Content Warning: Blood, animal cruelty, sexual assault.
‘She wants blood, and blood she must have or die’ – this is one of my favourite passages from Bram Stoker’s 1897 masterpiece, Dracula. (And there are several!) So, let’s set the scene. After a series of sleepwalking episodes, Lucy, one of the main characters in the novel, is left mysteriously exsanguinated: she’s been drained of most of her blood – yet ‘the usual anaemic signs’ couldn’t be found when the blood was analysed. So, one of Lucy’s admirers, Dr Seward, who Lucy had rejected as a suitor earlier, along with his mentor, Dr Van Helsing, decide to perform what Dr Seward calls a ‘ghastly operation’: they give her a blood transfusion. And then three more, all from different donors. Blood is highly symbolic in gothic literature, and especially in this novel. But let’s focus on these transfusions – were they common in Victorian England? What was going on in medicine at the time? In any case, these acts aren’t just medical interventions—they’re intimate, binding, sexual, and reveal a lot about 19th-century culture, morality, and sexuality – plus medicine, of course. In this Halloween special, we’ll uncover how these transfusions, along with Dracula’s bite, give us a window into the many anxieties about science at the time and the fears of a society terrified of female empowerment and sexuality. Let’s get into it.
Part 1 – The History of Blood Transfusions
The Early Days
Before we can understand the meanings of transfusion in Bram Stoker’s world, let me briefly introduce the history behind blood transfusions, which start in the early 17th century, when the English physician William Harvey first discovered how blood circulated in the body. (Until then, Galen’s theory of how blood worked, which was based on a mistaken understanding of the heart’s anatomy, had hardly ever been questioned.) Harvey understood that the heart behaved as a muscle, as a pump, and mapped how the blood circulated in the body, creating the physiological basis for people to imagine something like a blood transfusion. The body was starting to be understood through a mechanical framework, as a machine. But don’t think that the humoral theory was completely abandoned. Harvey still understood the blood as being a ‘store of life’, full of spirits, having nearly magical properties. As many other doctors of the time, he tried to integrate new medical discoveries into an old models of conceptualising the body. People weren’t ready to let Galen and Hippocrates go just yet. And this, personally, is one of the things that I find most interesting about the history of medicine; this coexistence of change and continuity, the mix of old and new. Understanding how blood circulated was a big shift, though.
Still, Harvey’s work wasn’t automatically and universally accepted in the early 17th century, so it wasn’t until half a century later that the procedure was first attempted. Physicians in England and France were essentially in a race to see who would perform a blood transfusion first, with Jean-Baptiste Denis, a doctor to King Louis XIV, being recognised as the first one to do it in 1667. Denis transferred the blood of a lamb to a teenage boy suffering from a fever. Yes, you heard that correctly! The first experiments with blood transfusions involved transferring blood between animals and, later, from animals into humans. Unsurprisingly, the boy showed signs of blood incompatibility – but survived. (I’m skipping over a lot here for the sake of brevity, including transfusions between animals, with the first attempts probably being performed by Francis Potter, a clergyman who wrote that the Pope was the Antichrist, and who was friends with Harvey. Later, the famous scientist Robert Boyle, along with the physician Dr Richard Lower, performed several cruel and honestly disgusting experiments with animals until, in 1666, a successful blood transfusion between dogs was performed in England. And, if you’d like to know more, I suggest checking out Paul Craddock’s book, Spare Parts, which is a great read.)
Ok, let’s go back to the lamb-to-human transfusion performed in Paris. I know that transfusing animal blood to humans sounds weird to us, but remember that it was believed that when we ate, the food was concocted in the stomach and later, in the liver, transformed into blood. So, if food essentially became blood, and people ate animals, why couldn’t an animal’s blood be assimilated by a human body? It wouldn’t have sounded that absurd if you’re thinking along these lines. (Also, if you’re interested in digestion and history – I have a couple of videos on that that you might like.) Also, you might be wondering – why a lamb, specifically? Well, we’re still very much in a time in which the humoral theory was central to how the body was understood. Blood was one of the four humours, and blood-letting was one of the main ways of redressing humoral balance and treating illness. Denis’ patient, the boy, had been bled – to remove the ‘bad’ blood, and given new blood. Lambs, because of their symbolic connection to Christ, were considered the purest animals, which explains this choice. The same happened in England, when, later that year, a similar blood transfusion was made by Dr Lower, on a man called Arthur Coga, a ‘lunatic’ who agreed to the experiment and who wished to write down his experiences in Latin, apparently, that was very important to him – I know, this video is just getting weirder and weirder.
