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Note: the following article analyzing Count Dracula’s attack on Mina Harker (in Bram Stoker’s Dracula) is a modified excerpt (pp. 123-124) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the Tampere University Press pages. For a list of my other academic publications, see the related page of my website.

Dracula’s Attack on Mina: The Issue of Ambiguity

The borders of the attack scene are somewhat blurry. Not only because the attack is implied to have taken place over a period of several nights, as Dracula tells Mina “it is not the first time, or the second, that your veins have appeased my thirst!” (Stoker 2003, 306), but also because the events that lead to this attack are similarly hazy.

Examining the facts from the night between September 30th and October 1st, Mina mentions how she cannot remember how she fell asleep but that she does recall an eerie stillness covering everything (Ibid, 274). What she construes as dreams or her imagination is in actual fact Count Dracula in the form of mist, invading the room like a “pillar of cloud” with red eyes (Ibid, 275).

Initially Mina is fascinated by the pair of red eyes that shine in the dark, but horror overcomes her when she recalls the three female vampires Jonathan encountered back in Transylvania and Dracula’s castle.

Dracula’s Attack on Mina: From Vampires to Empires

The seemingly incongruous grouping of desire and fear, fascination and repulsion, is repeated once more and transforms the attack scene into a link that is added to the existing chain of associations between the vampire and the Empire the text has created so far.

The attack scene is connected with those in the castle through Mina’s recollection, essentially being rendered a replica of the similar mixture of “honey-sweet” and “bitter offensiveness” promised by the colonizing process.

Dracula’s Attack on Mina: Sexual Innuendos

The attack continues the next evening. Mina has very little to say about it, limiting herself to admitting she slept a dreamless sleep, but also one that did not refresh her (Ibid 276). The peak of the scene comes the third night, when the Crew of Light, Mina, and Dracula all come face to face.

The first image the men notice when they enter the room is “the white-clad figure of [Mina] … [and] a tall, thin man, clad in black” (Ibid 300), a rather obvious image of a bride and a groom. Furthermore, Mina’s white clothes are covered in blood, a sign implying consummation of the unholy union.

Dracula’s Attack on Mina: The Repercussions of Imperialism

But perhaps the most ominous words, sounding like a judging triumphant voice, come in Dracula’s explanation of the events and the cause of his attack, as he says that the men “should have kept their energies for use closer to home” (Ibid 306).

What the text seems to imply, through the words and deeds of Count Dracula, is that if England, instead of being preoccupied with foreign adventures, had focused her energy “for use closer to home”, a disaster such as the one that occurred in Dracula would have been perhaps avoided. The character of Mina, a key depiction of the English woman and the core of Victorian values, inserts a moral dimension into the equation. Her appropriateness and adherence to the established norms having faltered, the energy of the men having been misplaced, it becomes an unsurprising outcome that the Empire is polluted from within.

The Threat from Within

The threat becomes more horrifying and the danger more imminent through the fact that the invader is not only a foreigner, but also someone with connections to minorities established within England – even during the attack, Dr. Seward does not fail to notice “the great nostrils of the white aquiline nose” (Ibid 300).

Minorities such as Jews and gypsies not only display a particular connection with time, being old and in a way timeless, but also with a particular kind of collective English memory, representing the traumatic colonial past – “the trace memory of the traumatic cost of improvement and expansion” (Trumpener 1992, 868).

Works Cited

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. London: Penguin, 2003.
Trumpener, Katie. “The Time of the Gypsies: A People without History in the Narratives of the West”. Critical Inquiry. 18.4 (1992): 843–884.

Read more: Angelis, Christos. “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic. Doctoral Dissertation. Tampere, Finland: Tampere University Press, 2017. Available from the repository of the Tampere University Press.