Dracula's Guest And Other Weird Tales Read Online Free Page B

caution, as ‘The Squaw’ amply demonstrates: both this story and ‘The Secret of the Growing Gold’ (1892) are propelled by the power of female vengeance. The tragedies of ‘A Gipsy Prophecy’ and ‘The Coming of Abel Behenna’ (1914), meanwhile,are provoked by their female characters’ unnatural command of Second Sight or their inconsistency, vanity and greed, whilst it is discernibly the withered old crone in ‘The Burial of the Rats’ who synchronizes the deadly assault upon its narrator. The sole female character in ‘Dracula’s Guest’ is likewise an unnatural object of fear and loathing – a suicide-turned-vampire whose seductive ‘life in death’ trance conjoins the twin pillars of sex and death in horrific association:
    In the instant, as I am a living man, I saw, as my eyes were turned into the darkness of the tomb, a beautiful woman, with rounded cheeks and red lips, seemingly sleeping on a bier.
    The incompatible polarization of women as either submissive angels or sexual demons is a particularly unequivocal feature of
The Lair of the White Worm
. Whilst Mimi and Lilla Watford are the embodiment of virtuous, meek womanhood, content to be sustained by their menfolk, Lady Arabella March, the social, sexual and financial independent, is the novel’s antagonist, terrifying, in part, precisely because of her overpowering femininity. Flaunting her womanliness in ‘tightly fitting white [clothes], which showed off her extraordinarily slim figure’ (Chapter X), Lady Arabella uses feminine wiles to lure Edgar Caswall into a promise of matrimony for her own financial ends. However, Lady Arabella is also the white worm of the novel’s title, a grotesque prehistoric survival that preys on humans and animals alike. In this way, dynamic femininity translates itself into an overriding animality, in turn transforming active female sexuality into a dangerous and noxious thing. In fact, throughout Stoker’s works, female sexual proximity of any kind is to be regarded with the utmost caution. In ‘The Squaw’, for example, the narrator notes his relief at having Elias P. Hutcheson join him in the second week of his honeymoon, whilst in
The Lair of the White Worm
Adam Salton treats his proposal of marriage to Mimi as a ‘painful duty’ ( Chapter XXVI ) that Nathaniel finally agrees to undertake.
    The intense anxiety pertaining to strong women in
The Lair of the White Worm
is nowhere more palpable than in Diana’sGrove. Reference to Diana calls to mind the goddess’s association with women and childbirth, yet the grove of the novel is reminiscent only of ‘many great deaths’ ( Chapter X ). As such, traditional roles of woman as life-giver and nurturer are reversed and the grove’s inhabitant is linked instead with death and destruction. Lady Arabella personifies this perversion of the female role, calmly pouring ‘shot after shot’ ( Chapter VIII ) into Adam Salton’s mongoose, whilst her rancid well-hole at the centre of Diana’s Grove perpetuates the image of a monstrous vagina:
    It was like… the drainage of war hospitals, of slaughter-houses, the refuse of dissecting rooms. None of these was like it, though it had something of them all, with, added, the sourness of chemical waste and the poisonous effluvium of the bilge of a waterlogged ship whereon a multitude of rats had been drowned. ( Chapter XXI )
    Its ‘Queer smell’ ( Chapter XIX ) characterizes Arabella’s perverted womanhood, the rank ‘primeval ooze’ ( Chapter XXI ) emanating from it being a harbinger of death rather than life. In her own death, furthermore, Lady Arabella herself is reduced to a putrid slime, unrecognizable in either form or species, the ‘great red masses of rent and torn flesh and fat’ ( Chapter XXXIX ) to which she is reduced invoking images of toxic menstrual blood and genital secretions, in turn implying that Lady Arabella has dissolved into her own rancid femininity.
    Born not of any union between man