When Bram Stoker first wrote Dracula, he drew upon a large tradition of vampire lore, both in novels such as Carmilla, the penny dreadful Varney the Vampire, and John Polidori’s The Vampire, and in folkloric tradition. Despite their many differences, all of Dracula’s predecessors have one thing in common: an emphasis on dangerous sexuality. Another element influencing Dracula is the idea of the “New Woman,” a proto-feminist challenge to the predominant “cult of true womanhood” that had reigned throughout the nineteenth century. The New Woman arose out of an 1894 exchange between two female writers; in terms of what made the New Woman “new,” she challenged traditional ideas about female vocations, sexuality, and pastimes. Of the two main women in Dracula, Lucy and Mina, Mina is typically read as a New Woman-like character, because of her typing skills and industrious nature. Lucy, who is more domestic and gushes about her many suitors, might at first glance be read as the antithesis of the New Woman. However, this paper will argue that Lucy and Mina are not only like New Women, but that Dracula and the three Transylvanian female vampires are also like New Women, in the sense that they transgress Victorian gender boundaries in a way that is seen as threatening to the dominant society. 

This paper will rely upon other critical examinations of Lucy and Mina’s New Womanhood in order to ground the research in scholarship. Of the sources that discuss Stoker and the New Woman, all actually agree that despite Lucy’s apparent domestic qualities, her attraction to multiple men and her potential hypersexuality make her a New Woman, which opens her up to being attacked by Dracula; the sources also agree that these women do something “wrong,” something that brings down the ire of the men in the society, and something that either makes them victims, or that must be corrected in order to save them from being victims. All agree that Lucy’s transgression, whatever it may be, is worse than Mina’s. But, other than that, they all take different approaches as to what the problem is. Keridiana Chez, in her article, “‘You Can't Trust Wolves No More Nor Women’: Canines, Women, and Deceptive Docility in Bram Stoker's ‘Dracula,’” argues that rabies theory and Dracula are connected, that Lucy and Mina are the most susceptible to Dracula’s attacks because they are the “prized domesticates” of the men in the Crew of Light,  and that Lucy’s main transgression is her idleness. Marjorie Howes, in “The Mediation of the Feminine: Bisexuality, Homoerotic Desire, and Self-Expression in Bram Stoker's Dracula,” argues that the text’s main tension arises from the bisexuality of all of the male characters, and that Lucy and Mina function as both mediators of desire and uncoverers of secrets. Charles E. Prescott and Grace A. Giorgio, in  “Vampiric Affinities: Mina Harker and the Paradox of Femininity in Bram Stoker's ‘Dracula,” meanwhile, indicate that Dracula feeds off of emotion and fulfills whatever the women desire--for Mina, knowledge, and for Lucy, sex. Finally, Carol A. Senf, in “‘Dracula’: Stoker's Response to the New Woman,” argues that Lucy’s sexuality and misplaced desire is problematic, while Mina is the ideal fulfillment of traditional femininity combined with New Woman vocational skills. 

    While all of these sources offer their own fascinating interpretations, none of them answer the question of why Lucy and Mina specifically became targets of vampirism, and what the connection between New Women, vampires, and patriarchal society might mean, both in the confines of the novel and in the greater confines of Victorian England.  In this paper, I argue that by aligning the four vampires with the two main women, Bram Stoker indicates that the transgression of gender boundaries is a precursor to monstrosity, but also reveals a paradox in which Dracula is both a punitive and a transgressive figure. Although neither Mina nor Lucy actually does anything to violate Victorian gender norms, they come close to doing so, and Stoker’s reclamation of Mina suggests that the only appropriate gender boundaries that women can cross are ones that benefit men.

    Bram Stoker’s vampire mythology associates a specific set of traits with these monsters, namely that they exist in the liminal spaces between gender boundaries. Aside from Van Helsing, the vampire expert and Quincey Morris, the American who encountered a vampire bat in the Pampas, none of the characters know what a vampire is, because these monsters are not native to England. Within this framework, then, the four Transyvanian vampires become representative of their entire species. The first and only time that Jonathan encounters the three “weird sisters” of Dracula, he enters into a forbidden room in Dracula’s castle and awakens beneath these three women, ready to be penetrated by their fangs. The female vamps have a “deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive,” they desire “kisses for us all,” and Jonathan notes, with some pain lest Mina someday see read it, that he wants them to “kiss me with those red lips” (Stoker 42). In a straightforward sense, the female vampires are hypersexual, much like vampire Lucy becomes; but, although this is a Victorian novel, female sexuality alone should not make these women so monstrous. Instead, as Christopher Craft notes in “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” the source of monstrosity to Jonathan and the other men in the text arises from the fact that the weird sisters are both feminine and masculine. Their fangs are phallic, penetrative objects that place Jonathan in a passive, feminine position, but they present themselves as overtly feminine, which “confuses what Dracula’s civilized nemesis, Van Helsing and his Crew of Light, works so hard to separate--the gender based categories of the penetrating and the receptive” (Craft 445). 

