu’s sealing kiss with that of an image of the two women, taking an “afternoon siesta” with Lulu’s hands placed on Sybil’s heart. The narrator remarks, “beneath its light pressure, Lulu could feel the blood leap in an ecstasy she could not understand” (183). It is clear that Lulu comprehends what it means to have a woman-lover; the ecstasy that Lulu does not understand is that which Sybil receives feeding from Lulu. The closing image of the chapter supports this reading. Sybil looks after Lulu’s retreating figure, she taps her own wrist lightly with her finger tips “and nodding her head towards it gently and slowly, she murmur[s] ‘But her young life throbs here” (186). The final image of this chapter is unequivocally of a vampire equating life with blood. For Daniels’ vampire, life and the innocence associated with youth, is for what she hungers.
When Sybil is distracted by overwhelming circumstances which threaten to divulge her bastard child, Guy is able to step in and resuscitates Lulu. By his “constant attendance,” Guy renews “the roses in those too pale cheeks and revive[s] the brilliant spirits so strangely clouded over” (251). It seems, then, that the cure for the female victim of a female vampire is simply constant male attention. Guy saves Lulu from the homosocial realm and returns her to the safe environment of the dominant power structure.
Lulu is not the only one to fall under Sybil’s spell. Ralfe is also in love with Sybil but he cannot serve as a source of “renewal” for her. Sardia muses that though Ralfe is in love with Sybil, if he ever broke free of her “magnetism” and if he “finds her out,” there would be a “terrible reaction” (110). In other words, Ralfe is only in love with Sybil because he does not know who she really is. “Female vampires are an alien gender to who men’s wrenching adoration is incomprehensible” (Our 42). This differs from Lulu, who is both repulsed and attracted to Sybil. For now, however, Ralfe is mesmerized by Sybil, “Ralfe has no thought, no emotion, no desire, which did not lay itself yearningly at the feet of Sybil Visonti” (Daniels 119). Sybil rules Ralfe’s mind, soul, and body. Ralfe realizes that Sybil “overpower[s] [his] reason, conscience, habit, principle” and “every noble feeling of [his] being” and makes him “an mere animal with an animal’s uncontrolled instincts . . . lost to everything but her beauty, her magnetism, her glowing eyes” (154).
Sybil is a threat to the rational male mind (so exonerated in Victorian literature, as seen in Stoker’s compliment to Mina as possessing a “man’s brain”) because she over powers reason and makes Ralfe an animal (Stoker 248). Sybil, as Ralfe notes, is able to do this, not because of her dizzying intellect or womanly accomplishments, but because of her beauty and magnetism. The former is superficial and the latter, because of her stage training, is fabricated. More accurately, to Ralfe, Sybil represents the threat of the vamp, more than the vampire—Sybil uses her womanly guiles to deceive and trick Ralfe. Ralfe has none of the physical effects that Lulu experiences. He has no change in personality, no wan of spirit. He is, for the most part, unchanged. It would seem, then, as far as Daniels is concerned, the female vampire while having power over men, is really more interested in the life blood of young women. While the love between women seems to be more exciting and intense, at least by Lulu’s experience, the overall negative view of Sybil’s treatment of Lulu casts a dim light on Daniels’ homosocial environment.
One last series of instances places Sybil in the company of the Victorian vampire: the constant presence of the moon. In the tradition of Varney the Vampire whose companion moon marks the “restorations” of his life, Daniels provides a narrative using the moon as a witness to Sybil’s life. From being an aristocrat’s daughter, having an affair with Julian, to birthing her child, “that same moon . . . had followed, followed, followed Sybil around the world” (Daniels 83). Instead of reviving Sybil, however, it is her advisory. In her delusionary state, after killing Julian, Sybil fears and hates the moon “‘Ah ha! you moon, you wicked murderous moon . . . Now haven’t I pleased you, Moon-Devil?’” (281). And finally, in pushing her child from the railing (where he lands unhurt in the snow), Sybil cries, “‘Lie there, you white-faced devil. I’m glad I’ve killed you too, you spy, you watcher!’” (291). This is the final image Sybil: a madwoman, haunted by the moon, so incapable she is, thankfully, unable to even harm a child.
