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SCHOLARS HAVE BECOME accustomed to asking what Dracula (1897) reveals about sex. One can see why in Bram Stoker's description of Lucy Westenra's second death, where her body "sh[akes] and quiver[s] and twist[s] in wild contortions" as her former fiancé drives a stake into her chest "whilst the blood from the pierced heart well[s] and spurt[s] around it."1 Christopher Craft adroitly calls this scene the novel's "climax," a sensual act that reinscribes "the line dividing the male who penetrates and the woman who receives."2 Yet although Craft is clear that Lucy's staking is not only a metaphor for coitus, he does not address what the violence of the act means as violence. In addition to Craft's work, many studies have catalogued and interrogated the multiple forms of sexuality throughout the novel, including homosexuality, voyeurism, coitus interruptus, sadism, masochism, and necrophilia, among others.3 The proliferation of forms of violence, however, remains untouched. Scenes detailing violence against women, men, animals, earth, institutions, monuments, and nations provide Stoker's novel its narrative momentum. In spite of its violent content, few scholars have asked what Dracula reveals about violence.
Dracula is at base a story of competing forms of violence; the titular Count's mythical violence opposes the hunting party's terrestrial violence. While it is true that at times the latter seems itself to be supernatural, especially in Van Helsing's use of sanctified communion wafers to combat vampires, by and large the rituals and customs that go along with the hunting party's actions are a disguise for conventional violence. When they finally dispose of Dracula, for example, their ritualistic plan of action is abandoned in a burst of force: Mina describes "the sweep and flash of Jonathan's great knife" as it "shear[s] through the throat, whilst at the same moment Mr. Morris' bowie knife plunge[s] into the heart."4 This outburst is quite different from what Van Helsing originally prescribed: that they take advantage of various inborn weaknesses in Dracula, including placing a "branch of wild rose on his coffin" to confine him and firing "a sacred bullet" into him "so that he be true dead."5 At the novel's close these superstitious rituals are forgotten and a contest of natural and unnatural violences is borne out. Dracula's supernatural ability to use violence...