Analysis: Chapters II–IV
The Author’s Note with which Dracula begins
reflects a popular conceit in eighteenth-century fiction. Rather
than constructing a narrative from the perspective of an omniscient
third-person narrator, Stoker presents the story through transcribed
journals. In effect, the novel masquerades as a real diary. Were
the story told as a first-person reflection, we would be sure of
the fate of the protagonist: because he is telling his tale, he
must have lived through it. However, because the author of the diary
writes directly as events happen, he may be tragically unaware of
the danger of his surroundings. Harker has no time to reflect on
his experiences and no way of knowing if he is placing himself in
danger.
This real-time technique is popular within the horror
genre: since the narrator has no way of knowing how the story will
end, neither does the audience. The 1999 film The
Blair Witch Project provides an excellent example of this
conceit in recent popular culture. The film purports to be the exact
contents of several film reels found in a supposedly haunted Maryland
forest, shortly after a documentary film team vanished there while
attempting to record supernatural activity. Watching the film, we
experience what the documentary filmmakers supposedly experienced,
in real time, to terrifying effect.
Because contemporary readers are so familiar with the
vampire legend—whether in the form of The Lost Boys, Buffy
the Vampire Slayer, Salem’s Lot, or countless other incarnations—it
is difficult to appreciate the magnitude of shock and dread that
Stoker’s contemporaries felt upon reading his novel. For us, the
suspense more likely comes from watching the characters piece together
the count’s puzzle.
Chapter III contains one of the most discussed scenes
in the novel. Drifting in and out of consciousness, Harker is visited
by the three female vampires, who dance seductively before the angry count
drives them away. The women’s appearance in the room where Harker
is sleeping is undeniably sexual, as the Englishman’s characteristically
staid language becomes suddenly ornate. Harker notes “the ruby of
their voluptuous lips” and feels “a wicked, burning desire that
they would kiss me.” As he stretches beneath the advancing women
“in an agony of delightful anticipation,” his position suggests,
not at all subtly, an act of oral sex:
The fair girl . . . bent over me till I could
feel the movement of her breath upon me. . . . 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. . . .
Harker is simultaneously confronting a vampire and another
creature equally terrifying to Victorian England: an unabashedly
sexual woman. The women’s voluptuousness puts them at odds with
the two English heroines, Lucy Westenra and Mina Murray, whom we see
later in the novel. The fact that the vampire women prey on a defenseless
child perverts any notion of maternity, further distinguishing them
from their Victorian counterparts. These “weird sisters,” as Van
Helsing later calls them, stand as a reminder of what is perhaps
Dracula’s greatest threat to society: the transformation of prim,
proper, and essentially sexless English ladies into uncontrollable,
lustful animals.
Harker spends a lot of time wondering whether this vision
of repulsion and delight is real. He is unsure whether the women
actually bend closer and closer to him, or if he merely dreams of
their approach. If the women are real, they threaten to drink Harker’s blood,
fortifying themselves by depleting his strength. If they are merely
part of a fantastic dream , as Harker suspects, they nonetheless
threaten to drain him of another vital fluid—semen. Critic C.F. Bentley
believes that the passage in which Harker lies “in -languorous ecstasy
and wait[s]—wait[s] with beating heart” suggests a nocturnal emission.
Either way, Harker stands to be drained of a vital fluid, which
to the Victorian male imagination represents an overturning of the
male-dominated social structure.
