Happy Autumn, and welcome to my latest queer history blog post! If you enjoy this post, then you’ll love my Historical Fiction novels! Find out more about my projects here, and sign up for my newsletter here to stay in touch.
Welcome back to my Queer History blog, and welcome back especially to Part 2 of my series on the OG bloodsucker himself – Dracula (or perhaps “themself” is more accurate? I’ll be diving into that more below!) In case you missed it, Part 1 of this series considered Bram Stoker’s original novel in terms of homosexual and queerplatonic allegory.
Accordingly, Part 2 will consider queer themes in this vampiric tale through the lens of gender, gender nonconformity and gender identity. Of course, since this is a story set in the tumultuous gender politics of the late Victorian age – there is plenty to talk about!
The Victorian Gender Binary
Before diving into the manifold ways that Bram Stoker’s characters upend and otherwise defy the gender status quo of Stoker’s era, a brief examination of the late Victorian Age is in order. I have regularly observed in this and other series on my blog that social history (particularly queer history) rarely develops in a linear fashion. While modern audiences might assume that history is continually progressing in a positive direction for marginalized (or otherwise disempowered) communities, the reality is nearly always far more complex than “time = progress”.
Women in the late Victorian Age faced a strict, but evolving, set of expectations
Much the same was evident in how women’s empowerment and social mobility arguably took significant steps backwards during the Victorian period. All of this aligned with the systemic enforcing of the Western notion of a gender binary ever-more tightly at all levels of society. Kathryn Hughes argues that “[d]uring the Victorian period men and women’s roles became more sharply defined than at any time in history. In earlier centuries it had been usual for women to work alongside husbands and brothers in the family business…As the 19th century progressed men increasingly commuted to their place of work – the factory, shop or office. Wives, daughters and sisters were left at home all day to oversee the domestic duties that were increasingly carried out by servants.”[1]
The increasingly rigid binary system of roles influenced the rise of “separate spheres” for men and women (note that although nonbinary individuals absolutely existed during this period, they were conveniently ignored by this particular division of influence and labors). Hughes notes that, “[w]omen were considered physically weaker yet morally superior to men, which meant that they were best suited to the domestic sphere.”
Furthermore, “[w]omen were assumed to desire marriage because it allowed them to become mothers rather than to pursue sexual or emotional satisfaction”, but were otherwise inclined toward what we would recognize as asexuality regardless of their actual identities. An ideal woman was thus intelligent, mature and polished but also cloying, infantile and yielding to the men who dominated her social and legal status throughout her life.
Of course, this suffocating sense of gender binary had significant implications for men as well. Felicia Appell emphasizes this double-edged sword: “Just as men had expectations for the ideal Victorian women, the women and the rest of society had expectations for the ideal Victorian man.”[2] Victorian men were required to succeed as laborers, administrators, managers, and bosses in an increasingly industrialized workforce, earn sufficient wages to support families single-handedly (preferably in modern middle-class lifestyles) and therein achieve recognition and admiration from both women and other men.
As Appell points out, this ideal created a context which forced men into an unhealthy independence and detachment, not to mention the inescapable economic pressure that came with financial survival in an era utterly lacking in social safety nets (one need only review the breadth of Charles Dickens’ body of work to grasp the implications of the “head of household” failing in his singular provisional duties).
New Women & Dandies
As strict as the late Victorian gender binary had become, society was changing (as it is wont to do!) This brings us to a discussion of the so-called “New Woman” who features in Stoker’s narrative. This concept emerged toward the very end of the eponymous Queen Victoria’s lengthy reign, around the 1880s and 1890s (and right when Dracula was first published). As the moniker implies, the New Woman represented a break in female archetypes and identity from the recent past.
A changing socio-economic outlook for women fueled the rise of “New Women”
Greg Buzwell notes that, as the 20th century drew closer, “the most radical and far-reaching change of all concerned the role of women, and the increasing number of opportunities becoming available to them in a male-dominated world. With educational and employment prospects for women improving, marriage followed by motherhood was no longer seen as the inevitable route towards securing a level of financial security.”[3] This was the era, of course, of Boston Marriages (see Part 1 of this series for more discussion of that subject), of women enrolling in major universities and adopting academic roles, the early campaigns for women’s suffrage, and ladies in bloomers (gasp!) riding bicycles to wherever they might wish to go.
Buzwell also notes that this was the arguable heyday of the “dandy” who, much like the New Woman epitomized a rebellion against the strict female “sphere” of the era, so too did the dandy similarly rebel against the rigid, stark expectations set forth for men. The term itself has evolved over the centuries, but has always been associated with particularly stylish and fashion-forward men – in Victorian parlance, therefore, men pursuing self-expression and actualization in manners previously considered suitable to women. Author Oscar Wilde, who exemplified the “dandy” trend in the late Victorian period, helped make the term synonymous with flamboyant, expressive men who transgressed the established gender binary of the age.[4]
Dandies took on a particular significance in the late 19th century, despite the term itself being far older
The turn of the century in Western society thus represented a paradox: there was a well-established (and theoretically accepted) inflexible gender binary. At the same time, however, societal and economic changes were quickly encouraging challenges to that very binary at its supposed height of influence. It is into this chaotic situation that Bram Stoker’s novel, and its vampires, was thrust – bringing us at last back to the text itself. Indeed, Stoker’s bloodsuckers seem to have a great deal to say about Victorian gender ideals – or rather, tearing said ideals to pieces bite by bite.
