As heir to the narrative’s ambivalence, the reader should leave Dracula with a troubled sense of the differences separating the forces of darkness and the forces of light. In its closing pages, Dracula deploys the venerable “paranoid Gothic” trope of reversing the roles of pursuer and pursued, of desiring (or murderous) subject and desired (or murdered) object, in order to implicate both in a specifically homosexual (and homophobic) identification; the homosexualization of persecutory paranoia is, as we have seen, the psychoanalytic redaction of this trope. Of course the closure of Dracula, in granting ultimate victory to Van Helsing and a dusty death to the Count, emphatically ratifies the simplistic opposition between the competing conceptions of force and desire, but even Dracula’s final dessication suggests his dispersal or infiltration into the forces of light. Where monstrosity had once been, there normality shall be. But surely this impulse toward a baffled identification, anxious as it is, comes as no surprise within a text whose relation to its resident monster(s) has been ambivalently cathected all along, characterized at once by an obsessive overdetermination of difference and a transgressive desire for sameness. In a justly famous tableau, Dracula speculates upon such anxiogenic identification. Jonathan Harker, standing before his shaving glass, puzzles over a certain absence in an image:

This time there could be no error, for the man was close to me, and I could see him over my shoulder. But there was no reflection of him in the mirror! The whole room behind me was displayed; but there was no sign of a man in it, except myself. (37)

Caught here in the uncanny interchange of the same and the different, Harker literally reflects the text’s disturbing power of ambiguation. The very (non)image of Dracula’s difference (“no reflection of him in the mirror”) “displays” an identification that Harker himself can see and speak, but not understand: “no sign” of man or vampire “except myself.”

So insistently does Dracula inscribe this trope of baffled identification that it repeats the pattern on its final page. Harker, writing in a postscript clearly meant to compensate for his assumption at Castle Dracula of a “feminine” passivity, announces his—and the text’s—last efficacious penetration:

Seven years ago we all went through the flames; and the happiness of some of us since then is, we think, well worth the pain we endured. It is an added joy to Mina and to me that our boy’s birthday is the same day as that on which Quincey Morris died. His mother holds, I know, the secret belief that some of our brave friend’s spirit has passed into him. His bundle of names links all our little band of men together; but we call him Quincey. (449)

As Veeder remarks, Harker’s terminal note “recapitulates the story that patriarchs want to hear”; it “provides both a tableau of domestic unity and a story which shapes the future by organizing the past.” And thus to shape the future requires a line of succession. As the “legitimate” offspring of Jonathan and Mina Harker, Little Quincey may arrive as little more than a name, a coded patronym, but his appearance on the scene has the force of an annunciation: the “natural” order has been restored, conventional gender roles have been rectified. Little Quincey’s official genesis, then, is “obviously” heterosexual, and his arrival resoundingly affirms the reproductive order. But this is a reproductive heterosexuality whose larger cultural burdens include male homosocial articulation, here materialized at the level of the polyandrous signifier: “His bundle of names links all our little band of men together.” In this text the linking of names also points retrospectively to the bundling of male bodies, specifically to an extravagant blood bond of the kind Lawrence would later call Blutbrüdershaft. On this reading, Little Quincey comes to represent the very excess that the reproductive order sponsors but refuses to affirm outright: he is the fantasy child of those sexualized transfusions, son of an illicit and closeted homosexual union that the text now underhandedly admits in the form of an almost farcically homosocial patronym “link[ing] all our little band of men together.” Little Quincey’s densely saturated name thus constitutes this text’s last and subtlest articulation of its “secret belief” in homosexual insemination: its belief that “a brave man’s blood,” sublimated into “our brave friend’s spirit,” may then “pass into” the Oedipalized son whose filial obligation is to remember the Name(s) of the Father(s) even as he forgets the homosexual desire that he must hereafter continue to relay.

The other telling feature here is the novel’s last prophylactic displacement—its substitution of Mina, who ultimately refused sexualization by Dracula, for Lucy, who was sexualized, vigorously penetrated, and consequently destroyed. We may say that Little Quincey was luridly conceived in the veins of Lucy Westenra and then deftly transposed into the purer body of Mina Harker. Here, in the last of its many displacements, Dracula ratifies the double postulate that governs its representation of eros: first, the matriphobic postulate that successful filiation requires the expulsion of all “monstrous” (that is, of any) sexuality in woman; second, the affined homophobic postulate that all desire, however mobile or polyvalent it may secretly be, must subject itself to heterosexual configuration. In this regard, Stoker’s fable repeats in passive, ventriloquial fashion the heterosexualizing ideology of his age. As we have seen, even revisionists of same-sex desire like Ellis and Symonds could not reconfigure such desire without replicating, at whatever level of metaphor, the basic structure of the heterosexual paradigm; and surely Schreber, despite the heroic magnitude of his conflict, could not elude the alienating enforcements either of the inversion model or its later psychoanalytic redaction. In the parallel “cases” of Schreber and Dracula, male homosexual desire, whatever its inclinations to cruise, is compelled to stay home and assume an essentially heterosexual, familial definition.

In his reading of Schreber’s paranoia, Freud even fantasizes that a specific reproductive failure, a break or rupture in the line of Oedipal succession, stands as the proximate cause of the “outbreak” of Schreber’s homosexual libido:

His marriage, which he describes as being in other respects a happy one, brought him no children; and in particular it brought him no son who might have consoled him for the loss of his father and brother and upon whom he might have drained off his unsatisfied homosexual affections. His family line threatened to die out, and it seems that he felt no little pride in his birth and lineage.…Dr. Schreber may have formed a phantasy that if he were a woman he would manage the business of having children more successfully; and he may thus have found his way back into the feminine attitude towards his father which he had exhibited in the earliest years of his childhood. If that were so, then his delusion that as a result of his emasculation the world was to be peopled with “a new race of men, born from the spirit of Schreber”—a delusion the realization of which he was continually postponing to a more and more remote future—would also be designed to offer him an escape from his childlessness. (PN, 57)

No passage could limn more precisely the triangular recirculations of homosexual desire, whose “correct” pedophilic object, the son, must inherit and transmit (but never enjoy) a structurally inescapable homosexual flux; the Schrebers’ failure to complete the Oedipal triangle, to engender its necessary third member, requires in turn that Schreber stage the entire drama as intrapsychic agon—as, that is, the fantasmatic history of his own millennial “unmanning.” Stoker’s novel of course closes with a more conventional Oedipal “reconciliation,” dutifully providing for the Crew of Light a son “upon whom [they] might have drained off [their] unsatisfied homosexual affections.” But in Dracula, this normalizing Oedipal itinerary yields a truly perverse telos in Little Quincey, a child whose conception remains curiously immaculate yet disturbingly lurid: son of his fathers’ violations. Never quite “naturally” engendered, Little Quincey descends from and into violence; the pleasures of his homosexual engendering “may be inferrable, but only from the forms of violence that surround them.”^[40]