It’s hard to beat Bella Lugosi’s Dracula from the 1831 film. The images from that adaptation certainly capture some of the sexual energy and anxiety that Stoker develops throughout the text, sometimes in passages so explicit that it seems impossible Victorian readers would not have understood the symbolic connections between different varieties of penetration.

The novel leads us to fear (and sometimes enjoy?) the penetration of characters by the fangs of the dreaded foreign monster. And then there is the counter penetration (by needles and stakes) of British women by the British men who, supposedly, love and defend them. Below the surface, it is hard NOT to see that these acts of penetration suggest various weird forms of eroticized mastery.

In your post, focus on one particular “penetration” scene and read the language very carefully, picking out short quotations that tell us something important about this novel. You might focus on a literal penetration by fang or stake or needle, but you might think of the broader sense of the word, of intrusion, invasion, trespass, etc.