Bram Stoker 's Dracul Victorian Men And Women

In the Victorian era, men continued to act as the superior gender to their female counterparts. Because men were usually more educated and wrote more works of literature, women were often absent from the bookshelves of the past. In The Stranger Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, the evident lack of women in the storyline elucidates the social roles they had at that time— to be maids, prostitutes, or innocent witnesses. Simultaneously, the lack of attention paid to women paradoxically bring more awareness to the topic. There are a few female characters in the novel, but they only play as observers, serving minor roles to the central plot of the story. Written at a time when gender roles were unstable and shifting,

The notion of separate spheres serves to set up the roles of men and women in Victorian society. Women fulfill the domestic sphere and are seen as submissive and emotionally sensitive individuals. Conversely, men are intelligent, stable, and fulfill all of the work outside of the home. In Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, the Count seems to actually embody the fear of the breakdown of such separate spheres. However, Stoker breaks down these separate spheres and the fear associated with their breakdown through the theme of the “New Woman” intertwined with the actions and behaviors of the characters in the novel.

Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” is a story about a Vampire named Count Dracula and his journey to satisfy his lust for blood. The story is told through a series of individuals’ journal entries and a letters sent back and forth between characters. Bram Stoker shows the roll in which a certain gender plays in the Victorian era through the works of Dracula. This discussion not only consists of the roll a certain gender takes, but will be discussing how a certain gender fits into the culture of that time period as well as how males and females interact among each other. The Victorian era was extremely conservative when it came to the female, however there are signs of the changing into the New Woman inside of Dracula. Essentially the woman was to be assistance to a man and stay pure inside of their ways.

In Dracula, Stoker portrays the typical women: The new woman, the femme fatale and the damsel in distress, all common concepts in gothic literature. There are three predominant female roles within Dracula: Mina Murray, Lucy Westenra and the three vampire brides, all of which possess different attributes and play different roles within the novel. It is apparent that the feminine portrayal within this novel, especially the sexual nature, is an un-doubtable strong, reoccurring theme.

Dracula is a novel written by Bram Stoker during the late 1800’s. The book starts out with Jonathan Harker, who is a smart young business man, who wants to travel to Count Dracula for a business ordeal. Many locals from the European area warned Jonathan about Count Dracula, and would offer him crosses and other trinkets to help fend against him. Mina, who is at the time Jonathans soon to be wife, visits to catch up with an old friend named Lucy Westenra. Lucy gives Mina an update on her love life telling her how she’s been proposed to by three different men. The men are introduced as Dr. Seward, Arthur Holmwood, and Quincey Morris. Unfortunately for her she will need to reject two of the men, and Lucy ends up choosing to marry Holmwood. Later on after Mina visits Lucy, Lucy starts to sleep walk, becomes sick, and then finds out she has bite marks on her throat. Due to this incident, another new character is introduced who happens to be Van Helsing. As the novel progresses, lady vampires are introduced and Lucy is eventually turned into one of the lady vampires as well. With the introduction of female vampires, the novel Dracula turns into a sexual and sensational novel by Bram Stoker. The female characters in the book are overly sexualized to where we can compare it to how women are viewed from back then in history to today’s world.

In the late 19th century, when Dracula by Bram Stoker is written, women were only perceived as conservative housewives, only tending to their family’s needs and being solely dependent of their husbands to provide for them. This novel portrays that completely in accordance to Mina Harker, but Lucy Westenra is the complete opposite. Lucy parades around in just her demeanor as a promiscuous and sexual person. While Mina only cares about learning new things in order to assist her soon-to-be husband Jonathan Harker. Lucy and Mina both become victims of vampirism in the novel. Mina is fortunate but Lucy is not. Overall, the assumption of women as the weaker specimen is greatly immense in the late 19th century. There are also many underlying

In Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, Stoker’s use of inverted gender roles allows readers to grasp the sense of obscureness throughout, eventually leading to the reader’s realization that these characters are rather similar to the “monster” which they call Dracula. Despite being in the Victorian era, Stoker’s use of sexuality in the novel contributes to the reasoning of obscureness going against the Victorian morals and values. Throughout the novel the stereotypical roles of the Victorian man and woman are inverted to draw attention to the similarities between Dracula and the characters. Vague to a majority of readers, Bram Stoker uses Dracula as a negative connotation on society being that the values of

