208
PARTISAN REVIEW
The scenes are structurally akin, but in the second, Van Hel–
sing, rather than Dracula, does the interrupting. The two men, after
all, have a lot in common; both are old, both foreigners who speak
with an accent , and both 1:um up the advanced thinking of their
respective times. Van Helsing, what is more, owes his life to
benevolent vampirism, to the sucking (by Dr. Seward) of infected
blood from his hand. Like Dracula, he lets out a sharp hiss when
startled; his bushy eyebrows, like Dracula's, meet over his nose . Van
Helsing is to Dracula as Victor Frankenstein is to his monster, as
Holmes is to Moriarty, as Dr. Jekyll is to Mr. Hyde, as Freud's ego
is to his id . "Oh, unconscious cerebration," exclaims Dr. Seward,
who is Van Helsing's pupil , "you will have to give the wall to your
conscious brother" - which amounts to saying where id was , there let
ego be . I conclude from all this that as women need husbands to save
them from Dracula or themselves, so men need a partriarch,
whether in his aspect of good father or bad, to save them from
women. Van Helsing, by the way, shares his first name, Abraham,
with Stoker and with Stoker's father , a retiring man who failed to
protect his son from his much younger and aggressive wife, a
feminist with a vengeance and a good friend of Lady Wilde , Oscar's
mother.
We meet Harker's three would-be paramours only once more,
at the very end of the novel, when Dracula is already cornered. Van
Helsing is looking for their crypts, so that he can cut off their heads
and transfix them with stakes, thus forever ridding the world of their
menace. But as he lingers over his task, he pins their menace on their
charms:
She lay in her Vampire sleep , so full of life and voluptuous
beauty that I shudder as though I have come to do murder. Ah , I
doubt not that in old time, when such things were , many a man
who set forth to do such a task as mine, found at the last his heart
fail him, and then his nerve. So he delay, and delay, and delay,
till the mere beauty and fascination of the wanton Un-Dead have
hypnotise him; and he remain on and on, till sunset come, and
the Vampire sleep be over. Then the beautiful eyes of the fair
women open and look love, and the voluptuous mouth present to
a kiss - and man is weak. ...
. . . Yes, I was moved-I, Van Helsing, with all my pur–
pose and with my motive for hate - I was moved to a yearning
for delay which seemed to paralyze my faculties and to clog my
very soul. .. .
