What Boundaries Does the Vampire Threaten?

What boundaries does the Vampire threaten?

Discuss possible answers to this question with reference to at least two critical or theoretical essays and at least two tellings' of the Dracula story.

Written By Amanda Turner

The Vampire in Dracula threatens the very existence of Victorian England. Stoker constructs the vampire as an embodiment of threat by surpassing his Gothic novelist predecessors to bring the threat of the Gothic home to Victorian England (Arata 119). This in turn crosses the boundary between what is foreign and what is national; and dually East and West. Dracula is open to many interpretations, each accompanying their own boundaries the Vampire threatens. Marxist's view Dracula as a metaphor for capitalism, whilst the queer perspective views it as a struggle between homosexuality and heterosexuality. Others such as Auerbach argue that "Dracula is in love less with death or sexuality than with hierarchies, erecting barriers hitherto foreign to vampire literature; the gulf between male and female, antiquity and newness, class and class, England and non-England, vampire and mortal, homoerotic and heterosexual love, infusing its genre with a new fear: fear of the hatred unknown" (p. 148). This essay is arguing that Dracula does cross all of those fore-mentioned barriers, as well as crossing a myriad of others. The essay is using the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker and the 1931 film version of Dracula by Tod Browning as the literary base from which the boundaries are derived and analyzed. Other boundaries threatened are; familial boundaries including maternal and paternal roles; pre-oedipal and oedipal, as well as the boundaries between child and adult. Sexual and human taboo boundaries are threatened, incorporating masculine and feminine as well as gender boundaries. The boundary between conservative and liberatory is threatened, evident in the contrast between Victorian women and the new woman. The threat of conflict between desire and fear; sanity and insanity; the realm of the unconscious versus the conscious, are all evident in the boundary between self and other; and Christianity is also threatened in Dracula. This essay analyses the threat these boundaries face from a historical perspective; a psychoanalytical lens (primarily Freud and Lacanian); queer and gender studies analysis; Jungian approach; and a Marxist interpretation, to assess the preternatural jeopardy the Vampire embodies. It is however important to note that the boundaries in Dracula are not as clear cut as suggested: instead they are fused and intertwined with one another.

Sexuality in Dracula comes under extreme threat. The social normative's surrounding Victorian sexuality are displaced and the reader is left to face up to what they fear the most; deviant forms of sexuality and gender identity distortion. This is witnessed in the conflict between Dracula, and Van Helsing and his entourage; the Crew of Light. Their conflict arises over a duel to see who is able to assert more power over women, both sexually and intellectually, gender functions that are woven tightly into Victorian ideals about masculine and feminine counterparts; as shown by Lucy. The killing of Lucy is a powerful reinstatement of male sexual dominance. Lucy poses a threat by exposing herself as a danger to sexual propriety; a threat to Victorian ideology - "Why can't they let a girl marry three men or as many as want her?" (Stoker, p. 60) - a threat which comes to fruition after Lucy is bitten. Once infected by Dracula, Lucy becomes sexually overt and aggressive; and is portrayed as a monster and a social outcast. She transforms into the 'Bloofar Lady' and feeds on children making her the maternal antithesis as well as a child molester (Jones, p. 87). In order to rectify Lucy's condition she is sexually overpowered by her fiancee Holmwood; he penetrates her to death with a stake through the chest, a staking which is overtly sexual in interpretation, as "the thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam.........He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper" (Stoker p. 241). This sexual innuendo restores the Victorian balance of sexual penetration from the female domain back its accepted station within the male domain. Showalter interprets the killing as a gang rape, done with "impressive phallic instrument" (p. 181). "Those serial transfusions which, while they pretend to serve and protect 'good women,' actually enable the otherwise inconceivable interfusion of the blood that is semen too. Here displacement (a woman's body) and sublimation (these are medical penetrations) permit the unpermitted, just as gang rape men share their semen in a location displaced sufficiently to divert the anxiety excited by a more direct union" (Craft, p. 128). This regression of female penetration has some basis within Freudian research into dreams. Nightmares, according to Freudian psychoanalysis, result from sexual oppression and occur most commonly in virgins, widows and nuns; and that the remedy is found in the love of a good or bad man (Jones, p. 87).

Dracula represents deviant sexuality. Dracula displays the breakdown of normal gender roles posed by the New woman, by creating a physical transformation from the sexually passive woman into the sexually aggressive vampire in his victims (Hendershot p. 374). Hendershot argues that this would have evoked anxiety in those members of society still upholding the Victorian values, as gender identity expectations were being redefined, and the clear distinction between the sexes provided a comfort zone (Hendershot p.