Chapter 2 - Bram Stoker’s Dracula and cerebral automatism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2012
Summary
One of the most memorable scenes of horror in Bram Stoker’s Gothic novel Dracula (1897) is the eponymous vampire villain’s encounter with Lucy Westenra in the Whitby churchyard. Lucy, an upper-class English debutante whose nocturnal sleepwalking leads her straight into the arms of the vampire, explains what it feels like to be bitten in terrifyingly visceral terms:
I have a vague memory of something long and dark with red eyes … and something very sweet and very bitter all around me at once; and then I seemed sinking into green water, and there was a singing in my ears, as I have heard there is to drowning men; and then everything seemed passing away from me; my soul seemed to go out from my body and float about in the air.
Lucy remains surprisingly silent about the blood, fangs, crucifixes, and other items of vampire iconography widely associated with Dracula. The passage is also remarkably free of the sexual suggestiveness that usually surrounds Dracula’s encounters with his female victims. For instance, nowhere does Lucy mention the penetration and exchange of bodily fluids that must have occurred during the abovementioned episode.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011