Vamping the Woman: Menstrual Pathologies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Maria Parsons
The polarised dialectic of the idealised, perfect woman and the demonised, sexual woman has dominated dominated Western separatist ideology for centuries. In terms of the body, it reaches a significant impasse in the nineteenth century. During the Victorian period, scientific and medical advances developed alongside a resurgence of feminist activism, particularly so, from the 1860s onwards. The female activist was embodied in the concept of the ‘New Woman’. According to Lyn Pykett:
The New Woman not only posed a threat to the social order but also to the natural order, and was represented as ‘simultaneously non-female, unfeminine, and ultra-feminine.’(3) Incorporated into varying depictions of the New Woman was a consistent perception of her as over-sexed and unduly interested in sexual matters. Correspondingly, scientific and medical discourses began to mirror public opinion. As such, female sexuality became the locus of attention in the medical world; with the womb, the reproductive organs, and the menstrual cycle, becoming primary sites for medical inquiry and pathologising.
Prior to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the “one-sex” model dominated medical thinking in relation to the human body. For years it was commonly accepted that male and female genitals were the same. In Latin or Greek, or in the European vernaculars until around 1700, there was no separate term ‘for vagina as the tube or sheath into which its opposite, the penis fits and through which the infant is born.’(4) It was not until the late eighteenth century that the common discourse about sex and the body changed. Organs that had shared a name – ovaries and testicles – were now linguistically distinguished. The context for the articulation of two distinct sexes was, however, according to the historian Thomas Laqueur, neither a theory of knowledge nor a reflection of advances in scientific knowledge, instead, he attributes reinterpretations of the body to
One of the foremost exponents in medical developments and theorizing of the female reproductive organs, particularly, menstruation organs in the nineteenth century was Dr Edward Tilt who published extensively on the subject in the latter half of the nineteenth century. His work included titles such as The Change of Life in Health and Disease, The Elements of Health, and Principles of Female Hygiene, On the Preservation of the Health of Women at the Critical Periods of Life to A Handbook of Uterine Therapeutics and of Diseases of Women. According to Tilt, regulation of the menstrual cycle was imperative to both the physical and mental health of women. As Laqueur notes
A nineteenth century medical text by Adam Raciborski entitled Traité de la menstruation, ses rapports avec l’ovulation, la fecundation, l’hygiene de la puberté et l’age critique, son role dans les différentes maladies, ses troubles et leur traitment, (7) made the connection between menstruation and heat. Writing in an early section on heat in dogs and cats he draws an analogy between the menses and heat in women. He states ‘We will see that the turgescence – the crisis – of menstruation (l’orgasme de l’ovulation) is one of the most powerful causes of over-excitement in women.’(8) From the 1840s on, menstrual bleeding became the sign of swelling and explosion whose corresponding behavioural manifestations were aligned with sexual excitement and animals in heat. Thus, the menstruating woman was rendered as “out of control” and in need of containment.
Practical developments in obstetrics and gynaecology also contributed to the focus on the menses as the primary cause of physical and mental ill-health in women. In particular, the redevelopment of the the speculum and the curette, revolutionised gynaecological practice. Furthermore, menstrual out-flow was measured and its consistency and colour recorded in order to determine normative points of reference. This both allowed and contributed to the diagnosis and treatment of a wide ranging number of female ailments as menstrual.
