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 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Pages 9-28 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussions of abusive relationships.
The protagonist of A Dowry of Blood addresses her unnamed lover. She was his wife, though the two had two other lovers as well. She attempts to justify her decision to murder him. She hopes that he will be proud of her “determination to persist” but chides herself for continuing to seek his approval (12). She clarifies that she did not always want to kill him.
She first meets her lover when raiders ransack her small Romanian village. Her attackers leave her to die, but a vampire finds her and is impressed by her beauty and her will to live. He gives her the name “Constanta” and offers to help her. Constanta agrees, and he bites her and drains her blood. The process is excruciating. He gives her his blood in return. Constanta transforms into a vampire and is immediately filled with hunger for blood. The man wants to give Constanta vengeance. He takes her to the camp of the men who destroyed her village and killed her family and tells her to take her revenge.
In an aside, Constanta confesses that she does not think that her lover ever saw her as an equal. She resents him for renaming her, and so, in her narrative, she will not ever use his name. From the context, it is clear that her lover is Count Dracula. Constanta kills the men who attacked her village, drinking their blood and ripping them apart. When she has finished, she weeps. Dracula takes Constanta to his castle, her new home.
Part 1, Pages 29-49 Summary
Dracula’s castle is crumbling and looks abandoned. Nevertheless, it is grand and opulent to Constanta, who has never seen such a large building in her life. Dracula tells her that it is all for her as he carries her inside. He prepares a bath for Constanta, who is covered in dirt and blood. She initially does not want Dracula to see her naked as no man ever has. Dracula swears that he “will never lift a hand against [her]...in anger, or in lust” and turns his back so Constanta can disrobe and get into the bath (32). He washes her hair and kisses her. Constanta asks to spend the night in his bed as she does not want to be alone; the memory of all the horror she has experienced that day is still too near. Dracula calls her his wife and vows to always give her what she wants. He does not want any secrets or divisions between them. Constanta and Dracula have sex at Constanta’s request. Dracula gives her blood to drink from his finger.
Constanta sleeps for days as she undergoes the full transformation from human into vampire. Dracula tends to her and continues to feed her his blood. Eventually, Constanta emerges and explores the castle. She can go anywhere except the banquet hall, which Dracula shows her only once. He uses it as a private study. It is full of medical and scientific equipment that he uses to research “the mysteries of the body” in an attempt to understand vampirism (44). Constanta believes that God created everything, so he must have created vampires too. Dracula dismisses her religious beliefs. Constanta has questions about vampirism, but her questions soon irritate Dracula. She learns that she will not be able to make other vampires for many centuries; only old and powerful vampires can transform humans. Dracula’s own maker is dead. Constanta feels an overwhelming love for Dracula.
Part 1, Pages 50-62 Summary
A visitor comes to the castle. He wears a plague mask and tells Dracula and Constanta that he is a physician. There is a plague sweeping through the region, and doctors have been unable to stop it. The doctor hopes that Dracula, as lord of his village, will tell his subjects to avoid markets and to avoid breathing foul air that could infect them. Dracula is dismissive, arguing that the villagers do not trust or listen to him. The doctor pleads with him, explaining the terrible symptoms of the plague. Suddenly intrigued, Dracula invites the man into his study.
Dracula asks the doctor to write down all the plague’s symptoms. When the man admits that nobody in the village knows that he has come to the castle, Dracula attacks him and drinks his blood. He urges Constanta to do the same, but she balks at killing the villagers’ only doctor. Dracula tells her that they must leave the castle; now that a plague has struck, people will raid their home. Knowing she might not have access to blood for some time, Constanta reluctantly drinks the doctor’s blood and prepares to leave. Dracula explains that the plague will kill about half the population; he has seen similar events before. Several decades pass as Dracula and Constanta travel from place to place to outrun the plague. Finally, they settle in Vienna.
Part 1, Pages 63-77 Summary
Starting in 1452, Constanta and Dracula live in a lavish Viennese townhouse, and Constanta enjoys a life of luxury. She is also delighted to be among humans again. Dracula has no love for humans and spends most of his time researching at the university. He and Constanta still hunt together, though Constanta prefers to kill and drink from evil-doers. She thinks of herself as “God’s lovely angel of judgement” (64). Dracula believes that vampires cannot be arbiters of justice. They fight about their motives for killing until Dracula becomes angry and asks if Constanta is disrespecting him. Constanta feels afraid of Dracula for the first time, but he quickly distracts her with promises of attending a theatrical performance.
