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32
Bram Stoker
they are avoiding seeing what they want to ignore; in other words, they
want Dracula to get her. This is not to deny that they also want to save
Mina; it is simply to claim that the ambivalence toward the mother is
fully realized in the novel.
We can now return to that ambivalence and, I believe, with the
understanding of the significance of the mother figure, comprehend
the precise perspective of the novel. Several critics have correctly
emphasized the regression to both orality and anality 21 in Dracula.
Certainly, the sexuality is perceived in oral terms. The primal scene
already discussed makes abundantly clear that intercourse is perceived
in terms of nursing. As C. F. Bentley sees it:
Stoker is describing a symbolic act of enforced fellatio, where
blood is again a substitute for semen, and where a chaste female
suffers a violation that is essentially sexual. Of particular interest
in the . . . passage is the striking image of “a child forcing
a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink,”
suggesting an element of regressive infantilism in the vampire
superstition. 22
The scene referred to is, in several senses, the climax of the novel; it is
the most explicit view of the act of vampirism and is, therefore, all the
more significant as an expression of the nature of sexual intercourse as
the novel depicts it. In it, the woman is doing the sucking. Bierman
comments that “The reader by this point in the novel has become used
to Dracula doing the sucking, but not to Dracula being sucked and
specifically at the breast.” 23 While it is true that the reader may most
often think of Dracula as the active partner, the fact is that the scenes
of vampire sexuality are described from the male perspective, with the
females as the active assailants. 24 Only the acts of phallic aggression,
the killings, involve the males in active roles. Dracula, then, dramatizes
the child’s view of intercourse insofar as it is seen as a wounding and
a killing. But the primary preoccupation, as attested to by the primal
scene, is with the role of the female in the act. Thus, it is not surprising
that the central anxiety of the novel is the fear of the devouring woman
and, in documenting this, we will find that all the pieces of the novel
fall into place, most especially the Jonathan Harker prologue.
As mentioned, Harker’s desire and primary anxiety is not with
Dracula but with the female vampires. In his initial and aborted