The New Woman in Fanu’s Carmilla, Stoker’s Dracula, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer
The correlation between the vampire, a figure that is usually regarded as the
subject of social ostracism, and the New Woman, the advent of which was feared by the majority of the British Victorian patriarchy, was a prominent aspect of much mid-to-late Victorian era literature. Supplementary evidence to support the compelling Victorian era literary connection between the vampire and the New Woman can be extrapolated from the unique gender role standards that defined that socially complex era. As Catherine Siemann suggests in her essay, “Darkness Falls on the Endless Summer: Buffy as Gidget for the Fin de Siecle,” the Victorian New Woman’s “personal autonomy, economic independence and sexual self-determination led [her] to be seen as a threat, undermining the social order” (Wilcox and Lavery 124). In transforming New Woman-like literary characters into vampires, their punishment or destruction could be interpreted as a culturally acceptable way to metaphorically control the New Woman, thereby keeping the existing patriarchal domination unblemished and intact. Thus, literature offered the Victorian patriarchy a psychological defense against this perceived cultural “threat;” unsurprisingly, male authors were the ones responsible for a good portion of these texts.
While New Woman-like vampires are featured in many Victorian works, including
Charles Baudelaire’s “The Vampire” (1857) and Julian Osgood Field’s “A Kiss of Judas” (1894), perhaps none capture, in metaphoric form, the anxiety about, and the alleged viciousness toward, the New Woman better than Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla (1872) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).
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...hers, Inc., 2002. 120-129.
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The novel Dracula by Bram Stoker has plentiful examples of key concepts we have examined in class including: Purity and impurity, magical thinking, strong emotions such as disgust and shame, , formalization, and myth. In this essay I will summarize events that take place within the novel when the protagonists deal with Dracula and then relate these events to the key concepts to demonstrate why the characters view him as dangerous, and therefore something to be avoided completely.
Birge, Barbara. "Bram Stoker's DRACULA: The Quest for Female Potency in Transgressive Relationships." Psychological Perspectives. 1994. 22-36.
This essay explores the blurring of gender roles within Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Angela Carter’s The Lady of the House of Love, focusing on the presentation of a sexually assertive female and its threat to the patriarchal society, and the duality of the female characters as they are presented as enticing and thrilling, but also dangerous and somewhat repulsive.
While Bram Stoker’s Dracula has been described as the “quintessence of evil creatures we meet in our everyday lives” and “the Darkness” in the hearts of men (Herbert, 2004, pp. 62), Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight
Conclusively, while Bram Stokers novel Dracula is seen as a gothic and horror story, I argue that it is a novel that seeks to address female sexuality directly. Seen through numerous passages, Stoker confronts and battles the views between sexuality during the Victorian era though his genius of characterization of characters present within the novel. As it seems highly intentional to me, I respect the way in which he criticizes and critiques upon female sexuality by bringing into light new ideas regarding female desires. When contrasting his text upon today’s culture, the differences to how one perceived the vampire has changed significantly.
The slave trade developed in the mid-15th century after Europeans began exploring and forming trading post on the West coast of Africa. The Portuguese, British, and French were among the ...
A querying of normative gender behaviour and sexuality pervades the 19th century gothic fiction text. What does this reveal about the cultural context within the tale exists?
Similar to almost every piece of literature ever created, Dracula by Bram Stoker has been interpreted many different ways, being torn at from every angle possible. Just as one might find interest in interpreting novels differently, he or she might also find interest in the plot, prose, or theme, all of which ultimately lead to the novels overall tone. Throughout the novel, it becomes blatant that the novel contains an underlying theme of female incompetence and inferiority. Through a true feminist’s eyes, this analysis can clearly be understood by highlighting the actions of Mina and Lucy, the obvious inferior females in the book. Through Stoker’s complete and utter manipulation of Mina and Lucy, he practically forces the reader to analyze the co-existence of dominant males and inferior females in society and to simultaneously accept the fact that the actual text of Dracula is reinforcing the typical female stereotypes that have developed throughout the ages.
Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, is a highly controversial work of fiction that is still being read for the first time today. Dracula touches many different categories including; sci-fi horror to 1800’s English romance literature. This is the main reason why the novel Dracula can be analyzed in many different ways using many different literary theories. The theory which stuck out most to me while reading this novel was the Feminist Theory. The Feminist Theory cannot be used to analyze Dracula as a whole novel, but it can be used in order to analyze the different female characters throughout the book. Therefore, Bram Stoker’s Dracula can be analyzed through the feminist theory by focusing on the characters Mina Harker, Lucy Westenra, and the three brides of Dracula.
In New York, Puerto Rican musical traditions evolved in accordance with societal change. This was necessary in a society, as Glasser describes “where Puerto Ricans lived among a constellation of constantly changing ethnic groups within a protean social environment”(Glasser, 7). In Puerto Rico there are diverse groups, with different traditions of politics, economics, and music. When Puerto Ricans migrate to the United States, they unite under an identity as “Puerto Ricans” but there is still diversity within. Furthermore, I believe it is the Ameri...
Jenkins Jennifer “On Punishment and Teen Killers.” Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, 2 August 2011. 7 May 2014.
At first glance, Joss Whedon's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," the hour-long TV series which premiered in 1997 and is now in its third season, bears little resemblance to the book which started the vampire craze -- Bram Stoker's Dracula, published a century earlier. And yet, looks can be deceiving. Although the trendy -- and often skimpy -- clothing and bandied about pop-culture references of "Buffy" clearly mark the series as a product of a far different culture than that of the Victorian England of Dracula, the underlying tensions of the two texts are far similar than one might think. Beneath the surface differences in the treatment of their heroines, the two texts converge in similarly problematic anxieties about gender and sexuality.
The Harlem Renaissance started as a literary and intellectual movement with a mission of both race propaganda and "pure" art. Their task was to identify and articulate a community consciousness rather than overthrow existing institutions. They represented the outsiders who wanted to be a part of the main stream. As for being a part of the community they were as far as the black community. However in the bigger picture, the black community was outside of the national community, which consisted of the white race.
For centuries, well before the basic notions of infectious diseases were understood, humans have realized that climate changes effect epidemic diseases (Patz et al.). The Roman aristocracy retreated to the hills each summer to avoid malaria and the South Asians learned that early in the summer, heavily curried foods were less likely to cause diarrheal diseases (Patz et al.). Patz et al. stated that there have been three distinct transition periods that changed the human to microbe relationship. Those three transition periods are: 1) Early human settlements enabling enzootic infective species to enter the human population, 2) Early Eurasion civilizations swapped dominant infections by military and commercial contact, and lastly, 3) European expansionism over the past five centuries caused the spread of often lethal infectious diseases. They also state that we could be in the fourth transition, with climate change having a wide range of impacts on the occurrence of infectious diseases in human populations.
The Harlem Renaissance or “New Negro Movement” as coined by Alain Locke was a time when African Americans emerged in the literary, performing and visual arts creating a “black” cultural explosion as we now know it. “Negro has been man without a history because he has been considered a man without a worthy culture (Schomburg, pg. 66) was no longer accurate as black culture was becoming more prominent each day. With slavery being abolished, African