He continues linking Lamia and late-nineteenth century feminism, claiming:
The analogy of women and snakes as well as having obvious roots in Genesis and Classical mythology is also located in menstrual myths. In many cultures it is believed that a girl’s first menstrual bleeding occurs when a snake descends from the moon and bites her. According to Mircea Eliade, the moon-animal par-excellence has been the snake. He states:
This connection between snakes, the moon and menstruation is further observed by Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove who pose the question ‘Why snakes?’ and, in response, point out that
Ancient languages also gave the serpent the same name, Eve, a name meaning ‘Life’ and according to the most ancient myths the original primal couple constituted a serpent/goddess dyad. Also the legendary Basilisk is said to be born of menstrual blood and is derived from the classical myth of the serpent-haired Gorgon. (13)
The nineteenth-century lunar influenced, fanged-vampire exploits age-old links between serpents, female sexuality and menstruation. The most famous vampire text of the Victorian period is undoubtedly Bram Stoker’s Dracula described by Marie Mulvey-Roberts as
Although Mulvey-Roberts’ seminal essay ‘Dracula and the Doctors: Bad Blood, Menstrual Taboo and the New Woman’ comprehensively explores menstrual pathologies in Dracula, I depart from her reading of the vampire as merely a metaphor for menstruation or as a ‘surrogate for menstrual taboo’ and will argue instead that the vampire in Stoker’s text functions as a displaced embodiment of female sexuality and menstrual blood, demonstrating stratifications of power and the interaction of a multiplicity of (pseudo)-medical and moral discourses. In this article, I will focus on the character of Lucy Westenra as an example of Victorian socio-cultural and psycho-sexual anxieties pertaining to women. From her first encounter with Dracula to her final beheading and staking, Lucy is an exemplary case study in the pathologising of menstruation and the control and containment of female sexuality.
From Jonathan Harker’s initial moonlight journey to Castle Dracula, to his moonlight encounter with the three vampire wives of his host, the motif of the moon dominates the narrative. Lucy’s nocturnal, sleepwalking nightmare through the streets of Whitby, her ascent to the graveyard and her encounter with the vampiric Count are illumined by a full moon.
The supine posture of Lucy in this scene is undeniably sexual and her nocturnal sleep-walking and encounter with Dracula reeks of illicit sexuality. Her sexual defilement or moreover her own expression of innate sexuality augers her eventual demise and descent into an uncontrollable blood-thirst, described by Stoker in terms akin to nymphomania. From the outset, Lucy is an example of the discontented Victorian woman, uneasy with her prescribed role. Her coquettish sexuality, flirtatiousness and flaunting of idealised, Victorian womanhood are evident in her response to a series of received marriage proposals. In a letter to her friend Mina Harker, she writes:
‘Marriage’ has a double meaning in this extract, on a superficial level it means exactly what it suggests but on another level it is a codified expression for sexual relations. Lucy, discontent and uneasy with her restricted role as ‘woman’ has no choice but to suppress any desire to explore her sexuality and is compelled to fulfil her duty as a middle-class Victorian woman. Masochistic self-abnegation is her only option in a society which rigorously denies any expression of female sexuality. In fact, her physical and mental deterioration commence when she accepts Arthur Holmwood’s marriage proposal. From this point of submission, to her nocturnal encounter with Dracula, it becomes apparent that she is incapable of fulfilling her required role. It is therefore, unsurprising and indicative of the cultural period that Lucy’s encounter with Dracula coincides with a physical deterioration in her health. Mina describes Lucy as ‘ill; that is she has no special disease, but she looks awful, and is getting worse everyday’(17) and Dr Seward describes her condition as ‘bloodless’ but lacking the usual anaemic signs. He continues:
Furthermore, Dr Seward is a psychiatrist and notably the most common approach to treating any signs of female sexual transgression in Victorian England was psychiatric. As Elaine Showalter points out in her work on women and madness, The Female Malady,
The treatment of Lucy’s illness (through blood transfusions) obviates the Victorian obsession with treating female mental illness (sexuality) by regulating the menstrual cycle. The symptoms from which she suffers are blatantly sexual and blood related. Blood loss is a significant indicator of menstruation and her lethargy and heavy sleep is, as Bruno Bettelheim notes, symptomatic of puberty. According to Bettelheim in his work on fairy tales, ‘During the months before the first menstruation, and often also for some time immediately following it, girls are passive, seem sleepy, and withdraw into themselves.’(20) Perhaps more relevant and more than likely known to Stoker in the 1890s, however, is the work of Dr. Edward Tilt, who documented numerous case studies of what he called Pseudo-Narcotism in a number of his menstrual patients. He describes Pseudo-Narcotism as
