The Soul Dracula Stole First
Why Lucy Westenra Is the Moral Heart of Stoker’s Novel
Guest post by LindaAnn LoSchiavo
To understand “Dracula,” don’t start with the Count. Start with Lucy.
At the novel’s opening, 19-year-old Lucy Westenra radiates warmth, innocence, and an irrepressible vitality. She is everything Victorian society celebrated in a young woman — and everything it quietly feared. Her startling question early in the novel — why couldn’t a woman marry multiple men if she loved them all? — exposes the fault lines beneath a rigid social order that permitted women almost no authentic selfhood. She isn’t wicked for asking. Her question is not motivated by lust but rather a sadness that two suitors must be rejected and turned away. But Lucy’s plain-spoken honesty makes what follows all the more devastating.
My poem “Lucy Westenra, Somnambulist” turns on that decision: of choosing among three men.
** Art by Giulia Massarin * *
Lucy Westenra, Somnambulist
Lucy Westenra, but yet how changed. The sweetness was turned to adamantine,
heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness.
— Dracula by Bram Stoker
“Regret explains my hesitation,” I
Explained to Mina. “Three proposals. Why
Must I choose one? Two others will feel sad.”
Permission granted, I’d enjoy all three —
But this exquisite fantasy is caged,
Unvoiced, restrained with all my private filths.
Somnambulist I am — as father was —
My sleepwalk self encountered entities
Whose kiss transformed plebeian stars, unleashed
A choreography of urges, strange,
Unholy, keeping night’s mind delinquent,
Outcomes forbidden in my shallow past.
I owe obedience to one man now
Who taught me how to be a ghost part-time.
Like trees, we’ve bound ourselves below without
Burial, cocooned in soil, still sentient,
Possessed of appetites, required to feast.
Ageless, preserved, my beauty’s my bait.
“Come closer, child! Let me teach you a game!
Who am I? Mistress of my darkest dreams.”
. . . . .
“Lucy Westenra, Somnambulist” from Vampire Verses: Poems Copyright © 2024 by LindaAnn LoSchiavo
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Dracula does not announce his menace. He moves like a slow infection, finding the generous and the open-hearted and reshaping them into something unrecognizable. Lucy is his first and most visible English victim, and her transformation is the novel’s moral center. What begins as pallor and sleepwalking ends in something predatory and lost. Her death — staked by the very men who loved her — reads as a reassertion of the social order she had quietly threatened. Stoker frames it as mercy. But it functions as punishment.
But this is precisely where “Dracula” transcends gothic horror. The novel’s true subject is corruption: how it spreads invisibly, how it preys on virtue rather than vice, and how it can hollow out a person before anyone thinks to sound the alarm. Lucy’s tragedy makes this argument with brutal clarity.
Yet her story is not the novel’s final word. The men who loved Lucy — and Mina Harker, who nearly suffers the same fate — refuse to retreat into grief or denial. They gather their knowledge, their courage, and their loyalty, and they push back together. Stoker’s deepest conviction, embedded beneath every shadow and coffin, is a quietly hopeful one: that good people, united by purpose, can name the evil among them and drive it out.
Lucy shows us what is at stake. The rest of the novel shows us what it takes to fight for it.
The character Lucy Westenra has a role in my gothic vampire serial DRACULA BEFORE STOKER: The Prequel. Read it on Substack, beginning with Episode 1.
ART credit: Giulia Massarin
Check out the award-winning collection of poetry Vampire Verses by LindaAnn LoSchiavo at this link.
“DRACULA BEFORE STOKER: The Prequel“ is a serial written by LindaAnn LoSchiavo you can read for free at this link.
Episode # 1 is here.
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