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Followers of my blog will already know that the horror genre (in all its wild variations) is intertwined with queerness much like ivy curling around a Victorian stone gate. As I have observed in my prior blog posts on the lesbian vampire Carmilla and Frankenstein, there is no dearth of queer-centric interpretations of our historical horror icons. As Halloween (or rather, Queer Christmas!) draws close yet again, it seems only fitting to consider the OG monster himself: Count Dracula.
But where to even begin with the iconic bloodsucker, the progenitor of entire genres of art, novels and filmography? A complete discussion of queer vampirism could constitute a blog of its own with entries to spare. For the purposes of this discussion, let’s consider the novel that arguably (but not really – see Carmilla above!) began it all.
The Count
While vampiric mythology has swirled around human society for thousands of years, Irishman Bram Stoker’s notorious tale Dracula has cemented vampires as a popular culture phenomenon for over 120 years.[1] The story, perhaps loosely based on a 15th century Romanian count, centers a cast of initially naïve English characters: Jonathan Harker, his fiancé Mina and her best friend Lucy. Harker travels to Transylvania to provide litigation services to the mysterious Count Dracula, a client of his firm headquartered in England. Harker’s legal mission quickly goes awry when the elderly, mysterious Count is revealed to be a monster surviving on human blood, alongside his trio of equally voracious “wives”. Trapped, Harker is all but helpless to watch as the Count journeys to England in pursuit of fresh victims.
Harker should probably have just turned around…
His target is the beautiful but hapless Lucy, who he soon vampirizes – spurring her own pursuit of local children to feed upon. Thanks to the efforts of a Dr. Seward and a Dr. Van Helsing (himself an expert on the vampiric creatures), the undead Lucy is returned to her grave permanently just in time for Harker to escape and marry Mina at last.
The Count, however, remains undeterred and sets his sights next on Mina herself. In one of the book’s most infamous scenes, the Count breaks into the couple’s bedroom and forces Mina to drink blood from his chest. With Mina’s life now imperiled, the intrepid team hunts the Count back to Transylvania and stabs him through the heart – ending his campaign of terror once and for all.
On the surface, most of this reads as the typical atmospheric Gothic horror – albeit one focused around a Victorian era monster quest. After all, evil (in the form of the parasitic Count) is defeated, the upstanding heroes are victorious, so on and so forth with a few nasty deaths along the way. So then what makes Dracula a study in queer literature, and a feature in queer history more broadly?
Mr. Stoker
To delve the deeper interpretations of a novel like Dracula, considering the author first is a fine place to start. Literary historians have suggested that Stoker was himself a repressed homosexual; he was certainly closely connected with famous writers of his age who likely were. In light of what appears on the page in Dracula, those relationships merit a closer examination.
Though Stoker was far from the first author to leverage vampire mythology in his fiction, his work has immortalized (pun intended!) the genre for over 120 years
Prominent among these relationships was that with Walt Whitman, the titan of the Romantic age (in this case referring to the 19th century literary movement). Whitman’s work “Leaves of Grass” (which once got him fired from a job) are thought to portray homosexual or at least sensual undertones of love among men; he also had a multi-decade relationship with streetcar conductor Peter Doyle.[2] What sources have described as this odd pair’s “romantic friendship” was certainly an enduring one, and strongly resembled the queerplatonic model prominent among elite ladies of the late Victorian Age even if its physical nature is unclear.[3]
Stoker’s relationship with Whitman began with the younger Irishman becoming an ardent fan of the latter’s literary work.[4] Stoker enjoyed a robust, effusive pen pal relationship with Whitman beginning when Stoker was in his 20s (and Whitman much older) until the pair finally met in 1884 when Stoker visited Philadelphia.[5] Stoker and Whitman remained close friends and confidantes throughout the remainder of Whitman’s life. Whitman even gifted him a signed copy of “Leaves of Grass” with his photograph in a particularly warm gesture. Though there is no suggestion of anything beyond emotional intimacy between the men, Stoker would have had a close view of Whitman’s relationship with Doyle (and how it perhaps reflected Stoker’s own longstanding business and personal relationship with Henry Irving, who had joined him on his American travels).
Stoker was a close friend of Oscar Wilde, who was publicly tried for homosexuality in 1895
Stoker’s relationship with Oscar Wilde, and particularly the latter’s infamous legal struggles, are another focal point for historians considering the matter of Stoker’s identity. Oscar Wilde’s trial in April 1895 for “gross indecency” was a terrifying moment for the vibrant Victorian queer literary community of which he was a leading light. Stoker and Wilde had been friends for many years during Wilde’s rise to fame and subsequent condemnation. Both attended Trinity College Dublin (where Wilde is honored today with a literary center bearing his name) and both men were once engaged to the same woman – Florence Balcombe. Stoker ultimately married her, but this particular love triangle (not uncommon to Wilde’s queer circle) and their enduring friendship thereafter suggests a resilient bond between the men.[6]
Perhaps most notable for the purposes of this post, however, is the timing of Wilde’s trial and his imprisonment – both of which occurred amid Stoker’s drafting of his infamous vampire novel. The complexities of Stoker’s personal relationships, and how these may have influenced his horror writing, thus bring us back to the text itself.
