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Although Count Dracula is undoubtedly one of the most iconic literary figures of monstrosity in popular imagination, the female vampires in Bram Stoker’s Gothic novel Dracula are the ultimate source of terror. These perverse and glamorous feminine monsters maintain a rampant sanguine and sexual appetite throughout, offering readers an abundance of perversions through richly grotesque and eroticized imagery. Indeed, the narrative’s peculiar presentation of female sexuality has been extensively revisited, adding to a growing body of diverse readings and interpretations. Stoker unravels the neat certainties and boundaries of femininity, painting these female characters in complex paradoxes, overflowing the novel with gender inversion, gender slippage and grotesque gender extrapolation that have left many readers in interpretational tangles. In order to navigate the dense mesh of socio-cultural anxieties projected onto the undead bodies of female vampires, unlike many works of criticism, this essay seeks to remain intimately connected to the text. The analysis will start by first exploring the alluring paradoxical nature of female vampire sexuality and its invocation of both terror and delight in audiences. It will then move on to discuss the monstrous presentation of Lucy Westenra’s femininity, combining psychoanalytic and feminist lenses to explore male anxieties in regard to female sexuality. Finally, the essay will observe the ambivalence of Mina Harker, the only female character to escape the clutches of Dracula, and the complexity of her gender performance as boundaries become unstuck.
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