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Roles of women victorian era
Short note on victorian age
The Role Of Women Victorian Era
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The 21st century has certain ways for people to act in society, although it's not as strict as it used to be. In literature there are writings about the expectations society used to hold. One era that had specific rules was the Victorian era. For example, women were not allowed to work or go to school, they were married off. Women didn't have all the privileges that men did. In the novel Dracula, Bram Stoker uses Victorian standards the characters must uphold to portray sex and death. It also portrays the gender roles they had in this era. For example, women did not have the right to vote, sue, or own any property. When a women was married off all her rights would be given to her spouse. Including even the right of consent to her own body. …show more content…
During the Victorian era, a predominant problem was the place women held in society. Two of the characters, Mina Murray and Lucy Westenra display not only the gender roles in a Victorian society as well as sex and death. In Dracula, Stoker portrays women as sexualized Victorian women and different women as pure. To be in a Victorian society women that were pure were held to a high standard. Women that were impure were looked down upon and didn't take part in social events. Considered in Dracula the sexual and impure women as evil; the pure women are strong. The ideal embodiment of a Victorian women is Mina Murray. We see Mina as an intelligent woman and strong in the novel.Traditionally Mina is the Victorians perfect wife. . Mina however in chapter six writes, "No news from Jonathan. I am getting quite uneasy about him…" (72). Jonathan being away from her, Mina remains faithful to Jonathan and does all she can to get Jonathan …show more content…
A character who definitely upholds to a Victorian society standards. Women who were sexual were looked down on as evil. These being the views of people in that society of sexualized and impure women in Victorian Society are sinful and evil, By Victorian society standards impure women were outcasts in society and why Stoker would compare sexual women and In the novel, Stoker uses Lucy's character to represent good and evil Victorian woman. We see that Lucy has pure qualities similar to Mina. With three men after her attention because of the pure qualities she possesses. Lucy, politely turns down to be with a man whom she loves. Mina being her best friend reflects well on her as she's close to the image of a traditional Victorian women. Throughout the novel we witness Lucy's reputation as a Victorian woman demolish altogether.Although Lucy is somewhat mentioned as sexual where Mina isn't. Dracula intentionally turns Lucy into a sexualized vampire. Described as "The sweetness was turned to … heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness" (187). There being the only option to turn Lucy back to her true sweet self in death is by stabbing her through the heart with a
There is a classic "good versus evil" plot to this novel. The evil of course being Count Dracula and the Good being represented by the Harkers, Dr. Seward and Lucy, Arthur, Quincy and the Professor. It is the continuing battle between Dracula and the forces of good. Good in this case is the Christian God. The battle is foretold by the landlady where she says, "It is the eve of St Georges Day. Do you no know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway?" and she hands Harker a crucifix (p 12).
Mina is also vastly unlike the contemporary female Gothic tropes due to her financial independence. Although Mina could be described as the ideal Victorian lady, Stoker also managed to include qualities associated with the much feared and controversial New Woman in her. She and Lucy mock the independence of the New Woman and joke that the New Woman will try to introduce the inversion of gender roles that contemporary society feared;
“Dracula, in one aspect, is a novel about the types of Victorian women and the representation of them in Victorian English society” (Humphrey). Through Mina, Lucy and the daughters of Dracula, Stoker symbolizes three different types of woman: the pure, the tempted and the impure. “Although Mina and Lucy possess similar qualities there is striking difference between the two” (Humphrey). Mina is the ideal 19th century Victorian woman; she is chaste, loyal and intelligent. On the other hand, Lucy’s ideal Victorian characteristics began to fade as she transformed from human to vampire and eventually those characteristics disappeared altogether. Lucy no longer embodied the Victorian woman and instead, “the swe...
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 the Victorian culture are inverted amongst the sexes of characters, thus pointing out the similarities of the characters and the so called “monster” which they call Dracula.
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...
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and Dracula by Bram Stoker, both nineteenth century texts, present women and their roles within society at that time as one of subservience to their male counterparts. Women had no independent means of subsistence, and were obliged to follow the conventions set by men.
...ny other novels of the time, Stoker’s Dracula purposely highlights the superiority of men, while simultaneously belittling women. After only a few pages of this novel, the reader should understand just how helpless the females become. No matter what the issue or controversy, they are unable to find any sort of solution, successful or not, without the help of the male characters. Stoker even goes as far as almost teasing Mina, by allowing her to aid in the hunt for Dracula, yet giving her trivial duties. Lucy on the other hand creates the novel’s most blatant case for male superiority. She is forced to constantly depend on four men for her survival. All blood transfusions she received were from men and even that could not save her life. Stoker manages to make a bold statement by pinpointing the inferiority of the two female main characters in the novel.
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.
Lucy is the Medusa archetype. She is physically attractive, and wins the heart of any man who comes near her (e.g. 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). He is her vent for sexual expression.
...sitive depiction of their sexual relationship. For Mina, however, renunciation of Dracula's evil must include the renunciation of her own physical needs and desires. The roles played by social mores and conceptions of gender and sexuality are, in the end, more than incidental. Indeed, the difference between Victorian England and 1990s America causes the subtle -- but significant -- valuation of the connections between good and evil and women and sexuality in two in many ways similar texts.
When Van Helsing figured out what was happening to Lucy he told Dr. Seward and after Lucy passed away the men went to where she was buried and it had been weeks and her body. The sight they saw was “more radiant and beautiful than ever; and I could not believe that she was dead. The lips were red maybe redder than before” (Stoker 171). This line should that Lucy turned into a vampire because Dracula had been sucking her blood. Jonathan Harker was also a victim of Dracula’s games but he fought through his mental trauma with the help of his Wife, Mina. The rein of Dracula’s evil ways came to an end and although Lucy lost her future, all of her friends were finally safe from
The two main female characters in Dracula, Mina and Lucy, show the standards set by men for women during the time. These two characters also serve as foils for each other, which further highlights the patriarchal standards in the Victorian society, and how women are evolving during the time as well. Lucy is described as an innocent
In Case's article “Tasting the Original Apple,” it talks about the role that now the new woman has and how it comes into conflict with how men react towards it as stated “Dracula is often read as a largely reactionary response to the threat of autonomous female sexuality posed by the phenomenon of the "New Woman," with its anxieties about female sexuality being most clearly visible in Lucy Westenra's story. Particularly once she has been "vamped," Lucy's sexual assertiveness seems to link her with the New Woman. But Lucy's actions as a vampire, like those of the "awful women" (42) Jonathan encounters at Dracula's castle, perhaps owe less to the specific threat posed by the New Woman's insistence on sexual autonomy than to the ambivalences built into the model of Victorian womanhood from the start. Since ideal womanhood (and the ground of male desire) was characterized by a combination of total sexual purity and at least the potential for passionate devotion to a man, this model...
Lucy poses a threat to the Victorian ideology by exposing herself as a danger to sexual propriety. She remarks about wanting to have more than one husband, which displays promiscuity, “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men or as many as want her?” this statement works as a threat which comes to fruition after Lucy is bitten. Once infected by Dracula, Lucy becomes sexually overt and aggressive; and is portrayed as a monster and a social outcast. She transforms into a fiend and feeds on children making her the maternal antithesis as well as a child molester.
One of the well-known characters in Dracula is, Mina Murray, virtuous, kind and good-natured, schoolmistress. Murray is the embodiment of the, “New Woman”. She empathically embraces the anti-Victorian feelings of that time in front of the rea...