GEORGE STADE
207
you yourselves cari tell it from the past. Is it not so?" In a conciliatory
spirit he promises the women that when he finishes his business with
Harker, they can kiss him at will. Meanwhile he throws them a
bone, or rather a sack containing a child he kidnapped from a nearby
village. Writing in his diary the next morning, Harker notes "that of
all the foul things that lurk in this hateful place the count is the least
dreadful to me; that to him alone I can look for safety." In general,
"nothing can be more dreadful than those awful women," but just the
same, they make him think of his angelic fiancee: "I am alone in the
castle with those awful women. Faugh! Mina is a woman, and there
is nought in common. They are devils of the pit." At this point we
might allow ourselves the venerable psychoanalytic stunt of reading
denial as affirmation; certainly later events would bear us out.
There is much to mull over in this episode, in particular the
equal and opposite emotions of attraction and revulsion, one revolv–
ing around the other; the familiar look of the blonde; and the impli–
cation that you have to be strong to hold up to a kiss, that for a
woman to kiss a man is to drain his strength, although the blonde
seems to be getting herself ready more for one of the common oral
perversions, than for a kiss. But what in retrospect seems most
curious is that Stoker never allows us to enjoy through Harker the
dangerous caresses of these femmes fatales. Perhaps the idea was too
horrible to contemplate. In any case, such scenes of interruptus must
have occupied a good portion of Stoker's fantasy life, for they occur
throughout the novel.
Lucy, for example, a few minutes before she is to expire (for the
first time), lies in a coma watched over by Van Helsing, Dr. Seward,
and her fiance, Arthur Holmwood. Then suddenly she awakes:
Her breathing grew stertorous, the mouth opened, and the pale
gums, drawn back, made the teeth look longer and sharper than
ever. In a sort of sleep-waking, vague unconscious way she
opened her eyes, which were now dull and hard at once, and said
in a soft, voluptuous voice, such as I had never heard from her
lips:-
"Arthur! Oh, my love, I am so glad you have come!" Arthur
bent eagerly over to kiss her; but at that instant Van Helsing ...
swooped upon him, and catching him by the neck with a fury of
strength which I never thought he could have possessed, actually
hurled him almost across the room.
"Not for your life!" he said; "not for your living soul and
hers!" And he stood between them like a lion at bay.