Furthermore, he describes Pseudo-Narcotism as ‘very intense when the menstrual flow is either very painful, deficient, or completely absent.’ His case study no.25 bears a striking resemblance to the description of Lucy’s physical health subsequent to her attacks from Count Dracula. The patient is described as of a
He also quotes the case of a patient who ‘at menstrual periods, could almost sleep while walking, and once remained sixteen hours in a state of stupor, from which she awoke quite well.’(23) Another patient ‘at menstrual periods, would remain for hours in what she called her ‘quiet fit’, a state of self-absorption, unaccompanied by hysterical phenomena, or by convulsions.’(24)
Lucy’s burgeoning sexuality, in conjunction with her prior thinking on sexual mores and behaviour, is opposed to and threatens the established sexual politics of the day. In no uncertain terms, Lucy must be appropriated into the fold of Victorian womanhood or if not face total annihilation of the self. Stoker’s Lucy is at a defining point in sexual development, the influence of the moon and the arrival of Dracula is an embodiment of menstruation and the maturation of female sexuality. Showalter, further, makes the point that
Specific examples again from Dr Edward Tilt include instructions that
Other notable examples involving purgation, as Showalter has noted, include the leeching of the labia, described by Tilt in case no. 42, whereby, leeches were applied frequently to the labia of a young patient to induce menstruation. Much medical advice and cures for anaemia in the nineteenth century often verged on the macabre. One suggested remedy for anaemia recommended to women was to ingest a daily cup of oxen blood. It was reasoned that what better way to strengthen one’s blood than to drink the blood of another, not however human blood, but the blood a strong animal. In consequence, abattoirs began to attract ‘blood drinkers’ – anaemics who came to drink a daily cup of blood. This medical trend is recorded in the literature and art of the day. Rachilde (the pseudonym of Marguerite Eymery-Vallette), a French writer, penned a short story ‘The Blood Drinker’ in 1900 which explored themes of the Eternal Feminine, blood-lust and the degenerative affect of female sexuality alongside contemporary medical cures for anaemia. Dijkstra surmises:
The trend for blood-drinking was also captured in a painting by Ferdinand Gueldry exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1798. The painting caused a sensation and a review in The Magazine of Art reported that
However, when most attempts to regulate and bring female sexuality under control had been exhausted, all that remained was the final frontier in treatments, clitoridectomy. It was first conceived as a treatment by Dr. Isaac Baker Brown, who practiced the operation on women in his private London clinic for seven years between 1859 and 1866. Brown was convinced that female masturbation was responsible for female madness and recommended the removal of the clitoris, if not the labia, as a cure. According to Showalter:
Van Helsing, Dr Seward, Arthur Holmwood and Quincy Morris fail in their attempts to prevent Lucy from changing into a nymphomanic, blood-fiend whose sweetness has turned to ‘adamantine, heartless cruelty, and purity to voluptuous wantonness.’ (31) Therefore, as in the treatment of incurable insanity in Victorian women, Lucy finally succumbs to the most horrific and nightmarish of ends. She is staked and beheaded:
The critic Darryl Jones describes the power and imagery of the scene as
As I have already demonstrated vampires in literature revolve around the motifs of the moon and blood. In addition, the moon compels the blood-parched figure of the vampire to blood-drinking or, in other words, initiates puberty, menstruation and a sexual appetite which demands to be sated. The novel itself, perhaps merely by coincidence, gives further credence to this argument by including a blatant symbol of female sexuality. Dracula arrives in Whitby on a boat called the Demeter. According to Barbara Belford in her biography of Bram Stoker, on a visit to the lighthouse at Whitby he was told about the Dmitry:
Thus, it is established that Stoker’s change of the ship’s name was a conscious decision. It is also more than credible to assume that Stoker was knowledgeable of the Classical Greek Goddess Demeter and what she signified. The definition of Demeter given by Barbara G. Walker is as follows:
