A space full of possibilities

One thing I've never quite been able to stop thinking about is Dracula's line:

"Tonight is mine. Tomorrow night is yours."

Because yes, on the surface it's the culmination of something we've known for weeks now. Dracula has repeatedly referred to Jonathan as property.

"This man belongs to me." "When I am done with him you shall kiss him at your will."

By 29 June, Jonathan isn't really being treated as a prisoner anymore. As he notes, prisoners still possess some measure of personhood. Jonathan has become an object to be allocated. Dracula is effectively negotiating property rights over his body while Jonathan stands close enough to hear it, just beyond the closed door.

But I don't think we ask ourselves often enough what "mine" actually means.

Because we know exactly what the women intend to do tomorrow.

"Kiss" in 'Dracula' has never really meant "kiss." Stoker wraps vampirism in intensely erotic language, but when the moment comes, the mouth doesn't descend to Jonathan's lips. It descends to his throat.

Their kiss is their bite.

So if tomorrow night belongs to them...

... what belongs to Dracula tonight?

The novel never explicitly answers that question, which is terrifying.

One reading is fairly straightforward: Dracula simply means Jonathan remains under his protection one last night before being handed over. "Mine" means "my prisoner," "my possession," "my responsibility." The Count still has business to finish before Jonathan becomes disposable.

However, I think the novel complicates that reading considerably. Once the wider context of Dracula's treatment of Jonathan is taken into account, "mine" begins to suggest something much darker than simple custody, especially as the novel takes care to emphasise something very particular about how the Count regards Jonathan.

He is extraordinarily possessive.

When he initially stops the three women. His dialogue is very specific.

"How dare you touch him?" "How dare you cast eyes on him?" "This man belongs to me."

There is no mention of leaving him alone on point of principle, or that their assault violates the unspoken rules of aristocratic hospitality, not even that he is under Dracula's protection specifically. But that Jonathan "belongs" to him.

This naturally raises the question. If we have established that "tomorrow" refers to feeding, what does "tonight" refer to? And why shouldn't it be the same thing?

Another disturbing element is that later on in the text, it is clearly established that Dracula prefers a long meal. Unlike his voluptuous roommates, Dracula rarely feeds only once upon his victims. His preferred hunting strategy resembles nothing so much as a cat playing with a mouse, taking as much pleasure in the act of play and amusement as the inevitable and bloody kill. He has played with Jonathan for months; he is about to embark on a journey upon which he will torment the crew of the Demeter for seemingly no other reason than his amusement (it would certainly be a better aid to his subterfuge to act with more subtlety, but that word seems anathema to the Count); and this is to say nothing of how he will treat poor Lucy and the various other victims he will fall upon in London.

Lucy is fed upon night after night, gradually weakened over weeks before her eventual death and transformation. Vampirism in 'Dracula' is a process and a ritual, one that the Count clearly delights in.

So if that's how Dracula normally hunts, why should Jonathan be any different? Particularly as the Count is seemingly so attached to him.

The more I reread the castle chapters, the more likely I find it that Jonathan has already been bitten multiple times without ever knowing or understanding what is happening to him. He doesn't even have access to a mirror anymore.

Think about how often Jonathan loses consciousness. Think about how often he wakes in bed with missing time. After the encounter with the three vampire women, he concludes that Dracula must have carried him back to his room, undressed him, folded his clothes, and put him to bed - a deeply intimate act if true.

However, he has no actual memory of the event. He simply wakes up afterwards and is left to put together the disparate pieces of the night before, one he already considers a nightmare.

Likewise, Jonathan repeatedly experiences overwhelming exhaustion, which seems at odds with the daily demands of his imprisonment. Although, of course, some grace must be given to the draining state of constant terror he is living in, and that to some extent this fatigue must obviously be to some degree psychological, it does not remove the fact that Stoker repeatedly associates sleep with vulnerability, and that Jonathan's exhaustion is later closely mirrored by the symptoms Lucy displays after nightly drainings.

Every significant supernatural violation happens when Jonathan is asleep. Or nearly asleep. Or hypnotised. Or unconscious.

Sleep is rarely ever just sleep in 'Dracula'.

Sleep provides access to victims in the dark of night for creatures beyond simple fantastical horror, but deep and violating terrors.

In a text so obsessed with recollection, recording, and primary sources, so that they may be presented in such a way that these unbelievable occurrences "may stand forth as simple fact." Any absence is glaring in its conspicuousness.