Dracula, too, is monstrous because he resists gender classification. Before Dracula even does anything vampiric, Jonathan notes with some horror that he has no servants--Dracula, a man, performs domestic tasks such as cleaning, tidying up the rooms, and (presumably) cooking meals for Jonathan (Stoker 32). However, Dracula is also intelligent, curious, and more knowledgeable about England than even the English characters are; he regales Jonathan with stories about his days as a Wallachian war lord, and the two often have “a long talk” throughout the night, indicating that Dracula is clearly interesting and well-learned enough to converse with Jonathan about a variety of topics (Stoker 32). This mix of the domestic and the savagely intelligent aligns with Craft’s idea about monstrosity arising from vampires’ resistance to conform to the gender categories that Van Helsing prescribes. Indeed, rather than simply allowing Dracula to be considered smart, Van Helsing has to follow up a compliment about Dracula the man’s “mighty brain and iron resolution” by later saying that Dracula the monster has a “child-brain” (Stoker 212, 264).

If the monstrosity of vampires arises from their refusal to adhere to strict gender binaries,  then according to the text’s internal logic, Lucy and Mina are slightly vampiric before Dracula even turns them. In the sense that vampires are both male and female in their behavior--and thus, never fully male or female in a Victorian gender norm sense--they are a lot like New Women, and Lucy and Mina, in their own ways, also show New Woman-like traits. Upon first glance, it is certainly odd that, of all the potential English women that Dracula could turn into vampires, he decides to choose Lucy and Mina, just as it is odd that, in three hundred years of existence, Dracula presumably only created three other vampires. While Chez links the vamping of the two women to their position as “prized domesticates” of the Crew of Light, and therefore at the most risk of the rabies-like virus of vampirism, this ignores the aforementioned gender binary-crossing of the vampires, and misses the link between vampires and New Women. Lucy, as a feminine woman who delights in her future husband, Arthur Holmwood, and frequently gushes about marriage to her roommate and friend, Mina, seems an unlikely candidate to be a New Woman. However, as Prescott and Giorgio and Senf note, Lucy’s relationships with her three suitors, as well as her queer-coded relationship with Mina, border on being unacceptable, but Lucy’s own self-censorship within her letters hides this facet of her personality and brings her relationships under less scrutiny than they may have otherwise been. Likewise, Mina, as an educated woman with typing skills, who aids the Crew of Light, documents all of the details on the Dracula case, and pieces together the entire novel, as Stoker “reveals” in an addendum at the end of Dracula, could definitely be considered a New Woman in the vocational sense. Therefore, Mina and Lucy are singled out among Victorian women because they behave in ways that make them attract vampires; like how Dracula never really does anything, but Jonathan still notices something is “off,” Mina and Lucy’s perceived transgressions make them potential New Women--and thus, potential victims.

Much like how Jonathan feels both threatened and enticed by the hypersexualized, yet gender non-conforming, female vampires that he encounters, Lucy’s potential bisexuality and polyamory make her attractive, yet frightening, to the men in the Crew of Light. First, unpacking the connection between Lucy and Mina is vital. In the nineteenth century, the field of sexology began to develop, which pathologized and attempted to explain homosexuality; while leading sexologists such Havelock Ellis and George Chaucey could explain “sound” masculine gender performance, they often had difficulty categorizing female friendships as different from lesbian relationships. In the words of Ellis, “we are accustomed to a much greater familiarity and intimacy between women than men,” unlike the “suspect” familiarity between two men that might mark them as being homosexual (Ellis qtd. in Prescott 494). Complicating the picture further was the belief that a woman who felt sexually attracted to another woman “lacked the language and social understanding to realize her attraction was sexual” (494). As Prescott and Giorgio argue, Lucy’s relationship with Mina displays many similarities to nineteenth century sexologists’ idea of a “rave,” a romantic female friendship that flourishes despite both girls’ interest in the opposite sex, lack of other gender transgressions, and pursuit of domestic skills (495). In Lucy’s gushing outpourings of love for Mina (“oceans of love and millions of kisses”) and her desire to be “sitting by the fire undressing, as we used to sit,” her relationship with Mina feels much deeper than her relationships with the men in her life and meets the “affectionate expressions of love” dimension of a rave (Stoker 101, 57, Prescott 495). Their relationship could even be said to take on a physical, penetrative dimension. When Mina brings Lucy back to their shared home after Dracula bites her, Mina sees Lucy’s neck wound and worries that “I must have pinched or pricked her with [my safety pin]...when her breathing became quieter, she put her hand to her throat again and moaned” (Stoker 88). The presence of the safety pin prick and subsequent moan is indeed sexualized, especially since the novel’s own symbolism correlates penetration and blood. Therefore, there is definitely evidence that Lucy and Mina’s friendship is a romantic and sexual relationship, but there is also evidence that they are very close friends who do not see anything romantic about their friendship. This ambiguity is what is notable; much like the vampires never penetrate Jonathan, the text never reveals anything illicit in Lucy’s relationship with Mina. Instead, it traffics in Lucy’s “guilt over her articulation of the forbidden,” and seems intent on punishing her for even daring to question Victorian social and sexual norms (Howes 110).

