Dracula is a Sex Addict

In Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Dracula is portrayed as a beast who indulges is drinking people’s blood. But is this obsession with drinking blood symbolic of a common issue or taboo in European culture at the time?

Lucy’s character is also heavily associated with sex since the beginning of the film. The Count’s experience with Lucy was on a dark night, when Lucy heard and felt the count calling to her. When Mina found them, it is confusing to the audience that Dracula is supposed to be drinking Lucy’s blood, because it looks so much like a sex scene. This would have been very taboo in Europe in this time period, as outlined earlier by Mina and Lucy giggling over Mina’s book. The count is also not in his human form, but closer to a werewolf covered in in fur. This could be symbolizing the count’s impulsivity in the moment to seduce Lucy and “drink her blood”.

Dracula met Jonathan in his castle in transylvania when the count requested Jonathan to sell him some real estate. During Jonathan’s stay, the Count made a few homoerotic remarks toward him, and as he learned more and more about the castle and the count, Jonathan began to realize he was a prisoner. Jonathan’s interactions with Dracula could be representative of Dracula being bisexual, which would be very taboo in European culture at the time. It also appeared that the purpose of Jonathan’s being there was to use his body to satisfy the Count’s and the three vampiresses’ thirst for blood from the safety of his castle. The vampiresses could be representative of

Another, more unrelated point that I thought of while writing this is the difference between Mina’s relationship with the count and Jonathan’s “relationship” with the vampiresses. This is representative of the difference in views on adultery in Europe at the time. When Jonathan is cheating, he is being seduced by three beautiful women at once but does not seek them out or long from them afterwards. When Mina is cheating, she is having dinner with a mysterious man who she falls in love with and eventually leaves Jonathan for. This difference aligns with the outdated view that women are irrational and will just fall in love with whatever stranger harasses them on the streets, whereas Jonathan was portrayed as stumbling into an affair that he did not fantasize about afterwards.

The Count’s interactions with Mina were very different from Jonathan and Lucy. Mina reciprocated the count’s desires, even expressing she that wanted him to make her a vampire so she could join him. This scene is representative of a few taboos in European culture at this time. Mina was “cheating” because she was sharing such an intimate moment with the count, but the gender role reversal of drinking Dracula’s blood from his chest that was even more out of the ordinary. It is important to note that Dracula did not force Mina to continue to drink his blood, but that she forced herself to finish. This means Dracula’s character role is reversed, because it is normally him that is drinking another person’s blood.

If Dracula is not representative of a sex addict, he is certainly a sexual deviant by the standards of European culture at that time. The deeper message behind that is that sexual deviancy causes suffering and “spreading” it with sexual acts with other people can make them suffer as well.

Gender Inversion in Dracula

     In the twenty-first century, people should have already veered away from the traditional gender roles that were put in place hundreds of years ago, but they have not. Even though some people have come out and are confident in their sexual orientation, whatever it may be, society as a whole is still not very accepting of anyone who is not ‘normal’. We have created a heteronormative culture that people are now forced to live in. Monsters are created to embody the traits of humans and society that people do not necessarily want to see. In the novel, the character Dracula is “immobilized by the competing imperatives of ‘wicked desire’ and deadly fear’”; he has to choose between doing what he wants to do and what society has told him he should do (Stoker 444). In his society, Dracula was not only shamed for being a vampire, but he was also told that his sexual desires were wrong. Dracula longed for penetration more than anything else, but he was constrained by the society he lived in. Although Dracula came close to fulfilling his hopes of penetration multiple times, he never let himself fully indulge for fear of what the society he lived in would do to him. Not only was Dracula afraid of people knowing of his desire for penetration, but he was also terrified of what would happen to him if he let himself indulge in penetration. As much as we would like to think that our society has evolved since Dracula was written, it has not; this exact same thing still happens today. If people’s beliefs or desires are anything outside of what society considers normal, they are terrified to express them out of fear of what people will say or do. Even if people live seemingly completely normal lives, if they have sexual desires that are not widely accepted, like Dracula’s, they will get shamed, judged, and even punished. The heteronormative culture that was created before Dracula was written still runs through our society today, and there is little to nothing that any one person can do to change it. Dracula shows how when people’s “ungratified desire” for any one thing is not fulfilled, they channel their desire into something else (Stoker 446). For Dracula, his desire for penetration is fulfilled by his three vampiric daughters whose anatomy permits them to be penetrated. For people in today’s society, their desire, whether it be sexual or otherwise, is projected onto something else, such as a sport or hobby where they can relieve some of that desire. According to the nineteenth-century psychologist Sigmund Freud, in order for a person to protect their EGO, they use a defense mechanism called sublimation. This simply means that they divert their sexual or aggressive energy into acceptable behavior. For Dracula, he diverts his need for penetration to his daughters. At the time women were supposed to be available and want to have sex whenever their husband desired and therefore, it was perfectly normal for Dracula to live vicariously through the penetration of his daughters. People in today’s society are forced to go through this exact same process in order for them to repress their desires. As much as people want to think that today’s society is changing, it is not, and much like Dracula, people today have to find ways to repress their desires and divert them to something that society sees as acceptable.