Sybil represents both an actual vampire in her interactions with Lulu and as a vamp in her relationship with Ralfe. In addition to these characteristics, Sybil is also noted as viewing each human being as “a tool, a lover, or an enemy. She intended to make the whole world serve her” (62). She is both intellectually and physically civilized, but morally barbaric (62). Above all else, however, she is not what she appears to be. In a parallel to Sybil’s sleep state reducing her to a grotesque image with sneering lip, Sybil is revealed to be a commoner of low blood adopted by a prestigious Italian family. Sybil is a fraud who uses her acquired talents, blood line, and good looks to survive off the well-doing upper crust of America. She is a vampire in this way; a parasite. However, she does characteristically represent the female vampire. She overpowers the rational male mind with her beauty, though this encounter does not seem likely to be fatal. She embodies physical desire, and like Bertha, as insanity sets in, so does violence. As if this weren’t enough to condemn her, the novel closes with Sybil as a bad mother. As Brunhilda threatened the upper-class lines, Sybil with her false claim to Italian royalty and her attempt to infiltrate her son into a wealthy American family, threatens to disrupt the class system and the authority inherently imbedded within it.
Sybil is not without her sympathetic moments, however. When Sybil is reunited with her son, she shows she is a loving mother and as Helen remarks, her deviousness is done in attempts to have food and shelter for her child “For one spark of human feeling yet remained within her. . . It was her love for her little child” (227). Sybil’s last desperate act is in response to her child calling Helen mother “They had all understood the natural fury that arose in Sybil’s soul at the sight of her son in Helen’s arms . . .” (291).
The only individual who shows physical signs of suffering because of Sybil, barring Julian, is Lulu. Daniels creates an intimate relationship between two women at opposite ends of the spectrum: the innocent and the experienced. The most palpable threat Sybil makes to the power structure is being able to seduce innocent young women away from men. The reader never for a moment thinks that Ralfe will forsake his marriage with Helen, or that Sybil will be able to lay claim to Ralfe as her child’s father. Sybil, like Dracula, has a preference for pretty young women, and, like Dracula, losses the upper hand when the young women return to dominant power structure of heterosexual relationships.
It seems strange that Daniels would write two decidedly erotic scenes between Sybil and Lulu just to condemn them. In fact, the relationship between Sybil and Lulu is completely extraneous to the plot and only serves to illustrate what is said of Sybil early on in the novel: she is a vampire. It is arguable that Daniels does not find fault in Sybil or Lulu for pursuing same-sex relationships, rather, that Sybil deserves punishment based on her deception of Lulu. It also allows for Daniels’ to write a love scene between two women that more critical audiences can chalk up to the evil of the vampire. Daniels provides an intimate portrayal of the homosocial realm that Stoker can only fear.
Daniels’s Sybil, like Brunhilda and Bertha, is a vampire because of the man with whom she is sexually involved. It is worth speculating that had Sybil resolved to be with women only, she never would have met Julian, learned his evil ways, bore his child, or gone mad. As did Brontë and Tieck, Daniels casts her vampire with a traditional hand, using madness, violence, and sexual aggression to temper Sybil’s characteristics. Like Brunhilda and Bertha, Sybil is an agent of her own revenge.
At the time of Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the New Woman, as depicted by the women who strove to be New Women, was defined as, “brave, courageous, self-reliant and independent” and “keep on a steady course of [on] the path of virtue and peace,” and “have learned for themselves the will of God concerning them” (Stanton 186). The will of God is that, “Woman [becomes] what God meant her to be, and Christ’s gospel necessitates her being, the companion and counselor not the encumbrance and toy of man” (Willard 325). Modern critics, and certainly Stoker’s characters as well, have another side of the New Woman. In addition to being self-reliant, the New Woman demands “sexual equality” (Johnson 22); does not marry, and is “career minded” (Gelder 78). One critic even goes so far as to say that gender, in the New Woman, “is reversed” (Brennan 78).
Bram Stoker’s text has a total of five vampires. In this evaluation, I consider Mina to also be a vampire, though she never fully becomes one. She is, however, “touched” by Dracula and begins to “change.” Stoker makes a point to remind the reader that Mina will be like “poor Lucy” if Dracula is not killed “in time.”
