NovelGuide: Dracula: Novel Summary: Chapter 3

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Chapter 3

Summary
When Harker realizes he is a prisoner in the castle, he panics. Later, however, he makes himself think over calmly what to do. He knows that he must not trust the Count with any information. He hears the Count return and, going into his bedroom, finds him making his bed. This confirms to Harker that there are no servants in the house. He realizes also that the carriage driver was the Count himself, a thought that terrifies him, since that man could control the wolves. He is glad of the crucifix that the hotelier's wife gave him, although as a Church of England Protestant, he has been brought up to find such objects idolatrous.
That evening, he has a long talk with the Count. The Count boasts of the proud history of his family, the Szekelys, who fought battles for lordship. He laments, "The warlike days are over." Then he asks Harker about various aspects of conducting business in England. He tells him to write to Peter Hawkins, his employer, to inform him that he will be staying with the Count for another month, and specifies that he must confine his letter to business matters. Harker feels he has no choice but to agree.
Knowing that the Count will read anything he writes, Harker decides to write only formal notes now, but to write later in secret to Hawkins and Mina. He will write to Mina in shorthand, concealing his meaning from the Count. Harker writes his two official letters, to Hawkins and Mina, and the Count also writes letters. Harker sees that one is to a Samuel Billington in Whitby, England.
The Count excuses himself, but before he leaves Harker, he warns him never to fall asleep anywhere in the castle but in his own bedroom, where he will be safe.
Harker places the crucifix at the head of his bed and leaves his room to explore the castle. He feels frightened, and believes that his nocturnal existence is destroying his nerve. He is leaning from a window, enjoying the view, when he notices the Count's head coming out of another window. Slowly, the whole man emerges from the window and crawls down the castle wall, face-down, like a lizard. Harker wonders what kind of a creature the Count is.
A few days later, Harker again sees the Count crawl down the wall and vanish into a hole or window. Harker tries to open some of the locked doors and eventually, one gives way. He enters and finds a pleasant room. Taking pleasure in disobeying the Count's order, he falls asleep in the room while fondly imagining the fair ladies who once may have occupied it, perhaps writing love-letters to their absent menfolk.
Harker does not know whether what happens next is a dream or reality. Three beautiful women visit him. They have sharp, white teeth and red, voluptuous lips. He simultaneously longs for them and fears them, feeling "a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips." One of the women approaches him, gets on her knees, and bends over him, licking her lips "like an animal." With her teeth, she touches his throat. At that moment, the Count rushes in, furious, and pulls the woman away. He tells the women to leave Harker alone, for "This man belongs to me!" He promises the women, "When I am done with him you shall kiss him at your will." He appeases them by throwing them a bag containing what Harker believes to be a half-smothered child. The women take the bag and disappear. Harker lapses into unconsciousness.
Analysis
This chapter contains one of the most famous scenes in the novel, where Harker is visited by three beautiful vampire women, or "weird sisters," as some critics call them. The incident, with a seductive vampire woman kneeling over Harker, who closes his eyes in "a langorous ecstacy," is heavily symbolic of an act of oral sex. Vampirism has long been treated as a metaphor for oral sex. Moreover, sexual climax has for centuries been referred to as the "little death," so the theme of the bite of the vampire, which was thought to kill the soul of the victim, carried sexual symbolism. The exchange of bodily fluids in both sex (semen) and vampirism (blood) is another link. Harker and his vampire lover are prevented from consummating their erotic passion when they are interrupted by the Count just at the point where the vampiress has made contact with Harker's neck with her teeth. The Count's arrival therefore leaves the would-be lovers tantalized and frustrated - though only the woman expresses her frustration, allowing Harker to maintain his air of respectability. He is allowed to feel horror, disgust and fear, because these women are deadly vampires. He is not, as an affianced Victorian gentleman, allowed to feel raw sexual desire.
Acceptable feelings towards acceptable members of the female sex are presented in the prelude to Harker's encounter with the vampires. We can understand this more mainstream Victorian scenario as a product of Harker's conscious mind. As he enters the forbidden room, he imagines a "fair lady" of past ages sitting at the desk, writing love letters to her absent lord with "many blushes." Here, he thinks, ladies have "sat and sung and lived sweet lives whilst their gentle breasts were sad for their menfolk away in the midst of remorseless wars." The picture is in stark contrast with Harker's erotic vision of the vampiresses. His lovelorn letter-writing ladies are refined, restrained, and blush with genteel shame at expressing their feelings for their husbands, even in writing. Their men are absent, so there can be no sexual contact. This is a very conventional Victorian ideal of romantic love: demure, decorous and asexual; the women engaged in chaste and harmless activities like singing, the men bravely fighting in the wars. It is also significantly similar to the relationship between Harker and his fianc�e Mina, who are separated and whose only contact is through letters.
The vampire women, on the other hand, are not only physically dangerous to Harker (vampires were thought to drain the life force and kill the soul) but emotionally threatening. They are embodiments of untrammelled female sexuality. Unlike any 'decent' Victorian lady, they take the sexual initiative and are unafraid to express their animal sexual appetites. In their devouring of the half-smothered child, they also smash the sacred icon of Victorian motherhood. Harker's hungry response to them raises the question of how his relationship with the respectable Mina will be affected by his encounter.
However, Harker's passive behavior towards the aggressive women is an interesting reversal of the traditional gender roles of violent male attacker and passive female victim. Harker becomes the victim, the damsel in distress, and the Count, who shoos away the women, becomes his rescuer. Critics have noted an implicit homosexual relationship between the Count and Harker, particularly in the Count's erotically charged words, "How dare you touch him, any of you?... This man belongs to me!... Yes, I too can love." However, this relationship is never developed in the novel.
It is noteworthy that Harker's two strongest encounters with the supernatural - the first being his terrifying journey to the castle, the second being the visit from the vampire women - have been consigned by him to the sleeping or dreaming state. To understand why this might be, we would do well to look at the psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious, formulated by Stoker's contemporary, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Most criticism of Dracula owes much to the theory of the unconscious.
Freud believed that all humans had a conscious and and unconscious mind. The conscious mind is made up of the aspects of our psyche that we have accepted as our own. The unconscious is where we hide those aspects of our psyche that we are unable to accept as our own. They are not subject to conscious perception or control, but they often affect conscious thoughts and behavior. In fact, the more the unconscious aspects of the psyche are suppressed and denied legitimate expression, the more they tend, in their drive to expression, to 'ambush' the person when he is least expecting it. This usually occurs when the conscious mind is not fully in control, in states such as sleeping, dreaming, drug 'trips,' mental illness and hypnotic trances. Repression happens on an individual level but also on a societal level. Respectable society in Victorian England suppressed many elements of the psyche, but perhaps the most obvious 'disallowed' elements were sexuality and aggression - particularly in females. Dracula, in common with much Victorian literature, was preoccupied both with what was suppressed (sexuality and aggression) and the states in which those elements could gain expression (sleeping, dreaming, hypnotic states and lunacy).