    Perhaps no work of literature has ever been composed without being a product of its era, mainly because the human being responsible for writing it develops their worldview within a particular era.  Thus, with Bram Stoker's Dracula, though we have a vampire myth novel filled with terror, horror, and evil, the story is a thinly veiled disguise of the repressed sexual mores of the Victorian era.  If we look to critical interpretation and commentary to win support for such a thesis, we find it aplenty "For erotic Dracula certainly is.  'Quasi-pornography' one critic labels it.  Another describes it as a 'kind of incestuous, necrophilious, oral-anal-sadistic all-in-wrestling matching'.  A

Dracula is a novel that indulges its male reader’s imagination, predominantly on the topic of female sexuality. When Dracula was first published, Victorian women’s sexual behaviour was extremely restricted by social expectations. To be classed as respectable, a women was either a virgin or a wife. If she was not either, she was considered a whore. We begin to understand once Dracula arrives in Whitby, that the novel has an underlying battle between good and evil, which will hinge on female sexuality. Both Lucy Westenra and Wilhelmina “Mina” Murray embody two-dimensional virtues that have been associated with female. They are both virgins, whom are innocent from the evils of the world and that are devoted to their men. Dracula’s arrival threatens those virtues, threatening to turn Lucy and Mina into the opposites, noted for their voluptuousness, which could lead to an open sexual desire.

The relationship that exists between gender, sexuality and sexual practice is one that is not static, but is ever changing and shifting dependent upon the society in which it exists (Brickell, 2007). This essay aims to describe how Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula, presents a “characteristic, if hyperbolic, instance of Victorian anxiety over the potential fluidity of gender roles” (Craft, 111-112), whilst also inverting and subverting conventional Victorian gender patterns through the characterisation and portrayal of the vampire women residing in Count Dracula’s castle, Mina, and Lucy as well as the ‘feminine’ passivity and submissive depiction of Jonathan Harker.

Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, published in 1897, explores various sexual erotic possibilities in the vampire's embrace, as discussed by Leonard Wolf. The novel confronts Victorian fears of homosexuality; that were current at the time due to the trial of playwright Oscar Wilde. The vampire's embrace could also be interpreted as an illustration of Victorian fears of the changing role of women. Therefore it is important to consider: the historical context of the novel; the Victorian notion of the `New Woman' specifically the character of Lucy Westenra; the inversion of gender roles; notions of sexuality; and the emasculation of men, by lessening their power over women; in the novel Dracula. In doing this I will be able to explore the effects

Bram Stoker's Dracula is a highly controversial novel written in the Victorian Era. The Victorian era was a time when gender played a very restrictive role in society. Men and women were expected to follow certain behavior and to stay within the conventions of the time. In Dracula, the reader encounters "the new woman", a woman who does not stay within the bounds of Victorian gender tradition. The reader also gains insight into the dominate role that men play in the novel and how the patriarchy impacts society. There are two opinions among critics, one being that the men primarily dictate the events and characterization in the novel, or the second argument being that women actually fulfill this role

In his Literary Theory: The Basics, H. Bertens classifies stereotypes of women in literature into a number of categories; dangerous seductress, self-sacrificing angel, dissatisfied shrew, and defenseless lamb, completely incapable of self-sufficiency, or self-control, and dependent on male intervention. Bertens concludes that the primary objective of these women – or “constructions” – is to serve a “not-so-hidden purpose: the continued cultural and social domination of males”. One such novel that came under feminist scrutiny for these particular reasons was Bram Stoker’s Dracula, although this perlustration didn’t occur until 70 years after Stoker originally penned his masterpiece. However, during the mid-1960s, the rise of the feminist

Even the most casual reader can note the fact that there are very few female characters present in Robert Louis Stevenson's 19th century novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Those that are found within the work hardly constitute as substantial ones none of the women have more than a few lines of dialogue and appear within the tale for longer than a chapter or two. A bevy of critics have pointed out the fact that such an egregious omission is hardly coincidental in fact, more than a few have cited the fact that this piece of literature functions as a protest regarding the degree of women's liberation that the New Woman possessed near the turn of the 20th century in Victorian England (Reed 2). When considered through this feminist lens, it becomes easily discernible to the prudent reader that Stevenson portrayed no female characters in a positive light and simply used them to reinforce negative aspects of femininity, which he believed were rapidly changing for the worse.

The moralists thought that sex was not to be for pleasure, and if there were acts of intercourse, it was only to satisfy the husband in a marriage. Women of the Victorian era were to “lay back and think of England.” I think that