According to Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist who wrote down everything he experienced, from the most boring and mundane to the most extraordinary, and who witnessed the experiment with Arthur Coga, the choice of animal was based on religion. He was told at the occasion that sheep’s blood has a symbolic power linked to the blood of Christ, since he is the Lamb of God. (‘Sanguis ovis symbolicam quandam facultatem habet cum sanguine Christi, quia Christus est agnus Dei.’, Arthur Coga wrote.) Later, it was reported that Coga was turning into a sheep, in a letter to the Royal Society, signed by ‘Agnus Coga’, or Coga the Lamb. And I’ll come back to this idea of people turning into animals, don’t worry. Again, I’m skipping over a lot here and I agree that this might be my weirdest text so far. In any case, many scientists who were experimenting with blood transfusions had questions about how the donor’s blood might influence the recipient. And, stick me on this tangent, because I promise it has to do with Dracula.
For instance, Robert Boyle was interested in how blood differed according to gender, age, and race. In the humoral understanding of the body, this made sense, as blood was believed to contain characteristics of each person. This was an incredibly influential idea – not only was it the basis for a lot of racism, eugenics, and misogyny, but it was the reason why things like wet nursing was so controversial. Ok, I might have lost you there. But breast milk was thought to be made of the woman’s blood – and so a mother would pass her characteristics to her offspring through her milk. A wet nurse would have a completely different influence, as her blood and therefore milk were of a different composition. Let’s go back to Boyle, who was assisting Dr Richard Lower in his experiments transferring blood between dogs. Boyle was curious to know if a ‘fierce’ dog who received the blood of a ‘cowardly’ dog would become more tame. This is what the early days of blood transfusion were like; this was the kinds of questions people were asking themselves.
Now let’s go back to Dr Denis, in Paris, and his transfusions between animals and humans. Could an ‘interspecies’ transfusion cause a change of species? In the novel, Dracula transforms into a bat and a wolf, which sounds fantastical, right? But the idea of changing species because of blood was seriously being discussed. But if you believed blood contained the essence of someone’s nature, would that be such a crazy question to ask? I mean, a Danish anatomist, Thomas Bartholin, wrote in 1673 how an epileptic girl, who had been given cat’s blood (apparently the ‘best’ blood to treat epilepsy), started exhibiting cat-like behaviours, such as climbing on houses’ roofs, jumping and scratching herself like a cat might. Another physician, George Acton, had a whole list of which animal’s blood would be best to treat each ailment, and he mentions cat for epilepsy, by the way. People were also worried about religion – would a Catholic receiving blood from a Protestant change beliefs? I realise these may all sound like very far-fetched questions. But these were the things 17th-century scientists were discussing, two centuries before Dracula. And, although, as we’ll see, the Victorian era brought with it much of the modern world, old beliefs were still a key part of how people understood the world around them.
Let’s continue our story. After a few other cases, the French Dr Denis treated a ‘mad’ man who suffered from ‘excessively warm blood’ – which is a way of saying he was too lusty and was constantly cheating on his wife, besides being described as a lunatic. He also received two doses of ‘gentle’ blood, this time from a calf. But, even though he wasn’t cured, the man refused a third transfusion. And then, he died. The cheating husband, not the doctor. Blood transfusions were still regarded with suspicion, with many French doctors being against them, plus Denis had lots of detractors. He had studied in the forward-thinking university of Montpellier, a rival to the much more conservative Faculty of Medicine of Paris. For ‘conventional’ doctors, following Galen, transfusing blood must have sounded crazy; keep in mind that bloodletting was a very common treatment – blood transfusions must have sounded like an inversion of the way things ‘should’ be.
And so, after his patient’s death, Denis was charged with having killed him – even though that transfusion didn’t even take place. But the widow had said it did… The plot thickens! As it turns out, she had been bribed by Denis’ rivals to say that the transfusion had indeed happened. The doctor was exonerated. As it happened, the wife had given her cheating husband arsenic… I mean, who am I to judge her?! Still, this all gave blood transfusions a terrible reputation – and they were already contentious to begin with. The very conservative Faculty of Medicine in Paris forbade transfusing blood, and a decade later, it was banned by Rome through a papal edict signed by Pope Innocent XI.
