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PARTISAN REVIEW
his cell to attract flies, which he eats. He then feeds his flies to
spiders, a more concentrated form of nourishment, in that they each
contain the lives of numerous flies. From spiders he advances to
sparrows. But Dr. Seward, unlike our more advanced medical ex–
perimenters, knows when to stop: he turns down Redfield's whee–
dling request for a pet cat. Like Mina later on, Redfield is in tele–
pathic communication with Dracula; he sees his "Master" in visions
and knows what he wants. He opens his window sash a crack so that
Dracula can pour in, solidify, and find his way to Mina, who with
her husband is visiting Dr. Seward . Thus Dracula gains access to his
two female victims in each case through the intermediary of a mad–
man.
The nature of Dracula's affinity for madness is explained in an
impromptu lecture that Van Helsing bestows on Mina and Dr. Se–
ward (and here his accent, which is supposed to be Dutch, becomes
a trial):
"To begin, have you ever study the philosophy of crime? Yes and
No. You, John [Seward], yes; for it is a study of insanity. You,
no, Madame Mina; for crime touch you not-not but once
[when Dracula attacked her] ... . The criminal has not full man–
brain. He is clever and resourceful; but he be not of man-stature
as to brain . He be of child-brain in much. Now this criminal of
ours is predestinate to crime also; he, too, have child-brain, and
it is of the child to do what he have done.... The Count is a
criminal and of criminal type . Nordau and Lombroso would so
classify him, and
qua
criminal he is of imperfectly formed mind."
This passage, and others like it, sets up a series of equivalences: to
be insane is to be criminal is to be childlike is to be a monster of ap–
petite is to be piggy about sex is to have an undeveloped brain.
In setting up these equivalences the distinguished Dr. Van
Helsing is not shooting from the hip: he is internationally renowned
for having "revolutionized therapeutics by his discovery of the con–
tinuous evolution of brain-matter." He is qualified, therefore, to
recognize in Dracula the paradox of the primitive: Dracula is both
older and younger than we are, younger because older, a centuries–
old case of arrested development, of incomplete moral evolution,
victim of a culturally undernourished environment, namely Transyl–
vania, where nothing is up-to-date. He is where we once were, but