For the scope of this paper, I view Mina as the main female vampire of interest, if not the main vampire, regardless of the novel being named after Dracula as “women, rather than Dracula, are the central horror in the novel” (Gelder 77). Auerbach agrees, “Though [Dracula] is the object of pursuit, Lucy, and then the vampirized Mina, are the objects of attention” (Our 23). More accurately, however, Mina, Lucy and the vampire sisters represent the spectrum of women associated with the New Woman. As Tieck spins a warning tale about the devouring, insatiable woman and Brontë addresses the Gothic pattern of the imprisoned, violated woman, Stoker uses the female vampire to exercise the concerns surrounding the New Woman.
Mina is central throughout the novel and is the only person to come in contact with Dracula and remain ultimately unscathed, if not bettered by it. The other four vampires, Lucy and the three vampire brides/sisters serve as foils by which the reader can speculate what will become of Mina should she perish and rise as a vampire. Mina remains poised between “angelic service and vampristic mutation” (Woman 25). Because Mina never becomes a full vampire, as Lucy does after death, Mina’s creation scene translates to an “infection” scene to accommodate Stoker’s text. In other words, Van Helsing explains that Lucy is a vampire because she died and became the Undead. With this reasoning, since Mina does not die, she is not a vampire. However, like Lucy, once Mina is bitten by Dracula, she begins to change: “the horror of Dracula [is] that Lucy and Mina might decompose into the fetid women in the vampire’s castle” (Our 108). It is the changing Mina that is most disturbing. In symbolic representation, Mina is changing into a New Woman. Luckily for Jonathan, Mina comes to represent the most acceptable aspect of the New Woman: the helpmate, loving mother, whose path is chosen by God. Like Brunhilda’s drinking of blood, Mina’s drinking from Dracula starts her down the path to vampire-hood.
Mina is an extraordinary woman and is held in the highest esteem by her male companions. She meets Stanton’s standard of having her path chosen by God:
“She is one of God’s women, fashioned by His own hand to show us men and other women that there is a heaven where we can enter, and that its light can be here on earth. So true, so sweet, so noble so little an egoist — and that, let me tell you, is much in this age, so skeptical and selfish” (Stoker 198).
In addition to her pious life, Mina is also very intelligent:
“Ah, that wonderful Madam Mina! She has man’s brain—a brain that a man should have were he much gifted—and a woman’s heart. The good God fashioned her for a purpose, believe me, when He made that so good combination” (248).
Mina’s physical appearance is rarely remarked upon, but the reader is told at one point she is “sweetly pretty” (235).
In the first two pages of the novel, in his travel journal, Jonathan makes memorandums to himself to get recipes for Mina. This immediately invokes Mina as a household helpmate and places her in the traditional role of the Victorian woman. He also chastises himself on behalf of Mina for forgetting his recent promotion, “Solicitor’s clerk! Mina would not like that,” correcting himself, “Solicitor—for just before leaving London I got word that my examination was successful; and I am now a full-blown solicitor!” (16). In addition to her domestic placement, Mina is represented as a helpmate as she is invested in Jonathan station in life.
Mina, however, is not the perfect picture of submissive domesticity. She embodies several of the positive aspects of the New Woman. She is self-employed as an assistant school mistress, but studies typography, shorthand, and train schedules so that she may help her husband in his career: “When we are married, I shall be useful to Jonathan” (57). Her married life is filled with a sense of “duty” and she has a mothering instinct, “We women have something of the mother in us that makes us rise above smaller matters when the mother spirit is invoked” (243). Mina does challenge the dominant power structure as well by repeatedly invoking negative sentiments of the New Woman, including supposing that eventually the New Woman will make her own wedding proposals, to which Mina concludes, “And a nice job she will make of it, too!” and noting that her and Lucy’s appetites would shock a New Woman (95). Gelder reads this as Mina asserting that she can “out do” the New Woman in female sexual independence (Gelder 78).
Lucy and the vampire sisters represent the negative aspects of the New Woman. Unlike Tieck who ascribes the husband with a lusty nature, Stoker creates a soon-to-be-bride, Lucy, whose voracious sexual appetite requires three men to satisfy her: “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble? But this is heresy, and I must not say it” (Stoker 62). In this passage, Lucy does not only refer to the power structure as “they,” clearly marking herself as outside such a structure, but remarks stealthily, “I must not say it” when in fact, she does not, she writes it. Through her writing, Lucy participates in subversive female discourse, writing, as do the New Women authors, to challenge the rules of the dominant power structure.
