Unclean! Unclean!

Those are Mina Harker's words when she comes out of her stupor at the hands of Count Dracula who has just been found in her bedchamber forcing her to suck on his tit where he has cut himself and is bleeding.

It is pretty much the best scene in the whole book and is positively messy with sex. The scene is described in such a way as to bring to mind - to our 21st century minds anyway - a forced fellatio. There is this description of the act where one of the men who bursts in upon the scene says it looks like nothing so much as a man forcing the nose of a kitten into a saucer of milk.

Fantastic.

One wonders, of course, how much Bram Stoker could have had such a thing in mind (or, indeed, even been aware of such a thing) in those pre-Freudian days, but throughout the novel the vampires are blatantly associated with sexual activity. The Brides of Dracula, who come to seduce Jonathan Harker during his stay in Castle Dracula, are practically soft core porn characters, both in their behavior and description. The thrusting of a stake into a female vampire and her subsequent baring of teeth and thrashing of extremities taking on a decidedly carnal - if gruesome - cast, with the hero plunging his stake into the creature again and again while she moans and screams. It seems impossible Stoker was not aware of himself.

Even before Dracula, of course, vampires had begun to take on the lascivious characteristics that were always under the thin veneer of Victoriana. Camilla, the most popular vampire novel prior to Dracula, was, after all, about a lesbian vampire seducing a young girl. But this very excitement which is evident in Stoker's book (the reader can sense his scribbling hand rapidly increasing the pace with which words are laid onto paper whenever the undead get a scene) is, in a way, part of the problem with Dracula.

Thing is - the book is really terribly conventional for its day. There must be twelve chapters in which the protagonists hold hands and pray together and resolve to love one another always. The men are, to a one, flat as the paper they are written out upon and Mina, clearly the most dynamic and interesting character, is constantly passing up action to moon over the men. One senses that Stoker either didn't know what he had in Mina Harker or was conflicted about a "new woman" protagonist and couldn't bear to let her loose upon the plot where she could have torn through literature for real.

Still worse, Dracula is hardly in the damned book. He gets several short chapters in the very beginning and then disappears almost entirely until the aforementioned "rape" of Mina Harker. Hell, he doesn't even get a final scene. The protagonists spend the last third of the book rushing all over eastern Europe to catch Dracula before he can return to his castle and regain his strength while Dracula outwits them in a hundred different (and boring) ways, but when they finally reach Castle Dracula, just before the sunset, the are successful in killing the fiend in his coffin before he can rise for the fight.

Its the most stunning anticlimax I have come across in ages.

Save for Sherlock Holmes, no character in fiction has been adapted for the screen as many times as Count Dracula. If one was to add all of the other media - books, comics, art, music, video games, toys and games - I would lay money that no character PERIOD has even been treated with so much as Count Dracula. And though, naturally, Stoker could not have known this would come to pass, to give such a creation no final speech, no fight to the death, no death scene, even? Criminal.

Look, I had always heard/read/been told that Dracula was boring and not worth the time it would take to read. I can say definitively that this was not the case. It isn't by any means a perfect novel and it is nearly buried on occasion underneath tedium and Victorian bloviating, but it reads faster than I would have expected it to and it is so impossibly classic that it feels perhaps more rewarding than it really is.