GEORGE STADE
... She was a fair to look on, so radiantly beautiful, so ex–
quisitely voluptuous, that the very instinct of man in me, which
calls some of my sex to love and to protect one of hers, made my
head whirl with new emotion .
209
But a despairing and distant wail from Mina breaks Van Hel–
sing's spell. He steels himself to "the horrid screeching as the stake
drove home; the plunging of writhing form, and lips of bloody
foam," until his work is finished. Well, vampires are "undead" in the
first place because the wages of sin is death. The vampire women are
killed doubly dead for the same reason . The sin, in this case, is fe–
male sexuality. What is sinful about it is that it arouses men, who
are weak. Why men should not be aroused, Stoker doesn't say, but
one can guess.
These notions are easier to laugh at - in a nervous sort of
way-when abstracted from the novel's events than when left latent
in them . Stoker's terrific sincerity is the very opposite of camp. Es–
pecially the novel's main event, Lucy's transformation, which is
stretched as on a rack over two hundred pages, pulls you in by the
lapels. Her full name is Lucy Westenra, which, as a number of cri–
tics have remarked, means roughly "Light of the West"; her decline
into vampirism has about it the atmosphere of a world-historical
catastrophe. Certainly she has the qualities of a daydream we can
document in the writings of Western males straight back to Chau–
cer, at least. She is very fair, so gorgeous that three well set up males
propose to her in a single day. She is virginal, innocent, inexperi–
enced, sweet, defenseless, a damsel in distress, a stimulus to fan–
tasies of sexual assault. And she has all the right attitudes: she regu–
larly makes invidious comparisons between the sexes in favor of the
male's greater nobility, bravery, generosity, fair-mindedness, com–
petence, good sense, steadfastness of purpose, self-control, and all–
around virtuousness. She has nothing but scorn for the "New
Woman," the feminists of her day.
But this paragon, as she sleepwalks out to Dracula and
thereafter night after night opens her window to him, proves that
after all she is only a woman. One good effect of Lucy's assignations
with Dracula is that it brings together the novel's main male charac–
ters, whose bonds of friendship to each other are made of better stuff
than the love of a woman . When her fiance, Arthur Holmwood,
later Lord Godalming (a good name for a would-be savior), becomes
alarmed over Lucy's lethargy and anemia, he calls in his friend, Dr.
