So now the original vampire writer guy defends himself in the exchange your Volgi linked to here.

Verdict: La Caitlin in a walk. This guy is reading the text, she’s paying attention to the subtext. The subtext doesn’t trump the text (attn: po-mo bastards), but it’s there! It informs the text.

As an upper-class Victorian single girl of, say, eighteen, Lucy is horrified at what’s happening to her. She’s dying and her immortal soul is in peril, and she has half-remembered dreams of spooky figures appearing in her bedchamber (with the attendant feeling of violation)*. But what’s happening to her has made her—involuntarily—react suspiciously like sexual satisfaction. (Contrast with Mina, as I said.) It’s a metaphor!

While Lucy would deny to the heavens that anything sexual is going on—and strictly speaking, nothing is—Stoker drenches it in sexual imagery by Victorian standards. He’s talking obliquely about sex, and the characters’ attitudes also drive them to react in ways we recognize as sexual. To recap: single, young Lucy’s suspiciously ruddy and languid, older married Mina’s shamed, and all the men in the book react very weirdly (by modern standards) to donating blood to Lucy—“Don’t tell Lord Godalming!” (Her fiancé.)

As the Ärzte sang in “Dein Vampyr,”

Yeah, ok, that’s not all that relevant, but it‘s a fun tune. (And I bent the language a hair to try and make some rhymes. Sue me.)

*Some subtle, some not-so, like when Drac wolf-jacks the largest lupine from the zoo and sends him smashing through the window so that he can get in. This is, of course, clearly Stoker’s allusion to Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf.” He loved the new-wave pop, that Stoker.

Frances Dade as Lucy Westenra & Béla Lugosi as the Count (Universal, 1931).

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.