Dracula/The Woman in White

This is such a great group! I'm learning so much from you guys, from the reviews and from the discussions that arise!
Even though it takes more time to write this kind of review, it's such an interesting process. At last I've had time to finish the review I've been working on.

I really love 19th century literature. Here is a summary of what I remember from these two watershed novels from that century.

The Woman in White began serialisation in November 1859 in the magazine All the year Round. That issue was particularly historic, as it was the same issue in which Dickens concluded serialisation of A Tale of Two Cities. Dracula was published in a single volume in 1897. Of the two writers, IMO, Collins is the much better writer. Bram Stoker was an amatuer writer in the best sense of the word, but his novel is peppered with inconsistencies and mistakes, and sometimes simply embarrasssing prose. However, it's often the case that badly written novels have the most impact on their culture.

1. Both books were hugely popular in their day, and gave rise to hosts of immitations. Although Dracula has lasted the course more than TWIW, the latter book has recently made a bit of a comeback in popular culture in the form of Andrew Lloyd Weber's musical. TWIW in its day spawned a whole subsidiary industry of WIW products: fashion, engravings, souvenirs, cook books, perfumes, dances, etc and was a mid Victorian rage. Dracula, well, you know...

2. Both books share very similar main themes, the theft of a woman's identity by a man. D is marked by the fear of Mina loosing her human identity and becoming undead; in TWIW Laura has her legal identity stripped from her due to her astonishing resemblance to a mad woman locked away in an asylum. The plot against her involves exchanging her identity for the mad woman so that her husband, the villain of the piece, may inherit her income.

3. Structurally, both books also share similarities. They are both divided into two main plot kernels. D: Plot Kernel 1- the 'rape' of Mina by the Count, plot kernel 2- the hunting down and killing of the Count. TWIW: Plot Kernel 1 - the plot against Laura Fairlie, plot kernel 2 - the attempt to reestablish her legal identity. These two movements may be described as attack-counter-attack.

4. The most fascinating thing about these two books is the narative strategy. Both books are presented as a series of primary documents produced by the characters themselves, arranged and presented to us by a nameless editor. These documents are produced by the characters themselves as the plot unfolds: diary entries, letters, sworn affadavits by witnesses, newspaper accounts, captain's logs and so on, so the writing of both novels has an immediacy and an urgency; they are not bathed in the glow of memory as in a bildungsroman.
This narrative strategy is especially extraordinary in the case of TWIW, as the plot is fabulously complex. I think I have read this book at least 7 times, and Collins's skill as a plotter never ceases to amaze me. He sets himself a real challenge to present such a complex plot in this way, sacrificing narrative omniscience and control in the interests of suspense. What late 20th Century modernist writers such as Lawrence Durrell and Joyce Carey were to do in multi-volume novels -view the same event from different angles-Collins was doing in one book in the middle Victorian period.

5. Another interesting thing, is that the means of re-establishing identity in both books lies in writing itself. The various writers in both books display an almost obsessive attention to the gathering of dates and the establishment of a chronology: “In this matter dates are everything…” (Dracula) “If we can prove that date, we prove our case against Sir Percival and the Count.” (The Woman in White) It's as if the gathering of srict scientific data is a counterbalance to the fantasy elements and the fear of becoming other in Dracula, while in TWIW, the gathering of data is a legal device: forensic, get it in writing....

6. The novels contain some larger than life characters, especially the villains. Count Dracula is of course tremendously charismatic, as his continuing after-life in the culture attests. Count Fosco from TWIW is also a marvelously depicted character: hugely fat, with a secret and mysterious past, an expert in Mesmerism and chemistry, and the owner of two pet white mice who live on his copious person in the pockets and sleeves of his clothes. There is even a passing reference to him in Middlemarch! (last few sentences of chapter 50)

7.Both novels are firmly of their time and address issues of contemporary concern. Dracula is obsessed with fin de siecle fears of the weakening of the blood, invasions from Europe and the status of the New Woman. The new technologies (telephone, typewriters and telegrams) are also used to fight the atavistic threat from the far past represented by the Count. The Woman in White was based on several notorious legal cases of false imprisonment of wives by husbands with the intention of stealing their property. The Matrimonial Causes Act had been passed a few years before the commencement of serialisation, and women's legal rights were of great contemporary concern.

8.However, both novels also slightly lift the veil of their contemporary ideologies, and give us glimpses of other ways of thinking and feeling. Both point out the limits and relativism of knowledge and values (the relativism of ideology): “Here, in England, there is one virtue. And there, in China, there is another virtue.” (TWIW); “Let me tell you, my friend, there are things done today in electrical science which would have been deemed unholy by the very men who discovered electricity -who would themselves not so long before been burned as wizards.” (Dracula ) And both propose a more natural, human view of behaviour divorced from social mores, Fosco focusing on physical needs: “What is your notion of a virtuous man, my pret-pret-pretty? A man who keeps you warm and gives you plenty to eat.”; Van Helsing on the parallel physical imperatives of laughter and death which ignore the laws of propriety: “He ask no person; he choose no time of suitability. He say: “I am here.”