Lucy’s relationship with her three suitors is another way that she potentially transgresses appropriate gender norms, but never acts upon these norms. Lucy’s first letter, which is a cursory response to Mina’s inquiry about the “tall, handsome, curly haired man” that Lucy is seeing, details one suitor, but her next letter reveals her inner anguish at having received three proposals from Seward, Quincey, and Arthur, respectively. In a moment of frustration--or perhaps longing--she writes, “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men?” and then immediately self-censors this remark as “heresy” (Stoker 60). While many critics, Chez and Prescott included, gloss over this line and focus instead on Mina, Senf argues that this line, and subsequent censorship, reveals the conflict between the inner, less acceptable Lucy and the facade that she wears to appease Victorian society. This line and Lucy’s midnight wanderings lend credence to this idea of her being trapped within gender norms, while secretly harboring a “degree of latent sensuality which connects her to the New Woman of the period” (Senf 42).  To Senf, Lucy’s vampirism frees her from the constraints she once felt; her “rebellious nature” ultimately takes over once the transformation begins (43). 

However, aside from these self-censored remarks, Lucy takes pains not to act upon her sexual desires, or, presumably, even to express them to anyone besides Mina. Instead, all of the signs point to Van Helsing analyzing Lucy’s behavior and vampiric condition as a sign of her sexuality. Mina worries about Lucy’s midnight encounter with Dracula, because Lucy’s health and reputation might be damaged; when Van Helsing suspects Lucy is one of Dracula’s victims, exactly what Mina feared becomes true. After being drained by Dracula nightly, an unconscious and drugged Lucy receives four blood transfusions within the span of a month--three from her suitors, and one from Van Helsing. The text itself seems to equate blood transfusions with sex, as Seward writes, “No man knows till he experiences it, what it is to feel his own life-blood drawn away into the veins of the woman he loves” (Stoker 119). If that is indeed the case, then Lucy has been bitten by Dracula, metaphorically assaulted by four men in order to “save” her, and then “correctively” penetrated by a large stake while all her former suitors watch. If the Crew of Light looks at her with disgust and horror when they find her in the tomb, it is only because they are seeing what they have done to an innocent woman.

Although, as Chez notes, the Crew of Light effectively replaces Lucy with Mina in the second half of the novel, and, as Prescott and Giorgio note, Mina and Lucy are both equally invested in their potentially romantic relationship, Mina’s suspect quality is not her sexuality, but her “man’s brain.” Van Helsing effectively outlines the Victorian view of Mina’s New Womanlike traits when he praises her by saying, “she has man’s brain--a brain that a man should have were he much gifted--and a woman’s heart. The good God fashioned her for a purpose, believe me, when He made that so good combination” (Stoker 207). All four of the critics that mention Mina note her industriousness as a positive quality, which Stoker himself seems to envisioned while writing her character. In his presentation of Mina as the ever-hardworking schoolmistress, he creates a character who appears to be the exact opposite of the relational, marriage-obsessed Lucy. Aside from Jonathan’s mentions of Mina throughout his time in Castle Dracula, the first time the text actually allows Mina to speak for herself is in her first letter, the first line of which is “forgive my long delay in writing, but I have been simply overwhelmed with work” (Stoker 55). She tells Lucy that she has been working on her stenographer skills on the typewriter, keeping up with her shorthand, and beginning her own journal that is not one of those “two-pages-to-the-week-with-Sunday-squeezed-in-a-corner diaries, but a sort of journal which I can write in whenever I feel inclined” (Stoker 55). There is certainly evidence that Mina enjoys the work that she is doing, that she possesses an “indefatigable middle-class industriousness,” as Chez puts it, just as there is evidence that Lucy is indeed bisexual and polyamorous, but the more important aspect is how the men around her perceive her industrious nature (83). Lucy’s ambivalent sexuality benefits herself and threatens the men of the novel--note that when Van Helsing gives Lucy a blood transfusion from Seward, he has to make sure Arthur does not find out, lest her fiance become jealous--but Mina’s industriousness is presented as beneficial to men right from the start. Regardless of the benefit that Mina herself might derive from her journaling, “Mina justifies her eagerness to work as a desire to help her future husband,” and her first letter reveals Jonathan’s implicit blessing of her vocation (Prescott 490). The tension between Mina working for herself and working for the men in her life is one that constantly plagues the novel. 

