42 pages • 1 hour read
S. T. GibsonA Dowry of Blood
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3, Pages 199-252Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3, Pages 199-216 Summary
Dracula moves them all to a crumbling chateau in the French countryside. He shuts them inside and locks all the doors and windows. Magdalena succumbs to her melancholy again, and Alexi fights with Dracula constantly. The residents of the nearby village grow suspicious of them, especially when young women start to go missing. Dracula does all the hunting, having forbidden the others from leaving the castle, and Constanta wonders if his pursuit of innocent village girls is a specific punishment for her. Constanta is tormented by the fact that she is as happy to see Dracula leave as she is to see him return. She starts to formulate a plan.
Constanta spies on a conversation wherein Dracula discovers that Alexi has been stealing silver from him. Alexi confesses that he is worried that Dracula will turn him out; he wants something of value to bring with him if necessary. Dracula assures Alexi that he will never let him go. They start to have sex, and Constanta hurries away. Another day, Constanta finds Alexi crying. She comforts him as he wonders if Dracula is deliberately cruel. Alexi kisses Constanta, and they have sex for the first time. Alexi confesses that he loves her, and Constanta realizes that she has wanted Alexi for a long time. Later, Dracula asks Constanta where Alexi is and realizes that the two of them have had sex. He hides his anger, saying that their tryst only happened because Alexi is angry with Dracula and Magdalena is ill. Constanta decides that Dracula’s cruelty is deliberate.
At last, Constanta, Magdalena, and Alexi hatch a plan to search Dracula’s study to learn how to kill him. Magdalena and Alexi are hesitant at first, but when Constanta tells them about Dracula’s former lovers, they realize that they are all disposable to him. Magdalena agrees to distract Dracula when he comes home while Constanta and Alexi search his study.
Part 3, Pages 217-232 Summary
In the study, Constanta and Alexi find a heavy, leather-bound book containing all of Dracula’s notes about vampires. The book explains how Dracula has murdered other vampires, including his maker. Upstairs, they hear Dracula return home and speak to Magdalena. They replace the book and hurry upstairs. Dracula does not notice anything amiss. He tells them that he was unable to secure them a meal as he was seen attempting to take a victim. Magdalena believes that the villagers will come after him; Dracula dismisses this concern, but Magdalena continues to anger him, and he snaps. Constanta warns Dracula not to touch Magdalena, and he grabs her by the throat. He threatens Constanta, telling her that he can destroy her just as easily as he made her. Later, Constanta tells Magdalena what she and Alexi found in Dracula’s study.
The villagers form a mob and march on the castle, seeking to destroy Dracula. Dracula is not afraid; all the doors and windows are shuttered and locked, and he does not believe that they will get past the front gates. Privately, Constanta tells Magdalena and Alexi that it is time to move against Dracula. Alexi is conflicted because he still believes that Dracula loves them. Magdalena insists that his love will eventually kill all of them. Alexi and Magdalena lure Dracula into their bedroom, where Constanta waits for them. Together, they seduce Dracula into bed and then pin him down with all their strength. Dracula does not realize at first that he is in danger. Constanta knows that she must act quickly as Dracula is extremely strong. She pulls out a sharpened wooden stake, and Dracula realizes what they are trying to do. He pleads with Constanta and tries to convince her that he will forgive her if she just puts the stake down. Constanta closes her eyes and raises the stake above her head.
Part 3, Pages 232-252 Summary
Constanta drives the stake into Dracula’s heart. His blood seeps out of him, staining the bed and his three lovers. They drink from him, taking his power into themselves. With Dracula well and truly drained of blood, Constanta lifts his body in her arms with her new strength. Alexi finds the keys to the door, and they take Dracula’s corpse outside to the gathering mob. Constanta presents Dracula’s body to them, telling them to do what they want with it. The mob decapitates Dracula while Constanta, Alexi, and Magdalena hurriedly gather whatever belongings they can and flee. As they run, they look back to see their home burning to the ground. Constanta assures Alexi and Magdalena that they will rebuild their lives and survive whatever comes next.