I'd better stop here. If you haven't read TWIW, I thoroughly recommend it as un-put-downable. Dracula is a romp read and fun too.

OMG!!!!! I just saw how long that review is!
Apologies for going on at such length!. But once you start, how can you stop?

Don't apologize for the length. I personally feel that the purpose of this group is to go more in depth than with a traditional review.

As for your comparison itself, I found it fascinating. The books appear to be on two totally different levels genre-wise, yet they really do appear to have a lot in common. Personally, I have never read the woman in white, but after reading this, I have added it to my reading list.

One of the many ways I selected people to invite to the group was checking to see whether they wrote longish reviews. Though people who write short reviews may also be quite deep thinkers (and I've invited a lot of them), people who write long reviews almost always are. You have not disappointed me, tomcatMurr! This is a fascinating comparison, and The Woman in White is now on my lengthening to-be-read list.

Your comment about Dracula being sloppily written and yet having an abiding impact particularly struck me. I'm thinking of the many reviews posted of The Da Vinci Code, another book that a lot of people (myself included) found badly written, but which has made a huge impact. People seem to either love it or despise it. Brown really lost me in an early scene when, after vividly describing the eerie, dim red lighting in the gallery at night, he has Langdon notice the color of Sophie Niveau's eyes. Nevertheless, the novel offers an introduction to feminist theology, packaged in an easy-to-read thriller format that many people have found exciting. My husband loved it. Regardless of whether one accepts Brown's thesis that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a child, the general idea of integrating a mystical feminine principle into the Christian religion (in a less asexual way than with the Virgin Mary) is interesting to consider.

I'm kind of middle of the road on The Da Vinci Code. While I enjoyed it pretty well as a fast-paced thriller, I would by no means describe it as well written. There were too many things that felt contrived and I thought that the hype for it was way over-the-top. It was an entertaining read that brought up some thought-provoking and controversial points, much the same way that I imagine Dracula did in its day. In some cases, a book is made to seem better than it really is by such things.

Perhaps for some books, being "good" is beside the point, if they strike a nerve with the public by bringing out a particular idea when the time is ripe for it. The central idea in The Da Vinci Code is so simple, it stands out in sharp relief, and stimulated a huge swath of the general public to read and talk about this one basic idea at the same time. A more nuanced and thoughtful book might be too subtle or perhaps too complex to make such a big splash - not everyone would necessarily be struck by the same aspect of it.

-->6 margad:

>>A more nuanced and thoughtful book might be too subtle or perhaps too complexFoucault's Pendulum presents itself here, does it not?

so amancine, can we have a comparison of The Da Vinci Code and Foucault's Pendulum?

Dracula is way better written than the Da Vinci Code, which although it does have some interesting ideas in it is really a pile of tosh.

Margad, your comments about the addition of a feminine principle to Christian theology are most fascinating, but I feel the Da Vinci Code is simply to weak to bear the weight of such critical insights. I'd be surprised if Dan Brown knew the meaning of the word 'theology'. But then maybe
I'm just a dreadful snob.:)

I'm thrilled that TWIW is being added to your TBR lists as a result of my review. It's really a great novel.

One of the interesting things about The Woman in White is Marian Halcombe - she is one of the great heroines in Victorian fiction. When all the men accept the situation she doesn't, she battles against her the odds.

In TWIW, Marian is the equal, if not more, to the men. This leads to an interesting 'relationship' between Fosco and Marian, while enemies, Fosco recognises her intelligence, her strength, she is his equal, the only person he acknowledges as such.

What is very open to comparison are the characters of Mina and Laura. They both conform to the Victorian idea of the 'pure' woman. Glyde and the Count desire to make these women theirs but are both doomed to fail - Dracula does not turn Mina, and Glyde cannot possess Laura (they is a question over where the marriage is ever consumated, Glyde can only get Laura's money if there is no heir - John Sutherland discusses this in 'Why doesn't Laura tell her own story?")

The narrative structure of both novels was a well-accepted structure in the the 19th century, indeed, the episolotary novel can be traced back to the first 'modern' novel in England - Samuel Richardson's Pamela. His subsequent novel, Clarissa, introduced the idea of the multiple viewpoint by having letters sent by a number of individuals.

A key cultural difference the two novels is that the success of the TWIW is purely literary (there have been adaptations on stage and in film but it is impossible to do justice to the complexity of the novel in another medium) but much of the success of Dracula is down to other media. When we think about Dracula now, we are really thinking about the movie versions - the Count we acknowledge the suave sexual gentleman, not the walking corpse of the novel.

tomcatMurr -

I think I may chose something a little less complex than Foucault's Pendulum for my first "book report" here. ;0

TWIW is one of my favorites, also, btw. Partly because my dad recommended it to me, but mostly because it is just a great read.

Thanks for this, Murr. I enjoyed your comparison and insights into both books. I haven't read TWIW, but will certainly do so.

I enjoyed reading the review - found it really interesting. I've read (and enjoyed) both novels. I hadn't realised that TWIW had produced a whole new industry - I wasn't aware that that happened back then. There again I should know from reading Zola that a lot of what I mistakenly think of as modern actually existed in the 19th century (The Ladie's Paradise springs to mind here). I was gripped by both novels and TWIW remains one of my favourites.

