Vampires, Dracula and Women
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The purpose of this research is to examine the ways in which the legend of the vampire, encased within Bram Stoker's Dracula, emerges as an index of the position of women amid fin-de-siecle decadence. The plan of the research will be to set forth the principal elements of the climate of social and sexual repression that defined prevailing ideas about women in Victorian society and culture, and then to discuss aspects of the novel that show it to be as much (if not more) a product of such closely held attitudes as a commentary upon them. Throughout, reference will be made, from a twentieth-century perspective, to the status of the so-called New Woman, whose identity was at the time of the novel's publication just beginning to emerge. The power and sensual attractiveness of the vampire offer access to forbidden (sexual) fruit that could not fail to appeal to the elements of repression of Victorian culture. Precisely because of the strict moral sanctions against what today would be referred to as acting out depraved sensibilities, Dracula offers those behaving under the guidelines of a repressive culture the opportunity--in the form of an unsought moral obligation--to explore the abyss of profane knowledge and activity and render it powerless in the world. Initially, of course, the obligation comes to light as a depraved thrill, in Harker's half-waking, half-sexual experience in Dracula's castle with the three vampire women. "There was something about them that made me un
. . .
om number Lucy and Mina. Hartman's evaluation of the contemporaneous commentaries on such women makes it inconceivable that Stoker was unaware of the mid-century criticisms of such women. She summarizes in a sociological frame the atmosphere in which Van Helsing (accurately) perceives the fall from grace of Lucy and Mina.
[T]he attack on middle-class women, which intensified in these last decades of the century, was something more than simple nostalgia for an imaginary perfect past. Middle-class women were being made into scapegoats by many who were frightened or resentful of the rapid social change whose signs were everywhere. The irreligious, unsubmissive, outspoken painted creatures, the luxury-hungry imitators of the "queens of the demimonde," the so-called rampant modernizations were monsters of the mind. But like most such creatures, they had some relation to the real world.
The new woman, then, had a dual aspect in popular image. While increased visibility was argued to have expanded her theoretical opportunities to raise the moral tone of society, it had also, according to observers, made her recognizably more open to dangerous and corrupting influences . . . The new woman, in herself, was now seen as potentia
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Stoker Bantam, Van Helsing, Lucy Mina, Mina Lucy, Earnshaw Count, Stoker's Dracula, Sigmund Freud, Mina Mankind, Dracula Moreover, Mina Victorian, van helsing, stoker bantam, mina lucy, lucy mina, victorian society, mina's journal, dr seward, middle-class women, teeming millions, van helsing's, york bantam 1989, role pursuing dracula, bram stoker york, overt sexual hunger, york ballantine 1975,
Approximate Word count = 8376
Approximate Pages = 34 (250 words per page)
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