The Imprint of the Mother: Bram Stoker’s ‘The Squaw’ and The Jewel of Seven Stars

Abstract

Like the bite of the vampire, the theme of marking punctuates Stoker’s work. Birthmarks, the indelible touch of the devouring mother, are seared into the skin of the child. Stoker’s lesser-read Gothics express Victorian patriarchal gynaecological anxieties of maternal imprinting, the notion that the pregnant mother’s sensory experiences and traumas would physically mark her unborn child in utero. Dracula (1897), of course, notoriously codifies the maternal as consuming through the figures of the Weird Sisters and the Bloofer Lady, whilst simultaneously exploring and repeating the idea of returning to the imprinting womb, whose bite begins at the vampiric vagina dentata. But Dracula is also surrounded by works in Stoker’s oeuvre where the devouring mother is embodied by the act of maternal imprinting, and in The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903/1912) and the earlier short story ‘The Squaw’ (1893) the birthmark inflicted against the child in the womb functions as a symbol of territory and possession, of colonial and psychic conflicts between the devouring mother and the Symbolic father waged on the battleground of the child’s body. Offering new ways to read the intersections of motherhood, superstition, science and anxiety in his work this chapter writes a new direction for the critical and cultural reception of Stoker’s Gothic.