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Homosexuality and Gender
Performance in Dracula and
Frankenstein
ART 1: Queer(y)ing Masculinities, Bryant Keith Alexander
ART 2: "Kiss Me with those Red Lips": Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula, Craft
ART 3: Monstrous Dialogues: Erotic Discourse and the Dialogic Constitution of the Subject in
Frankenstein
ART 4: Feminism, Sex Role Exchanges, and Other Subliminal Fantasies in Bram Stoker's
"Dracula"
ART 5: Vampire and Replicant: The One-Sex Body in a Two-Sex World
ART 6: READING THE SYMPTOMS: AN EXPLORATION OF REPRESSION AND HYSTERIA IN
MARY SHELLEY'S “FRANKENSTEIN”
ART 7: Frankenstein and the Feminine Subversion of the Novel
ART 8: The Mediation of the Feminine: Bisexuality, Homoerotic Desire, and Self-Expression in
Bram Stoker's Dracula
ART 9: Vampiric Seduction and Vicissitudes of Masculine Identity in Bram Stoker's "Dracula"
ART 10: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Spectacle of Masculinity
ART 11: Horror's Twin: Mary Shelley's Monstrous Eve
ART 12: Heterosexual Horror: Dracula, the Closet, and the Marriage-Plot
ART 13: Coveting the Feminine: Victor Frankenstein, Norman Bates, and Buffalo Bill
ART 14: "A Wilde Desire Took Me": The Homoerotic History of Dracula, Schaffer
ART 15: Filthy types: "Frankenstein", figuration, femininity
ART 16: 
ART 17:
ART 18: 
ART 19: 
ART 20: 

ART 1: Queer(y)ing Masculinities

"Defining masculinity is slippery
...
Halberstam continues, “As a so- ciety we have little trouble in
recognizing [masculinity], and indeed we spend massive amounts of time and money ratifying it, and
supporting the versions of masculinity that we enjoy and trust; many of these ‘heroic masculinities’ depend
absolutely on the subordination of alternative masculinities” (p
...
This is both a starting realization of most
studies in/on masculinity and a clear point of intervention into the ways we think about and interrogate the
social constructedness of masculinity (Whitehead, 2006)
...
Shelley’s confused and conflicted creature in Frankenstein
...
1), these epigrams as marketing
devices also demonstrate the ways in which the social constructions of the hetero-masculine or the
dominating relational dynamic of the masculine-feminine binary seemingly play or do not play out in the
context of a homosexual relational subjectivity and gay masculinities
...
That distortion, the representation of desire under the defensive
mask of monstrosity, betrays the fundamental psy chological ambivalence identified by Franco Moretti
when he writes that "vam pirism is an excellent example of the identity of desire and fear” p107

"In Dracula Stoker borrows from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde a narrative strategy characterized by a predictable, if variable, triple rhythm
...


Obviously enough, the first element in this triple rhythm corresponds for- mally to the text's beginning or
generative moment, to its need to produce the monster, while the third element corresponds to the text's
terminal moment, to its need both to destroy the monster it has previously admitted and to end the narrative
that houses the monster
...
Within its extended middle, the gothic novel entertains
its resident demon-is, indeed, entertained by it-and the monster, now ascendent in its strength, seems for a
time potent enough to invert the "natural" order and overwhelm the comforting closure of the text
...
Jonathan Harker, whose diary opens the novel, provides Dracula's most precise
articulation of this anxiety
...
There was
something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear; I felt in
my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips
...
Seward's description of the Count: "His eyes flamed red with devilish passion; the great nostrils
of the white aquiline nose opened wide and quivered at the edges; and the white sharp teeth, behind the full
lips of the blood-dripping mouth, champed together like those of a wild beast" (336)
...
Luring at first with an inviting orifice, a promise of red softness, but delivering instead a

piercing bone, the vampire mouth fuses and confuses what Dracula's civilized nemesis, Van Helsing and his
Crew of Light,7 works so hard to separate -the gender-based categories of the penetrating and the
receptive, or, to use Van Helsing's language, the com- plementary categories of "brave men" and "good
women
...
Are we male or are we female?
Do we have penetrators or orifices? And if both, what does that mean? And what about our bodily fluids,
the red and the white? What are the relations between blood and semen, milk and blood? Furthermore, this
mouth, bespeaking the subversion of the stable and lucid distinctions of gender, is the mouth of all
vampires, male and female
...
” p109-10

"Dracula's desire to fuse with a male, most explicitly evoked when Harker cuts himself shaving, subtly and
dangerously suffuses this text
...
” p110

"Dra- cula's daughters offer Harker a feminine form but a masculine penetration:

" Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed to
fasten on my throat
...
I closed my eyes in a
langorous ecstasy and waited-waited with a beating heart
...
Here the "two sharp teeth," just
"touching" and "pausing" there, stop short of the transgression which would unsex Harker and toward
which this text constantly aspires and then retreats: the actual penetration of the male
...
” p110-1

"Hereafter Dracula will never represent so directly a male's desire to be pen- etrated; once in England
Dracula, observing a decorous heterosexuality, vamps only women, in particular Lucy Westenra and Mina
Harker
...
Late in the text, the Count himself announces a deflected homoeroticism when he
admonishes the Crew of Light thus: "My revenge is just begun! I spread it over the centuries, and time is on
my side
...
" (365; italics added)
...
Van Helsing, who provides for Lucy
transfusions designed to counteract the dangerous influence of the Count, confirms Dracula's declaration
of surrogation; he knows that once the transfusions begin, Dracula drains from Lucy's veins not her blood,
but rather blood transferred from the veins of the Crew of Light: "even we four who gave our strength to
Lucy it also is all to him [sic]" (244)
...
Everywhere in this text such
desire seeks a strangely deflected heterosexual distribution; only through women may men touch
...
” p111

"This insistent ideology of heterosexual mediation and its corollary anxiety about inde- pendent feminine
sexuality return us to Dracula, where all desire, however, mobile, is fixed within a heterosexual mask, where
a mobile and hungering woman is represented as a monstrous usurper of masculine function, and where, as

we shall see in detail, all erotic contacts between males, whether directly libidinal or thoroughly sublimated,
are fulfilled through a mediating female, through the surrogation of the other, "correct,” gender” p115

"The portion of the gothic novel that I have called the prolonged mid- dle, during which the text allows the
monster a certain dangerous play, corre- sponds in Dracula to the duration beginning with the Count's
arrival in England and ending with his flight back home” p116

"The action within this section of Dracula consists, simply enough, in an extended battle between two
evidently masculine forces, one identifiably good and the other identifiably evil, for the allegiance of a
woman (two women actually-Lucy Wes- tenra and Mina Harker nee Murray)… As critics have noted, this
pattern of opposition distills readily into a competition between antithetical fathers
...
"25 The theme of alternate paternities is, in short,
simple, evident, unavoidable
...
Indeed, as we have seen, the
vampiric kiss excites a sexuality so mobile, so insistent, that it threatens to overwhelm the distinctions of
gender, and the exuberant energy with which Van Helsing and the Crew of Light counter Dracula's influence
represents the text's anxious defense against the very desire it also seeks to liberate
...
” p117

"the destruction of Lucy Westenra, who, having been successfully vamped by Dracula, requires a corrective
penetration
...