Speaking of popes, you may have heard a story about Pope Innocent VIII in 1492 having paid three Jewish boys to have their blood taken and transfused into him, or in other versions drinking the blood directly, but it’s very likely that this is a myth. In any case though, you can already see how blood having magical, life-saving properties, is nothing new. And the same goes for drinking blood and using blood in medical remedies; which is another subject entirely, which I won’t get into here, but the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, who I seem to mention in pretty much every video, did write that gladiators’ blood had medical properties. Ok, end of tangent, let’s leave both the gladiators and the pope alone and go back to the 19th century.
Things were not looking great for the new procedure, and, for nearly a century and a half, it fell into obscurity and was virtually abandoned by physicians and experimenters. Although some people, such as Michael Ettmüller, a German physician, still wondered about the potential of blood transfusions not just as a life-saving measure, but a potential treatment for illness. Who knows, maybe it could even prolong life? See how we’re going back to Dracula territory here? Anyway, let’s jump forward a bit.
In the 19th Century
Enter James Blundell (1790-1878), a London physician who, in 1818, made the first blood transfusion between humans. (And just as a side note, he was inspired by the work of Dr John Henry Leacock, who, after experimenting on cats and dogs, suggested that blood transfusions be limited to members of the same species – great thinking there.) Of course, not only was transfusing blood between animals and humans dangerous, not to mention unbelievably cruel to the animal, but just imagine the logistics of tying a screaming farm animal to a table so that the procedure could be done! (Also, just as a sidenote, and obviously I’m not condoning animal cruelty of any kind here, but people did believe that animals couldn’t feel pain. Even the philosopher Rene Descartes wrote about this; since animals had no minds, just bodies, reactions which we would see as expressions of pain were just a natural consequence of ‘matter acting upon matter’. What a horrible thought.)
Let’s go back to Blundell and his human-to-human transfusions, in which the donor consented to the whole thing in the first place. Blundell worked as an obstetrician, and his patients were mostly women suffering from postpartum haemorrhage. He noted that sometimes fevers, pains and dark urine followed these transfusions – which we would now see as signs of blood incompatibility. And some of them, sadly, died. So, unsurprisingly, even though Blundell brought blood transfusions back as a possible treatment, he wrote in 1829 how transfusion should only be used when there was ‘no hope’ of saving the patient otherwise.
Using humans improved chances of the blood being compatible, sure, but there were four main problems still: 1) the lack of knowledge about blood groups 2) the lack of antiseptic measures to avoid contamination 3) the best tools to use (people experimented with quills, silver, brass, and glass pipes, and syringes, which was what Blundell did) and 4) the fact that blood clotted quickly. This is mentioned in Dracula, too. In Blundell’s case, one of the few things to do was to make the time the blood was outside of the body as quick as possible. That’s why in the 19th century most transfusions were performed directly from one person to another – blood banks as we have them today would be virtually an impossibility. In the novel, Van Helsing, the eccentric but brilliant doctor trying to defeat Dracula, mentions a way of dealing with the blood clotting, by defibrinating it – so, taking the protein fibrin out. In any case, when Dr Van Helsing is trying to save Lucy – the girl who had been attacked by Dracula on several occasions and left with very little blood in her body, he says that the first blood donor to Lucy – her fiance, Arthur – had blood that was ‘too pure’ for that. We’ll come back to this in a bit.
This all meant that, by the late 19th century, fewer than 350 cases of blood transfusion between humans had been recorded. Having said that, several of them were performed at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and talked about in the press in the years before the novel was written. And, in Ireland, Dr Robert McDonnell was trying out ways of removing the protein fibrinogen from the blood, which could prevent the blood from clotting – again, that is mentioned in the novel. Still, by the time Bram Stoker was writing Dracula, blood transfusions were still very much experimental; scientists tried injecting people with air and even milk to see what happened – again, milk was believed to be essentially made from blood, so you can see the logic behind this. Clearly, transfusions were risky. They were used as a last resort, mainly in cases when a patient had lost so much blood that it was worth the risk – such as in the case of postpartum haemorrhages. Scientists of all kinds – biochemists, physicians, surgeons – were experimenting and trying to figure out the best way to do the procedure, especially the German Leonard Landois. Three years after the publication of Dracula, in 1900, the Austrian physician Karl Landsteiner, based on the work of people like Landois, described the chemistry of the blood. Blood could finally be classified into groups, essentially solving the issue of compatibility. But even then it took some time for group matching to be adopted and for blood transfusions to become like they are today. (And Landsteiner’s research was why he received a Nobel Prize in 1930.)
