Gender Roles In Dracula

Small Project #5: Dracula As a Response to the New Woman

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is defined by the themes of gender and societal change. The novel portrays vampirism—embodied by Dracula and his female followers—as a corrupter of the virtue of the young women whom the Count attacks and turns into vampires, thereby threatening the stability of women’s role in English society. Stoker’s work is increasingly concerned with the threats of societal upheaval, especially in regards to traditional societal gender roles and female sexuality. This concern is born out of an attempt to grapple with of shifting gender roles in Victorian English society. The portrayal of gender roles in regards to Mina and Lucy in Bram Stoker’s Dracula are a response to the

In the Victorian Age, divergent roles and standards for women surfaced in response to the industrial revolution, prompting the controversial proto-feminist ideal of the “New Woman.” In the early stages of the Victorian Age, upper and middle class women were expected to take on the role of the “Angel in the House”; they where to be domestic caretakers of children (as motherhood was the utmost priority) and their homes in service of their husbands (British Library). A woman could not vote or own property; rather, she was the property of her husband and submissive to his will. Furthermore, by Victorian standards, women were to be chaste and sexually reserved towards anyone save for their husbands, making discussions of female sexuality incredibly taboo. Yet with the advent of the industrial revolution in the late nineteenth century, and the subsequent expansion of collegial education to women and increased presence in the industrial workforce, women began to challenge these patriarchal societal norms. A woman who led this non-traditional, independent lifestyle was termed a “New Woman” by her contemporaries. Women who embodied this

Through her interactions with multiple perspective proposals, Lucy expresses a desire for sexual independence and liberation from her societal restrictions. In a letter to Mina, she laments society’s unwillingness to “let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her” (50). By scandalously longing for polygamous marital relations, Lucy expresses a sexual forwardness characteristic of a New Woman, an affront to traditional values of purity and monogamous devotion. Her primary relationship to both Arthur and Quincy (and even to some degree the other men in the group) is as a love interest. By contrast, Mina would never suggest such sexual deviancy, and instead assumes the traditional sexless roles as mother to the men in her life. Mina is presented throughout the text as a nurturing spirit, to whom the men, namely Arthur, feel comfortable “break[ing] down..and express[ing] his feelings on the tender or emotional side” because she is so incredibly maternal (196). Mina describes herself (and by extension all women) as having “something of the mother in us” which allows her to adequately comfort Arthur “as though he were [her] own child” (197). In her embracing of motherhood (and thus becoming desexualized in place of being sexual autonomous), Mina represents the traditional Victorian role of