Dracula, after all, kisses these women out of their passivity and so endangers the stability of Van Helsing's
symbolic system
...
” p119

"Dracula's authorizing kiss, like that of a demonic Prince Charming, triggers the release of this latent power
and excites in these women a sexuality so mobile, so aggressive, that it thoroughly disrupts Van Helsing's
compartmental concep- tion of gender
...

This sexualization of Lucy, metamorphosing woman's "sweetness" to "adamantine, heartless cruelty, and
[her] purity to voluptuous wantonness" (252), terrifies her suitors because it entails a reversal or inversion of
sexual identity; Lucy, now toothed like the Count, usurps the function of penetration that Van Helsing's
moralized taxonomy of gender reserves for males
...
” p119-20

"With a careless motion, she flung to the ground, callous as a devil, the child that up to now she had
clutched strenuously to her breast, growling over it as a dog growls over a bone
...
There was a cold-bloodedness in the act which wrung a groan from Arthur; when
she advanced to him with outstretched arms and a wanton smile, he fell back and hid his face in his hands
...
Leave
those others and come to me
...
Come, and we can rest together
...
Furthermore, by requiring that the child be discarded that
the husband may be embraced, Stoker provides a little emblem of this novel's anxious protestation that
appetite in a woman ("My arms are hungry for you") is a diabolic ("callous as a devil") inversion of natural
order, and of the novel's fantastic but futile hope that mater- nity and sexuality be divorced
...
There are in fact four transfusions, which begin with Arthur, who as Lucy's
accepted suitor has the right of first infusion, and include Lucy's other two suitors (Dr
...
One of the established observations of Dracula criticism is that these
therapeutic penetrations represent displaced marital (and martial) penetrations; indeed, the text is emphatic
about this substitution of medical for sexual penetration
...
a polyandrist" (211-212)
...
” p121


"Van Helsing will repeat, with an added emphasis, his assertion that penetration is a
masculine prerogative
...
A woman is better still than
mobile, better dead than sexual:


Arthur took the stake and the hammer, and when once his mind was set on action his hands never trembled
nor even quivered
...
Arthur placed the point over the heart, and as I looked I could see its dint in the white flesh
...


The Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips
...
But Arthur never faltered
...
His face was set, and high duty
seemed to shine through it; the sight of it gave us courage, so that our voices seemed to ring through the
little vault
...
Finally it lay still
...
(258-259

) Here is the novel's real-and the woman's only-climax, its most violent and misogynistic moment, displaced
roughly to the middle of the book, so that the sexual threat may be repeated but its ultimate success
denied: Dracula will not win Mina, second in his series of English seductions
...
Violence against the sexual woman here is
intense, sensually imag- ined, ferocious in its detail
...
By disciplining Lucy and restoring each gender to
its “proper" function, Van Helsing's pacification program compensates for the threat of gen- der indefinition
implicit in the vampiric kiss
...

Indeed, the actual expulsion of the Count at novel's end is a disappointing anticlimax
...
” p124

"With his left hand he held both Mrs
...
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
...
(336)

In this initiation scene Dracula compels Mina into the pleasure of vampiric appe- tite and introduces her to a
world where gender distinctions collapse, where male and female bodily fluids intermingle terribly
...
That this is
a scene of enforced fellation is made even clearer by Mina's own description of the scene a few pages later;
she adds the graphic detail of the "spurt":

With that he pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails opened a vein in his breast
...
But this scene of fellation is thoroughly displaced
...
" Such fluidity of substitution and
displacement entails a confusion of Dracula's sexual identity, or an interfusion of masculine and feminine
functions, as Dracula here becomes a lurid mother offering not a breast but an open and bleeding wound
...
We are back in the genital region, this time a woman's,
and we have the suggestion of a bleeding vagina
...
” p125

"We may read this scene, in which anatomical displacements and the conflu- ence of blood, milk, and
semen forcefully erase the demarcation separating the masculine and the feminine, as Dracula's most
explicit representation of the anx- ieties excited by the vampiric kiss
...
 The novel, having presented most explicitly its deepest anxiety,
its fear of gender dissolution, now moves mechanically to repudiate that fear
...
Van Helsing's doubled
penetrations, first the morphine injection that immobilizes the woman and then the infusion of masculine
fluid, repeat Dracula's spatially doubled penetrations of Lucy's neck
...
41 More- over, each penetration
announces through its displacement this same sense of danger
...
The shared
displacement is telling: to make your own holes is an ultimate arrogance, an assertion of penetrative
prowess that nonetheless acknowledges, in the flight of its evasion, the threatening power imagined to
inhabit woman's available open- ings
...
We may say that Van Helsing and his tradition have polished
teeth into hypodermic needles, a cultural refinement that masks violation as healing
...
The medical profession licenses the power to penetrate, devises a delicate instrumentation,
and defines canons of procedure, while the religious tradition, with its insistent idealization of women,
encodes a restriction on the mobility of desire (who penetrates whom) and then licenses a tremendous
punishment for the violation of the code
...
But there was no
reflection of him in the mirror! The whole room behind me was displayed; but there was no sign of a man in
it, except myself" (37)
...
”” p127

"Yet beneath this screen or mask of authorized fraternity a more libidinal bonding occurs as male fluids find
a protected pooling place in the body of a woman
...
Here displacement (a woman's body) and sublimation
(these are medical penetrations) permit the unpermitted, just as in gang rape men share their semen in a
location displaced sufficiently to divert the anxiety excited by a more direct union
...
It is an added joy to Mina and to me
that our boy's birthday is the same day as that on which Quincey Morris died
...