Because she is bitten by Dracula, Lucy will require a blood transfusion from not only three, but four men, a kind of “metaphorical intercourse” (Pope 207). This plot point helps to establish further the connection between the vampirized woman and the characteristics of the New Woman.
The vampire sisters represent the worst aspects of the New Woman. In addition to their aggressively sexual nature, they are continually disobedient and operate in their own female-exclusive society: “‘How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it?’” (Stoker 40). After Dracula commands the vampire sisters to leave Jonathan alone, Jonathan evaluates the door leading to their chamber: “the bolt of the lock had not been shot, but the door is fastened from the inside” (43). What Stoker implies here is that the women have locked out Dracula. Not only have the vampire sisters barred from their community—the women’s part of the castle—the male who attempts to dominate them, but they possess the strength to keep him out: “[the door] had been so forcibly driven against the jamb that part of the woodwork was splintered” (43). Dracula simply cannot keep these women in their proper subservient station, “‘Back, back, to your own place! Your time is not yet come. Wait! Have patience! To-night is mine, To-morrow night is yours!’” (52-53). The vampire sisters are homosocial, sexually aggressive, and non-subservient; Lucy is sexually ravenous, but submits to the dominant power structure; Mina is both non-sexual and readily takes her place as a servant to the dominant power structure but does not see any danger in a little bit of change.
Mina’s infection scene occurs after Lucy’s death. Like Rochester’s account of Bertha’s change, the occurrence is first relayed by a male outsider:
With his left hand {Dracula] held both Mrs. Harker’s hands keeping her away from her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare breast which was shown by his torn open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink” (298).
Though not as blatantly sexual as some passages, the scene occurs on a bed, the placement of Dracula’s hands indicate a kind of embrace, and the intimate image of Mina lapping at Dracula’s chest like a kitten—all insinuate the sexual nature of the exchange.
Mina next describes a ghastly intimacy with Dracula that is never detailed by either Lucy or the vampire sisters, “‘I felt my strength fading away, and I was in a half swoon. How long this horrible thing lasted I know not; but it seemed that a long time must have passed before he took his foul, awful, sneering mouth away. I saw it drip with the fresh blood!’” (304). Mina’s testimony, as we shall see in discussing a contemporary female vampire, parallels the thoughts of a rape victim.
Mina is partly an agent in Dracula’s revenge against the men who would cross his path:
“And you, their best beloved one, are now to me, flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful wine-press for awhile; and shall be later on my companion and my helper. You shall be avenged in turn; for not one of them but shall minister to your need.” (304).
In this infection scene, Dracula insists now that Mina’s alliances are blurred. He promises to indoctrinate her into the society of vampire sisters he has already begun. Or perhaps not. Perhaps Dracula has had enough of the unruly women in the castle back home and seeks out a new London companion who is submissive and dutiful. Strangely enough, the qualities that Dracula lists in this passage are the same attributes expected of the Victorian wife.
Mina’s creation scene serves as an explanation as to why Dracula’s presence is such a threat to England. Dracula has a simple plan to dominate the world, beginning with England “where, perhaps, for centuries to come he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless” (54). It is the women of England, as newly made vampires, who will see Dracula’s plan through: “Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine — my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed” (324). Auerbach surmises, “Women perform on behalf of withheld males the extreme implications of vampirism” (Our 87). The roles are reversed: as Tieck and Brontë cast their vampires as agents of revenge, Stoker creates his female vampires, and any potential ones, as propagating the downfall of England, and, therefore, the world. The symbolic interpretation is that these demons are really New Women will be England’s bane.
How will the men of London fall victim to the vampire women? If the men aren’t in love with the women who become vampires as Jonathan is who remarks, “I suppose it is thus that in old times one vampire meant may; just as their hideous bodies could only rest in sacred earth, so the holiest love was the recruiting sergeant for their ghastly ranks” (Stoker 315), then the vampire’s sex appeal will certainly hook the men, as Van Helsing theorizes:
So he delay and delay [...] Then the beautiful eyes of the fair woman open and look love, and the voluptuous mouth present to a kiss — and man is weak. And there remain one more victim in the Vampire fold; one more to swell the grim and grisly ranks of the Un-Dead!” (391).