Jargoneer is right to draw attention to the character of Marian Halcombe in TWIW. She is one of the strongest (and strangest) women in 19th Century fiction, and one of the most deliberately masculine. In many ways Collins was a proto feminst, as many of his novels concern the injustices meted out to women by the 19th century patriarchy.
However, I would hesitate to call either Dracula or TWIW an epistolary novel, as there are important differences between these two books and the epistolary novels of the 18th century.
1. Epistolary novels consisted mostly of letters, while D and TWIW consist mostly of other kinds of written documents such as diary entries, newspaper articles, sworn affadavits etc. Letters form only a small number of the different documents which make up the narrative strategy.

2. In epistolary novels, the letters are written from one character to another: the letter is intended for the eyes of another character in the novel. The reader of the novel is a kind of eavsedropper. In D and TWIW, the documents and texts are not primarily written for the eyes of another character within the novel, but are written for an outsider, perhaps a later historian investigating the vampires, or a judge who has to make a decision on the case of Laura Fairlie, and ultimately, of course, the reader of the novel. There is an implied reader, in the case of these novels, who is altogether diffrent from the implied reader of the letters in an epistolary novel.
The comment jargoneer makes in his last paragraph is especially interesting.

My goodness, when I saw this topic I had to jump in because I actually had to write a paper comparing these two books for my gothic novel class. I mostly focused on how these novels present and struggle with ideal femininity but there was certainly plenty to explore with that theme.

In TWIW I speculated that Laura and Marian are two halves of an "ideal woman." Laura is the sweet, ethereal super-feminine angel of the house while Marian is intelligent, strong but physically unappealing to the hero. It's like her masculine brain was at war with her feminine nature, which manifested itself as her physically "ugly" outward appearance. While Walter courts Laura, it's telling that not only does Marian play a central role, but the ending indicates (and I hope I'm not giving too much away), that Walter's happiness depended on both sisters being a part of his life. When comparing it to Dracula, I noted that while Van Helsing kept praising Mina for having "a man's brain but a woman's heart," she really could not give much useful information until put under hypnosis. It seemed like that if Mina's "male brain" was able to manifest itself without the dissociation brought on by hypnosis, she would be in the same predicament as Marian.

I also compared how Fosco in some ways is almost as much a vampire as Dracula because while he didn't suck blood per se, he drained the spirit out of his wife, drugged Laura and stole her life, and wrote in Marian's diary which was one of the creepiest moments in the whole book; it was as if he invaded her mind.

Wow, I could probably go on but in the interest of not reposting my entire 15 page paper I'll stop here. Needless to say, I was very happy to find this topic.

Wow, tomcat, it looks like great minds think alike!

I have The Woman in White on my bookshelf now and am looking forward to diving into it. Jane Smiley says in her book Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel that one of the great themes in literature is the question of how women should handle the tension between their desire for honest self-expression and personal growth and male society's desire for them to be sweet, compliant spouses and mothers. Both TWIW and Dracula appear to address this theme. It's interesting that they were both written by men.

Tomcat, your review is excellent! I really enjoyed reading it, and it brought back to my mind the pleasure I felt when reading The Woman in White, about a million years ago. I also agree with you about the far superior quality of Wilkie Collins' writing style as opposed to Bram Stoker's. Let's not forget, though, that Stoker began writing almost as a pastime, while working as manager for the great Shakespearean actor Henry Irving.
I enjoyed both books, although in a different way, and I am seriously considering a re-reading of TWIW, obviously thanks to your review!

#14 thanks for your additional comments: What a coincidence that we should choose to compare the same two books, out of all the million possible combinations....
Interesting what you say about Marian and Laura being composites of a female persona. I hadn't thought of that.
Don't be afraid of dumping your 15 page essay on the group. We like length here.

# 16 am seriously considering a re-reading of TWIW
#15 I have The Woman in White on my bookshelf now and am looking forward to diving into it.'
No greater praise for a reviewer than that. Thanks guys, I'm blushing here......
I'm working in something else for the group at the moment, but it's going to take some time. Meanwhile I am enjoying reading the other threads.

NocturnalBlue, I second Tomcat. If you don't feel like typing in the whole 15 pages at once, you could serialize it for us.

#14> or try to post them as a link.....we are all eagerly waiting to read them!

Alright, here it is. It was actually closer to 14 pages double spaced. I do discuss the endings of both books in depth (but I don't give away any big twists I don't think) so fair warning if you haven't read them yet. I stop discussing each individual book and start comparing the two about 2/3's of the way in. Enjoy.

It would not be an overstatement to say that novels of the Victorian era had a preoccupation with femininity. Discussions of female propriety and feminine autonomy informed many of these novels, usually in the personification of their female protagonists. The authors of these novels used tales ranging from the mundane to the fantastic to work out their own definitions of femininity in order to construct images of a “perfect” English heroine. While not all of the details are identical, there are some common traits shared by all the heroines in Victorian novels: they start out as innocent creatures who do not challenge male authority and perhaps most strikingly, they are somewhat asexual. From this description, one could speculate that the ideal English woman for authors such as Dracula’s Bram Stoker and Wilkie Collin’s The Woman in White is that of a young, quiet, beautiful woman who not only has no sexual experience, but has no desires or appetites at all. Yet in reading their respective novels, a reader sees that perhaps this image is oversimplified and does a disservice to the complexity of the novels and their authors.