If the men in Mina’s life see no issue with the potentially progressive skills that she has acquired, perhaps it is because these skills are not framed as problematic to the Englishmen until the outsider, Van Helsing, imposes strict gender binaries upon Mina. As previously stated, Van Helsing is the one who first problematized Lucy’s ambivalent sexuality by giving her the blood transfusions, showing the men the sexual nature of vamp-Lucy, and then ordering the corrective penetration; his notion of Mina’s “man’s brain” and “woman’s heart” also marks the first time that the Englishmen in the Crew of Light begin to see anything wrong with Mina’s skills. Noting Mina’s exclusion from the Crew of Light, even though she was the one who made copies of all of the notes and transcribed Seward’s phonograph journal, Howes writes that all the men are “anxious over Mina’s role in what they feel should be an exclusively male endeavor” (114). However, there is little evidence to suggest that Seward, who openly allowed her access to his personal records, and Jonathan, who constructed the novel alongside his wife and taught her shorthand, were particularly anxious about her participation until Van Helsing addressed it. Just as Lucy becomes a potential victim for Dracula once the men notice her “transgression,” so too does Mina become a victim--or perhaps, she chooses to defect “to vampirism’s liberated expression” because “Van Helsing has rendered knowledge itself taboo for Mina...proper femininity itself has become unclear” (Howes 115, Prescott 506). Either way, the moment of perceived transgression, the moment when the men notice that Mina is New Womanlike, and thus vampiric, is the moment that her transformation into an actual vampire begins.

Just as Van Helsing, the vampire expert, links Lucy’s ambivalent sexuality to the hypersexuality of the three female vampires, he implicitly links Mina’s intelligence, methodical nature, and gender-inappropriate behavior to Dracula. Stoker himself draws parallels between the two, most notably in the doubling of scenes from Jonathan’s journal and Mina’s journal. When Jonathan first meets Dracula, the vampire instructs Jonathan to give him all of his knowledge about England. The pair sit in Dracula’s large library, where Jonathan notes that Dracula is reading “of all things in the world, an English Bradshaw’s Guide,” a book of train schedules, and that Dracula “had clearly studied beforehand all he could get on the subject of the neighborhood, for he evidently at the end knew very much more than I did” (Stoker 28). Just as Dracula interrogates Jonathan so that he can know everything about England before he arrives, Mina hears of Dracula’s imminent arrival and declares, “I shall be prepared. I shall get my typewriter this very hour and begin transcribing...I can ask [Jonathan] questions and find out things” (Stoker 161). Not only does her compilation of all of the  journal entries and news clippings make her the most informed one in the Crew of Light, just as Dracula is more informed than Jonathan, she even displays an uncanny precocity at something Dracula himself enjoys: train schedules. And, much like Jonathan’s reaction to Dracula, Mina’s intelligence seems curious, rather than threatening, to Van Helsing at their first meeting, because he does not suspect that Mina’s knowledge might succeed his own or that she might balk at being excluded from the Crew. In short, he does not suspect that she might be “vampiric.”

