Note: the following article on gender and sexuality in Dracula is a modified excerpt (pp. 102-107) 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 repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see the list on the main website.
Productive and Non-Productive Sexuality in Dracula
Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a text replete with sexual innuendos. More importantly, it is filled with hints at a non-normative sexuality.
Count Dracula makes it almost explicit, when he warns the three female vampires that are about to attack Jonathan to stay back, stating “[t]his man belongs to me!” (Stoker 2003, 46). Hindle notes that Stoker’s earlier drafts were even more revealing, as Dracula’s full warning originally was “[t]his man belongs to me I want him” (Hindle 2003, xxxiv).
In this regard, it is pertinent to underline that this kind of sexuality implied here is non-productive. Not only is it contrary to the normative heterosexual monogamy encouraged by Victorian society, but through this very lack of procreation it also becomes atemporal; by denying the children, it essentially denies the future.
In terms of homoeroticism and temporality, it is also worth noting that Baudelaire considered the lesbian as “the heroine of modernism because she combines with a historical ideal the greatness of the ancient world” (Benjamin 1983, 90).
Perhaps tapping into Stoker’s only-unconscious writings, Coppola’s film adaptation includes a fleeting scene where Mina and Lucy kiss in the garden during the storm.
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