Nonbinary Vampires?
Stoker’s vampires were inherently transgressive, threatening and terrifying to the Victorian imagination. Scholars argue that a key element of this terror was the pernicious threat that the vampires represented to 19th century gender normativity. Eszter Muskovits takes this view, emphasizing that “[t]he character of the vampire represents more than simple homosexual tendencies, namely the fluidity of gender identity in a seemingly rigid gender structure of the Victorian society.”[5]
On a superficial level, such assertions seem odd; after all, Count Dracula clearly seems to be a man (and his historical inspiration was an infamous Count) who is “married” to a trio of unmistakably female vampires. But this reading fails to account for the strict binary which would have been familiar to Stoker’s readers and the manifold ways in which the vampiric characters (and later, the naïve human ones) thrive in a dangerous gray area.
For Victorians, vampires were dangerous in more ways than one…
The Count, for his part, seems to exist entirely outside the gender binary altogether. Jessica Lovett notes that, in Victorian terms, the Count’s physical appearance offers both distinctly masculine and feminine traits. For example, “[h]is chin is the properly broad and strong chin associated with manliness, but immediately his cheeks are thin—which gauntness is more often associated as a femininelike feature.”[6] Likewise, his hands “are masculine in that they are coarse, broad, squat” but likewise his nails are “long, sharp…evidently effeminate.” Lovett notes how Harker, giving the reader this odd description, finds the Count deeply unsettling, perhaps as a result of “these amalgamations of both sides of the binary.”[7] To Harker, such a person as the Count would be strange indeed and wildly outside of his experience of how a nobleman should present.
The gender ambiguity of the Count goes beyond his unusual physical appearance; rather, it becomes distinctly apparent at the core of vampirism itself. Vampires, in their most familiar mythologies including that of Bram Stoker, encompass both “masculine” and “feminine” behavioral traits. Or, more specifically, the “male” Count Dracula and his “female” wives each seem to subvert their respective gender expectations. Afiqah Izzati Azhar writes that the Count’s violent acts of “transforming his victims into vampires resembles the image of a mother giving birth to children. The male body in this respect, therefore, is rendered productive and fertilizing by his vampiric sexuality because he reproduces, and he alone creates other vampires.”[8]
Stoker’s vampires seem to flout the gender categories of his era
In other words, Dracula’s species seems to assign reproduction – the raison d’être for most women of the late Victorian Age – to a male or perhaps nonbinary leader of the pack. The metaphor is heightened toward the novel’s climax when Mina is forced to suckle blood from a wound in the Count’s chest, which is described as “a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink.” The allegorical comparison to breastfeeding, and its close association with physical birthing, is unmistakable and repellent to the characters that witness it. Scholars also argue that in this scene Dracula is both dominant (in his forcing of Mina to accede to his physical demands) and passive (effectively nursing her from his own chest), performing a dual male and female role in the same action.[9]
Female Vampires – Victorian Nightmares?
The role reversals are notable in the novel’s female characters also. The female vampires, presumably birthed by Dracula himself, epitomize a Victorian nightmare: aggressive, dominant, sexually powerful and violent women with the desire and means to predate on everyone around them. Together, they represent an extremity or a perversion (or perhaps something closer to the reality) of an “ideal Victorian man”.
In Part 1 of this series, I briefly discussed the scene in which Jonathan is paralyzed by the wifely trio as they prepare to (unsuccessfully) devour him. The text is clear that the female vampires are perhaps only seconds away from tearing into Jonathan, using their vampire teeth to accomplish the task. The teeth themselves have phallic implications, as Azhar notes, but the ladies’ swaggering and perhaps hypersexual attitudes toward Jonathan (in comparison to his helplessness) represent an outrageous subversion of the Victorian gender binary ideal.
It is equally clear that both Lucy, then later Mina, are headed down this particular pathway to gender nonconformity or even something like “nonbinary” gender status. Lovett highlights this threat: “The humans in the novel, and notably the straight, cisgender male humans, are driven to extreme violence and anger due to the improper and warped sexuality of the vampires—Lucy being arguably the most oppressed and fiercely villainized.”[10]
Lucy, once rebirthed by Dracula, transforms into a particularly harrowing sort of predator who targets young children in the village around her former home. The young newlywed who would almost certainly have produced children had she survived instead contents herself with feeding upon them.