If Mina and Dracula already share a symbolic link even before he turns her, then it calls into question why she becomes useful to the men again once she is definitely linked to Dracula. After all, if Van Helsing identifies her vampiric qualities as the problem (although, note that her “woman’s heart” is ostensibly the reason for her exclusion), then the internal logic of the text should dictate that once Mina has a psychic link to Dracula’s activities, she should be even more of a threat than ever. Of all of the critics cited in this paper, Howes alone has an explanation for this: the men in the Crew of Light “use her merely as a passive medium through which to monitor the count’s activities” (115). However, this might not be entirely accurate. Like Lucy, as the effects of vampirism begin to take their toll on Mina, she loses the ability to speak, first during certain parts of the day and then increasingly throughout the day; when she notices this, she urges the men to hypnotize her “before the dawn, for I feel then that I can speak, and speak freely” (Stoker 270). Although the fact that Mina is more useful to the men in an altered state is somewhat problematic, the fact that Mina consents to this is notable. She understands that her connection to Dracula can be exploited in order to benefit the Crew of Light. Paradoxically, she takes an active role by turning herself into a passive object, which enables her to once more become a part of the Crew of Light, albeit in an “acceptable” way, because she is no longer threatening to the men. Senf considers this as evidence that Mina is more intelligent and cunning than the men who use her knowledge (48). Like Van Helsing’s first meeting with Mina, where he praises her by calling her “one of the lights,” and a “good woman,” the men enjoy Mina’s knowledge and see no danger in it, until her knowledge becomes problematic and potentially dangerous (Stoker 165). The first time this happened, the danger was that Mina’s thirst for knowledge would take her beyond the tasks that the men wanted her to do; this time, the danger is that Mina might harness the psychic link and use it without the necessity of the men, because it was she who came up with the idea of hypnotism. Both times, the risk is that Mina might become autonomous and threatening like Lucy, a risk that is most literally demonstrated by the fact that, minute after minute, Mina comes ever closer to becoming a vampire, and ever closer to Lucy’s eventual fate. 

The differing treatment and end fates of vamp Lucy and vamp Mina can give a clue as to the underlying symbolism behind what their transformations indicate about Victorian society, and the types of gender transgressions that are considered acceptable. Although the men claim not to know the source of Lucy’s mysterious illness, Seward’s willingness to call in Van Helsing indicates that he at least has some clue as to what the problem is. Van Helsing treats an unconscious Lucy to blood transfusions from every man that he can find. He refuses to let Arthur kiss her, and “swooped upon him...dragged him back with a fury of strength...and actually hurled him across the room” rather than let him kiss Lucy, despite there being no evidence that vampirism is transmitted through kisses (Stoker 146). He forces all of Lucy’s lovers to witness her transformation into “The Thing,” a creature with a “carnal and unspiritual appearance...a devilish mockery of Lucy’s sweet purity” (Stoker 190). If Lucy’s transformation were the only one that occurred in the novel, this behavior could be seen as part of the “normal” mythology of vampirism, but Mina’s treatment during her transformation belies the normalcy of Lucy’s. Although the men literally witness Mina drinking from Dracula’s breast, the “unclean” Mina is allowed to embrace Jonathan and even to kiss his breast, which is implied by the line “she shuddered and was silent, holding her head on her husband’s breast. When she raised it, his white nightrobe was stained with blood where her lips had touched” (Stoker 248). She never receives a blood transfusion and never transforms into a hypersexualized female vampire like Lucy does. Instead, she lets the fate of Lucy become a warning to herself: she does not allow herself to kiss or touch Jonathan again after she sees the blood on his robe, she allows the men to hypnotize her, she tells them that they should kill her rather than let her become like Lucy, and even during the worsening of her symptoms, the men seem not to fear Mina the way they did vamp Lucy, because vamp Mina wastes away rather than becoming more sexual and beautiful. And the monster that Mina begins turning into is an intellectual one, rather than a sexual one--the men’s fear is that “if it be that she can, by our hypnotic trance, tell what the Count see and hear, is it not more true that he…[could] compel her mind to disclose to him that which she know?” Their fear is not of a dangerous sexuality that cannot be stopped or controlled, but of being left out of the chain of knowledge between Mina and Dracula. 

