A Vampire’s Touch: Exploring Sexual Nature in Dracula

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Jonathan and Sexuality
Jonathan Harker, Mina Murray’s fiancé, represents a typical human dealing with sexual desires. He knows for certain that he wants to marry and spend the rest of his life with Mina but still struggles with natural, sexual urges. The reader clearly detects Jonathan’s struggle when he encounters the three vampire ladies in Dracula’s castle. As he lies there, Jonathan feels “an agony of delightful anticipation,” and also describes one of the ladies as having “a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive” (38-39). Here Jonathan uses contrasting words to describe his encounter with the vampires. In his mind, he knows this is wrong, but his body is telling him otherwise: “[T]he skin of my throat began to tingle as one’s flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer – nearer (39). Yu describes this internal conflict by mentioning “there is in Harker a certain guilt-ridden complicity. He finds it arduous to resist the fair vampiric temptress, yet he cannot overcome the uneasy feelings of nameless fear and intense guilt” (147). “At the same time,” states Kuzmanovic, “however, Harker’s fantasizing about the ladies expresses his suppressed heterosexual desire, which then finds its manifestation in the dream/event with the three vampiric women that he experiences while in the ancient ladies’ room” (416). Yu and Kuzmanovic clearly show that Jonathan is like any typical man fighting to control his sexual desires. Thus, the majority of men can relate to what Jonathan is experiencing.
In the midst of his stay at Castle Dracula, Jonathan discovers Catholicism’s power to control his sexual desires. At the beginning of the novel, Jonathan has absolutely no association with Catholic prac...

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... Dejan. “Vampiric Seduction and Vicissitudes of Masculine Identity in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Victorian Literature and Culture 37 (2009): 411-25. Cambridge Journals. Web. 18 April 2013.
McCrea, Barry. “Heterosexual Horror: Dracula, the Closet, and the Marriage-Plot.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction. 43.2 (2010): 251-70. Academic Search Complete. Web. 18 April 2013.
Prescott, Charles E., and Grace A. Giorgio. “Vampiric Affinities: Mina Harker and the paradox of Femininity in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Victorian Literature and Culture 33 (2009): 487-515. JSTOR. Web. 29 April 2013.
Stoker, Bram, and Roger Luckhurst. Dracula. New ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Print.
Yu, Eric Kwan-Wai. “Productive Fear: Labor, Sexuality, and Mimicry in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 48.2 (2006): 145-70. Academic Search Complete. Web. 18 April 2013.

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