Sometimes, Constanta thinks that she catches glimpses of Dracula in busy crowds. Alexi takes a boat to America, where he intends to become an actor. Constanta and Magdalena are sad to be parted from him, but Constanta is sure that they will see each other again. They all decide that after spending so many years together, they need to “strike out in the world on [their] own” (247). Magdalena goes to Rome to study politics; she and Constanta spend their last few days together after Alexi leaves. Constanta is anguished to see Magdalena go and begs her to be careful. She is not sure where she will go but thinks that perhaps she will finally return to her home country of Romania. She also wants to fall in love again. She and Magdalena part ways. Constanta hopes that one day, she will stop asking God for forgiveness for what she has done. She promises Dracula that she will live her life fully and believes that if there was ever a part of him that really loved her, that would make him happy. Her final promise is that she will never speak his name, not even to tell her future lovers about him and how they met.
Part 3, Pages 199-252 Analysis
Constanta’s story of Abuse and Vampirism comes to a close as the three lovers decide to kill Dracula and escape so that they can live freely at last. Just before Constanta and Alexi become lovers, Alexi asks whether Dracula knows that he is being cruel. Constanta decides that he does. She uses her belief in Dracula’s deliberate cruelty as a justification for killing him. However, as the novel is narrated from Constanta’s first-person perspective, Dracula is never given interiority, so his true intentions are deliberately vague. This ambiguity underscores that Dracula’s intentions are irrelevant to his partners’ decision to escape the marriage: Regardless of whether Dracula is acting with deliberate, premeditated cruelty, Constanta, Magdalena, and Alexi are experiencing emotional and physical abuse and are justified in taking action to reclaim their lives.
All four of the vampires in the story deal with complex questions of Immortality, Violence, and Morality in the final pages of this book. Dracula exclusively hunts innocent young women, which Constanta believes is a deliberate power play designed to hurt her. Dracula has always found Constanta’s desire to kill evil people frustrating, and now that his lovers are all locked up at home, he can force his preferences for violence upon them. Despite her distaste for many forms of violence, Constanta concludes that in this case, killing Dracula is the only way for the three of them to move forward with their lives. This is a common ending for vampire stories: Vampires are created through violence, and they must be destroyed through violence as well. Vampire stories are about extremes, which is why breaking up with Dracula and running away to start a new life would not be enough. Just like in Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula must die at the end so that the other characters can live.
However, Dracula’s death is left open-ended, again highlighting Constanta’s status as an unreliable narrator and the novel’s intentionally ambiguous relationship to its source text. The events of Dracula are not narrated in this story, so it is not clear whether Jonathan Harker and his friends attempted to kill A Dowry of Blood’s Dracula and his brides by staking them through the heart and decapitating them, as Bram Stoker tells it. If this novel’s Dracula was indeed subject to Harker’s assassination attempt, it was evidently unsuccessful. Despite the uncertain effectiveness of this murder method, Constanta and her lovers take Harker’s same approach when they try to kill Dracula. They do not even decapitate him personally, instead leaving the final killing act up to an angry mob. Vampires in fiction are notoriously difficult to kill, especially when they are very old and very powerful. It is perhaps for this reason that Constanta says that she sometimes thinks she sees Dracula in a crowd: Perhaps he really is still alive, having survived this assassination attempt just as he is implied to have survived the one from Dracula.
This section of the text features a final push toward Rebirth and Self-Discovery, this time revolving around the characters’ lives after Dracula’s death. Constanta, Magdalena, and Alexi at last realize that the only way they can live their lives fully is if Dracula is no longer around. Instead of choosing to live in dangerous stagnation, they choose the path of painful but ultimately rewarding growth. Once Dracula is dead, his lovers decide to part ways. Although they love each other, they also recognize that they have been forced together by circumstance and that they have never had the opportunity to explore who they are outside of the context of their relationships with Dracula and with each other. All of them get to do the things that Dracula specifically forbade them from doing: Alexi gets to become an actor, Magdalena gets to participate in politics, and Constanta gets to return to the home that she lost when the book began and potentially reclaim the identity that Dracula erased when he turned her into a vampire and gave her a new name.