His bundle of names links all our little band of men together; but we call him Quincey
...
His official genesis is, obviously enough, heterosexual, but
Stoker's prose quietly suggests an alternative paternity: "His bundle of names links all our little band of men

This is the fantasy child of those sexualized transfusions, son of an illicit and
nearly invisible homosexual union… We may say that Little Quincey was luridly conceived in the veins
together
...
” p129




“The result in Dracula is a child whose conception is curiously immaculate, yet disturbingly lurid: child of his
fathers' violations
...
He is the
unacknowledged son of the Crew of Light's displaced homoerotic union, and his name, linking the "little
band of men together," quietly) remembers that secret
...
Through this eroticized discourse subjecthood
comes into being
...
Almost immediately,
they appear to "discover" an intense, obsessive erotic connection, albeit one that is acted out entirely
through discourse
...
The unknown territory that Walton discovers is
not the tropical North (in fact, he never gets there), but an area of warmth and desire where it "should" not
be, where it is "alien," or even "inverted" (as in tropical heat instead of cold); that is, in a relationship with
another man
...
Walton describes anticipation of his trip this way: "I cannot describe to you my sensations
...
It is impossible to com- municate to you a conception of the trembling sensation, half pleasurable and half
fearful, with which I am preparing to depart
...
"3 What he expects to find
in this unknown place is "the region of beauty and delight
...
I feel my heart glow with an enthusiasm that elevates me to
heaven" (15-16)
...
" Discovery of the "terra
incognita" of illicit homosexual desire is what both Victor and Walter attain, with each other and, for Victor,
also with the monster
...
Victor's journey, both erotic and scientific, is always transgressive, involving
investigation of what is forbidden, pro- scribed, but infinitely, obsessively, attractive
...
” p85

"Speech is an intense desire and need, almost a physical sensation
...
The dis- cursive bond begins
with Walton's telling his story —"confessing"' —to Victor: "I was easily led by the sympathy which he
evinced, to use the language of my heart; to give utterance to the burning ardor of my soul” (28)
...
" The description of the be- ginning of Victor's "confession" that immediately follows this is
perhaps less joyous, somewhat agonized, but unquestionably erotic
...
a groan burst from his heaving breast
...
he appeared to despise himself for being the slave of passion" (28)
...
” p86-7


"The first real encounter in which speech between them is possible —after the monster has learned
language—takes place on the alpine glacier at Chamonix
...
In
both cases, the couple is physically as well as met- aphorically outside the everyday,the "known" world, at
the margin, and this is one of the things that makes "discovery" in all its meanings pos- sible
...
Again, in Victor's relationship with the monster, science and pleasure
are conflated
...
” p87

"As with Walton, confessional speech is what binds Victor and the mon- ster
...
He begs Victor repeatedly to listen to his story:
"Listen to my tale
...
Listen to me, Frankenstein, and so on
...
He capitulates, however, without explanation:
"He led the way across the ice: I followed" (101)
...
” p87

"They establish their erotic-discursive bond on the glacier at Chamonix, and from this moment they are, in a
sense, pledged exclusively to each other
...
They have had their wedding night
...
In both his aspects, however, the monster is, in a sense, "feminized
...
” p90

"He goes on to elaborate his threat of hierarchical reversal, comparing himself to Mil- ton's Satan, who
rebelled against his creator, as the monster does: "Re- member, that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy
Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel" (100)
...
From this moment on, Victor of- ten takes the role of apparent
subordinate, and the monster that of mas- ter
...
He addresses Victor
as "Slave!" and continues: "You are my creator, but I am your master;—obey!" (167)
...
The
obsessive chase, in which the monster participates by providing "clues" to his whereabouts as well as
suste- nance for Victor throughout, underlines the indissoluble primacy of their bond, the intensity of desire
that links them
...
and uttered a wild cry of ec- stasy when I
distinguished a sledge, and the distorted proportions of a well-known form within
...
The hierarchical relationship be- tween the monster and Victor, therefore, is not
static: it can shift, even reverse itself
...
Through discourse they come together in desire, in recip- rocal constitution of self
...
Even though the position of each term relative to the other may reverse, as in the monster's
appropriation and Victor's concession of agency, leading or "seduction," the basic nature of their
relationship is unchanged
...
It is important that he envisions the female monster as his equal
...
He
says, "My companion will be of the same nature as myself"; that is, not other or object, but another subject,
an equal partner in the dialogue that will constitute them both as such (146)
...
" p92-3

"The two monsters would both be female in a sense, the male monster having been feminized through his
position in his relationship of alterity with re- gard to Victor
...
The unrealizedpotential that the female monster would carry within her is the overturning of the
hierarchized model of self-constitution that is based on alterity and inequality
...
Saville, Walton's enigmatic sister, is the designated recipient, the envisioned reader, of the letters that
make up Frankenstein
...
” p93-4

"Throughout Frankenstein, we, the readers, are frequently reminded that we are reading
...
The way in which this is typically
accomplished is by suddenly drawing attention to this structure with its many levels of me- diation, pulling
the reader away from absorption in the "action," empha- sizing that this is a story, a narrative
...
The presumptive reader's presence, our avid involvement in a suspenseful narrative, is
teasingly evoked by Vic- tor's ironic apology to Walton for "tediousness
...
” p94-5

"Does Mrs
...
"3 An excellent Freudian article which deals with the sexual connotations of Stoker's vampire story is C
...
Bentley's, "The Monster in the Bedroom: Sexual Symbolism in Bram Stoker's Dracula
...

Bentley's article is, in fact, more titillating than the novel itself
...
All the men surround Arthur in a rather
voyeuristic brotherhood as he pounds the stake into Lucy;4 group orgy also raises its head earlier when the
three vampire women approach Harker
...
”” p105

"Stoker dreamt, he tells us, of the episode of Harker swooning as the vampire women assault him,8
suggesting a male desire to assume passivity at the hands of an aggressive woman” p106


"Early in the book Harker vividly demonstrates this yearning for an active female as the three lovely and
aristocratic vampire women approach him
...
" Harker tells us of the
blonde girl's "deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive"; he awaits consumation
with eyes closed "in languorous ecstasy" (p
...
In the Victorian view, only fallen (and hence lower-class)
women enjoyed sex
...
" They are lovely and coquettish, yet in the spirit of a gang-bang, they approach him saying, "He is
young and strong; there are kisses for us all" (p
...
They are aristocratic, female rapists, much more
thrillingly perverse than mere lower-class prostitutes
...
Stoker’s vampire women not only reject
motherhood, they dine on children, as special gourmet items peculiar to the female palate; the male
vampires never touch children
...

Goldfarb recounts the brothels that catered to masochists, sadists, and homosexuals
...
” p108 Disagree

" Her mother is important in Lucy's helpless- ness
...
” p109

"Dracula comes to her while she is sleeping, and she apparently never awakens nor becomes aware of
anything but a nightmare
...
” p109

"Mina's wider experience and knowledge of life are also shown by her vocation-- stenography--a
stereotypical feminine skill in our time, but for the Victorians, a new role for women
...
This idea was
revolutionary for the time
...