For instance, in The Woman in White, Collins’s heroine Laura Fairlie may have fit this ideal image, but she is unable to marry the hero until she undergoes massive changes that cause her to deviate from the ideal. Most obviously, Laura is not only promised to, but she actually marries another man for a time before she weds Walter. While it is never stated explicitly in the book, it would be foolish to assume that a man as obsessed with self-gratification as Sir Percival Glyde would never have touched his wife. The author certainly implies to the contrary with a description of an incident that occurred the day before the wedding: Percival with a look of “odious self-complacency” said something to Laura that shocked her sensibilities so that her faded to a “deadly whiteness” and refused to tell her sister Marian what was even said (p. 167).

Such a reaction is completely in concert with Laura’s character as Collins presents her to us. This Laura is so frail and delicate that if she even had sex to begin with, a reader could imagine her being so overwhelmed by the experience that her heart would give out mid-coitus, adding an unwanted layer of tragedy to the story. Collins seems well aware of this problem and does much to gloss over it to keep the reader from having to focus too much on Laura’s married life. First, even though Laura is the axis on which the story turns, she never gets her own narrative. Second, Marian’s journal, the only document that describes Laura’s married life in any sort of detail, has a huge gap in between Laura’s wedding day on December 22 and her June 11th reunion with her sister, by which time Sir Percival seems far more preoccupied with purloining Laura’s estate rather than her virtue.

Displacing the chronicling of Laura’s marriage to Marian serves another purpose than just obscuring the fact that Laura has most likely lost her innocence before the book’s end. If not for Marian, the reader would be completely unaware that Laura even had a character of her own. Throughout the first part of Walter’s narrative, Laura is often locked in her room with a headache or embarrassment over her feelings for him. It is Marian who confesses Laura’s love for him and subsequently asks him to leave for everyone’s sake (p. 59). After Walter resumes the narrative, Laura is reduced to a diaphanous, child-like state, convalescing and making pale drawings while Marian plays the role of devoted mother to Walter’s hard-working father figure.

However, by the novel’s end when Laura recovers her life and marries Walter, Marian is conspicuously present. She even goes so far to say that she does not want to be parted from them “until the last parting of all” and more tellingly, says that she wants their children to say that they “cannot live without their aunt” (p.559). One could easily picture such a statement as a setup for a more tragic novel where the mannish prospectless older sister deeply insinuates herself into her sister’s charmed life with intent to destroy her happiness. However, Walter is quite happy at this proclamation and content to remain as close to Marian as he is to Laura. Perhaps this is Walter, and in turn Wilkie Collins, recognizing that the pretty face and heart of Laura is not enough; she is essentially only half a person and needs her older sister’s mind and spirit to complete her.

Is this to say that if Wilkie Collins made Marian wealthier and more beautiful then she would have been the ideal English woman? Most likely not, because while Collins seems to require his female characters be more than quiet innocents, he takes great pains to show us from the first moment Marian is introduced that there is something amiss. During this first introduction, Walter describes in great detail how she is physically masculine with the presence of hair on her upper lip and large manlike hands (p. 25). Her appearance seems to be a physical manifestation of rebellion; throughout the novel she decries her womanly weaknesses and generally shows a misogynistic attitude towards her own sex. It is as if her assertive, sharp mind was a masculine one by nature and therefore could not reside in a female body without altering it from a physical ideal.

Naturally, if Marian has such a masculine mind and misogynist attitude, she could not be an ideal English wife to Walter or anyone else for that matter. The force of her personality would probably overwhelm any Englishman striving to maintain his manhood. In fact, the only male who finds Marian attractive at all is the corpulent, villainous Count Fosco. Count Fosco seems to show a preference for strong-willed women such as Marian and the younger Eleanor Fairlie, as opposed to the “pretty, flimsy blonde” that is Laura Fairlie (p. 287). The Countess Fosco was known for being an opinionated woman who married her husband against her family’s wishes. Yet by the time the reader meets Eleanor, she is, according to Fosco, a “perfect, English wife” (p. 538). Apparently, Fosco’s definition of a perfect English wife is a completely subservient woman who rolls cigarettes and proudly claims that she will “wait to be instructed” on matters of importance such as whether crime causes its own detection (p. 203).

Obviously, the reader is not meant to agree with Fosco on such a matter, so how are we supposed to regard Marian, Eleanor and for that matter Laura in terms of how they represent womanhood? Eleanor Fosco is not only a hollowed out shell of a woman, but she is also directly opposed to the heroes, therefore the reader should be incredulous about Count Fosco’s claims about her being an ideal English wife. Laura is the physical ideal of the English woman, but her misfortunes corrupt her purity and innocence. One could argue that she gets that purity and innocence back by through her “social, moral and legal” death when Fosco steals her identity and gives it to Anne Catherick and her “reparenting” by Walter and Marian when the three go into hiding in London. The argument would be perfectly valid, but it still does not explain why she has to enter into her marriage with Marian firmly at her side. Marian, while she is not meant to be subdued by the likes of Fosco, is certainly not meant to marry in her untempered form; Laura’s heart and femininity are necessary complements.