Going back to Lucy, who receives transfusions from four different donors in the book, she’s lucky not to have had a bad reaction. And, while researching for this text, I came across a really cool paper explaining Bayesian analysis, according to which Lucy’s blood type could be deduced as AB+, but would more likely be A+. Apparently, Lucy’s case is used to teach medical students, how cool is that? In any case, by solving the problem of clotting (by using anticoagulants like sodium citrate), knowing about blood groups (and later, in the 1940s, about the Rh factor), and introducing proper sterilisation (thanks to people like Joseph Lister and Louis Pasteur), things changed dramatically. But, when Bram Stoker, was writing Dracula, everything was much different.
And, while the novel doesn’t mention blood incompatibility, there’s much to analyse here. After several blood transfusions have left Lucy’s friends depleted, Dr Van Helsing exclaims: ‘What are we to do now? Where are we to turn for help? We must have another transfusion of blood, and that soon, or that poor girl’s life won’t be worth an hour’s purchase. You [Dr Seward] are exhausted already; I am exhausted too. I fear to trust those women, even if they would have courage to submit.’ By this, he means the maids who work at Lucy’s house, who are dismissed entirely as possible donors. They’re just silly, weak women. So, trying to save Lucy, Van Helsing says to one of her admirers: ‘A brave man’s blood is the best thing on this earth when a woman is in trouble. You’re a man, and no mistake. Well, the Devil may work against us for all he’s worth, but God sends us men when we want them.’ So, blood isn’t just about life; it’s about masculinity and male vitality.
Part 2: The Symbolism of Blood Transfusions
When the two doctors are trying to save Lucy, Van Helsing says: ‘There is not time to be lost. She will die for sheer want of blood to keep the heart’s action as it should be. There must be a transfusion of blood at once. Is it you or me?’, to which Dr Seward replies, ‘I am younger and stronger, professor. It must be me.’ The first choice of donor, though, ends up being Arthur, Lucy’s fiance, who Van Helsing describes as ‘so young and strong and of blood so pure that we need not defibrinate it.’ So… In the novel, not all blood is the same. And, even though Bram Stoker didn’t know about blood groups, there’s a certain hierarchy of blood, with the ‘purest’ coming from strong young men. Thinking of the transfusions in the book, they are described in quite vague terms – possibly because the author himself didn’t know too much about the procedure. This is what Van Helsing says:
‘… We are about to perform what we call transfusion of blood – to transfer from full veins of one to the empty veins which pine for him.’
Dr Seward then says that ‘with swiftness, but with absolute method, Van Helsing performed the operation.’ Again, he calls this a ‘ghastly operation’ and adds ‘I have not the heart to go through with the details’ – very convenient if the author is unsure of how blood transfusions were done!
Regardless of details though, the idea behind blood transfusions does reflect what people knew at the time. Stoker came from a family of doctors – three of his brothers were physicians and one of them even became the president of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland – and it’s likely that Stoker consulted them when working on Dracula. In any case, while there’s Victorian science and medicine in the novel, there’s a sense of technological progress and modernity, there’s also a lot of old beliefs and symbolism, too. Of course, the idea of consuming someone else’s blood to prolong life or to gain power is very ancient, and beings like vampires have a long history. If we’re thinking of the 19th century, John William Polidori’s novella ‘The Vampyre’ comes to mind, famously written as a result of a story competition involving Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Polidori and, of course, Mary Shelley, whose Frankenstein was born in the same occasion. The Vampyre is the basis for much of what we would come to associate with Dracula, too: his aristocratic origin, his power, and corrupting sexuality. Around 50 years later, ‘Carmilla’, by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was published, with other aspects of the vampire lore, such as how you defeat them by driving a stake through their heart and decapitating them. Of course, the most interesting aspect of this story is its queerness – the protagonist, a young woman, is both attracted and repulsed by the female vampire. And, as in Dracula and in The Vampyre, there’s a fear and a fascination with Eastern Europe. (There’s a lot to be said here about imperialism, race, and colonialism in the Victorian era, but I won’t get into that here – although I should mention that the way Romani people are represented in Dracula isn’t great.) Oh and if you haven’t read these stories, I highly suggest you do, they’re open access and I’ve linked them in the References.