So then, it is the female vampire who serves purveyor of Dracula’s scheme. Ultimately, the female vampire posses a more immediate, dangerous threat than the singular vampire male. As Jonathan notes, “nothing can be more dreadful than those women. . .” (42). As further evidence of their strength, the deaths of Lucy and the vampire sisters require Bible, holy words, and a hard-driven stake, while Dracula expires when struck with ordinary knives.
Mina does not die as a vampire, but Stoker does provide a mock death scene after she has been bitten by Dracula. Mina, realizing she could transform into what Lucy became, asks for death instead of existence as a vampire, “‘You promise me, one and all—even you, my beloved husband—that should the time come, you will kill me’” (351).
Lucy’s death has many interpretations—from reading it as a confirmation of male authority, or that it is Lucy’s return to monogamous patriarchy, or her last attempt to kill said patriarchy by killing her fiancé Whatever the interpretation for Lucy, Mina’s mock death has an element that Lucy’s death does not have: Mina requests it. Further, Mina prepares herself for this death by asking for the Burial Service to be read for her at that very moment. The scene closes as Jonathon reads the Service with “that little group of loving and devoted friends kneeling round that stricken and sorrowing lady; or heard the tender passion of her husband’s voice. . . “ (351). This closing image is very different from the end of Lucy’s death scene: the men seething with hatred, looming above Lucy, performing an ancient ritual that is often noted as representing a gang rape. Mina is completely in control of this situation: she has requested it, she instructs it, and most of all, the men kneel at her feet.
As Lucy becomes a vampire after her death, Mina exhibits the effects of the vampire’s touch, but not simply with longer teeth (355). Mina assimilates knowledge at a stunning rate, providing a classification of Dracula as a “quâ criminal” and ultimately using logic to conclude where Dracula is next headed, “I do believe that under God’s providence I have made a discovery” (361, 371). To the discovery which Van Helsing remarks, “‘Our dear Madam Mina is once more our teacher’” (374). Mina, with the help of the vampire’s touch, “You have won from your suffering at [Dracula’s] hands,” has been promoted from assistant school mistress to head teacher (362).
Mina-as-vampire is not only a subservient helpmate to the hunting party. As a vampire, like the vampire sisters, Mina challenges the authority of the men:
She opened her eyes, and we all started as she said, sweetly and seemingly with the utmost unconcern:— “Oh, Professor, why ask me to do what you know that I can’t? I don’t remember anything.” Then, seeing the look of amazement on our faces, she said, turning from one to the other with a troubled look:— “What have I said? What have I done? I know nothing, only that I was lying here, half asleep, and heard you say ‘go on! speak, I command you!’ It seemed so funny to hear you order me about, as if I were a bad child!”(367).
In this passage, Mina subtly reminds Van Helsing and the rest of the men that she gives her assistance freely, not because they demand it. In this way, she is her own woman. In this scene, however slight, Mina addresses her role in the hunting party, and, through some humor and her “sweetness,” she is able to rebuke Van Helsing for commanding her. This ability to rebuke male authority is something neither the vampire sisters nor Lucy are able to accomplish. Mina is Stoker’s answer to the “good” New Woman.
It is interesting to note that Mina is a “vamp” long before Dracula every gets the bite on her. “Vamp,” while meaning “a woman who uses her charm or wiles to seduce and exploit men,” also means “to piece together something old with something new.” Throughout the novel, Mina is responsible for “knitting together in chronological order every scrap of evidence” (238). She does this long before she is ever the product of the vampire’s baptismal of blood (306). In fact, her skill is why Dracula attacks Mina in the first place, “‘You would help these men to hunt me and frustrate me in my designs’” (304). Pope notes that Dracula attacks both Mina and the narrative because he views them as equally threatening (Pope 206). Dracula, then, has little concern with the men, rather, he views Mina and her skill of vamping as a hazard. It seems strange, then that he would bite Mina in hopes of controlling her when all it does is make her a better agent for the men’s pursuit.