The Woman in White ends with a scene where the hero’s son is presented to him by a party that is not his wife. The presence of a son is vital to the denouement of the story. Laura’s troubles were a direct result of the fact that there was no male heir to Limmeridge House; the son is a narrative device that shows that this issue will not recur in the next generation. While the son is Walter and Laura’s, it is Marian that who presents young Walter Jr. to his father. While it seems odd at first, the logic of having Marian present the son is consistent with everything that has occurred beforehand. It continues the narrative sleight of hand that obscures the fact the delicate revirginized Laura had to have sex, albeit with a much more desirable partner, to create the child in the first place. By having Marian hold Walter’s son and present him as the heir to Limmeridge, Collins displaces this product of sexuality to the half of a wife that could handle its power.

By essentially giving Walter two half-wives, Wilkie Collins seems to describe an ideal English woman as someone with both Marian’s masculine brain and a Laura’s feminine heart. If he had combined the two, he would have created Dracula’s heroine Mina Harker. However, even though Mina seems doubly blessed, she is victimized by the predatory Dracula in the same fashion as her feminine-brained, feminine hearted best friend Lucy Westenra.

Early in the novel, four of the five heroes give blood transfusions to the doomed Lucy, including her fiancé Arthur Holmwood. At her funeral service, Arthur, unaware that the other men all gave blood to Lucy, claims that the blood transfusion makes him feel as if he married her before her death (p. 225). This strikes Professor Van Helsing as beyond ironic because if Arthur’s claim about his symbolic union with Lucy is true, then this ideal of an Englishwoman is indeed a symbolic slut (p. 227). Even if Van Helsing knew at the time about Lucy’s fleeting desire to marry three men, he would have not regarded her promiscuous and impure, symbolic or otherwise (p. 81) because such a musing was quickly dismissed as heresy and she did not consciously act on it.

When Lucy becomes a vampire though, she becomes the polar opposite of the model of Victorian purity. Before she even says a word, Dr. Seward notices that her hair is now dark which physically removes her even further from the blonde innocent she was in life (p. 273). In fact, the word used repeatedly to describe this new lustful Lucy is “voluptuous,” which derives from the Latin word voluptas meaning “pleasure.” The word is fitting in both sound and sense; speaking it is rather indulgent. There is an extravagance of syllables to the word and to even utter it, the speaker must lick her teeth, smack her lips, then purse them into a kiss; all these are sexually provocative gestures. The use of that word plus her repeated attacks on children show that the sexuality of vampire Lucy is one of insatiability—she destroys life rather then creates it. When she beckons Arthur to “come to her,” it is easy to see why all the men are repulsed: she literally and metaphorically seeks to devour them (p. 274).

It is no wonder that when it appears that Mina is going to succumb to Lucy’s fate, the men all become determined to chase Dracula back to his homeland in order to destroy him. However, it could be argued that Mina would not have been threatened if she was not isolated from the men’s quest to destroy Dracula in the first place. Mina, like Lucy, is presented as an ideal of English womanhood. Although she is employed as a knowledgeable assistant schoolteacher, she is still presented as comfortably innocent and asexual. However, if Stoker truly thought innocence was ideal for Mina, then he would not have so obviously shown that keeping Mina innocent would be so disastrous. Jonathan Harker repeatedly makes statements in his journal about how he’s glad that Mina’s part in the adventure is done and that it is better she does not have to deal with the troubles with Dracula. These claims are interspersed with observations about how Mina’s complexion is changing and her sleep is being troubled exactly the way Lucy’s was. The reader is silently yelling at Jonathan to stop being so ignorant about Mina’s behavior and for Mina to stop demurely accepting her husband’s desire for her to stay clear of the Dracula problem and tell him about her nighttime troubles.

But in a novel so concerned with the sweetness and purity of its female protagonists, why would Stoker insinuate that Mina should be corrupted by awareness of Dracula’s power and be part of the plot to stop him? Perhaps the answer lies in Van Helsing’s description of Mina as having “a man’s brain…and a woman’s heart” (p. 302). Van Helsing has a great deal of respect for Mina’s intelligence, praising her whenever he gets a chance and even going so far as to ask her for her perception of Dracula’s motivations for fleeing London and releasing the grip he has on her mind. However, this man’s brain is still bound to a woman’s heart, with all its desires and weaknesses. And a woman’s heart is insufficient to protect Mina’s manly brain from Dracula’s power, compelling her to perform her own adulterous blood transfusion with the count.

