Dracula There Are Numerous Themes and Motifs

Dracula

There are numerous themes and motifs present in Bram Stoker's "Dracula," such as sexuality, femininity, Christianity, superstition, and ancestral bloodline, to name but a few. However, perhaps one of the most obvious themes surrounds sexuality and femininity.

Stoker's "Dracula" can be seen as a sort of Victorian male "Harlequin" novel, filled with adventure, intrigue, and damsels in distress. And much like the Harlequin type novels for women today, Stoker's novel has an underlying theme of dangerous sexuality, the forbidden fruit. Many of Stoker's passages actually read as erotica:

The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue ... Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed to fasten on my throat .... I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super sensitive skin of my throat ... I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited, waited with beating heart (Stoker Chapter 3 pp).

This is certainly every man's fantasy and probably has been since the days of Eden, to be seduced by three women. Stoker wittingly incorporates sexual images by placing a stamp of evil upon them. The vixens were not truly women in the sense of normal women. They were other-worldly, evil and dangerous, as well as enticing and irresistible. By Stoker's description, it is easy to assume that the female vampire is positioned for a sexual act, thus, showing a female sexual aggression that is unfamiliar, yet desirable, to Harker. Certainly such an act would be possible only in a house of ill-repute, or in a male fantasy, a man's imagination, much like a woman's fantasy of being rescued by a knight on a white horse. This type of sexual behavior would never have been expected of Victorian women, nor accepted by Victorian society.

In the late nineteenth century, women were very much the victims of the Madonna-prostitute fantasy. If a woman was not a mother and/or wife, she was expected to be virtuous and pure, innocent of carnal knowledge and desires. And if she was neither, she was condemned by society as a fallen woman, or basically a whore, with little if any redeeming qualities to offer. Stoker allows Dracula to pit these characteristics against one another, good against evil, by using the cultural assumptions and beliefs of female sexuality. Lucy and Mina represent the epitome of virtue. They are everything they should be, innocent, pure, and ignorant of evil.

Stoker portrays the victims of the vampires as hypnotized and transfixed. They are not savagely raped or murdered, they are sexually seduced, and become willing participates, unable to resist their own sexual desires. Stoker uses the word, voluptuous several times throughout the novel to describe the vixens. When Lucy is transformed, her purity has turned to "voluptuous wantonness" (Stoker Chapter 16 pp). Stoker even includes a passage of how her lips were crimson and the blood trickled down and "stained the purity" of her death robe (Stoker Chapter 16 pp). Then again he writes an image that is extremely uncharacteristic of Victorian women and again uses the word voluptuous:

"She still advanced, however, and with a languorous, voluptuous grace, said, 'Come

to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come!' There was something diabolically sweet in her tones, something of the tinkling of glass when struck, which rang through the brains even of us who heard the words addressed to another"

(Stoker Chapter 16 pp).

Lucy had become sexual enticing and filled with "hunger" for her man, something he would only have experienced in his dreams or imagination, but hardly in Victorian reality. She was as much a raving vixen as the three that had visited Harker. Lucy is so filled with sexual energy that she pleads for gratification, and promises Arthur his own release, one that may overwhelm him. Lured by sexual desire, Arthur, "seemed to move under a spell ... moving his hands from his face, he opened wide his arms" (Stoker Chapter 16 pp). Not only is poor Arthur lured, but the other men as well have a difficult time resisting Lucy's sexuality. She had become a true temptress in every sense of its definition and the men were left vulnerable and weak from their own desires. This oversexed woman, who was everything she should not be, had turned the men into everything they should not be, which was out of control.

Thus, the men conclude that she must be destroyed, for that it is the only way to restore her purity, "my friend, it will be a blessed hand for her that shall strike the blow that sets her free" (Stoker Chapter 16 pp). Moreover, it becomes important to make certain that Mina does not fall victim to the dark forces and lose her virtuous state as well. However, it can also be seen that the men fear their own downfall from grace and virtue, for how can any mortal man resist such temptation.