If there's one person who can link trees to penis's it's Sigmund Freud. By coming up with psychoanalysis, he reckoned that when we fall asleep we become unconsciously aware of 'stimuli' whatever that is, and we react to it by dreams.
So, Freud thinks that anything 'which consist of three parts can mean a man's sexual organ and that the phallus 'is symbolically substituted with all things similar to it by their form, namelylong objects that jut out'. So, linking this to what we have began reading in Dracula, in which reality and the dream state become confusingly intertwined, Jonathan Harker writes in his diary; "Soon we were hemmed in with trees [...]". Freud would see these 'trees' and the phallus. (trying not to write 'penis' too much as it freaked me out how much we said penis last lesson.)
Moving on, Freud says that pretty much everything other than trees, mountains, rocks, sticks etc are female genitalia. To carry on with the quote above- "[...] which in places arched right over the roadway til we passed through a tunnel [...]" SO to conclude, Harker is thinking about bits 'n' bobs.
Freud then goes on to say that journeys, whether threatening or not, symbolises sexual intercourse. "The carriage went at a hard pace straight along [...]".
It is true that sex and what not is a key element to the Gothic, and I do know that there will be a lot of symbolism and sexual-like things, but I don't really like Freud's interpretation of dreams. I think that sex is a very animalistic instinct which all of us probably have in our unconscious, but to me, a tree is a tree. Well not anymore, Freud's ruined that for me.
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