Not wanting to waste a perfectly good mind in the struggle with Dracula, Van Helsing agrees to Mina’s request to hypnotize her. Although it is widely disproved now, it was believed a century ago that hypnotism can extract truths that a person hides, consciously or unconsciously. Much is made of the fact that Mina cannot remember what she tells Van Helsing when in a trance. This could be construed two ways: firstly, it shows the amount of power the hypnotizer has over his subject, which creates a strange connection between the heroic Van Helsing and the villainous Dracula. Van Helsing only uses this power to dissociate Mina’s male brain from her female heart so that she can aid the heroes without dealing with the barrier of her femininity. One could argue that if Mina’s mind was fully able of expressing itself without hypnotism, it would overpower her female heart, resulting in a masculine appearance and misogyny much like Marian Halcombe’s in The Woman in White, which would destroy her claim to ideal womanhood. (It is now known that hypnotism makes a mind more malleable instead of more truthful. To assume that the author had any actual knowledge of hypnotism would not only put him decades ahead of his time, but would add an unwanted layer to the story where Van Helsing would be using the hypnotic trance to manipulate and overpower much Dracula, uncomfortably blurring the line between hero and villain).

But does Mina have the best claim to ideal womanhood? True much of the information she gives to Van Helsing and the others is through hypnosis, but after her “adulterous” encounter with Dracula she is has strong awareness of what he did to her and what her fate could be. Like Laura Fairlie, her pure heart gets a stain before she achieves her happy ending. Like Marian Halcombe, Mina is knowledgeable about the dangers and evil that surrounds her, meaning she cannot claim innocence via her mind’s lack of knowledge about the more unsavory aspects of the world.

This ambiguity and contradiction about the place of female innocence is brought to further light in Dracula’s own concluding “baby scene.” Unlike in The Woman in White, a male heir is not vital for the resolution of the story because the trials of the heroes have absolutely nothing to do with the inheritance of property. Dracula is a story about the threatening power of sexuality, therefore the showcasing of a child, the product of sexuality, seems to be an odd choice for a happy ending. Moreover, when the child is presented to his father Jonathan Harker by Van Helsing, Jonathan muses to himself about how the child has the name and the spirit of the deceased Quincey Morris, as well as the names of all the men that fought against the evil Count (p. 485). In one sense, Jonathan Harker shares his son’s paternity with four other men, giving Mina the (perhaps unintentional) symbolic promiscuity that had already bestowed upon Lucy.

It definitely seems odd that two novels with such fixations on female innocence, both sexually and in regards to knowledge of the world, would have the innocence of the heroines taken from them on all counts. Of course Dracula more obviously appears to regard sexuality as a destructive force, but the The Woman in White does not look upon it much more favorably. Before the ending scene with Walter and Laura’s son, the only characters that express sexuality at all are Sir Percival, Mrs. Catherick and Count Fosco. Sir Percival’s and Mrs. Catherick’s, while crude and about instant gratification, are never the most threatening aspects of their characters.

Count Fosco however, could almost be viewed to be a predator in the manner of Dracula. His presence both stimulates and reviles Marian, which is expressed quite well in the scene where his kisses her hand. Fosco senses a life force in her much like he must have seen in Eleanor before he married her. The fact that Collins made Fosco the one obese character is rather telling: this is a man that has insatiable appetites. He derisively calls Laura a “poor flimsy pretty blonde” (p. 287) largely because he senses that she could not sustain him physically or emotionally. She is pale and small, someone Fosco could overpower with his mere breath; there is no energy or blood to feed on, so to speak. Eleanor Fosco may have had Marian’s presence once, but she clearly is not much more than a pale imitation of the woman she used to be. Marian, however, stimulates him intellectually, emotionally and possibly even sexually. The postscript Fosco writes in Marian’s journal, with it’s exclamations of “Delightful!” and “Stupendous!,” almost has an orgasmic glee to it because he finally is able to conquer this woman he found so formidable (p. 300).

Perhaps that is why Dracula and Count Fosco are the most threatening figures in their respective stories: these are men that threaten to consume everything around them. Dracula may have a preference towards women, but the men certainly have reason to fear him. In the scene with the three vampires, Dracula warns them away from Jonathan Harker claiming that Harker is “his,” (p. 55). Harker himself is driven to the brink of insanity by his experiences in Castle Dracula, a victim of the Count’s efforts to trap and emasculate him. It is also implied that Renfield, who himself has a propensity to consume the life of small animals, lost his mind before he lost his life to Dracula’s machinations. In The Woman in White Fosco overpowers Sir Percival, reducing him to a cartoon villain, forever telling him to stop losing his temper and to follow his orders. While Sir Percival’s motives are more directly opposed to those of Walter, Marian and Laura, he finds himself consumed by a fire over one hundred pages before the end of the story, leaving Fosco behind for the climactic showdown with Walter in the end. Even when Fosco meets Frederick Fairlie, who disowned his sister Eleanor because of her marriage to him, he manages to overwhelm the man.

If the men have such trouble in the presence of such voracious villains, then no wonder they feared for the women they love. In Dracula this is far more obvious, with Lucy and Mina succumbing to the Count’s advances presumably due to their feminine weaknesses. But Count Fosco is just as much a vampire as Dracula in many ways: he puts Laura Fairlie into a drug-induced hypnotic-like trance with the intention of stealing her life, he has consumed the spirit and vitality of his “perfect English wife,” and he even penetrates and violates a weakened Marian by writing in her journal, figuratively taking hold of her mind much the way Dracula took hold of Mina’s.

