Mesmeric Powers
A common trait in Victorian-era anti-Mormon literature was "the sexual magnetism of the Mormon male, and the hypnotized passivity of his innocent victim." Count Dracula's power over his victims was a hypnotic one, from his assault on Jonathan Harker in Transylvania to his seduction of Mina, Harker's fiancée, in London. In the novel, Dr. Van Helsing, the all-wise vampire killer, describes a victim to Harker in this way: "She was bitten by the vampire when she was in a trance . . . and in trance could he [Dracula] best come to take more blood. In trance she died, and in trance she is Un-Dead, too." Isoldi Keene's "mesmeric powers" were established from the first moments in Trapped by the Mormons and reinforced by the bogus raising of the dead scene in the gypsy wagon.
Trapped by the Mormons illustrates these powers with a scene directly from Graham's book that has since become a stock portrayal of the Hollywood movie vampire. The nighttime scene places Keene below Nora's window gesturing with his hands and eyebrows, supposedly in a mesmeric throb, as he draws Nora to him in a hypnotic sleepwalk. Graham describes the scene in her book as follows:
For a moment Jacinth stood still, her heart beating fiercely. She knew she was not sleep-walking, yet could not explain why she had ventured forth to face the night alone. As she paused, wondering, a figure materialized from the shadows. This time it was no spirit form, but a tall, dark-coated man, with a slouch hat drawn over his eyes, and a muffler partially concealing his chin. "Angel, wife, love of my soul," he whispered passionately, and the voice was that of Ziba Wayne. Turning quickly, Jacinth swayed forward, and was caught in his arms. "What does it mean?" she gasped; "oh! Ziba, what does it mean?" Holding the trembling form, he drew her away from the cottage, and answered in a soothing whisper -- "My sweet one, I had need of you, I was sick with love. I wanted to prove my power, to summon you forth as the night summons the stars. I stood beneath your window, and, looking up, called upon Heaven to let my spirit enter your chamber and draw you down to the garden below. I worked the charm upon my knees."
There is a similar scene in Tod Browning's Dracula where the Count draws his female victim from her second story bedroom to him waiting below in a mist-enshrouded garden. These almost identical incidents depicted by two different filmmakers nine years apart and from two separate literary sources produced, as they appeared on the screen, distinctly similar images -- convincing evidence that Graham's Mormon and Stoker's vampire were cut from the same mold.
In a further application of Keene's mesmeric powers, the mystic Mormon elder would also alter the perceptions of events in the minds of his victims. As Jacinth witnessed the temple rites with Ziba Wayne, Graham provided her readers with a description of its influence on the young girl: "In fancy she actually beheld the blasphemous antics of these people, Ziba's power forcing them to appear sacred to the mind of the girl his love had bewitched."
The Kiss of Death
Along with his mesmeric powers, Dracula's central modus operandi was sucking the literal lifeblood from his victims with a kiss. The transfer of blood from his virginal female victims also assumed a virtual transfer of identity and a change in personality. A vampire's kiss also carried with it sexual connotations. In Stoker's Dracula, Mina declares that after being seduced by the vampire and forced to drink of his blood as he did of hers, that she was as a result "tainted" and "polluted." In another instance, Dr. Van Helsing reasons that the transfusion of another man's blood (other than her fiancé) renders the female victim a bigamist! Dracula himself claimed Harker's fiancée as his own bride, owing to her blood that flowed through his veins. In lines suggesting a marriage ceremony, the vampire declared, "And you, their best beloved one, are now to me, flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful wine-press for a while; and shall be later on my companion and my helper."
The contamination that Mina feels is also due to the sexual attraction and the associated Victorian guilt felt during a vampire's seduction of a victim. When Jonathan Harker was first attacked by vampires, it was not by the Count himself, but by his three wives. As Harker described in his journal:
All three [of Dracula's wives] had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me feel uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down, lest some day it should meet Mina's eyes and cause her pain; but it is the truth.