The implications of Count Dracula’s arrival into Whitby on a ship called the Demeter are manifold. Firstly, it reinforces the argument that the figure of the vampire is essentially feminized (an embodiment of female sexuality and menstrual blood). The whole scene, including the harbour and the convulsing waves suggest the spasming walls of the uterus prior to menstruation:
The Demeter, a symbol of the female genitals, contracting in a spasmic sea, expels Dracula onto the shores of Whitby. Boundaries, both social and physical, are breached as he is bled and birthed from the Demeter. At this point Dracula is menstrual bleeding, infective and invasive, inciting female sexuality. The infection of his victims when it does not involve death is the giving of life, immortality in the realm of the undead. Similarly, puberty is a rebirth, a metamorphosis from one stage of sexual development to the next and the arrival of the vampire is ‘usually expressed with the juxtaposition of repressed with uncontrollable sexuality.’(37) Furthermore, the vampire has been described as ‘A perfect embodiment of eros and thanatos, an archetype of the unconscious whose coming augers all manner of erotic deliria. Dracula’s female victims become deranged psycho-sexual cannibals.’(38)
The significance of the Demeter also reverberates in the nightmarish quality of Dracula’s nightly visits to his victims. As Walker points out in her explanation and history of the term ‘Demeter’ like the majority of Asiatic Goddesses in their oldest forms, Demeter was a triadic figure appearing as Virgin, Mother and Crone, or Creator, Preserver and Destroyer. One aspect of her crone phase is echoed in the legendary medieval Night-Mare. (39) Walker elaborates
The equine association of the nightmare is also explored by Ernest Jones in his work entitled On the Nightmare. After exhausting the etymological origin of the term nightmare, he argues:
Furthermore, Jones draws a link between the horse and the vulva which reinforces the connection between Demeter, the horse, and the nightmare. Giving examples of horses and women he quotes an old Prussian saying ‘If the bridegroom comes on horseback to the wedding one should loosen the saddle girth as soon as he dismounts, for this ensures his future wife an easy childbirth.’(42) The footnote attached to this anecdote explains that this ‘symbolic equating of the horse’s saddle-girth and harness with the female vulva is commonly met with in folklore.’
(43) Thus, the female horse or mare, her saddle and girth, like the Demeter, has a symbolism located in the female genitals, specifically indicating the vulva.
horse glares on. The link between horses and sexuality here is explicit. I would also go as far as to suggest that Stoker’s scene of the Demeter entering Whitby Harbour and Lucy’s same night sleepwalking episode with its inference of an incubus type sexual encounter replicates Fuseli’s painting.
It is also notable that the birth and development of psychoanalysis as a field of study more or less coincided with developments and advances in psychiatry, obstetrics and gynaecology. Auerbach notes that
The characteristic symptoms described by victims after a night-visit from a vampire correlate with similar descriptions of the nightmare. Ernest Jones, Freud’s disciple, describes the three cardinal features of a typical nightmare as
Lucy Westenra’s first encounter with Dracula is most definitely depicted as nightmarish. In a supine position, the most common posture of a nightmare sufferer, she is described as having
According to Jones, the latent content of the nightmare consists of a representation of a normal act of sexual intercourse. He describes the exaggerated symptoms exhibited by sufferers of the nightmare as indicative of those experienced in some degree when fear of coitus is present. He also observed the prevalence of the nightmare amongst pre-menstrual women. He describes the case history of a young lady of about fifteen who was
Jones interprets the occurrence as the coming to pass of what she both dreads and desires. He also makes the point that erotic feeling is in most cases more ardent in the days preceding the catamenial period, giving the following example:
In his appraisal of the occurrence of nightmares prior to the menses, he concludes that these examples arise during a time when ‘Paracelsus stated that the menstrual flux engendered phantoms in the air and that therefore convents were seminaries of nightmares.’ (51)
Or, finally to quote from the eminent Victorian sexologist, Richard Von Krafft-Ebing, who in his work, Psychopathia Sexualis, reports the case of a married man who presents himself with cuts on his arm. When questioned as to the origins of the marks, he responded:
Nineteenth-century macabre, barbaric and often downright ludicrous pseudo-science served to construct female sexuality and sexual desire as diabolical and vampiric. Overall, Lucy’s transformation into a bloodthirsty vampire reifies a case study in the simultaneously, medical, gynaecological, psychiatric and psychoanalytic practice of menstrual pathologising and its concomitant control and suppression of female sexuality.
