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he has come to London expressly to feed his brain, to grow up:
"With the child-brain that was to him he have long since conceive the
idea of coming to a great city. What does he do? He find out the
place of all the world most of promise for him.... It help him to
grow as to his brain . ... What more may he not do when the greater
world of thought is open to him."
He will then be pretty near invincible, although he is hard to
resist as it is. We are susceptible to him because he is already in us,
which is why, as Van Helsing puts it, "all men are mad in some way
or the other." In the continuous evolution of brain-matter, that is,
nothing is discarded. The old is merely overlaid with the new, one
function of which is to keep the old in its place . The primitive brain
that makes Dracula what he is lies dormant even in cultured British
gentlemen, but in them it is entombed in an overlay of new brain–
matter generated by progressive Victorian culture. The overlay
manifests itself as a kind of self-control or self-denial, a resistance to
temptation, what in the novel is called "bravery."
It
is what
distinguishes Victorian gentlemen from Victorian ladies, in whom
the overlay is thin.
Women are so much more susceptible to Dracula because very
little stands between them. Their beauty is skin deep: right beneath
it, they are crazy, criminal, selfish, and sexy, half-evolved monsters
of appetite. Dracula merely releases something in them that is al–
ready raging to get out - and they know it. "Why are men so noble,"
Lucy writes to Mina, "when we women are so little worthy of them?"
And women fear what they know about themselves - which fear
sends good women looking for husbands. "I suppose we women are
such cowards," Lucy writes, "that we think a man will save us from
our fears, and we marry him ." A woman needs a husband to keep
her in line; she has nothing in her of her own with which to resist
Dracula. And to be bitten by Dracula is to become abandoned to
lust, a kind of moral rabies. And that is what
it
is about Dracula that
appeals to women.
Take the three lovelies Jonathan Harker meets early in the
novel. He has come to Dracula's castle on business. Soon he finds
himself a prisoner, of whom or what he can't quite figure out. One
night, looking for a means of escape, he wanders into a ladies'
boudoir, "where in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen, with
much thought and many blushes, her ill-spelt love-letter." He
decides to sleep there, rather than in his own spartan chamber. He
dozes off on a couch, then awakes to find that he is not alone . Under _