‘The Blood Is the Life’
In these stories, the vampire is unnaturally kept alive (or ‘un-dead’) thanks to the blood of others. I mean, in Carmilla, the vampire was over two hundred years old! There’s also a lot of overlap here with myths surrounding the history of witchcraft, with people being accused of killing children for their blood – not to mention antisemitism, with the centuries of false accusations against Jewish people for commiting ritual murders of Christian children – again, for their blood. But let’s leave religion and magic out of the equation for a bit and go back to medicine. Let me tell you about another story that you might not have heard of, also published before Dracula, which explains a little bit of the symbolism behind it. I’m talking about Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1869 tale, Good Lady Ducayne. There’s nothing supernatural in it but it’s arguably just as chilling as any ‘proper’ vampire tale. A young girl, living in poverty with her mother and desperate to make some money, accepts a role as the companion of an old lady, who pays her generously to go with her to Italy and basically do nothing but read sometimes and enjoy the sunshine. Sounds too good to be true, right? Lady Ducayne is described as ‘a shrunken old figure in a gorgeous garment of black and crimson brocade, a skinny throat emerging from a mass of old Venetian lace, clasped with diamonds that flashed like fire’. So, far so creepy, right? Her character is described as the ‘indescribable horror of death outlived, a face that should have been hidden under a coffin−lid years and years ago’.
There’s something vampyric and unnatural about the fact that this lady is still alive, and the author writes that ‘People who live to be as old as she is become slavishly attached to life’. How is she still alive, you may be wondering? Well, she has an Italian doctor who travels with her, who ‘experimented with chemistry and natural science, and even alchemy’. Suddenly, the ‘mosquito bites’ the young girl was suffering from, plus a general weakness after several weeks of bad sleep, are explained. The doctor had been drugging her with chloroform and bleeding her in the night to inject his elderly patient with her young blood – the ‘mosquito bites’ were made by him. Ironically, he says of the made-up mosquito: ‘What a vampire!’. (And, sidenote, chloroform had started to be used only a few decades earlier, so this was very much ‘modern’ medicine at the time.) Luckily, the girl is saved by another doctor, a young handsome one, of course, who had just finished his studies and recognises the marks in her arms. Naturally, they end up getting married and become rich with the Lady’s money. What is so interesting about this story is that the idea of blood as a medical therapy is taken seriously; there’s nothing supernatural here. And an old kind of medicine (even if it relies on the ‘modern’ chloroform), a medicine based on alchemy, that is corrupt, closer to charlatanism than science, is vanquished by a new kind of medicine. Thinking back to Dracula, it’s not a coincidence that alchemy is mentioned here – as it’s esentially the art of transforming things. Plus, one of the great alchemical quests is the search for immortality. In the novel Dracula, it is said that ‘he [Dracula] was in life a most wonderful man. Soldier, statesman, and alchemist – which was the highest development of the science-knowledge of his time.’
In Lady Ducayne’s story – and it’s probably not a coincidence that her name brings the idea of decay into mind – what is ‘unnatural’ is the fact that, just like vampires, this old lady wishes to live longer than what is normal for humans. And, although blood was sometimes used as a remedy for specific conditions, Lady Ducayne isn’t suffering from any illness, she’s just old – she’s literally decaying. But in this story, there’s the idea of someone’s vitality, health, and youth being taken from them through their blood. Of course, the main difference here, besides the matter of the supernatural, is consent. In Dracula, Lucy’s friends donate their blood voluntarily, even if Dr Seward writes that ‘… the draining away of one’s blood, no matter how willingly it be given, is a terrible feeling.’ Of course, the poor young girl working for Lady Ducayne hasn’t consented to having her blood taken; she isn’t even aware of it, which is what makes the story so terrifying to read. In both cases, blood transfusions and young girls are central to the story – even if the blood flows in opposite directions, being given to Lucy and being taken from Lady Ducayne’s servant. In Lady Ducayne’s tale, medicine and technology allow for this ‘vampirism’ to occur; in Dracula, on the other hand, medicine is a force for good, it serves to counteract the vampire’s action of taking blood by giving back life to his victims, thanks to the generous blood donors. Whether blood transfusions are used for ‘good’ or for ‘evil’ can give us an insight into how the procedure was perceived, but also about how people felt about modernity and medicine in general.