Blood and Love?
It seems appropriate to close out Part 1 of this series with an eye specifically to gay and/or homosexual evidence in the text of Dracula – both among the men, and perhaps among its female characters also (Part 2 will examine other queer aspects, particularly gender identity, in the novel more fully).
The obvious place to start is with Jonathan Harker and the enigmatic Count. From the moment of Jonathan’s arrival in Transylvania, the text strongly indicates an intense jealousy (perhaps in multiple senses) radiating from the Count toward his prey. Whereas Harker, in his famous first description of his client’s “lofty domed forehead” and “cheeks firm and thin”, sees an impossibly strange creature in the Count, the Count almost immediately treats Jonathan as a personal possession. Eszter Muskovitz argues that “Jonathan is the only male whom Dracula threatens with the danger of vampirism,” signaling a direct, specific desire for the intimate act of bloodsucking itself.[7] She adds that the allegory here is far from subtle: “[t]he act of bloodsucking is a metaphor for coitus as the canine tooth penetrates into the orifice on the neck,” with obvious implications for the Count’s scheming to achieve this intimacy with the unwitting Harker.[8]
Vampirism has long been viewed as metaphor for physical sex and sexuality in a broader sense
Two scenes in particular bear out the homoerotic undertones of the Count’s obsession with Harker. The first is the shaving scene early in the novel, before Harker realizes that he has landed in a trap. In Chapter 2, Harker begins to shave himself with the aid of a small mirror. He realizes, to his consternation, that although the Count is behind him and watching him closely, there is no reflection of his client in the mirror. This realization distracts Harker long enough that the young man cuts his face, “and the blood was trickling over my chin.” The Count’s response is immediate, and terrifying:
“When the Count saw my face, his eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury, and he suddenly made a grab at my throat.”
But a brush with Harker’s crucifix stops the Count from bringing this potential attack to completion; instead, he admonishes Harker for relying on the mirror and cautions him against further injuring himself. If the vampiric “kiss” is indeed a metaphor for an even more intimate physical action, then the urgency in the Count’s reaction to the site of a wound in Jonathan’s skin reads almost as an act of sexual arousal or aggression.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Harker closes the chapter with an ominous admission:
“Doors, doors, doors everywhere, and all locked and bolted. In no place save from the windows in the castle walls is there an available exit. The castle is a veritable prison, and I am a prisoner!”
Another scene touching on these themes is equally infamous, this time involving the Count’s bloodthirsty trio of wives. Harker, by this point, has at last been attacked and subdued by the vampires all around him; the wives taunt and tease Harker (itself an interesting subversion of Victorian gender stereotypes). The setting and context makes clear that the wives are fully prepared to, quite literally, eat Harker alive. Indeed, the trio appear to toy with him until the key moment of consummation.
Except – they never get there. Dalton Valette emphasizes how this scene abruptly changes as soon as one of the female vampires declares that “[t]here are kisses for us all.” This declaration, itself a double entendre, prompts the Count himself to break up the party.[9] Lucas Künnecke similarly refers to this moment as “[o]ne of the most overt homoerotic (or bi-erotic) moments of the story.”[10] The Count tosses his wives a human baby which they might devour, and emphatically declares “[t]his man belongs to me!” The Count’s jealousy of his wives’ unmistakable physical, and likely sexual, dominance of Jonathan, and his refusal to share his victim, rings like a gunshot off the page.
All of this raises another consideration; shortly after these events, the Count abandons Jonathan to head to England – ultimately stalking Lucy and of course, Jonathan’s fiancé Mina. One reading of these plot developments suggests that the Count is looking for a fresh victim in the form of someone Jonathan dearly loves. Another reading, however, could view the Count’s departure (and leaving Jonathan trapped in Transylvania) as an attempt to keep Mina and Jonathan permanently separated (and Jonathan thus permanently at the Count’s disposal). The Count’s notorious wrecking of Jonathan and Mina’s marriage bed, which occurs toward the climax of the narrative, certainly suggests that the Count is far from a happy celebrant of the couple’s belated union.
Lest We Forget the Ladies…
Speaking of Mina, it would be remiss to neglect possible lesbian interpretations of the text in addition to the relationship between Harker and the Count. It bears acknowledgment here that women-loving-women relationships were at an intriguing nexus in the late 19th century; I have written in other posts about the Boston Marriage phenomenon, which saw a number of famous female couples cohabiting together in shared lives with tacit public acceptance throughout the Victorian age.