Constanta befriends a young embroiderer named Hanne and is glad to have human company. Dracula becomes jealous and suspicious, accusing Constanta of having “fallen into a shameful infatuation with a weak human girl” and wanting to run away with her (68). Constanta insists that she loves Dracula and would never leave him. They resolve their fight, but then Dracula disappears for two days. Constanta is overcome with worry for Dracula and feels physical pain at being parted from him for so long. When he returns, she cries with relief at his feet. In the early 1500s, the Ottoman army invades Vienna. Dracula is not concerned by the chaos the invasion creates; it makes hunting even easier. Constanta hunts Ottoman soldiers, believing that God means for her to help beat the invading army back from the city. Eventually, Dracula decides that they must once again leave their home. He arranges for them to travel to Spain.
Part 1 Analysis
Vampire stories often magnify a concept or an aspect of human life, bringing it to extremes so it can be more easily examined and deconstructed. In the original Dracula, Bram Stoker uses vampires to examine cultural fears about religion, gender, and disruptions to the social order. A Dowry of Blood similarly magnifies and deconstructs abusive relationships. Abuse and Vampirism go hand in hand in this text, with the relationship between Constanta and Dracula quickly becoming unhealthy. While a human lifetime might stretch to a century, vampires can live forever; a relationship is therefore more likely to span a few centuries than a few years or decades. This first part of the novel establishes a repeating pattern that mirrors real-life abusive relationships. Things start out happily enough with a honeymoon period, but then tension starts to build. The abuser exerts increasing control over their partner, making the partner feel afraid. Fights ensue when the tension gets too great, after which the partners come back together, with the abuser reinforcing the previous status quo. Dracula is able to exert control over Constanta quite easily, as he is older and stronger than she is. He knows about vampire lore and history, and he keeps that information from her to maintain his power. She has no emotional connections besides him, as he finds her when everyone she knows has just been killed. When she makes a connection with Hanne, Dracula immediately intervenes on the basis that vampires and humans cannot safely interact. He positions himself as the only one who can truly love or understand Constanta so that she remains reliant on him. His control over Constanta is so effective that when he leaves for just two days, she misses him terribly and agrees to obey him as before.
Like many fictional vampires, Constanta grapples with questions of Immortality, Violence, and Morality. Her first act as a vampire is to exert vengeance against those who have harmed her and her loved ones, setting up her later preference for killing cruel people. Many vampire stories raise similar questions: What does it mean to be a being who must kill people and drink blood to survive? Is such a life sustainable, and if so, at what cost? Do vampires have a responsibility to be selective about who they kill? Constanta believes that they do, but Dracula disagrees. She tries to strike a painful balance between what she thinks is right and what she needs to survive, while he absolves himself of any guilt.
Constanta’s story is one of repeated Rebirth and Self-Discovery. The story starts with her rebirth as a vampire as her human life ends. She discovers that she has a taste for vengeance, but she also experiences a self-effacement: Dracula robs her of her name, and the raiders rob her of her family and her home. Constanta’s age is ambiguous in this text. In this section, she suggests that she has had sex before, but she is unmarried before she meets Dracula, and no man has seen her naked. When she becomes a vampire, she feels her life “slipping away from [her] the way girlhoods must slip from women” (29). These details suggest that she is a young woman, though later sections will introduce information that makes her mortal age less certain.
The setting of this book is also ambiguous. It starts in Romania in either the 1300s or the 1400s; 1452 in Vienna is the first date given. It is possible that the outbreak of the plague that Constanta and Dracula flee is the Black Death (1346-1353), which killed up to half of the population of Europe. However, there were many later outbreaks of the same disease. In addition to this ambiguity, Constanta’s narration contains some contradictions and typos, introducing uncertainties about her reliability as a narrator. Constanta refers to Dracula as her “savoir” instead of her “savior,” and on multiple occasions, she uses “lead” as a past tense verb instead of “led.” When Constanta meets Dracula, she says that his “face was obscured by the blinding sun” (15), even though she later suggests that sunlight is dangerous or deadly for vampires. Similarly, just moments after the line about sunlight, she says that “drops of grey rain tumbled from the empty sky” (16). These inconsistencies undercut much of the story’s tension and highlight that the narrative is mediated through Constanta, whose first-person perspective may not be fully reliable.