In Dracula, the character Renfield, who is a patient in the mental asylum ran by Dr Seward, and who Dracula manipulates, keeps repeating ‘the blood is the life’. This is what he says:
‘..I used to fancy that life was a positive and perpetual entity, and that by consuming a multitude of live things […] one might indefinitely prolong life. […] The doctor here will bear me out that on one occasion I tried to kill him for the purpose of strenghtening my vital powers by the assimilation with my own body of his life through the medium of his blood – relying, of course, upon the Scriptural phrase, ‘For the blood is the life’.
The phrase comes from this biblical prohibition: ‘Only be sure that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is the life; and thou mayest not eat the life with the flesh.’ (Deuteronomy 12:23) Since Dracula is the opposite of all that is good and godly, this becomes ironic, not to say heretical. And, of course, blood-drinking brings to mind the ceremony of the Eucharist and drinking the blood of Christ through wine.
When, after Lucy’s death, Dracula attacks Mina – she’s Lucy’s best friend and the other female character in the novel, he makes her drink his blood, which is described as ‘the Vampire’s baptism of blood’. There’s a lot of religious symbolism in Dracula, but I’ll stop here. I just wanted to add, as we’re talking about drinking blood and immortality, that probably one of the biggest inspirations for all these myths is the story of the Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed (1560-1614), who was accused of having beaten and killed hundreds of young female servants to bathe in and drink their blood, so as to stay beautiful and young forever. The countess deserves her own video, but scholars have been arguing for a while now that these allegations were probably motivated by political and economic interests of other nobles, as she was an incredibly powerful woman. Still, it goes to show how the idea of drinking blood to live forever had become part of folklore throughout the centuries. By the 19th century, suffice it to say that the idea of blood as life-giving was shared by medical writers of the time, who, echoing William Harvey two centuries earlier, wrote of blood as a vital, almost magical substance. James Blundell wrote in The Lancet that, after a transfusion, a patient felt “as if life were infused into her body”. Another British physician, Charles Egerton Jennings, also advocated in favour of blood transfusions in his book Transfusion. Just like Blundell, he was also thinking particularly of women who had just given birth and lost too much blood. They had created life; it was only fair that they would receive some life-giving blood back, right? Let’s talk (even more) about gender.
Blood and Women in Dracula
There are two main female characters in Dracula. Lucy, who I mentioned earlier, is Dracula’s first victim. Dr Van Helsing and Lucy’s admirers – because in the novel she is beautiful and a bit flirty, so she has plenty of suitors – believe the only way to save her is through blood transfusions, donating their own blood. Her fate is in the hands of men. Again, Van Helsing briefly considers asking the maids for their blood, but quickly dismisses the idea. Dr Seward describes the scene like this: “I stood by to see my life-blood transfused into her veins.” There’s the idea of men sacrificing themselves for women, the Victorian belief that women were fragile and needed men for protection. And there’s something romantic about this idea; going back to Blundell and his postpartum patients, it was usually the husbands’ blood that was transfused to their wives; men were literally saving women from death through their male vitality. In Lucy’s case, she’s passive; she has no agency and is mostly unconscious or too weak to know what’s going on with her body. This dynamic mirrors broader Victorian medical practices in a way that is chilling, where women were often treated as passive recipients of care, overseen by male doctors who made decisions on their behalf. The paternalistic approach in “Dracula,” where Lucy’s fate is decided exclusively by the men, reinforces the belief that male intervention was essential for female survival. In stark contrast, Dracula’s bite corrupts, it’s full of violence and violation, it evokes sexual violence, with Dracula representing unrestrained, invasive male desire. This is what the count says as he attacks Mina yet again:
‘First, a little refreshment to reward my exertions. You may as well be quiet; it is not the first time, or the second, that your veins have appeased my thirst!’