Stoker has his cake and eats it too through his emphasis on the necessity of death for these women once
they have allowed the sexually demonic Dracula to direct their will and morality; they all revert and register
purity and morality just as the stake enters their heart
...
Lucy becomes again a woman of
"unequalled sweetness and purity" (p
...
It is this failure to integrate sexuality, and to project it instead
onto Satanism, that renders the novel finally worthy only of the appellation "popular literature
...
All sexuality is
relegated to the vampires
...
The good women become pure of eroticism, redeeming
their men from the onus of sexual temptation
...
” p279


“As Craft writes: Are we male or are we female? Do we have penetrators or orifices? And if both, what does
that mean? And what about our bodily fluids, the red and the white? What are the relations between blood
and semen, milk and blood? Further- more, this mouth, bespeaking the subversion of the stable and lucid
distinctions of gender, is the mouth of all vampires, male and female
...
So- cial
difference, however, is clearly present: as in the one-sex model discussed by Laqueur, the masculine is
posited as socially superior
...
” p279

"In Stoker's novel the inability to classify the vampire body within the two- sex model produces anxiety
within the traditional Victorians who inhabit the novel
...

Harker writes, "as he spoke he smiled, the lamplight fell on a hard- looking mouth, with the very red lips and
sharp-looking teeth, as white as ivory" (? 1:19-20; emphasis added)
...
The troubling status of the
vampire's body is further indicated in the novel through the use of the pronoun "it" to refer to the vampire
...
Although vampires retain their social
gender as men or women, anatomically they are the same, with the genital organs being superseded by a
mouth which is the same in both male and female vampires
...
" John Seward,
Lucy's former admirer, refers to her thus: "I was, in fact, beginning to shudder at the presence of this being,
this Un-Dead, as Van Helsing called it, and to loathe it" (?15:241-42)
...
During the brutal destruction of Lucy's body, she is referred
to exclusively in gender-neutral terms as "the thing" and "the body" (?16:258-59)
...
6 From this
perspective Lucy and Dracula are "things" not because of their aggressive sexuality but because they defy
classification as male or female; they uncannily inhabit the human body and render supposed genital
differences between men and women null and void
...
The confusion of fluids-blood for semen, blood for milk, a man's
blood for men- strual blood-of sexual acts-enforced fellatio on a man's chest, a man breast- feeding a
woman, a woman performing cunnilingus on a man's chest-and of gender roles-a man nurturing a woman,
a man's chest substituting for a menstruating vagina-point back to the one-sex model discussed by
Laqueur in which the body itself was prone to fluctuations between "male" and "fe- male" organs and fluids
...
8 Stoker associates Dracula's blood with both
semen and menstrual blood: Mina has performed both fellatio and cunnilingus-as the use of the word
"wound" suggests-on Dracula: her experience is beyond any classification in Mina's two-sex world and is
hence unspeakable and "un- clean
...
Jonathan's imprisonment in the Castle Dracula undermines
his mas- culine identity by placing him in the position of a Gothic heroine
...
Aubert imprisoned
by the ruthless Montoni, Jonathan gradually comes to realize that he is under Dracula's despotic power
...
I rushed up and down the
stairs, trying every door and peering out of every window I could find; but after a little the conviction of my
helplessness overpowered all other things" (?3:39)
...
Dracula appropriates his letters, reading and censor- ing his discourse,
much as Gothic heroines such as Emily, Marian Halcombe, and Maud Ruthven have their letters and/or
diaries stolen and censored by tyrannical men
...
1” p381


"In the Castle, Jonathan is a feminized (and Easternized) man: he is part of Dracula's harem, masculinity
reduced to a ghost of itself
...
Dracula claims that Jonathan is his- "this man belongs to me!" (?3:53)-and
expresses his love for Jonathan, the new member of his harem: "yes, I too can love; you yourselves can tell
it from the past
...
Dracula then promises to pass Jonathan as possession from his own
use to the use of the women: "I promise you that when I am done with him, you shall kiss him at your
will" (?3:53)
...
” p381

"His desire to be penetrated by the vampire women feminizes him as he waits "in a languorous ecstasy" for
the vampire bite (?3:52)
...
” p381

“Although Jonathan's membership in the vam- pire hunters' group restores his activity, within the novel the
presence of the vampire body, with its one-sex status, continues to plague his masculine ego and to plague
heterosexuality itself
...
Moving
towards Transylvania, he clings to "the hilt of the great Kukri knife," clutching a phallic symbol which will
restore stable gender distinctions (?25:402)
...
He finally gets to use the knife
to destroy Dracula's body as he slashes open his throat (?27:447)
...
” p382-3

"Yet, as critics have noted, this restoration of "nonnality" is troubled
...
'6 Addi- tionally, as Rebecca A
...
17 Moreover, Jonathan's wishful statement that "every trace" of the
encounter with Dracula "was blotted out" on their return trip to Transylvania is troubled by the fact that,
following this statement, he affirms the continuing existence of the Castle Dracula, which "stood as before,
reared high above a waste of desolation
...
” p152

"Beret Strong has argued that eighteenth-century hysteria theory combined corporeal symptoms
associated with femininity with the masculine associations of reason: as a result, hysteria, in this period, "is
located at the crossroads between masculine and feminine as they are culturally construed
...
She observes that because a social and
psychological system categorizes strong emotion as feminine and common, the men who experience such
emotion risk chaos: a redefinition of gender and class status
...
” p155-6


"Although her novel emphasizes Caroline's moment of grief, it is through Victor's self-conscious struggles
that Shelley reveals the actual work of perpetuating a system designed to denigrate feminine outbursts in
favor of masculine self-control
...
you must assist me
in acquiring sufficient calmness" (p
...
However, Victor previously had admitted that "my tears flowed" as
he looked on William's miniature before Earnest entered the room
...
His correction of Earnest's behavior further
confirms the family's inability to cope with outward signs of male grief; the contradiction of this brotherly
reprimand with Victor's own unseen tears alerts us to an interior struggle with his father's ideals of
masculinity and reserve
...
In her
novel of creation, the only scenes that obliquely indicate sexual desire are the monster's hovering over the
sleeping Justine and his triumph over the prone body of Elizabeth
...
Eliza? beth describes herself as "cousin and playmate"; Victor is her "constant friend
and companion" (p
...
” p158

" Shelley's 1823 addition, she makes Victor reflect on his lack of feeling when, on his wedding day, he
gazes at his bride and "instead of feeling the exultation of a?lover?a husband?a sudden gush of tears
blinded my sight
...
190, emphasis mine)
...
His fears of
"mischance" are a conscious response to the monster's death threat, yet they apply to his unstated doubts
about his cousinship with Elizabeth
...
”” p158

