‘A pestilence which walketh in darkness’: diagnosing the Victorian vampire

Abstract

This essay attempts to place on a more secure historical footing a suggestion made by Ernest Jones — that the nocturnal and sanguinary exploits of the vampire can ‘only point to a natural and common process, namely nocturnal emissions accompanied with dreams of a more or less erotic nature. In the unconscious mind blood is commonly an equivalent for semen’ (Jones, 1931: 119). C.F. Bentley applies Jones’s idea to Dracula , suggesting that Jonathan Harker being visited by the three female vampires has ‘the unreal quality of a masturbatory fantasy or erotic dream’ (Bentley, 1972: 28). Similarly, Christopher Craft states that in Dracula ‘blood substitutes for semen’, and points out that the ‘symbolic interchangeability of blood and semen in vampirism was identified as early as 1931 by Ernest Jones’ (Craft, 1989: 230). The problem with such comments, however, is that they suppress the historical dimension. They suggest that this perceived relationship is somehow essential, that one activity — vampirism — ‘symbolises’ autoeroticism, and that this equation finds its source in the ‘unconscious’. It is the role of the post-Freudian critic to bring this to light and explain the real significance of this ‘fantasy’. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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