43). When one girl goes on her knees—another reference to fellatio—he finds her “deliberate voluptuousness” to be “both thrilling and repulsive” (p. 43).

This is definitely not the Jonathan Harker we see throughout the rest of the book, and while he is certainly an admirable husband to Mina one doubts whether the passion he achieves with her ever reaches the level it might have done with this vampire girl; once he returns to England he seems somehow diminished, and certainly older. The playful, curious boy of the early journal entries is gone.

One might, of course, count the male characters’ gift of blood to the ailing Lucy as a sexual act, although more a conjugal than a passionate one. Arthur says afterward that he now feels as though he and Lucy were really married, and Van Helsing forbears from telling him that the other men have performed the same act, as though to do so would be to accuse Lucy of promiscuity. Seward, too, feels that he has achieved some sort of physical union with Lucy after giving her blood: “No man knows till he experiences it, what it is to feel his own life-blood drawn away into the veins of the woman he loves” (p. 141).

But it is in the character of Lucy herself that we are given the most explicit contrast between vampiric sensuality and Stoker’s portrayal of the ordinary human variety. Lucy, when we first meet her, is obviously attractive to men—she receives, after all, three marriage proposals in one day—and she is coquettish, too: “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?” (p. 66) she asks only half-jokingly. Nevertheless, she is pure, and she is frequently dressed in white as though to emphasize this purity. Her principle attribute, constantly reiterated, is sweetness. Sitting in the Whitby churchyard Lucy is “sweetly pretty in her white lawn frock” (p. 72); asleep in her room she “looks, oh, so sweet” (p. 100); meeting Van Helsing and Dr. Seward, she is “very sweet to the Professor (as she always is)” (p. 126).

But it is a girlish sweetness rather than a womanly one, and in her pliability she displays “the obedience of a child” (p. 103) rather than the adult decision and strength characteristic of Mina. The contrast with the undead Lucy, therefore, becomes all the greater: undead, “the sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness” (p. 226); “the whole carnal and unspiritual appearance ... [was] like a devilish mockery of Lucy’s sweet purity” (p. 229).

Some feminist scholars have found Stoker’s attitude to be incurably sexist. Phyllis A. Roth, for example, has written: “I would emphasize that for both the Victorians and twentieth century readers, much of the novel’s great appeal derives from its hostility toward female sexuality.” This seems an overly simplistic way of looking at this not entirely simple tale. In what way, for example, can the novel be said to be more hostile toward female than toward male sexuality? Is not the least wooden, the most genuinely passionate human character Mina, rather than the various conventional and interchangeable young men? Van Helsing describes her as “one of God’s women, fashioned by His own hand to show us men and other women that there is a heaven where we can enter, and that its light can be here on earth” (Roth, p. 243).

Mina has, as Van Helsing describes it, a man’s brain and a woman’s heart; by contrast, Lucy, who is all femininity (at least within the limited and conventional terms in which Dracula defines femininity), is seen to be a moral as well as a physical lightweight, something less than a whole person, and therefore unable to defend herself against the monster. Lucy is capable only of extremes—sweetness or cruelty, purity or wantonness—while Mina is a more balanced human being, hence less vulnerable. If there is a moral to Dracula, it might be that simple goodness is not adequate to fight evil. One must bring brains and moral strength into the arena as well.

Therefore, in an important sense Dracula can be seen as a feminist rather than an anti-feminist novel, in spite of the demonization of sexuality in general terms and the offhand, almost obligatory denigration of the “New Woman” (p. 100). It is Mina who laughs at the New Woman, and yet she herself could hardly be more of a New Woman if she tried: a self-supporting career woman, capable, accomplished, an equal (and to tell the truth, more than equal) partner to her mate.