The atavistic Mr. Hyde, like Dracula (who is unusually hairy and can take the form of a wolf or a bat), inhabits the border territory between the human and the animal, a no-man’s-land that seemed to cause particular anxiety to Stevenson’s and Stoker’s contemporaries. Another of Stevenson’s tales, The Master of Ballantrae (1889), also deals with doubles, in this case twins, who can be seen to represent ego and id.

Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray ( 1891 ) illustrates the impossibility of true repression. The beautiful young man Dorian Gray makes a Faustian pact by which, however depraved his behavior, he always retains his youthful radiance; only his portrait, which he keeps hidden away, exposes the dissipation and cruelty of his soul. H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887) juxtaposes, like Dracula, images of death and sex; H. G. Wells’s popular scientific fantasies The Time Machine ( 1895) and The Invisible Man (1897) play with contemporary nightmares of atavism and the dual nature of man; James M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904) vividly fictionalizes the male mother-fixation and unwillingness to grow up.

While Stoker, in Dracula, does not seem to be working within a particular psychological scheme, neither does he seem unconscious of the psychological implications of his story, as Barrie does. His character Dr. Seward, after all, is medically up to the minute; he speaks of Jean-Martin Charcot, the pioneer of hypnotic suggestion under whom Freud studied during his early years, and mentions the relatively recent concept of unconscious cerebration. Stoker was a sophisticated man, no innocent, and while modern critics have tended to assume that Dracula’s women are meant by Stoker to be pure, its men brave and gallant, it is worth considering the possibility that Stoker was not unaware of the ambiguity of his own effects. Here, for example is one of the novel’s most famous scenes—rightly famous, for its graphic power is particularly intense :

The Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam. But Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it....

And then the writhing and quivering of the body became less, and the teeth ceased to champ, and the face to quiver. Finally it lay still. The terrible task was over (p. 231).

As nearly every modern reader remarks, Arthur and the undead Lucy here enact a terrible parody of the sex act, ending in the “little death” of orgasm. If it is so obvious to us, could it have been totally hidden to Stoker? And what about Mina’s frightful experience with Dracula?

With his left hand he held both Mrs Harker’s hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare breast which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink (p. 300).

No sexually experienced adult could fail to note that Dracula and Mina are mimicking the act of fellatio. The movements are explicitly sexual, and the act is described in detail. Later, when Mina looks back on the scene, the connection is made even more clear: “When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some of the—Oh my God! my God! what have I done?” (p. 306). The placement of the dash, the moment at which Mina breaks off her sentence, simply cannot be accidental. Some of the what?

The only “sex acts” in the novel are vampiric; the only time we see its characters explicitly sexualized is when they become vampires or are in the process of being seduced by vampires. Thus when Jonathan Harker is approached by the three vampire maidens at Castle Dracula he feels in his heart “a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips” (p. 43) and watches their approach “in an agony of delightful anticipation” (p.