Importantly, sapphic love (and even platonic friendship) took many nuanced forms during this period of history and did not necessarily have a physical or immediately sexual component. That said, despite the prevalence of women/women committed partnerships, the late Victorian era was a time of intense societal change which impacted queer relationships (platonic, romantic and otherwise). Charles Prescott and Grace Giorgio note that within the context of Stoker’s novel “[i]n the cultural climate of feminist reform, sexology, and degeneration anxiety…the essential inviolability and asexuality of female friendship comes under suspicious attack.”[11]
Beginning with Carmilla, lesbian and sapphic undertones have a deep association with vampire mythology and storytelling
Of course, physical consummation is not inherently necessary for queerness (even queerness which could be perceived as a threat to Victorian morality) to be present; it is through this lens that Mina and Lucy’s relationship bears closer examination. Lucy and Mina are openly acknowledged in the text itself as the “closest of friends”. Elizabeth Macaluso certainly takes this view in her analysis, arguing that Lucy and Mina’s relationship is the true romantic heart of Stoker’s tale. She suggests that Stoker “privileg[es] Lucy and Mina’s queer friendship over Dracula’s frightening nighttime calls,” and therefore “makes the argument that queer love is not monstrous or dangerous but benign, romantic, and productive.”[12]
Certainly, there is something going on between Lucy and Mina; Prescott and Giorgio write that “Lucy’s most passionate connection is undoubtedly with her dear friend,” citing her effusive letters.[13] These include Lucy’s suggestion of “[o]ceans of love and millions of kisses” to Mina and multiple references to being undressed, or undressing, together in intimate evenings of companionship “as we used to sit.” These references are all the more interesting given that Lucy ultimately becomes a vampire and arguably a representation of a wayward, bloodthirsty and lustful abomination (not unlike the Count himself) who is then brutally impaled back into her grave by a group of men.
Mina’s situation is more ambiguous but no less fascinating; as a supposed “New Woman” standing on the moral high ground throughout the story, scholars argue that Mina’s replies to Lucy are loaded with constant self-correction and perhaps self-denial about the deeper implications of her friendship. Indeed, her love for Harker (the only socially proper such love within this context) seems to be inextricably interwoven with her love for Lucy.
Even in the era of “Boston Marriages”, Lucy and Mina’s relationship raises questions
In Chapter 12, for example, Mina infamously declares, “as you love me, and [Harker] loves me, and I love you with all the moods and tenses of the verb, I send you simply his ‘love’ instead. Goodbye, my dearest Lucy, and blessings on you.” This comment, among others, seems to confirm that the driving relationship in Mina’s life (and her story in the novel) is not that with Harker, who comes off almost as a peripheral character in Mina’s tale. Rather, her most important relationship is with Lucy – fueling her terror and devastation at Lucy’s monstrous fate.
To Be Continued…
Incredibly, this discussion so far hardly scratches the surface of the profoundly queer interpretations associated with Bram Stoker’s novel. Whereas this post has focused primarily on sexual orientations, queerplatonic relationships and identities, the next post in this series will delve into the even more complex territory of gender identify and non-conformity. Until next time – watch out for garlic and stakes!
[1] The Bram Stoker Estate, accessed August 25, 2023, https://www.bramstokerestate.com/dracula.
[2] Teo Armus, “Was Walt Whitman ‘gay’? New textbook rules spark LGBTQ history debate,” NBC News, November 27, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/was-walt-whitman-gay-new-textbook-rules-spark-lgbtq-history-n821636.
[3] Martin G. Murray, Pete the Great: A Biography of Peter Doyle,” The Walt Whitman Archive, accessed August 26, 2023, https://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/anc.00155.html.
[4] Meredith Hindley, “When Bram Met Walt,” National Endowment for the Humanities, November/December 2012, Volume 33, Number 6, https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2012/novemberdecember/feature/when-bram-met-walt.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Dalton Valette, “The queer horror of “Dracula”, Salon, August 30, 2022, https://www.salon.com/2022/08/30/dracula-queer-horror-bram-stoker/.
[7] Eszter Muskovitz, “The Threat of Otherness in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” TRANS- [En ligne], 10 | 2010, mis en ligne le 08 juillet 2010, consulté le 24 août 2023. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/trans/391 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/trans.391.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Dalton Valette, “The queer horror of “Dracula”, Salon, August 30, 2022, https://www.salon.com/2022/08/30/dracula-queer-horror-bram-stoker/.
[10] Lucas Künnecke, “Blood, Sex and Vampirism: Queer Desires in Stoker’s Dracula and Le Fanu’s Carmilla,” Academia (2015): 1-17.
[11] Prescott, C., & Giorgio, G. (2005), VAMPIRIC AFFINITIES: MINA HARKER AND THE PARADOX OF FEMININITY IN BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA, Victorian Literature and Culture, 33(2), 487-515. doi:10.1017/S1060150305050953
[12] E.D. Macaluso, “I Love You with All the Moods and Tenses of the Verb”: Lucy and Mina’s Love in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, In: Gender, the New Woman, and the Monster. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30476-8_2
[13] Prescott and Giorgio, ibid.