However, it is important to note that the two women that Dracula and Fosco do not completely devour are Mina and Marian respectively. Marian is weakened not by anything Fosco did to her, but by a fever brought about by standing out in the rain eavesdropping, and even then she recovers only to help bring Laura back to health after their forced separation. Mina manages to use the result of Dracula’s attack on her to help the men track him to the castle so they can vanquish him. And there is also the happy ending for Mina and Laura/Marian embodied in the birth of sons, the results of sexuality at its procreative best.

This is why it would be far too simplistic to say that Bram Stoker and Wilkie Collins believe that an ideal English woman is an innocent, submissive, almost asexual beauty. If anything, these authors seem to be ambivalent about what they believe an English woman should be. On one hand, a woman should be pure sexually and psychologically, but they acknowledge that such innocence would have dire consequences. So then it would be better if a woman is smart, assertive and knowledgeable about the world, but not too much because then the woman would become too masculine and would need to be tempered by a feminine heart. Perhaps the passage where Bram Stoker describes Jonathan’s encounter with the female vampires as “thrilling and repulsive” is most telling. Stoker and Collins both seem to recognize there is a fine line between desire that is nurturing and sustaining, and desire that is destructive and consuming. They also both believe that not only are women more susceptible to the vagaries of desire, but are also capable of either inspiring or destroying the men they love when that desire is awakened. Therefore a perfect English woman is one who not only has a man’s brain and a woman’s heart, but is able to use each at the appropriate time in order to keep not only her desires, but the desires of the man she loves, from crossing that dangerous line between passion and destruction.

This is fascinating, NocturnalBlue. It seems to be a human truth that both women and men function better if they incorporate elements of both sexes' traditional qualities into their personalities. The Victorian era, when both of these novels were written, was a period when the culture valued a much stronger stereotyping of male and female roles and personalities than most of us in Western culture do today, so it is very interesting to see male writers realizing the necessity of women incorporating "male" qualities into their personalities in order to be healthy, not just as human beings, but as women.

I am trying to think of a novel that does the same thing for men, showing that they need "feminine" qualities in their personalities to be psychologically healthy, but I am coming up blank. There must be some, but it may be that because the feminine has been traditionally considered less valuable than the masculine, it is more threatening to consider this theme in reverse.

Great review, NocturnalBlue. You make many fine points.
It's important to remember why so many Victorian writers focussed on women and their role: most of their readers were women. Writing about women rather than about men meant more chance of commercial success in the highly competitive and lucrative world of Victorian publishing.

Another point which struck me while I was reading your review is that it is noteworthy how many Victorian novels have at their centre created or artificial families. Our stereotype of the Victorians was that they were obsessed with family. Socially and economically the family was the prime unit. However, their literature abounds in images of families created by mutual consent rather than by bloodties. Marian, Walter, Laura, is one example. Mr Jarndyce, Esther and Ada Clare spring to mind as another. In Dombey and Son, Florence forms a family unit with the inhabitants of the Wooden Midshipman.
Mmmm. There could be master's thesis in here somewhere...

As I mentioned in an earlier post there is critical debate about whether Glyde and Laura consumate their marriage. I don't have the novel at hand but there are suggestions that Laura is pure when she marries Walter. Whether this purity is physical or spiritual is open to debate, but it should be remembered that Glyde can only get hold of Laura's fortune if there is no heir.

TWIW is a social novel to a large extent as well, Collins was effectively pointing out the legal difficulties women faced in Victorian England. English law disenfranchised women, and Collins was campaigning for this change. (It is worth remembering the 'modern' relationships Collins had in his private life).

The idea of sexuality in Dracula is intriguing. Some critics have suggested that Stoker wrote the novel while suffering from syphillis. While we see Lucy as becoming sexualised, and the possibility of Mina and Harker succumbing also (re Harker and Dracula's brides), Dracula himself remains repellent. Reading the novel now we are apt to skip over this, and view Dracula in the image of Christopher Lee, while in truth he is closer to Count Orlok from 'Nosferatu'. He is not a lover, he is the plague.

Interesting insights! George Eliot and Georges Sand and some of the other women who had eccentric marriages spring to mind, but the precise details and dates escape me at the moment. The Victorians were certainly family-obsessed - but wasn't there also a certain amount of experimentation going on at the fringes? Or was that a slightly earlier period?

Regarding Dracula being repellent - for a great many women of that time, sex itself was repellent. They were not very healthy, for one thing, with the tight corseting, etc.

#20, NocturnalBlue, outstanding review! I quite enjoyed reading it. It gave me a lot of food for thought. Thank you!

This is a fascinating thread! I should definitely pick up The Woman in White the next time I'm in the mood for a good dramatic plot-twister.

Margad: there was DEFINITELY a lot of experimentation going on at the fringes. Michael Mason's excellent studies The Making of Victorian Sexuality and The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes do a great job of outlining the incredibly complex and multifaceted sexual world of Victorian England. Liberals, Swedenborgians, social reformers, medical professionals - there were so many different practices and perspectives going on.

