It's been a long time since I personally read the book. Since I was 8. And I'm 25 now. Many say that Dracula raped Lucy and especially Mina (by making her drink his blood). And many ironically think that's what Eggers did with Orlock, since they're convinced he represents an abuser, rapist, pedophile, and groomer. It's funny how they claim to have understood the film, and when you explain to them why Robert Eggers himself says the complete opposite, suddenly Robert Eggers becomes an idiot who writes badly and whose opinion doesn't count on his own work. 🤷♀️
I re-read it recently to essay on “Nosferatu”. In the book, unlike Mina’s case, we never get Lucy’s account of what happens when Dracula feeds on her.
Beth Shane (“Your Girls That You All Love Are Mine Already": Criminal Female Sexuality In Bram Stoker's Dracula”) describes it best than I ever could: Lucy’s encounters with Count Dracula are connected with her somnambulism and dreams, and the reader “never witness the [first] bite [of Dracula in Lucy]; as a result, ambiguity surrounds the causal relationship in the process of becoming a vampire”. There’s no description of the three times Dracula feeds on Lucy, making the nature of their interactions, as noticed by Beth Shane, open for interpretation.
It’s Mina (who notices Lucy is not in her bedroom), who sees Dracula feeding on Lucy, in their “favorite seat” (the grave of a suicide in Kingstead churchyard) from afar. After that, we only have descriptions of when he shows up at her window, usually as a bat or a wolf (asking for entrance), her “bad dreams”, and the morning after when she needs blood transfusions. Then, Van Helsing arrives to unravel the truth behind Lucy’s sickness (like Von Franz with Ellen). The last time Dracula feeds on her and turns her into a vampire (by her drinking his blood), her mother (who is said to have a heart condition) dies of a heart attack seeing Dracula in wolf form at their window, and Lucy is panicking, not knowing what to do. She ends her “Memorandum” writing: “My dear mother gone! It is time that I go too. Goodbye, dear Arthur, if I should not survive this night. God keep you, dear, and God help me!” When Dr. Stewart and Van Helsing arrive the next morning, they find Lucy nearly dead because Dracula fed on her. They do another transfusion but Lucy dies, anyway. A week later (or so) she raises as a vampire, the “Bloofer Lady”.
According to Beth Shane, the novel creates this ambiguity “to perpetuate and to exacerbate contemporary [Victorian] views regarding the radical instability of female nature”. The author concludes “Lucy's encounter with the vampire brings only latent impulses to the surface”, where Bram Stoker explores “this physiological uncertainty to perpetuate the sensational terror that all female sexuality is monstrous, threatening to render the British man a debased specimen of his former glory”. In this way, “Stoker's novels enact the same anxious rhetoric that likewise informs the portrait of female sexuality in nineteenth-century sexology”.
This is the thesis Eggers adapted on his “Nosferatu”, with authors like Shane, Pamela Gilbert (“Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women's Popular Novels”), Phyllis A. Roth (“Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula”), etc. This interpretation of vampirism as a allegory for Victorian anxieties about sex is still popular in academia. Dracula scholars still create essays around this because of the time period the novel was written.
As for Orlok being a “groomer”, a “pedophile” and a “rapist” originates from not being able to connect the dots and making stuff up instead of listening to what Eggers has to say. He was very clear on what folk vampirism methods he adapted. Also, I don’t know how the film could be clearer on how Orlok is Death. More: Ellen recounts her teenage years to Von Franz. She calls Orlok’s shadow a “presence”. She doesn’t know who this shadow is.
