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The most striking phenomenon of his erotic life after maturity was his liability to compulsive attacks of falling physically in love which came on and disappeared again in the most puzzling succession. These attacks released a tremendous energy in him even at times when he was otherwise inhibited, and they were quite beyond his control.
Sigmund Freud, 'The "Wolf Man"'1
Once when I expounded to her a specially important part of the theory, one touching her nearly, she replied in an inimitable tone, 'How very interesting', as though she were a grande dame being taken over a museum and glancing through her lorgnon at objects to which she was completely indifferent.
Sigmund Freud, 'The Psychogenesis of a case of Homosexuality in a Woman'2
Is it possible that love is all subjective, or all objective?
Bram Stoker, Dracula3
In the 1994 special issue of the Women's Writing journal dedicated to the Female Gothic, the contributors acknowledged the importance of revising the debate about the form.4 For Ellen Moers the Female Gothic was characterised by concerns about motherhood and associated images of birth trauma. Later criticism focused attention on how specific structural features, including images of absent mothers and 'lost' daughters, were related to the form's anti-patriarchal politics.5 Whilst such inquiry did not restrict analysis of the form to simple convention spotting, the contributors to the 1994 special issue argued that a re-evaluation of the Female Gothic through a range of recent theoretical approaches, including various psychoanalytical and historicist theories, could move the critical debate on. It was argued that such approaches would help to account for the presence of more subtle Gothic references, including images of the double, models of desire, and specific constructions of gender, all of which have a special place in the Female Gothic. By focusing on these less formal elements of the Female Gothic, an often quite radical re-assessment became possible, one in which writers as diverse as Milton and Stoker could be brought within the ambit of the Female Gothic tradition.6
In this article I will develop, and move beyond, some of the arguments made in that issue. In particular, Fred Betting's essay on Dracula (1897), in which he explored a male anxiety about the appropriation of the predominately female-authored romance,...