The Feminist Movement In Bram Stoker's Dracula

IF YOU READ THIS YOU ARE AN ASSHOLE. HAHA! IF YOU READ THIS YOU ARE AN ASSHOLE. HAHA! IF YOU READ THIS YOU ARE AN ASSHOLE.

Arthur, Quincey, Jack, and Van Helsing). Her chief quality is sensual beauty, but her sexual desire is repressed and not allowed to communicate. And yet both the spiritual side and the sexual side are in her, and when the long repressed sexuality finds a vent, it explodes and takes over completely. In other words, she is transformed into the completely voluptuous female vampire precisely because her sexual side of personality had been completely buried by her Victorian education. Her repressed self needs such expression that when Dracula came along, she went out to greet him, and then invited him into the house (by opening her window to the bat).

This book I think shows a very c lear and obvious theme of femininty throughout the novel. It shows women as innocent, quiete, and having high morals. Then they are sucked into the evil that is Dracula. The women are shown as whores to us the readers, and they even have a parallel to the Siren creatures - especialy Dracula's brides. They lure in men, and use their sexuality to do what they want with them.

Going from a pure proper woman that is to be married to dangerous vampire that is hunting children in the night. This is a perfect analogy of how the desires of sex can lead to your downfall with Lucy’s lust for the vampire bite changing her. Robert Humphrey in his article Ideals of the Victorian Woman as Depicted in ‘Dracula’ goes into further detail of it. “Stoker is showing the ease, ability, and potential in which the ideal Victorian woman can be converted into the evil, unchaste, impure, sexual woman of Victorian society.”(Humphrey. Web).

Caroline Forbes is in critical condition with her health and her friends, some of which are vampires, decide that to restore her health, she needs to ingest Damon, a vampire’s, blood. Katherine Pierce, the evil doppelganger of Elena, then murders Caroline to make her presence in the town known to the Salvatore Brothers. This ultimately makes Caroline a vampire. Life as an immortal being in The Vampire Diaries allows vampires to compel human minds, manipulating them. Katherine Pierce often used this technique to get what she wanted.

Rose, 2). Dracula accentuates the lust for sexuality through the main characters by contrasting it with the fears of the feminine sexuality during the Victorian period. In Victorian society, according to Dr.William Acton, a doctor during the Victorian period argued that a woman was either labelled as innocent and pure, or a wife and mother. If a woman was unable to fit in these precincts, consequently as a result she would be disdained and unfit for society and be classified as a whore (Acton, 180). The categorizing of woman is projected through the “uses the characters of Lucy and Mina as examples of the Victorian ideal of a proper woman, and the “weird sisters” as an example of women who are as bold as to ignore cultural boundaries of sexuality and societal constraints” according to Andrew Crockett from the UC Santa Barbara department of English (Andrew Cro... ... middle of paper ... ... the Victorian ideals is seen as a threat to society and is deemed unfit.

Gynophobia is so prevalent in the horror story that Count Dracula comes across as the main tyrant of fear, but only a naive reader would think this. The true terroristic element comes from the fear of sexual expression of women. There is substantial evidence supporting female repression, “In the coffin lay no longer the foul thing, her destruction was yielded as a privilege to the one best entitled go it, her face of unequalled sweetness and purity.” (Stoker 134) Starting with Lucy’s transformation of becoming a vampire, it awakens her sexuality thus exposing the men’s vulnerability. Attempting to demonstrate woman can’t handle power. She becomes a sex crazed feign the men must destroy, to k... ... middle of paper ... ... her life is spared in the end.

The gothic vampire classic Dracula, written by Bram Stoker, is one of the most well known novels of the nineteenth century. The story focuses on a vampire named Dracula who travels to England in search of new blood, but who eventually is found out and driven away by a group of newly minted vampire hunters. A major social change that was going on during the late nineteenth century, around the time of that this novel was being written, was the changing roles of women in British society which constituted as the “New Woman” movement and the novel seems to explore and worry about this subject extensively. These women wanted to be freed both politically and sexually, but much of the general population at the time found it unsettling (Dixon, 2006). In this paper, I argue that the female characters in Stokers Dracula portray aspects of both traditional 19th century women and “New Woman”, suggesting that Stoker is supportive of some parts of the “New Woman” phenomenon but does not support all aspects of it.

evil, where a young woman loses her youth when she encounters the wicked Dracula. The vampire story essentials always include a victim of Dracula, that is a young women. In this novel there are two women that are victims of Dracula’s actions. The first lady is Lucy who is not very innocent as she is secretly married to three men, but chooses one, Arthur Holmwood to live with forever. Lucy starts sleepwalking and is caught by Dracula in the night.

It is clear from analysis of the original text that it is very much built within the framework of the patriarchal and repressed 19th century context. In Victorian England, expression of female sexuality was very much frowned upon and only two polar opposite states of sexuality existed – that of the pure, chaste virgin, and of the somewhat soiled wife and mother. When considering the main female characters, the first discrepancy between the movie and the book appears. In the book it is quite apparent throughout that Dracula is attempting to turn the chaste Lucy and Mina into their opposites – into Nosferatu, vampires and embodiments of the suppressed sexuality that in many ways defines the original text. However, in the movie Lucy is almost shockingly sexually aware, and is very forward with Quincey in particular before she is under the influence of Dracula.