GEORGE STADE
brought from a far distant land for such fell use. He has chosen'
this earth because it has been holy . Thus we defeat him with his
own weapon , for we make it more holy still . It was sanctified to
such use of man, now we sanctify it to God .
203
I must outline one more of Dracula's attributes, one that ex–
plains why women can't resist him. That attribute is Dracula's
multiplex relation to madness, especially in men. Nearly all the male
characters, as they watch Dracula's effect on women, wonder
whether they are going or have gone mad. Jonathan Harker actually
comes down with brain fever and has to do time in an asylum. Dr.
Seward has to take chloral hydrate to sleep: "I sometimes think we
must all be mad and that we shall wake to sanity in straitjackets," he
says. Even the stalwart Van Helsing gives way to what Dr. Seward
calls "a regular fit of hysterics," during which he "laughed and cried
together, just as a woman does ," babbling all the while how he and
his three male comrades are all Lucy's husbands because they have
given her transfusions of blood and how "this so sweet maid is a
polyandrist," thus implying what we had already guessed, that the
exchange of blood is a metaphor for sexual intercourse.
When Dracula comes to England he selects for his first base of
operations the grave of a young man who killed himself to spite his
mother. A local gaffer tells Lucy and Mina the story: "He hated her
so that he committed suicide in order that she mightn't get an in–
surance she put on his life . He blew nigh the top of his head off with
an old musket that they had for scarin' the crows with.... I've often
heard him say mase!' that he hoped he'd go to hell, for his mother
was so pious that she'd be sure to go to heaven, an' he didn't want to
addle where she was ." The grave of this young mother-hater (to
whom Stoker has given a number of his own feelings), looks over the
harbor; Lucy and Mina often sit on a slab that covers it for the
breeze and the view. That's how Dracula gets his teeth into Lucy.
One night, under his influence, she sleepwalks to the grave, where
Dracula is waiting for her. Her habit of sleepwalking is given in the
novel as evidence of her lack of character and will. ("Lucy is so sweet
and sensitive that she feels influence more acutely than other people
do.") It is also evidence of an impulse she doesn't know she has.
But the novel's prize madman is of course Redfield, an inmate
in Dr. Seward's asylum, located next door to Dracula's main London
address. According to Dr. Seward's unconventional diagnosis, Red–
field is "a zoophagus (life-eating) maniac; what he wants is to absorb
as many lives as he can." He first spreads sugar on the windowsill of
