Dracula Topic Tracking: Sexuality

Chapters 1-4

Sexuality 1: The first threat to Jonathan's well-being and sanity comes in the form of three beautiful seductresses. By threatening to compromise his loyalty to Mina, they are attacking Jonathan's honor as well as his neck.

Chapters 5-8

Sexuality 2: When Mina sees Lucy in the courtyard, Lucy looks virginal and angelic, while Dracula looks dark and evil. By the time Mina reaches Lucy, Lucy is portrayed using post-coital imagery.

Chapters 9-12

Sexuality 3: As the attack of a vampire is shown using sexual imagery, the remedies of the doctors are sexual, too. Seward describes his blood transfusion to Lucy as "life-blood" entering "the woman he loves," and then decides not to tell her fiancée about the event, as if it were an affair.

Sexuality 4: Next Morris provides blood for Lucy, again without telling Arthur. Now all the men who have proclaimed their love for Lucy have symbolically consummated that love.

Sexuality 5: "Voluptuous" is the word used to describe the evil thing that Lucy is becoming. Again, we see sexuality as a bad thing, used by vampires as tools of seduction and betrayal.

Chapters 13-16

Sexuality 6: Arthur describes his blood transfusion to Lucy as his symbolic marriage to her. The other three, who are now joined in a blood-pact to Arthur through his 'wife,' decide not to tell Arthur of the 'affairs.'

Sexuality 7: The only thing that seems to convince Arthur and Quincey that Lucy is an evil Undead is not the fact that she is feasting on a child but that her 'purity' has turned to 'voluptuous wantonness.'

Sexuality 8: The killing of the vampire Lucy contains much sexual imagery. It is her former husband-to-be that performs the act, pounding a phallic stake through her body. She then becomes animated in a manner suggesting a hideous sexual climax: writhing and twisting as blood foams out of her mouth. Only in the post-coital moment is she restored to the beauty she was in life.

Chapters 21-23

Sexuality 9: Dracula's attack on Mina is littered with imagery of sex, rape and betrayal. Her husband is unconscious on the very bed on which the act is taking place. Dracula is holding her in an awkward position and her face is forced 'down on his bosom'. Clothes are torn apart, and the blood of the deflowered is dripping down both their bodies.

Chapters 24-27

Sexuality 10: Before Van Helsing destroys the three woman vampires, who die in the same sexual way as the vampire Lucy, he reflects upon the danger of being seduced by the women's beauty and never being able to kill them. The contemplation recalls Jonathan's strength months ago in the face of the same women, and his corresponding devotion to Mina.