Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

Modern versions of the story, especially films, concentrate onMina; but the book concentrates on Lucy. She is the prototypicalfemale with no ambition other than marriage. She has noambition, no substance, except that she is female in the bestsense: compliant, ignorant, a virgin picking a husband. She hasthree marriage proposals, and all three men are in love withher: they are not looking for equal partners; they feel sexual desirefor her. She feels sexual desire for Arthur, so she chooseshim and rejects the others. Dracula the vampire has begun hisseduction of her; but she stays physically a virgin in the conventionalsense past her death. The place of sex is moved tothe throat; and the meaning of sex is in draining her body of allits blood. Her virginity is a “perfect tenderness in the body, ”and the spilling of her blood is not a ritual of the first time butof every time. A literal virgin, and certainly ignorant, she knowsnothing and wills nothing until after she herself appears to bedead and has become a sexual predator: then she has an appetitefor blood, an appetite for life, never mediated or morethan temporarily sated. In life, still human, her purity is suspectdespite her virginity. Her choice of the suitor for whom she hassexual desire suggests already that she is not entirely good, despitethe endless sighs of characters remarking on how goodLucy is. During her long affair with Dracula, when he comesand drinks her blood and she submits and is mesmerized andpresumably feels ecstasy, her blood is replenished by those tryingto save her life. Arthur is away; and so others give blood—her former suitors and Professor Van Helsing, the expert onvampires who is trying to outwit the vampire. When Arthurgives blood, he claims that the transfer of blood means thatthey are really married. The other men determine not to tellhim that they too have been married to Lucy in the same way.