e or dreaming. But on the whole, and throughout the book, blood is invoked in a way that shows it to be an emblem for the bodily fluids associated with the sexual act.
Meanwhile, there is repeated reference to a loyalty to the moral conventions and terror at their being threatened by the milieu of the netherworld. Once Jonathan recovers from his experience with the three women vampires and comes to a consciousness that something is rotten in the state of the Carpathians, he seeks an answer to the riddle of the Count, finally finding him in repose in his box, and determining, filled with revulsion, to, as he thinks, kill him: "This," Jonathan writes in his journal, "was the being I was helping to transfer to London, where, perhaps, for centuries to come he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless. The very thought drove me mad" (Stoker, Bantam 54). The balancing of the erotic with the monstrously horrible elements of Dracula frame a moral q
...