" His descriptions of scientific discovery display a sexual tension that would have been inappropriate in
Alphonse's home
...
[the] consummation of my toils" (p
...
His rhetoric sounds
like an address to a lover: he desires scientific discovery "with ardour," while his warmest feelings toward
Elizabeth are decidedly less enthusiastic, no more than a platonic, "paradisiacal [dream] of love and joy" (p
...
Shelley illustrates, then, that to maintain this code of masculinity, physical passion must be controlled
to protect the interior, domestic world of serenity from the outside world of turbulent feeling
...
The rejection of his disappointing but powerful offspring unleashes a truth
about the denial of human feeling that sheer masculine repression can no longer control
...
24 These symptoms are evident in Shelley's character when, like the hysteric, he is
unwilling to communicate a truth, either to himself or to those around him
...
"I dreaded to behold this monster," he says, "but I feared
still more that Henry should see him" (p
...
His fear of Henry's reaction demonstrates, as Ellis notes, "his
inability to bring the Monster home" to the family that refuses to acknowledge the world's unpleasantness
...
" He then hallucinates, seeing the monster "seize him," and falls down
"in a fit" (p
...
e
...
174)” p162

“The narrative associates Victor's future bride with unnatural monstrosity in two forms
...
He
awakens from this vision of Elizabeth/Caroline to view the monster standing over his bed
...
””
p162

"Victor's last words to Elizabeth, then, are doubly loaded
...
” [Incest and homosexuality?] p163

“When Victor hears his wife scream, "the whole truth rushed into my mind, my arms dropped, the motion of
every muscle and fibre was suspended
...
193)
...

However, Shelley explicitly contrasts his former paralysis with the active role he takes after Elizabeth's
death: "I rushed toward her, and embraced her with ardour" (emphasis mine)
...
Her language
suggests that Victor's paralysis in a situation demanding action is due to both the fear of defiling his bride's
virginity and the fear of the unleashed powers of sexuality
...
" Victor regains command of Elizabeth as a sexual being, emphatically closing down the possibility of
passion and asserting her innocence to assure us that she did die before losing her virginity” p163

"Shelley shows that Victor's failure is not so much that he made a monster, but that he failed to tell anyone
about it
...
Shelley indicates that the division of gender roles is dangerous not
just because of its instability, but because it produces this isolation
...
Shelley's
text works to change structures of narrative as well as to introduce new topics of discussion
...
” p156

"And through much of the novel she adopts a male voice while assigning her self-effacing female
characters (appropriately described as exotic, as out? siders) to a marginal position
...
But perhaps in adopting a male voice, the
woman writer is given the opportunity to intervene from within, to become an alien presence that
undermines the stability of the male voice
...
57)"


ART 8: The Mediation of the Feminine: Bisexuality, Homoerotic Desire, and SelfExpression in Bram Stoker's Dracula, Howes

"Because the fundamental ambivalences motivating the novel revolve around an issue which few fin de
siècle texts could discuss explicitly, male homosexuality,3 Dracula uses the feminine to displace and
mediate the anxiety-causing elements of masculine character, representing the forbidden desires the men
fear in themselves as monstrous femi- ninity” p104

"The text hovers between revealing and concealing homoerotic desire, between articulating it as the voice
of the male subject and displacing it onto the discourse of a female other
...
” p104

“Prevalent Victorian misconceptions of homosexuality preserved a heterosexual model of sexual attraction
by characterising homoerotic impulses as “misplaced” sexual desires
...
Dracula feminizes desire and obsessively fears the woman in man, which is undeniably and naturally
present and always threatening to overwhelm the masculine
...
The circumstances of Jonathan Harker's escape from the Castle Dracula and the
seduc- tive clutches of the female vampires remain a mystery at the novel's close
...
where
...
This omission by Harker and the
narrative structure constitutes a repression of an explicitly feminine (homoerotic) desire whose insistent
need for expression, matched by an equally determined impulse to repres- sion, provides the energy for the
rest of the novel
...
The deaths of the other sailors are
likely penetrations of men by the count and, there- fore, are admitted but suppressed by the narrative,
which implies but does not describe them
...
Although Count Dracula's
interest in Harker when the latter cuts himself shaving has been called trivial and passing,12 it is in fact far
from insignificant
...
The suddenness and intensity of the incident suggest a spontaneous eruption of desire
and its swift suppression
...
In the latter scene, however, the

repressed homoerotic subtext re- turns with the count, who intervenes furiously, exclaiming: "This
man belongs to me!" (D, 47)
...
” p108




"In Dracula ambivalent flirtation with a feminine (homoerotic) desire to play the passive woman's part and
be penetrated leads to a defensive reaction against the feminine
...
Dracula' s sexuality is
pri- marily oral rather than genital
...
The vampire's mouth is a soft (feminine) orafice which contains (masculine) penetrative teeth
and is the same for male and female vampires (Craft,109)” p110

"The link between the natural expression of emotion and the admission of forbidden desires represented as
vampiric is the feminine character of both” p110

"Mina speculates on her feminine role as a safe outlet for male emotion: "I suppose there is something in
woman's nature that makes a man free to break down before her and express his feel- ings on the tender or
emotional side without feeling it derogatory to his manhood" (D, 235)
...
Van Helsing says of her: "She has man's brain- a brain that a man should
have were he much gifted- and a woman's heart
...
This purpose is to help Van Helsing and his cohorts
defeat the vampires; Mina is instrumental to their efforts in both her mas- culine and feminine
capacities
...
Harker is better out of it
...
16 The
description of "men of the world" who have been in many "tight places" carries sexual connotations, and
the use of "touch" suggests a wish to separate the feminine from the sensual
...
The referent of "it" is unclear- what is no place for a wom- an? "It" is certainly
meant to refer to "the affair" that is one of the many "tight places" in which the men have been in their time
...
” p114

"Although Mina is excluded solely on the basis of her sex, she is consistently presented as some- one who
displays a good balance of the characteristics of both sexes
...
Mina has been rescued from the threat of vampiric gender
indefinition, but her enduring bisexuality reminds us that the feminine has been suppressed but not
eliminated
...
understand" the adventure (D, 382)” p117


ART 9: Vampiric Seduction and Vicissitudes of Masculine Identity in
Bram Stoker's “Dracula”, Kuzmanovic

"Both groups of critics, however, tend to overlook the unique position that the young solicitor Jonathan
Harker occupies in the narrative: he is the only character who is both an object of the vampire's seduction
and an agent of his destruction
...
At the same time, his membership in that group
has been too easily taken for granted by most critics
...
” p411

"I am interested in how the proliferation of sexual anxieties and repressed desires in the novel, rather than
being the ultimate point of the narrative in themselves, interact with Harker's gender and professional
anxieties in order to stage a contained and temporary identity crisis, which finally results in a restructuring
of his ego
...
I argue, however, that homoerotic
desire, while initially a manifestation of Harker's faltering masculine identification, eventually functions as a
defensive mechanism of Harker's ego helping to prevent a more radical identity crisis
...
She argues that the novel
indicates an anxiety about the servile, emasculating position in which the professional male must place
himself, symbolized by the “ female role of subservience which Harker must adopt as a solicitor in relation
to his client, Dracula” (99)” p412

