Crimson † Chess (Vlad Dracula)

Coitus Interruptus: Sex, Bram Stoker & Dracula

Coitus Interruptus: Sex, Bram Stoker, and Dracula

Elizabeth Miller

Online publication: Nov. 17, 2006

An article of the journal Romanticism on the Net

Issue44, November 2006
The Gothic: from Ann Radcliffe to Anne Rice

Copyright © Michael Eberle-Sinatra 1996-2006 - All rights reserve

Readers of Dracula have been assured repeatedly that the novel is all about sex. Indeed, every sexual practice, fantasy and fear imaginable has been thrust upon its pages: rape (including gang rape), aggressive female sexuality, fellatio, homoeroticism, incest, bestiality, necrophilia, pedophilia, and sexually transmitted disease. Words have been twisted to yield new meanings, passages have been examined out of context, and gaps in the text have been declared intentional omissions. Furthermore, critics comb every aspect of Stoker's life looking for evidence for their particular brand of psychosexual analysis, sometimes even inventing "facts" to support flimsy theories. The preponderance of such readings of Dracula demands re-assessment. While it would be folly to deny any erotic content in a novel about biting and sucking, the incessant pursuit of this path has led us down the slippery slope of revisionist biography and reductive textual nit-picking. Such readings may be a product of the late twentieth century's voyeuristic obsession with sexuality, coupled with a determination to project (sometimes in condescending fashion) its own self-proclaimed sophisticated and liberated views onto a Victorian text - and its author.

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Imagine a Dracula in which wooden stakes are wooden stakes, and blood is merely blood. This is not an easy task when we consider the extent to which the text has been pushed to the brink of total libidinal abandon. If we take Bram Stoker at his word, we must assume he did not deliberately intend his novel to be concerned with sex. We need only recall his comment to William Gladstone in 1897 that "There is nothing base in this book" (Letter 48) and his later declaration that "the only emotions that in the long run harm are those arising from sex impulses" ("Censorship" 436). Scholars disagree on whether the author of Dracula was aware of any sexual subtext of his novel. On the one hand, Maurice Richardson doubts that Stoker had any inkling of the erotic content of the vampire superstition (420). But Barbara Belford is certain that Stoker not only was fully aware of it but deliberately developed a "coded eroticism" (8), while H.L. Malchow is convinced that "Stoker was no prude, and the world of the theater in which he was immersed was full of the sexually unconventional and ambiguous" (136). Nothing in the numerous reviews of Dracula suggests that his contemporaries detected sexual themes in the novel, nor did the Lord Chamberlain's Office require any deletions from the text of the dramatic reading presented in May 1897.[1]

Yet we have been assured repeatedly that Bram Stoker's Dracula is all about sex. Indeed, every imaginable sexual practice, fantasy and fear has been thrust upon the pages of the novel: rape (including gang rape), aggressive female sexuality, fellatio, homoeroticism, incest, bestiality, necrophilia, paedophilia, and sexually transmitted disease. In some cases, words have been twisted to yield new meanings, whole passages have been examined out of context, and gaps in the text have been declared intentional omissions. The incessant pursuit of sexual innuendo has led some down the slippery slope of reductive textual nitpicking and revisionist biography. Most alarming of all, as critics comb every aspect of Stoker's life looking for evidence for their particular brand of psychosexual analysis, they have at times distorted or even invented "facts" to support flimsy theories.

Sex and the Vampire Text

The great push began with Ernest Jones, the Freudian scholar who saddled Shakespeare's Hamlet with a massive Oedipal complex. In On the Nightmare (1931), Jones asserts that the latent content of vampire belief "yields plain indications of most kinds of sexual perversions, and that the belief assumes various forms according as this or that perversion is more prominent" (98). Using Freud's underlying thesis that morbid dread always signifies repressed sexual wishes, Jones expands on the way in which the vampire legend combines the two major ingredients of blood and death. The theme was picked up and applied specifically to Dracula in 1959 by Maurice Richardson, who contends that vampirism in the story makes sense only from a Freudian perspective, that Dracula is a "kind of incestuous, necrophilous, oral-anal-sadistic all-in wrestling match", a "blatant demonstration of the Oedipal complex" (418-19), and that the novel presents the vampire count as a father-figure of great power, the evil father who hordes all the women and the young men (sons), who kill him to destroy his sexual monopoly.