The Housewives’ Guide To Anatomy

(Oh, I know the housewives have been missing for some time, the dishes have piled up, the children turned skittish and translucent. But suddenly here we are, saying that we got caught in traffic on the way home from the hairdresser’s. If someone objects that traffic simply couldn’t have been that bad, we will only look blank and complain about the car’s vinyl seats, and how terribly they chafed our thighs.)

It is much noted that sexuality in Bram Stoker’s Dracula is displaced from humans onto vampires; women, indeed, are liberated from their obsessive, saccharine purity only once they become vampires. Also noted is the gender ambiguity of the vampires: male and female, they have sopping vaginal mouths punctuated with pointy phallic teeth; female vampires may thereby penetrate human males; male vampires may suckle human females on blood.

The sexuality is also fugitive, locating itself anywhere but in the genitals. Genital stand-ins can take up residence anywhere, in fact: in the chest punctured by a stake, the throat pierced by teeth. In the latter image both the phallic substitute and the vaginal one are shrunken down to the scale of dollhouse miniatures. Much is made of the daintiness of the holes in Lucy’s neck.

Once seduction becomes so vagrant and ambiguous, the seduced (and the readers) are less responsible, wandering out to the cemetery on the cliff in a trance. The characters may have mastered the defense of genital purity (though Lucy’s explicit wish to marry three men—a detail I was surprised not to see mentioned in the criticism at the back of my Norton critical edition—does suggest that their mastery is not entirely settled) but they can’t withstand these tiny not-quite-genitals that take up residence in odd locations.

The vampires are so hermaphroditic (the teeth forever in the mouths, in diminutive but permanent coitus) that we might wonder why they bother with humans at all.

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