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Dracula 33
seduction by them, he describes his ambivalence. Interestingly, Harker
seeks out this episode by violating the Count’s (father’s) injunction to
remain in his room; “let me warn you with all seriousness, that should
you leave these rooms you will not by any chance go to sleep in any
other part of the castle” (42). This, of course, is what Harker promptly
does. When Dracula breaks in and discovers Harker with the vampire
women, he acts like both a jealous husband and an irate father: “His
eyes were positively blazing. The red light in them was lurid . . . ‘How
dare you touch him, any of you?’ ” (48–49). Jonathan’s role as child
here is reinforced by the fact that, when Dracula takes him away from
the women, he gives them a child as substitute. But most interesting
is Jonathan’s perspective as he awaits, in a state of erotic arousal, the
embraces of the vampire women, especially the fair one: “The other
was fair as fair can be, with great wavy masses of golden hair and eyes
like pale sapphires. I seemed somehow to know her face and to know
it in connection with some dreamy fear, but I could not recollect at
the moment how or where” (47). As far as we know, Jonathan never
recollects, but we should be able to understand that the face is that of
the mother (almost archetypally presented), she whom he desires yet
fears, the temptress-seductress, Medusa. Moreover, this golden girl
reappears in the early description of Lucy.
At the end of the following chapter, Jonathan exclaims, “I am
alone in the castle with those awful women. Faugh! Mina is a woman,
and there is nought in common.” Clearly, however, Mina at the breast
of Count Dracula is identical to the vampire women whose desire is
to draw out of the male the fluid necessary for life. That this is viewed
as an act of castration is clear from Jonathan’s conclusion: “At least
God’s mercy is better than that of these monsters, and the precipice
is steep and high. At its foot a man may sleep—as a man. Good-bye,
all! Mina!” (4; emphasis mine).
The threatening Oedipal fantasy, the regression to a primary oral
obsession, the attraction and destruction of the vampires of Dracula
are, then, interrelated and interdependent. What they spell out is a
fusion of the memory of nursing at the mother’s breast with a primal
scene fantasy which results in the conviction that the sexually desirable
woman will annihilate if she is not first destroyed. The fantasy of
incest and matricide evokes the mythic image of the vagina dentata
evident in so many folk tales 25 in which the mouth and the vagina are
identified with one another by the primitive mind and pose the threat