It’s hard not to read this as sexual assault, especially as Dracula stakes his claim on Mina, saying:
‘And you, their best beloved one, are now to me flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful wine-press…’
Again, the connection between wine and blood is highlighted, mocking the religious connotation behind wine, too.
Plus, Dracula’s foreign origin—the fact that he is from Eastern Europe—adds another layer to the fear, and the Victorian anxiety about the “other.” There’s a lot here in terms of fears of contamination, with Dracula representing both a literal and metaphorical invasion. This is how Van Helsing describes Transylvania:
‘The very place where he has been alive, Un-Dead for all these centuries, is full of strangeness of the geologic and chemical world. […] Doubtless, there is something magnetic or electric in some of these combinations of occult forces which work for physical life in strage ways.’
Earlier in the novel, when Jonathan, Mina’s husband, was a prisoner at Dracula’s castle and planned on escaping, he wrote: ‘Away from the cursed spot, from this cursed land, where the devil and his children still walk with earthly feet!’. So, there’s an idea of mysterious, diabolic forces, but also of this place being stuck in an earlier period, before modern times.
But let’s go back to women. The other female character in the novel is Mina, who is Lucy’s best friend and eventually becomes a target of Dracula’s as well. Mina is a big contrast to Lucy. Unlike Lucy, who is passive, Mina plays a much more active role in the fight against Dracula. She plays an unglamourous, ‘secretarial’ role of sorts, typing everyone’s letters and journals, organising everything so that all characters can read each other’s accounts and learn how to defeat Dracula. Mina is arguably the perfect Victorian woman: she is devoted to her husband and deferential to men, she’s pretty and ‘pure’, she’s pious, but she’s also clever – yet not so much that it could be threatening to male authority. There’s some ’empowerment’ here, but not so much that would challenge the status quo. But perhaps Mina’s key trait is her faithfulness to her husband, her chastity. Lucy, on the other hand, is an object of desire for three men – four, if we include Van Helsing, and there are a few creepy moments with him! Lucy even writes to Mina of what a shame it was that a girl could only marry one man, and she had three lovely suitors! When Arthur, her fiance, first gives her his blood, he sees it as marriage: “the transfusion of his blood to her veins had made her truly his bride,” makes this explicit. So, this exchange of bodily fluids, blood transfusion, becomes a metaphor for sex. So much so that when the others donate blood too, they decide not to tell Arthur, so as not to make him jealous. Van Helsing says:
‘Nothing must be said of this [the other transfusions]. If our young lover should turn up unexpected, as before, no word to him. It would at once frighten him and enjealous him, too.’ Dr Seward agrees, adding that ‘…he [Arthur] felt since then [the transfusion] as if they two had been really married, and that she was his wife in the sight of God. None of us said a word of the other operations, and none of us ever shall. […] it was a sweet and comforting idea for him.’
Even Van Helsing, when he gives Lucy his blood, feels he committed adultery! And, later, when they end up having to tell Arthur what had happened, this is what Van Helsing says: ‘For her [Lucy] – I am ashamed to say so much, but I say it in kindness – I gave what you gave: the blood of my veins; I gave it, I who was not, like you, her lover, but only her physician and her friend.’ There’s a lot of anxiety here, especially around the idea of “polyandry”—a term used to describe a woman having multiple male partners, which was considered highly taboo in Victorian times, as you might expect. The idea that Lucy has received blood from multiple men introduces an implicit fear of a woman being “claimed” by several men, a concept that undermines Victorian ideals of female purity and monogamy. The secrecy surrounding Lucy’s multiple transfusions only makes this clearer. Arthur is at first unaware that other men have also given their blood to Lucy, which adds a layer of tension about Lucy’s purity being compromised. This dynamic challenges the idea of a woman’s body belonging exclusively to her husband, reflecting Victorian fears of women’s sexuality and them having multiple intimate connections.
