Chapters XV-XXI

There is an instance where all of the men are trying to 'release Lucy's soul' by putting the stake in her heart and cutting her head off, so they are waiting around her tomb for the right moment. On one of the earlier nights, when it is just Dr. Seward and Van Helsing there, they witness Lucy returning to her tomb with a child and dropping it when she sees them. My point by directing you to this scene is to elaborate on the fact that I was appalled at the conduct of the two men at this moment in the novel. They know what she has done to the child (or at least Van Helsing does for sure) but they leave it on the side of the road to be found. It seems to me that, despite their fear of being blamed for the incident, a human life should be more important, and at least one of them should have stayed with the baby to make sure it was okay. This is not a major issue in the novel, but it struck me particularly.

Within these chapters, the problems of gender roles surfaced to an extreme high. The first place that I noticed it was in Lucy's preying on children. Why did she choose innocent children rather than adults? There is the obvious and superficial reasoning that could be applied to this and that is that she is 'new' to vampirism and must start out small, with victims that pose no threat to her. But my inclination is that Stoker had a more specific idea in mind when doing this. It challenges the woman's typical gender roles. Lucy, as a woman, is commonly expected to be nurturing and sensitive to children, but in this case she falls at the opposite extreme; she is actually causing pain in children and feeding off of them (rather than vice versa; where the woman provides food for the infant, whether it be breast milk or other food in general).

Mina's role as a woman is different as well. Seward and the other men constantly reiterate her value to them in that she keeps the records by typing out the diary entries and the papers. They keep her within the gender limits, though, by basically saying that she is very useful to them for a woman and attempting to take on the typical male roles of protecting her by keeping her uninformed about the central action or happenings of their pursuit of Dracula. An essay by John Allen Stevenson called "A Vampire in the Mirror: Sexuality in Dracula" elaborates more fully on these gender role challenges.( http://www.jstor.org/stable/462430 )

However, Dracula drastically mixes up these gender roles in the scene where Mina is drinking blood from his breast (as if drinking milk from the breast of the mother). Jonathan is unable to assert his power because he is trapped in sleep, presumably by something that Dracula did to keep him out of the way. This scene puts Dracula in the role of the mother and Mina in the role of the child feeding from him. At the same time, Dracula is asserting his power by forcing the blood of Mina and himself to be transferred back and forth, therefore joining them together as if in intercourse. At this point he is staying true to his threat to make Jonathan's dear Mina belong to him forever. He is taking on the role of benefactor as well as lover to Mina and this confuses the gender relations in the novel for the time being.