I think obsession with alternative ways to form families (and think about all the Victorian novels involving orphans) are part & parcel of obsession with a traditional family...because if the family unit defines you, then the question of what would happen if you were divorced from it becomes infinitely intriguing.

Thanks for confirming my vague impression, Emily. I'll put Michael Mason on my list of references for the next time I'm in a Victorian mood. I went through a phase of being fascinated with even very bad Victorian novels, and I have a small collection of period etiquette books (not yet cataloged). The intense repressiveness of the society had a way of illuminating eternal human truths, perhaps because what is essentially human can't be stamped out. Trying to seems to make it just spring up stronger than ever.

Having now read The Woman in White, I have reread this thread, and it is more fascinating than ever.

NocturnalBlue, your insight that Laura and Marian are like two halves of the same woman, both of which were needed to make a complete spouse for Walter, reminded me of the classic virgin/whore split. Laura is, as you point out, extremely virginal. And while Marian is certainly no loose woman, I was struck by the scene in which Walter first sees her. Marian is standing with her back to him, and he is attracted by her figure, until she turns around, and he sees her unattractive face. (Collins never says what is unattractive about it, or if he did, I missed it.) Is there a hint here that there is something inherently lusty about Marian that must be suppressed?

Perhaps this goes some way to explaining why Marian feels so insulted by Count Fosco's admiration for her. While it is understandable that the sensible and intuitive Marian would not be attracted so such an unscrupulous man, his admiration for her never crossed the line to harassment, so her revulsion at the idea that he would admire her seemed a bit over-the-top to me. However, perhaps Marian sensed that by admiring her rather than Laura, Fosco implied that she was that other type of woman.

Dinnertime. More later.

It also struck me how constantly Marian refers to herself as handicapped by her female mind. It reminded me of the way Queen Elizabeth I would talk about being just a weak woman. Perhaps for both the fictional Marian and the real Elizabeth, this was a way of deflecting criticism for being overly assertive? They called attention to their gender and claimed to be weak just as they were about to display their strength.

margad,
In the real Elizabeth, I'd believe that, but not in Marian, and no that is only a gut reaction, not an analysis as I can't exactly analyze why I feel that way. Just vibes. Only that I don't think Marian was someone that bothered with prevarication, she was too direct.
Although as far as Elizabeth I was concerned, I suspect it was a well-honed trait that had some genetic roots and not entirely natural to her.

I believe also some small amount of facial hair was mentioned on Marian...ahh...I had to find the description.
"The lady's complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache. She had a large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw; prominent, piercing, resolute brown eyes; and thick, coal-black hair, growing unusually low down on her forehead." p.35 in my B&N copy.

Since the fair and pale was considered so attractive all of the above would have been the opposite side of Laura's "coin".

It seems odd to me that Marian would have so little self-knowledge, since she was so sharp about other things. The description you quote, Cateline, emphasizes how masculine she appears, foreshadowing her particularly intelligent and capable "masculine" behavior (as contrasted with Laura's "feminine" emotional and mental frailty). I agree, Marian was extremely direct in other ways, so it seems all the more strange that she would so constantly mischaracterize herself as being impaired because she supposedly thinks like a woman. I would be more inclined to expect her to feel defensive about her "masculine" characteristics.

I had forgotten Marian had so much facial hair. This is interesting, because I read an article sometime in the past few years saying that women with higher testosterone levels that average (which could be reflected in more facial hair) tend to be more assertive and have stronger sex drives than other women. I think the study involved women lawyers who specialized in litigation. Marian would have been good at that, don't you think?

The only thing I can come up with regarding Marian's lack of self-knowledge would be her almost cloistered existence. To my eye she seems to have almost turned in on herself intellectually and channeled her whole existence to the protection of the frail Laura.
Personally Laura irritates me. I cannot see for the life of me the reasoning behind the great love Marian and Walter had for her. But I shouldn't expect "reason" to enter the picture I know. Walter did say towards the end that he did not include many extraneous (to the story line)happenings, so I can hope that Laura was more than she appears in the book. But I have to think that after any length of exposure to Laura, boredom would gnaw at a relationship with her.

Regarding what you mention about testosterone levels etc, that could explain her extreme reaction to Fosco. In spite of his dubious past and oily appearance, he was a man that lived life to the fullest, and I am sure the sexual vibes he put out were quite strong. Whether Marian wanted to or not she responded on some level, but her conscious mind was repelled by him at the same time.

I think Marian would have been good at whatever career she chose, and the more argumentative the better. LOL

Yes, Laura drove me bananas! The strength and persistence of Walter's infatuation for her made it hard for me to really respect him. While he was a kind and considerate man, it seemed to me his affection for Laura resembled the way a person would feel about a child, or even a pet, not a wife. Thus NocturnalBlue's theory that both women were required, symbolically, to form a single whole woman who could serve as a suitable partner for Walter, or any well-rounded man. Or, possibly, Marian and Walter served as mother and father to the childlike Laura - NocturnalBlue reminds us that it is Marian, not Laura, who presents the baby to Walter.

Yes, Fosco definitely put out sexual vibes. Possibly, his great size was supposed to remind us (in a repellent way) of his physical nature.