While Lucy has the benefit of a dedicated and informed medical team, we never get insight into who examines Jonathan. He is completely isolated, and the first time he would have any semblance of aid is at the Hospital of St. Joseph and Ste. Mary, in Buda-Pesth. We can read between the lines that Agatha and her fellow sisters may be more informed than they are willing to let on to the kind and gentle Englishman's wife; however, we as the reader have little to no insight as to Jonathan's true journey to recovery. It is never confirmed either way whether Jonathan bears bite marks, and especially as the novel continues and Jonathan's own, more subtle transformation surfaces, that uncertainty feels very deliberate.*

On a more sobering note, there's another layer to all this that I find deeply unsettling. Modern readers and analysts often talk about the vampire women as representing sexual danger. I would go as far as to say that that is explicit in the text. What is (only slightly) more subtle is the Count's sexual possessiveness, particularly regarding Harker. His unbridled rage ("Never did I imagine such wrath and fury, even to the demons of the pit.") is almost entirely and explicitly due to his insistence, not that he objects to what they are doing, but that he has exclusive access that they are not entitled to. The language is incredibly territorial and possessive. It is undeniable that Jonathan is "claimed", and that he is ignorant of what that actually means.

There is a reason Christopher Craft titled one of the most foundational essays on 'Dracula', "Kiss Me with Those Red Lips."* One of his central arguments is that Dracula repeatedly displaces homoerotic desire rather than eliminating it. The Count violently interrupts the women at precisely the moment they are about to penetrate Jonathan's body with their teeth, only to declare that Jonathan belongs to him instead.

Whether one accepts every part of that reading or not (spoiler for the footnote below, but I don't), the possessiveness is undeniably there. However, I think "desire" is actually far too soft a word for what is happening. Nothing about that scene (or indeed anything in that castle!) is consensual. Jonathan is not caught between competing lovers. He is caught between competing owners. And the most horrifying aspect of that dynamic is that it is not simply that the women desire him, in the most literal sense, but that later on in today's entry (June 29th), after the bombast and fire of the first confrontation, Jonathan overhears four vampires calmly negotiating who gets to use his body first, laughing and giggling all the way.

The true horror of Dracula's castle has never been the blood-sucking monsters, but the systematic and practised manner in which the Count spends weeks stripping Jonathan of every marker of autonomy.

By the time Dracula has confined his freedom, destroyed and counterfeited his correspondence, stolen his clothing and his legal identity, impersonated him to implicate his guilt in crimes he had no capacity or desire to commit, eroded his concept and relationship to time and place, and even, to some degree, using the knowledge once freely given, stolen his voice and accent (articulated beautifully and brought from subtext to text in Re: Dracula), he has destroyed (or attempted to destroy) every aspect of Jonathan's personhood.

By the end of June, his body is the last thing he has left, and now even that is being divided up for spoils.

Stoker deliberately leaves this night ambiguous.

Maybe Dracula simply keeps Jonathan locked away until morning. Maybe he feeds on him one last time (or for the very first time, having left his dessert for last). Maybe he begins whatever process would eventually transform Jonathan into an actual vampire. Maybe a lurid combination of all three.

We will never know for sure.

Jonathan is left exactly where Gothic fiction so often leaves its victims: asleep.

Unconscious and unable to remember.

Jonathan has become an unreliable narrator through no fault or desire of his own, but because Dracula has systematically deprived him of the ability to be a credible witness to his own life. Large portions of his experience are literally unknowable to him. The diary, which began as a meticulous record of travel observations and light-hearted "food blogging", has gradually become an archive of absence rather than presence: missing hours, missing memories, missing letters, missing clothes, and missing agency. If the diary is Jonathan's attempt to preserve reality through writing, Dracula's greatest victory is not merely imprisoning Jonathan's body but making parts of his own story impossible for him to tell.

We are left with a terrible and dread cold conclusion. For all that Jonathan and his friends do witness, perhaps the greatest dangers and deepest traumas are still left in the dark, where no one is awake to record them.

Footnotes:

Let it be noted that I only really agree with Craft as far as his homoerotic reading goes in this paper. He really lost me in the second half. Be warned: if you do read it, he has a quite violent (and, in my opinion, misguided) interpretation of the patriarchal underpinnings of the Crew of Light and their intentions.

Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la

In a fit of desperate passion,

Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la

Seize a shovel, raise to heaven,

Fa-la-la, la-la-la, la la la!

Strike him with all your aggression,

How sweet and calm the count comes across. How desperate Jonathan is to get out.

The count fucking blowing him good night kisses

The weird sisters trying to get at him again cuz they know his times up but….