"Harker's identity crisis is ultimately precipitated by nothing else than his ego's inevitable internal resistance
to its own coherence and stability in circumstances that pressure him to endorse and fully internalize certain
aspects of mature masculinity - heterosexual romance, professional advancement, climbing up the social
ladder, entering a tight social circle of professional men who lead the society
...
” p413

"The MOST CONSISTENT narrative line in Dracula is the one following the initial instability of Harker's
masculine identity and then his gradual initiation into the kind of masculinity on which England can rely for
its future
...
Steward, Lord
Arthur, and Quincey Morris—have already proved their virility through shared adventures in the past,
Harker’s initial link to them is only through his wife Mina, Lucy's best friend, and he is significantly excluded
from the early scenes of symbolic male bonding over Lucy's dying and dead body
...
Therefore, Harker's
encounters with Dracula in this narrative of masculine initiation first occasion a contained, limited crisis of
Harker's identity, fleshing out his original unwitting resistance to sexual and professional maturation, but
then they actually allow him to contain that inevitable crisis and establish for himself a more sexually and
professionally stable masculine identity necessary for being one of the symbolic saviours of England
...
Hawkins, Harker's employer,
explicitly implicates Harker's manhood in his professional growth: "He is discreet and silent, and has
grown into manhood in my service
...
2; emphasis added)
...
” p415




"The lack of such identification early in the narrative is indicated not only by his servile professional position
in Castle Dracula, but also in his consistent articulation of his situation as analogous to that of an
imprisoned and endangered heroine
...
2);
"Then the horror overcame me, and I sank down unconscious" (56; ch
...
It is then so near the end? To-morrow! To-morrow! Lord, help me, and those to
whom I am dear!" (70; ch
...
In fact, these are all sentences from Harker's journal
...
” p415

"Harker ventures beyond his quarters and discovers a room which, by decorations and furniture, he judges
to have been "occupied by the ladies in bygone days" (51; ch
...
In this room , his feminine identification
strengthens even more: "Here I am sitting at a little oak table where in old times possibly some fair lady sat
to pen, with much thought and many blushes, her ill-spilt love-letter, and writing in my diary in shorthand all
that has happened since I closed it last” (51; ch
...
This emphatic juxtaposition of the image of the lady
with the image of Harker, both writing about their feelings and awaiting their destiny, is immediately
reinforced by Harker’s move from the lady's seat into her bed: "I determined not to return tonight to the
gloom-haunted rooms, but to sleep here, where, of old, ladies had set and sung and liv ed sweet lives whilst
their gentle breasts were sad for their menfolk away in the midst of remorseless wars” (52; ch
...
This
sentence, which starts with Harker as a protagonist and ends by substituting the ladies for him, confirms
Harker's strong identification with these ladies
...
Dracula has emphasized to Harker that he comes from a
tradition of warrio rs and that he sees himself as an heir to that tradition, which makes it possible to see
Harker’s thoughts about the ladies being sad for the warriors as an expression of his own sympathy, and
perhaps desire, for Dracula
...
3)
...
” p416


"Lying in the ancient ladies' bed, whether awake or asleep, Harker is first visited by three
voluptuous vampire-ladies, who instigate in him "a wicked, burning desire that they would
kiss [him] with those red lips" (53; ch
...
Away from his fiancee and from the moral and
social norms of England, Harker's ego loosens control over his desire, which initially
seems hyper-heterosexual: he wants to be illicitly kissed by no less than three women
...
There was a deliberate voluptuousness
which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an
animal…  Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and
seemed about to fasten on my throat… I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there
...
(54; ch
...
”
p416-7


"Harker's apparent obliviousness to the fact that Dracula as well might wish to suck his blood - or do
whatever else the women were about to do - goes hand in hand with his denial of his own preference to be
Dracula's victim rather than the women’s” p417

"Craft's assumption that Harker's fantasy is a displaced momentary acknowledgment of the hidden truth of
his suppressed homosexual desire simplifies the role of homoeroticism in the novel
...
After all, what is the
usefulness of concluding that in his unconscious, exposed in this hallucinatory scene, Harker makes a
homosexual object choice when, as Freud famously puts it, "all human beings are capable of making a
homosexual object-choice and have in fact made one in their unconscious" (1 In; emphasis added)
...
In order for such healing to occur, Harker's ego needs to experience itself as threatened, not by its
own intrinsic instability, but by a kind of monstrosity which is defined enough in cultural imagination in order
to be rationally denied and removed in its entirety
...
In this way, homoerotic desire actually serves to restore and strengthen Harker's
masculine rationalism and self-discipline, which have been dissipating during his previous experiences in
Transylvania
...
Therefore, a terrifying aspect of this scene
may be Mina's aggressive sexuality, which she, unlike Lucy, never acknowledges in her writing, but which
might actually explain her husband's stupor” p421

"The most obvious interpretation is that Dracula has tainted Mina's purity, which sets the stage for Harker's
defense of his wife's womanhood and soul as a necessary part of the reconfirmation of his manhood
...
It follows, then, that this seduction scene is as double-edged in its implications as the scene of
Harker's seduction in Dracula's castle
...
In other words, Dracula's presence is once again ambiguous
...
” p421


ART 10: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Spectacle of Masculinity,
London

[when animating monster] “my eyeballs were starting from their sockets” (50); “my voice became broken, my
trembling hands almost refused to accomplish their task; I became as timid as a love-sick girl” (51)

“Normative readings of this scene, focusing on its horrific aspects, disguise its participation in the
Petrarchan convention of (female) dismemberment: in the representation of the loved one as a composite of
details, a collection of parts
...
But unlike Adam, all three characters seem to have fallen not merely from Eden but from the
earth, fallen directly into hell, like Sin, Satan and-by implication-Eve
...
Most notably, Victor Frankenstein is slated to marry
his "more than sister" Elizabeth Lavenza, whom he confesses to hav- ing always considered "a possession
of my own" (Ch
...
But the mysterious Mrs
...
Even relation-less Justine appears to have a
metaphorically incestuous relationship with the Frankensteins, since as their servant she becomes their
possession and more than sister, while the female monster Victor half- constructs in Scotland will be a more
than sister as well as a mate to the monster, since both have the same parent/creator
...
the disguised but intensely sexual waking dream in which Victor Frankenstein in effect couples with his
monster by applying “the instruments of life" to its body and inducing a shudder of response (Ch
...
” p252

"Talia Schaffer details Stoker's close friendship with Oscar Wilde, disavowed in a panic after Wilde's
disgrace and conviction, and contests that "Dracula explores Stoker's fear and anxiety as a closeted
homosexual man during Oscar Wilde's trial" (381)” p253

