Contaminating Sexualities In Bram Stoker's Dracula

6. Contaminating Sexualities

Another group which is often excluded from the action in Dracula are women. Vampiric women, for instance, do not get their own voice but are only talked about by other characters (mostly men). Mina seems to be the only woman with a proper voice in the story. Carol Senf argues in her article "'Dracula': Stoker's Response to the New Woman": "If it were not for Mina Harker, the reader might conclude that Stoker is a repressed Victorian man with an intense hatred of women or at least a pathological aversion to them" (34). Mina can be reasoned exhibits features of the New Woman. The New Woman was a figure that emerged during Stoker's time as "a professional woman who chose financial independence and personal fulfilment

This image of women as sexual (and literal) predators presents a stark contrast to the perfect angel of the house whose "[cheeks] […] glow with the blush of innocence rather than the flush of sensuality" (Gilbert and Grubar 616). This blatant sexuality connects the female vampire figure to the New Woman who was more outspoken about her own sexuality as women had previously been (Senf 35). The dangers of female sexuality manifest in Lucy when she turns from an innocent girl into a vampire. However, Lucy's sexual depravity is already hinted at in earlier stages of the novel before her transition into a vampire: She complains to Mina that "a girl [cannot] marry three men, or as many as want her" (Stoker 60; Senf 42), claims she is "a horrid flirt" (Stoker 59) and Van Helsing jokes that she is a "polyandrist" (Stoker 158). This image of women is connected to Edward Said's Fatal Woman, an exotic, oriental woman who is of the "legendary, richly suggestive, and associative sort" (Said, Orientalism 180). Figures like Cleopatra or Isis have often been portrayed this way in Western literature and culture (Said, Orientalism 180). It is perhaps no coincidence that a picture of "Cleopatra with the asps to her bosom" (Le Fanu 258) already graced the room of the vampire and title character in Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla," a gothic novella that

Blanche, for example, dreads "all those coons eyeing her and her daughter up every time they walk down their own street" (Levy 98). Beyond that, the Jamaican immigrant Gilbert faces opposition when he wants to work in a factory (Levy 258). The position is denied to him since his potential employer fears Gilbert's influence over the women working there: "You see, we have white women working here. Now, in the course of your duties, what if you accidentally found yourself talking to a white woman?" (Levy 258). It is made clear to Gilbert that the husbands of these women simply would not want him talking to their wives, otherwise "all hell would break loose" (Levy 258). This fear of white men that immigrants may consort with white women is evident in other scenes in the novel too. For instance, when the "colony troops" are introduced to England by a Corporal, he warns them: "[D]on't think you lot are going there to paint the town red. No white women there will consort with the likes of you" (Levy 111). Moreover, only a little later in the narration, Gilbert and his comrades walk through a village only to be noticed by the villagers. One of the white men clearly disapproves of a young woman interacting "very nicely with a lucky [soldier]" (Levy 115) and drags her away. Towards the end of the novel, after Queenie has given birth to a Jamaican's baby, Bernard blames Gilbert by