1. Marie Mulvey-Roberts, ‘Menstrual Misogyny and Taboo: The Medusa, Vampire, and the Female Stigmatic’ in Andrew Shail and Gillian Howie, ed., Menstruation A Cultural History, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p.159.
2.Lynn Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Woman’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing, (London: Routledge, 1992), pp.137-138.
3. ibid., p.140.
4. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: From the Greeks to Freud (London: Harvard, University Press, 1990), p.5.
5. ibid., p.11.
6. ibid., p.217.
7. English translation: Treatise on menstruation and its relationship to ovulation, fertility, hygiene at puberty and the critical age, its role in different illnesses and its symptoms and treatment.
8. Adam Raciborski, quoted in Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: From the Greeks to Freud, p.220.
9. Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p.305.
10. ibid., p.309.
11. Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, (London: Sheed and Ward, 1979), pp.165-166.
12. Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove, The Wise Wound: Menstruation and Everywoman, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), pp.263-264.
13. Source: Barbara G. Walker, The Woman’s Encyclopaedia of Myths and Secrets, (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983), pp.642-644.
14. Marie Mulvey-Roberts, ‘Dracula and the Doctors: Bad Blood, Menstrual Taboo and the New Woman’ in William Hughes and Andrew Smith, ed., Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), p.78.
15. Bram Stoker, Dracula, (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), p.100.
16. ibid., p.67.
17. ibid., p.120.
18. ibid., 121-122.
19. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830-1980, (London: Virago, 1987), p.74.
20. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p.225.
21. Edward Tilt, The Change of Life in Health and Disease: A Practical Treatise on the Nervous and Other Afflictions Incidental to Women at the Decline of Life, (London: John Churchill and Sons, 1870), p.199.
22. ibid., pp.197-168.
23. ibid. pp.168-169.
24. ibid. p.169.
25. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady, p.56.
26. Edward Tilt, The Change of Life in Health and Disease, p.238.
27. Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, p.338.
28. ibid., p.338.
29. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady, p.75.
30. ibid., p.76.
31. Bram Stoker, Dracula, p.225.
32. ibid., pp.230-232.
33. Darryl Jones, Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film, (London: Arnold, 2002), p.88.
34. Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula, (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996), p.222.
35. Barbara G. Walker, The Woman’s Encyclopaedia of Myths and Secrets, p.218.
36. Bram Stoker, Dracula, pp.86-87.
37. Allen Eyles, Robert Adkinson and Nicholas Fry, ed., The House of Horror: The Complete Story of Hammer Films, (London: Lorrimer, 1981), p.95.
38. ibid., p.95.
39. The Oxford Classical Dictionary gives the following definition: ‘In Arcadia Demeter was worshipped with Poseidon. The Black Demeter of Phigaleia and Demeter Erinys of Thelpusa were both said to have taken the form of a mare and to have been mated with Poseidon in Horse shape, and at Phigaleia she was shown as horse-headed.’ Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawforth ed., The Oxford Classical Dictionary, (Oxford: Oxford University, 2003), p.448.
40. Walker, Barbara G., The Woman’s Encyclopaedia of Myths and Secrets, p.218.
41. Ernest Jones, On the Nightmare, (London: L. & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1931), p.247.
42. ibid., pp.249-245.
43. ibid., p.249.
44. Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p.178.
45. ibid., p.179.
46. ibid., p.23.
47. Ernest Jones, On the Nightmare, p.75.
48. Bram Stoker, Dracula, p.102.
49. Ernest Jones, On the Nightmare, p.45.
50. ibid., p.45.
51. ibid., p.45.
52. Richard Von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, (London: Staples Press, 1965), p.85.
List of Illustrations:
Fig.1 Ferdinand Knopff, Istar (1888), in Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p.309.
Fig.2 Ferdinand Gueldry, The Blood Drinkers (1898), in Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p.338.
Fig.3 Barbara Shelley in Dracula – Prince of Darkness, dir. Terence Fisher, (1966)
Fig.4 Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare (1781), in Jean Marigny, Vampires: The World of the Undead, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), p.64.