“
...
In hidden respects, Dracula remains Lucy; what we
are encountering throughout as we read this story of vampires, bloodsuckers, and zombies is a version of
the romantic comedy, a retelling of the marriage-plot
...
According to Jennifer Fleissner, Dracula "kill[s] off
Lucy, the 'susceptible' sexual woman, and place[es] Mina, the working woman as wife, mother, and writing
machine” (448)
...
Senf reads the whole novel as a response to the anxieties provoked by the advent
of the fin de siècle "New Woman" (33)
...
Auerbach points out that "Lucy
...
it inculcates the restraints of marriage in a
reluctant girl" (160)
...
In the marriage-plot, otherwise free-floating or "dark"
desires are harnessed into orderly channels of social and biological reproduction, the inner vampire
transformed, so to speak, into the outward wife and mother
...
The prediction may come
true, in fact, for both of them
...
The fate of Mina the wife and Lucy the vampire bride are one and the same, depicted
through different generic lenses
...
” p263

"Many elements of Jonathan's experience match that of a successful heroine in a marriage-plot; he is
physically displaced from his own country and people to a new, foreign place where he knows no one and
is suddenly confined to a strange, huge house from which he is forced to write jolly letters home, all the
while part fearing, part desiring some kind of bloody penetration
...
He scales the steep walls "just as a lizard"
and, like any good Victorian husband, has plenty of unnamed business to transact outside the house (47)
...
" Jonathan in Dracula's castle is one possible inner story, the psychological
truth of the young, perhaps sexually inexperienced Elizabeth Darcy, née Bennett, transplanted to her
husband's intimidating stately home in Derbyshire, wandering through the cor- ridors of Pemberley while
her husband is out working or riding or hunting or in London
...

Count Drac- ula is mysterious, powerful, and menacing, but at the same time he is also the per- fect
husband of the marriage-plot, the brooding aristocrat, not the adventuresome rake
...
The demons of the novel are heterosexual ones, viewed with fear and wonderment from the
outside
...
Daly
mentions in passing that Castle Dracula is one of only three "models of domestic- ity" we get in the novel
(51)“ p266

"In portraying Jonathan as Dracula's “ ife,' what is involved is less a furtive exploration of homosexual
desires than a projection from the closeted self into the place of the marrying heroine - a hypothesis about
what it would be like to love men publicly
...
” p267


ART 13: Coveting the Feminine: Victor Frankenstein, Norman Bates, and
Buffalo Bill, Negra

"Behavior deemed "monstrous" often involves crossing gender boundaries and this practice, still flourishing
in contemporary cultural texts, has a long history
...

There is little question that the extremes they are driven to are indeed "monstrous
...
” p193


"Given this commonality among the three characters, it seems reasonable to argue that this overinvestment
in childhood signals an arrest of psychosexual development
...
Boys must
necessarily renounce their connection to the maternal in order to identify with their fathers - this is a
prerequisite for the adult, het- erosexual ability to desire women
...
The ramifications of these characters' failure to progress completely
through the Oedipal trajectory are manifold
...
In the case of Victor Frankenstein, it is important to note the the loss of his beloved mother, and her
attempt to replace herself with Elizabeth: "My children
...
This expectation will now be the consolation of your father
...
" (47) These events are traumatic to Victor and cement his aversion to
adult sexuality
...
Instead of being required to adjust to the loss of his mother, Victor Franken- stein is given an
immediate replacement for her, but he finds the substitution inadequate, and the familial pressure that is
brought to bear on him to establish intimacy with Elizabeth is more than he can bear
...
The
too-direct juxtaposition of Elizabeth and Caroline forced Victor to attempt to move immediately and
suddenly from Mother-love to woman-love (and with the same woman!)
...
This is the conflict that motivates Victor's dream and its conflation of Mother and wife-tobe” p196

"Victor literalizes his masculine/feminine split by creating the Monster as his masculine doppelganger - that
side of him who will continue to pursue learning, to engage in strenu- ous physical activity, and
voyeuristically desire women
...
The novel
leaves us in little doubt as to whether we ought to read the Monster as a psychic extension of Victor
Frankenstein
...
Our cultural commitment to
preserving the gender split and dichotomizing human sexuality leads us to criminalize middle-range
behaviors that span masculinity and femininity more than the extremes” p198

"Fundamentally, Victor Frankenstein, Norman Bates, and Buffalo Bill share that most trangressive of all
cultural desires - the wish to embody two genders simultaneously
...
Rather, they covet the
feminine as a means of transcending gender, as a route toward a type of non-phallic power
...
The function of the narrative is to quell this threat and the
ideological out- come of the challenge put down is a strong re-assertion of dominant gender
dichotomies” p198

“In all three of these texts, it would seem that the pathology of the monsters is, in some sense, only a more
heightened, radicalized version of Oedipal desire
...
” p199


Art 14: "A Wilde Desire Took Me": The Homoerotic History of
Dracula, Schaffer


"Stoker began writing Dracula one month after his friend, rival, and compatriot Oscar Wilde was convicted
of the crime of sodomy
...
Dracula seems to be
structured by the anguishing choice between repressed helplessness and dangerous action, and it is the
unconsciousness of the whole problem that gives the novel its mythic status
...

We need to locate the metaphors by which he named the love that so famously could not speak its name
...
Rather, homosexuality was produced by the language that
evaluated, disguised, and denounced it
...
” p385 

" Fictions may begin as replace- ments, but they can lose their reference; in Dracula, a text is an object of
desire, stolen, hidden, protected, copied, and transmitted from man to man
...
) In Stoker's sublimated sexual universe, a 'book' is
not a clumsy substitute for 'body' but an actually affective sexual experience itself
...
”2” p387

“Wilde's grotesquely distorted public persona became the face of homosexuality in 1895-the face Stoker
was supposed to see in his own mirror, that would indeed support his self-accusation of 'ugliness
...
” p388-9

"It should be no surprise that, within the stony fastness of Castle Dracula, censorship flourishes: Dracula
reads and destroys Harker's illicit literary productions, and within the great stone lunatic asylum, Dracula
bums Seward's overemotional diary
...
Like Stoker, whose name his echoes, Harker is a married man, a solicitor
who has not practiced law, and a younger man loyally working for a beloved older man
...
He represents not so much Oscar Wilde as the
complex of fears, desires, secrecies, repres- sions, and punishments that Wilde's name evoked in 1895
...
Dracula represents the ghoulishly inflated vision of Wilde produced by Wilde's prosecutors;
the corrupting, evil, secretive, manipulative, magnetic devourer of innocent boys
...
For Stoker writes Dracula's plot to
allow his surrogate Harker to experience imprisonment, just as Wilde languished in gaol
...
He writes as a man victimized by Wilde's trial, and yet as a man
who sympathizes with Wilde's victimization
...
” p398

"It was probably inevitable that Stoker would rejuvenate Wilde in the specific form of a vampire
...
” p398