If the types of vampires that Lucy and Mina turn into differ, and thus the response that the Crew of Light has to them differs, then that fact that Lucy has to die twice, while Mina can be saved from even a single death indicates that the sexual aspect to New Womanhood is much more frightening than the vocational. The intellectual autonomy of women is preferable to the sexual autonomy of women, because one can be repurposed to help men, while the other, by the text’s internal logic, cannot. According to Senf, Stoker’s characterization of Mina combines the strong women that he grew up around with the emphasis on purity that many female characters in his novels share; she claims that “Mina’s intelligence, her ability to function on her own, and her economic independence” make her a New Woman, but “by negating her sexuality, having her adopt a more traditional feminine role, and by showing her ability to abide by the group’s will,” Stoker ultimately reveals that Mina is not a New Woman (48). In short, her traditionally feminine moral constitution, her “woman’s heart,” overrides her vampiric intelligence. Mina can be redeemed because her New Woman-ness can be reversed and can be repurposed to help the men in her life. The men can silence Mina, they can hypnotize her, they can have her help them in the Crew of Light, and they can make sure that she is still a good wife to Jonathan at the end of the day. But Lucy cannot be redeemed in the same way. The men are afraid of her sexuality, hence the corrective penetration. By restoring Mina back to a human woman and “saving” Lucy by killing the hypersexual part of her, Stoker makes a point about the type of gender boundary crossing that is acceptable to Victorians. But, Stoker also makes a point about the fact that Victorian England clearly does not recognize the danger of New Women, as evidenced by the necessity of Van Helsing to teach the men what boundaries Lucy and Mina have crossed. Van Helsing then, is both an expert on actual vampires, and an expert on vampire-like behavior in human women, both things that are silent dangers to England; he identifies vampires in order to stake them, and “vampiric” women in order to cure them, if such a cure can happen while these women are alive. 

Finally, this paper has discussed how Dracula is the inevitable punishment that Van Helsing, the representative of Victorian society who is ironically an outsider, calls down upon these potentially transgressive women, but Dracula is also the victim of persecution by Victorian society. The connection between Dracula and Mina, where some sources claim that Mina calls Dracula to her knowingly and consensually and others focus on Mina’s distress about becoming a vampire, is a form of doubling. Where Mina has a “man’s brain” and a “woman’s heart,” Dracula can be said to have a woman’s brain and a man’s heart; the “child-brain” of Dracula aligns with the infantilizing treatment that Lucy, the most feminine woman in the novel, receives at the hands of Van Helsing, while Dracula’s moral constitution is consistently praised as being savage, calculating, and war-like, like a man. As a man on the borders of acceptable behavior, who also never engages in anything particularly transgressive (note: he only feeds off of women, even though Craft and Howes both note the queerness of his desire for Jonathan), Dracula faces the same dilemma as Lucy and Mina do, and experiences the same persecution as both do. However, the positioning of Dracula as both oppressor and oppressed indicates the paradox at the heart of Victorian gender ideals. If Dracula is the patriarchy, then the patriarchy is monstrous, but if he is the instrument of the patriarchy, then it suggests that the patriarchy is something worse than monstrous: it is the creator of monsters and the persecutor of that which it creates.  Van Helsing’s quest becomes a desire to expunge the monsters that he allowed to be created, because he drew attention to that which was never transgressive, and made it transgressive by naming it so. 

The connection between Mina, Lucy, and Dracula is the heart of this novel, where the most transgressive acts are implied, but never actually described within the pages. While Lucy’s relationship with Mina might be romantic, it also might be entirely innocent, just as Mina’s knowledge and vocational skills might make her a threat to the men around her, but these same skills, when employed in the service of men, make her a good wife and an excellent secretary. Dracula, as the double of Mina, might truly be a cause for concern within English society. Or, he might not quite be the menace that Van Helsing describes him as. The real danger behind vampirism, then, is the fear of crossing the strict gender boundaries that Van Helsing prescribes, the fear that both women and men might find themselves liberated from the societal necessity to adhere to such boundaries, and the fear that, if the boundary-crossers are not rooted out, all of England might fall prey to the insatiable appetites of the New Vampires.

 

Works Cited

 

Chez, Keridiana. “‘You Can't Trust Wolves No More Nor Women’: Canines, Women, and Deceptive Docility in Bram Stoker's ‘Dracula.’” Victorian Review, vol. 38, no. 1, 2012, pp. 77–92. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23646855. Accessed 20 Nov. 2020.

 

Craft, Christopher. “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Dracula by Bram Stoker, edited by Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal, Norton, 1997, pp. 445-59. 

 

Howes, Marjorie. “The Mediation of the Feminine: Bisexuality, Homoerotic Desire, and Self-Expression in Bram Stoker's Dracula.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 30, no. 1, 1988, pp. 104–119. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40754849. Accessed 20 Nov. 2020.

 

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, pp. 487–515. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25058725. Accessed 20 Nov. 2020.

 

Senf, Carol A. “‘Dracula’: Stoker's Response to the New Woman.” Victorian Studies, vol. 26, no. 1, 1982, pp. 33–49. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3827492. Accessed 20 Nov. 2020.

 

Stoker, Bram. Dracula, edited by Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal, Norton, 1997.