Sins of the flesh: anorexia, eroticism and the female vampire in Bram Stoker's Dracula

Abstract

This article discusses anorexia as an aesthetic ideal rather than as an actual illness, as well as its erotic connotations in the context of Victorian literature and culture. The nineteenth century regarded anorexia as a gendered disease: like other so-called ‘female maladies’, it is connected with male standards of femininity and the devastating effects it has on women's self-image. The sometimes contradictory representation of anorexia in literature offers a particularly interesting insight into cultural assumptions of what was (is?) considered as ‘truly feminine’. I will concentrate on the analysis of vampire women in Stoker's Dracula, since the female vampire manifests all the contradictions in Victorian and fin de siècle assumptions of femininity. In the novel, all the vampires except the Count himself are female, and the transformations these women undergo are mainly manifest in their bodies. The act of eating in Dracula becomes not only aesthetically and culturally unacceptable but monstrous and grotesque, the vampire thereby becoming an exaggerated representation of the Victorian culture of anorexia and personifying male fears about women and hunger. Stoker's message seems to be that the fleshy sensual woman is not only sexually incontinent but fatally dangerous, thus needing to be corrected – if not savagely eliminated.