itual-sexual tension: "As I look around this room, although it has been to me so full of fear, it is now a sort of sanctuary, for nothing can be more dreadful than those awful women, who were--who are--waiting to suck my blood" (42). Further to this point, Bentley cites the sociocultural overlay in which the vampire theme is developed:
The ambivalence of Harker's response, combining both 'longing' and 'deadly fear', is especially revelatory, as is his concern over the feelings of his fiancee, Mina: the vampire women offer immediate sexual gratification, though on illicit and dangerous terms, a tempting alternative to the socially imposed delays and frustrations of his relationship with the chaste but somewhat sexless Mina. The entire episode, including Harker's subsequent doubt as to whether he was awake or dreaming, has the irreal quality of a masturbatory fantasy or erotic dream (28).
The highly suggestive language in which Jonathan's experience is couched also makes it a kind of metaphor for the sucking of something rather different from blood, though equally, one would say, forbidden by cultural and literary convention. Such language, and the episodes to go with it, recurs throughout the novel. Bentley cites Stoker's silence on the details of the Harkers' marriage bed, as against "what is rejected or repressed on a conscious level [that] appears in a covert and perverted form through the novel, the apparatus of the vampire superstition, described in almost obsessional detail in Dracula, providing the means for a symbolic presentation of human sexual relationships" (Stoker, Bantam 28). It can be argued that, in the climate of mainstream Victorian fiction, Stoker gets away with it because this is a vampire story and therefore abstracted from the conventions of more or less realistic romantic melodrama typical of, say, Dickens or even the Brontes; Jonathan gets away with it because he isn't quite sure whether he is awak...