GEORGE STADE
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any device to hoodwink-even Jonathan ," who is her husband.
Mina sounds like a philandering wife, but Jonathan ought to be un–
derstanding. He, too, had come under Dracula's spell. He, too, had
experienced what Redfield puts in words: "His eyes . . . they burned
into me and my strength became like water." Dracula has the evil
eye - which means that his gaze is a projection of your guilt; you see
him seeing in you what you have tried to hide from yourself.
Most often, he visits his victims when they are asleep, when
hypnosis would be redundant, for to sleep is to dream, and to dream
is to become passive before those fantasies we normally inhibit.
Dracula's victims, when they awake, remember him, if at all, as a
dream of suffocation and blood. After he has visited her a few times,
Lucy Westenra, for example, begins to think of sleep, in her words,
as "a presage of horror." "What do you mean?" asks her doctor. "I
don't know," she answers ; "Oh, I don't know. And that is what is so
terrible. All this weakness comes to me in sleep; until I dread the
very thought." But after a while her dread turns to something else,
and she sleeps as much as her interfering friends will allow. Though
finally as she is on her death bed, Dr. Van Helsing tries to keep her
awake: "It will be much difference
[sic],
mark me, whether she dies
conscious or in sleep"- for if she dies in her sleep, she will awake as a
vampire; if she dies conscious, she will simply die . Much later, Mina
Harker, after a few nocturnal visits from Dracula ("tainted as she is
with that vampire baptism"), keeps in touch with him telepathically
while she sleeps. To find out where he is, Van Helsing, Dracula's
opposite and opponent and alter ego, puts her i:1to an hypnotic
trance. "Where are you?" he asks. "Sleep has no place it can call its
own," she answers, thus letting in the chill of interstellar space .
The night, starlit or moonlit, is a chiller in itself, and not just
because that is when we sleep and dream. "No man knows till he suf–
fers from the night how sweet and how dear to his heart and his eye
the morning can be," writes Jonathan Harker in his diary. One of
Dracula's many advantages over us is his ability to see in the dark,
his native element. "I love the shade and the shadow," he says. Van
Helsing provides a partial explanation: "His power ceases, as does
that of all evil things, at the coming of the day." But during the night
he can materialize out of mists , dust motes, and moonbeams, things
there and not there , but there enough to prod an agitated imagina–
tion into connecting the dots . And at night he can transform himself
into a wolf or a bat; he can call up or command legions of animals
such as these, animals that fit Freud's definition of the uncanny,