Like the Count, Stoker’s female vampires represent an upending of Victorian femininity
In this instance, a formerly bright young lady on the path to sacred motherhood instead becomes a consumer of children’s blood – not unlike the mythological Lillith (another icon of gender role subversion). Rather than perform her dutiful role as a nurturer of children, the “monstrous” Lucy nurtures herself on their bodies. Little wonder, then, that Van Helsing directs his cohort of sturdy men to impale Lucy’s undead body into her coffin; Lucy’s vampire form both mocks her former femininity, and threatens the dominant, socially powerful men around her.
In fact, it is Mina’s “infection” of vampirism, and her increasingly subversive behavior, which prompts the frantic expedition to kill the Count once and for all toward the end of the novel. After Mina’s (awkward) encounter with the Count, she herself begins to exhibit the same monstrous, horrifying transformation that consumed Lucy. Van Helsing, sensing the threat of this transformation yet again, remarks, “Madam Mina, our poor, dear Madam Mina is changing… Her teeth are sharper, and at times her eyes are more hard. But these are not all, there is to her the silence now often, as so it was with Miss Lucy.” These physical and mental changes are, once again, suggestive of aggression, domination and, by extension, masculinity. The men face a renewed and palpable threat – and so react accordingly in a fierce effort to bring Mina back from total abandonment of her “true nature” and designated societal role.
In this context, it is understandable why Dracula has been interpreted as a deeply anti-feminist text; after all, if one reads the female characters’ vampiric destinies as a perverse condemnation of “New Women”, then Lucy’s staking and Mina’s rescue/humbling suggest that female empowerment is best left to fantasy. A queer interpretation might be somewhat more generous, however, especially if Stoker’s views may have been impacted by his own perhaps queer inclinations (see Part 1) and the distinctly queer friend group of literary lights he inhabited.
Stoker’s vampires, while violent and bent on their own survival, could also represent a pathway out of the confinement of the Victorian gender binary through fantastical characters. By subverting, upending and even ignoring said binary, Stoker’s vampires arguably expose the limitations of that binary to the cold light of day. In the end, it is perhaps that hardened, binary worldview which forces human nature into the restrictions of a coffin – rather than the vampiric one.
Of Bloodsuckers and Binaries…
Queer metaphor in this iconic horror novel goes vastly beyond what this two-part series has considered, and yet in the end it is unlikely to ever be conclusively proved how Stoker himself wished for his most infamous work to be interpreted. Speculation endlessly abounds (as it does for all great works of fiction), but the more interesting question is perhaps what all of this tells us about queerness and its variations in the Victorian age.
Even in a largely homophobic cultural context which attempted to enforce binaries against waves of change, reams of evidence attest to the existence (and thriving) of queer people and subcultures in this period. In this context, Dracula might have read as both a horrifying challenge to “proper society” but also a fantasy escape where that society was violently turned upside down. The horror genre, throughout history, has been leveraged as an attack on the marginalization of “others”. In that sense, Stoker’s novel is arguably one of the earliest entries in the queer horror family which presents a fascinating, if dangerous, exploration of queerness brought out into the open. Certainly, those writers and filmmakers who have followed in Stoker’s footsteps have taken the “queer angle” and run quite far ahead. It is perhaps inevitable, then, that the seeds of queer vampires (and the alternate world they represented) were always buried in the text of Stoker’s novel – regardless of whether he intended them to be or not.
[1] Kathryn Hughes, “Gender roles in the 19th century,” The British Library, May 15, 2014, https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/gender-roles-in-the-19th-century.
[2] Felicia Appell, “Victorian Ideals: The Influence of Society’s Ideals on Victorian Relationships,” McKendree University, accessed September 9, 2023, https://www.mckendree.edu/academics/scholars/issue18/appell.htm.
[3] Greg Buzwell, “Daughters of decadence: the New Woman in the Victorian fin de siècle,” The British Library, May 15, 2014, https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/daughters-of-decadence-the-new-woman-in-the-victorian-fin-de-siecle.
[4] Sithma Illangasinghe, “How has the meaning of the term ‘Dandy’ changed over history and how does this reflect changing ideals of masculinity?,” Medium, October 9, 2021, https://medium.com/@sithmaillangasinghe/how-has-the-meaning-of-the-term-dandy-changed-over-history-and-how-does-this-reflect-changing-1e8952e319c7.
[5] Eszter Muskovits, “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
[6] Jessica Lovett, “”DANGEROUS DEVIATIONS”: QUEER VAMPIRISM AND AESTHETIC OTHERINGS IN STOKER’S DRACULA,” https://www.academia.edu/download/64786380/RUUJCL_Spring_2020_Edition.pdf.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Afiqah Izzati Azhar, “TRANSCENDING QUEER SEXUALITY AND GOTHIC MONSTER AT THE FIN DE SIÈCLE,” School of English, The University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, 14th ICLLCE 2019 Singapore 015-011, https://icsai.org/procarch/14icllce4imelt/14ICLLCE-015-011.pdf.
[9] Prescott, Charles E., and Grace A. Giorgio. “Vampiric Affinities: Mina Harker and the Paradox of
Femininity in Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula.’” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 33, no. 2, 2005, p. 503
[10] Lovett, pg. 59.