At the end of the novel, Jonathan remarks, “We were struck with the fact that, that in all the mass of material, of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of typewrit ing. . .” (400). Mina, then, dissolves authenticity of the individual men’s voices, creating one document that is from her own hand. Similar to the New Women authors, Mina becomes a woman who assimilates information and writes her own story. “Dracula calls up a ‘tradition’ of women writers”—from women who write “ill-spelt” lover letter in the castle, to Lucy and Mina corresponding, to lady journalists, and finally, Mina as compiler of information (Pope 80). Importantly, Mina creates this story with the use of the modern invention, the typewriter.
What makes Mina a vampire is that as her teeth extend, she is conscious of fighting of her “two selves fighting,” and she even becomes “more affectionate than ever” (Stoker 348, 282). She challenges male authority, but does so in an acceptable manner. Mina also accepts “conventional” notions of sexual normalcy (Gelder 78). Ultimately, why it is that Mina does not become a vampire is most important.
When Van Helsing insists that one of the advantages the hunting party has over the Count is their community, “‘We have on our side power of combination—a power denied to the vampire kind,’” he forgets the opening chapters of Jonathan’s journal and the three women who terrorize him during his stay in the Transylvanian castle (Stoker 251). In this reference, Van Helsing is thinking only of the male vampire. As Mina soon finds out, female vampires have their own community. They call to her: “‘Come sister. Come to us. Come! Come!’” (388). Though Mina neither answers nor goes with the vampire sisters, the next time she speaks, she sounds like them (and Lucy, when she calls Arthur), “‘Come!’ she said, ‘come away from this awful place!’” (393). Finally, while watching the battle, Mina is not afraid, but has “a wild, surging desire to do something” (397). But she does not.
The removal of the mark upon Mina’s forehead is not achieved from Dracula’s death. Dracula’s death takes little effort once Jonathan and Quincey get their hands (knives, rather) on him. God removes the mark from Mina’s forehead as Van Helsing predicts, “‘For so surely as we live, that scar shall pass away when God sees right to lift the burden that is hard upon us [...]’” leaving her forehead “‘as pure as the heart we know’” (308). Until Mina is faced with the offer to join the vampire sisters’ community and subsequently refuses, it is not completely clear that she will stay with the hunting party—the dominant power—or choose to escape with her vampire sisters into a realm where her obedience is not required. Mina’s choice to stay with the hunting party is Stoker’s indication to his reader that Mina’s heart is pure. Mina chooses to remain in the domestic sphere, rather than to join the vampires in their homosocial one. Quincey notices that the mark is missing from Mina’s forehead, but he does not actually watch it disappear. The last time Mina is noted as a marked woman is just before the vampire sisters ask her to join them.
The novel closes with Jonathan remarking that no original documents are left and also that Mina is now a mother. Their son has a “bundle of names” which reflect all of the men in the hunting party, but Jonathan and Mina simply call the child Quincey. Though Pope reads this ending as “a final reassurance of the primacy of men and male bonds under patriarchy,” Quincey is a product of his mother. Baby Quincey, as reflected in his name, like Mina’s manuscript, has been pieced together. Mina, as she has done with the men’s stories, has collected information and assimilated it into her own story; this story’s ending happens to be a child.
Mina as both female vampire and woman also represents the positive aspects of the New Woman. Stoker presents Mina as a balance between New Woman ideals without all the fear associated with the negative aspects of the New Woman. Mina, on her own volition, is able to reclaim her status as a pure woman by distancing herself from the extreme of New Womanhood as represented by the vampire sisters. In Stoker’s construction, Mina, as the only surviving vampire, represents the only acceptable kind of New Woman.
Of vampire narratives from this time period, Auerbach remarks that men are more concerned with the female vampire’s sins against gender than with God (Our 41). Daniels’ Sybil, though consistently devious and destructive, is only specifically called a vampire when she is with another woman. Paradoxically, however, had Sybil stayed away from men altogether, she would not have deteriorated into madness the way she does. Similarly, Stoker’s Mina, on the other hand, is saved from vampirehood because she chooses to remove herself from the homosocial company of the vampire sisters and instead, fulfills her prescribed role as wife and mother. Stoker certainly uses the guise of the female vampire to address concerns regarding the emerging New Woman. In contrast, Daniels employs the tale as a warning, in that, before Sybil is a vampire, she is a fallen woman.
Next Chapter Chapter Three: Those Hungry Lips
