42 pages • 1-hour read
A Dowry of Blood
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Symbols & Motifs
Blood
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussions of abusive relationships.
In A Dowry of Blood, as in other vampire stories, blood is both a motif and a necessity: It is a vampire’s number one priority as it is necessary for a vampire’s survival. Blood is intrinsically linked to questions of Immortality, Violence, and Morality. Vampires must drink blood to survive, and in most cases, they must kill the people they drink from or risk being discovered. All vampires therefore must decide where they get blood, whose blood they drink, and how they feel about this aspect of their existence. Constanta prefers to drink the blood of people she deems to be evil or abusive, though she cannot always choose whom she drinks from while in a relationship with Dracula.
Dracula uses blood as a form of control to help him maintain his power over Constanta, Magdalena, and Alexi. He creates his spouses by drinking their blood and giving them his own blood. When Constanta is a new vampire, he feeds her his blood until she is strong enough to hunt for humans. He tries to prevent his lovers from drinking each other’s blood, though his reasons for discouraging them from doing so remain obscure. When all of them are imprisoned in the chateau in France while Dracula hunts, his control over the blood they drink becomes absolute. When the three of them kill Dracula, they drink his blood, which makes them strong. This consumption is a way for all of them to reclaim the power that Dracula took from them when he turned them.
Travel
The characters in A Dowry of Blood travel extensively across Europe over the course of several centuries. Their travels are a motif that connects to the theme of Rebirth and Self-Discovery, as they learn about themselves and grow as people when they visit new places. The ability to travel and to see the world change over centuries is one of the only perks of a vampire life with Dracula in this story. The first time that Constanta is truly happy in the story is when she arrives in Vienna and falls in love with the city. She can participate in the world in a way that was not open to her when she lived in her small Romanian village. Magdalena specifically wants to be a vampire so that she can travel and engage with European politics more freely. Both Constanta and Magdalena love Venice, and their relationship flourishes there. Alexi immediately chooses Paris for his honeymoon, and he connects with the artist community there. There is even an offhanded reference to him meeting Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller.
Of course, Dracula limits the extent to which his lovers can enjoy their travels. He does not want them to go out without him, and he spends most of his time on his research. If they want to reap the benefits of travel, they must do so against his wishes. Dracula’s spouses recognize and value travel, and it is for this reason that all three of them choose to travel independently once Dracula is dead. They decide that an immortal life does not need to be a miserable one; they can expand their horizons and participate in the world even though they are vampires.
Religion
The relationship between vampires and religion is explored in many vampire stories. In Dracula, Bram Stoker is clear: Vampires are evil creatures that are not protected by God. They cannot interact with any holy symbols, including crucifixes or the Eucharist. While they exist as vampires, their souls are in purgatory or hell, but by killing them, it is possible to send their souls to heaven. Other stories, like Anne Rice’s The Vampire Armand, take a more nuanced view, exploring vampires’ connection to religion in detail without arriving at solid answers.
A Dowry of Blood is a retelling of Dracula that also draws inspiration from The Vampire Armand, which is largely set in Venice and Paris. Constanta is the only explicitly religious character in the novel, and she sometimes asks God questions about her existence. However, she is not concerned with the idea that she is sinning by killing people, even choosing to believe that the murders she commits are according to God’s will. She also has no trouble entering churches or taking the eucharist. Her faith is a source of strength for her, but it is also something that the story does not explore in much detail. She never loses faith, and she never learns (or really asks) whether her status as a vampire impacts her relationship to Christianity in any way. In this way, religion is a motif whose ambiguity aligns with Constanta’s status as an unreliable narrator: Just as Constanta’s narration is muddied by inconsistencies, so too does her relationship with religion reveal her tendency to leave many aspects of her life unexamined.
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