"As Ellis Hanson argues, "To comprehend the vampire is to recognize that abjected space that gay men are
obliged to inhabit; that space unspeakable or unnameable, itself defined as orifice, as a 'dark continent'
men dare not penetrate
...
To homophobes, vampirism could function as a way of naming the homosexual as
monstrous, dirty, threatening
...
Dracula, however, functions as both accusation and elegy
...
” p399


“After Harker "felt all over the body," he muses that Dracula might "create a new and ever widening circle of
semi-demons to batten on the helpless" (D, 51)
...
In a widely reported
comment, Wilde's judge called him "the center of a hideous circle of corruption
...
(Dracula
works to lose his characteristic national accent: "I am content if I am like the rest, so that no man
...
Similarly, Wilde carefully acquired a
perfect English pronunciation, in marked contrast to Stoker, who kept his Irish accent all his life
...
Harker reveals this strategy in an impromptu error
...
if
I wished it I could have no choice" (D, 32; emphasis added)
...
’” p404

"Since Dracula is a dreamlike projection of Wilde's traumatic trial, Stoker elaborated and distorted the
evidence that the prosecutor used to convict Wilde
...
” p406

"The modern monster causes moral harm by perverting cultural or religious ideas
...
He is artificial rather than natural
...
The Gothic's secretly
depraved aristocrat removes his victim to an inaccessible abbey or castle
...
) The rest of society is still moral,
sane, and good; the victim simply can't communicate with it
...
Dracula is the progenitor of "Alien," "The Thing," "Dawn of the Dead," and
"Invasion of the Body- Snatchers," where evil infects random victims' bodies and characters
...
” p407

"The novel's composition, with its newspaper clippings and emphasis on journalistic techniques like
shorthand, obliquely acknowledges its debt to the Wilde-saturated newspapers of April, May, and June,
1895
...
Oscar Wilde was convicted May 24, 1895
...

Dracula's vital date is May 24 and 25
...
On this pivotal date, we meet the characters and see the 'crimes' committed that the
rest of the novel works to recompense
...
(Wilde was sentenced at his final trial, which lasted from May 22 to May 25
...
It
is May 25 when Dr
...
They plan to "mingle
our weeps over the wine-cup, and to drink a health with all our hearts to the happiest man in all the wide
world" (D, 61)
...
These four
different attitudes correlate to three different real-world events
...
Lucy's day of triumph resembles Irving's
...
Finally, the envious but stalwartly loyal loser,
Quincey Morris, encodes Stoker's own feelings on that momentous occasion-Stoker, who didn't get any
honors, but had to write the thank-you notes and organize the ceremonial dinners
...
As the prototypical victim
of the 'between men' scenario, she gets sacrificed to promote homosocial bonding
...
Male-male fluid exchange is sanctioned by the sentimental fiction of unrequited love
...
For the cross first
appears when Van Helsing places "a little gold crucifix" on Lucy's dead lips (D, 164)
...
It closes her lips-no kissing is possible-and purifies them of their 'voluptuousness
...
A servant steals the cross
...
Like any vampire, Dracula does not die-he
lives on in the praiseworthy desires of his nominal enemy, Jonathan Harker” p415

"To sum up: the novel's ending accomplishes three tasks
...
Second, he resolves the "between
men" triangle by constructing a space for a spectator within any erotic encounter, and reverses the
heterosexualizing imperative by making the spectator female
...
The ending's final function is to produce a series of stand-ins for the
pleasurable male body
...
” p418

“Quincey dies in Harker's lap, fluids "spurting through his fingers" (D, 376)
...
'17 This vision,
made inevitable by the men's physical situation, is nevertheless excluded from the text
...
Later, we find that Quincey and Harker have a son from this encounter
...
Quincey's spirit fled his dying body, swirled along in his blood,
soaked into Harker and became the 'seed' of Harker's son
...
Instead of epidemiological worry, this new
blood transmission produces thriving sons
...
” p419

"Little Quincey Harker can be read as the child of Dracula's and Harker's mutual desire
...
' Meanwhile, Quincey's martyrdom is a red herring as well as a red stain
...
” p419

" Stoker's oblique desires, his triangular arrangements, his literary arousals, have produced a satisfactory
waystation between the closet and the open land
...
"We
could hardly ask anyone, even did we wish to, to accept these as proofs of so wild a story" (D, 378,
emphasis added)” p420


ART 15: Filthy types: "Frankenstein", figuration, femininity, Vine

“In the same way that the monster laments the 'deformity of [his] figure’ (p
...
Echoing the monster's own impassioned arguments for sympathetic relationship later in the
novel, Frankenstein hints that sympathy is necessary in order to un-monster the monstrosity of humanity
itself
...
113)
...
In an ironic repetition of Frankenstein's desire, the
monster requests the creation of a mate who will be a reflection of himself, who will function as the specular
image of his form
...
My companion must be of the same species, and have the same defects
...
You must create a female for me, with whom I can live in the interchange of those
sympathies necessary for my being, (p
...
In this sense, the monster's demand
for figuration repeats Frankenstein's assimilation of femininity to patriarchal narcissism
...
Should she indeed awake, and see me, and curse
me, and denounce the murderer? Thus would she assuredly act, if her darkened eyes
opened, and she beheld me
...
The crime had its source in her: be hers the
punishment! (pp
...
22 She is eliminated because she does
not provide the monster with the image of his desire, because she does not reflect his
demand in the form of fulfilment
...
Insofar as she refuses to reflect the monster, she becomes the sign of his
failed narcissism, a sign whose meaning the monster is unable to countenance - and
which he obliterates by contriving her death
...
” p255

“Homans suggests that Franken- stein's creation of the monster is a narcissistic attempt to replace (and
efface) the maternal and feminine in favour of masculine self-sufficiency: 'By making the demon masculine',
she says, 'Shelley suggests that romantic desire seeks to do away, not only with the mother, but also with
all females so as to live finally in a world of mirrors that reflect a comforting illusion of the male self's
independent wholeness' (BW, p
...
Further, Homans argues that Shelley's text critically dramatises patriarchy's erasure of the mother by literalising - in the murderous ravages of the mon- ster - the Oedipal logic
that makes accession to language and culture a repudiation of the mother's body (a repudiation which,
Homans shows, is mythologised in western tradition - BW, p
...
” p255

"Mary Jacobus argues that the monsteress's threat to Frankenstein does not lie in her deformity, but in her
desire: in the 'dangerous autonomy of her refusal to mate in the image in which she was made' (RW, p
...
The 'turn' of her desire, indeed, hints at new and unforeseen figures of being consequent on her
possible rejection of the monster; as Frankenstein speculates, 'She
...
As if to recall the root of troping as 'turning' (Greek: tropos ), Frankenstein fears
that the monsteress will trope into existence monstrous and unimaginable economies of desire; turning
perversely to man rather than the monster, she might leave the monster forlorn and confront man with her
unpreceden- ted and incalculable demand
...
” p257




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