Later in the story, when Mina is also attacked by Dracula, her experience differs significantly from Lucy’s. Unlike Lucy, Mina retains some level of autonomy even after being bitten, and her resistance to Dracula’s control is portrayed as a battle for her soul. Her salvation lies in her unwavering devotion to her husband, her religion, and her adherence to the moral expectations of Victorian society. Van Helsing and the others see her as both a victim and an asset—someone who, despite her affliction, remains aligned with the men’s goals. Mina’s struggle to resist Dracula’s influence symbolises the fight to maintain purity and moral strength, contrasting sharply with Lucy’s fate, which can be seen as a warning against vulnerability and lack of control. So, these blood transfusions are not just life-saving procedures exemplifying what modern medicine could do, but possessive acts, where each man symbolically stakes his claim over Lucy. So, blood is about life, but also male power and control, especially where women are concerned. (Though we could also talk about queer aspects of this, especially with the character Jonathan, but I’ll leave that for another day.) The Victorian era was a time of much change, including gender dynamics. The late 19th century saw movements advocating for women’s rights, yet Victorian-era beliefs held that women were inherently fragile and needed male strength to guide and protect them—especially regarding health and morality. Stoker’s depiction of the men trying to save Lucy reflects all this.
Unfortunately, though, despite the transfusions, Lucy eventually becomes a vampire. This transformation shocks her friends, perhaps especially because of her newfound aggression and independence; she’s monstrous. The fact that she’s preying on young children only makes this worse; she’s become the opposite of what a good woman should be: a caring mother. Lucy becoming a vampire can be read as the ultimate loss of male control over female bodies and female sexuality. Her transformation is terrifying because it represents her rejection of her former controllable self. The collective effort to destroy Lucy, significantly led by her fiance, Arthur, is all about the patriarchal need to reassert control. In Mina’s case, on the other hand, her femininity and sexuality are not a threat; she is kept under control. Ultimately, “Dracula” reflects the anxieties of its time— such as changing gender dynamics. The novel captures the fears of a patriarchal society striving to maintain control over women’s bodies, choices, and power. But, if there’s anxiety about gender, there’s also a lot about the fear and fascination with ‘the other’, and conflicting belief systems – about religion, science, medicine, and the coexistence of old and new.
Final Thoughts
In 1818, when Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was published, it was read as a cautionary tale about unchecked scientific and technological development, about the horrors that could happen not because of supernatural powers, but science itself. By the end of the century, with stories such as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and The Island of Dr Moreau, this was still very much a fear in people’s minds. Dracula is different, though. It reads to me as more conflicted. When Van Helsing is first trying to convince the others that they’re dealing with a vampire, he says: ‘Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are…? […] It is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all’. He asks, ‘A year ago which of us would have received such a possibility [the existence of vampires], in the midst of our scientific, sceptical, matter-of-fact nineteenth century?’ And yet, when thinking of what they had available to defeat Dracula, Van Helsing says: ‘…we have resources of science’.
In Dracula, blood is about power over life, and especially control over the female body. But, along with this symbolism, and its old history – including the connection with the humoral theory – blood transfusions stand out as something unambiguously good – not at all like in Lady Ducayne’s story. In Dracula, medicine symbolises modernity, and both are forces for good. The Victorian era brought with it a lot of innovation and progress – people were talking about magnetism, hypnotism, and electricity as new therapies that could revolutionise medical care. Blood transfusions were a part of that modernity. So, even though it might seem weird to have contemporary science – and by contemporary I mean late 19th-century – juxtaposed with all this symbolism and folklore, that’s exactly what the story is about. The coexistence and conflict between old and new – the new, experimental medicine exemplified by blood transfusions, and the old, outdated world of Count Dracula. For me, what makes this even more interesting is that the arena where this struggle takes place is the female body. It’s a story about saving Lucy and, later, Mina. So, there’s a lot here about gender roles, about femininity, purity, and chastity. Of course, I’ve only scratched the surface of the novel in this text, choosing to focus on blood transfusions; there’s so much more that could be said about Dracula, including the fascinating world of cannibalism in medicine – remember, this was the time when people were eating ground-up Egyptian mummies for their health, so there was a lot going on! But more on that on another day, perhaps. In any case, let me know in the comments if you read this novel, and if so, whether you like it or not. (You can tell I’m a big fan.) Plus, I’d love to know your favourite vampire story, as I’m always on the lookout for what to read next. Thank you, and see you next time.
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References:
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897).
Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (1995).
Boel Berner, Strange Blood (2020).
Mary E. Braddon, Good Lady Ducayne (1896).
Robert Boyle, Memoirs for the Natural History of Humane Blood (1683).
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Paul Craddock, Spare Parts: An Unexpected History of Transplant Surgery (2021).
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