Gender Roles In Dracula Essay

The Novel Dracula written by Bram Stoker is an essential book in horror literature. Like most novels which are written by men, Dracula is more pleasing to the male audience and male fantasies. Primarily, it is more than obvious that there are strong themes of female sexuality and its symbolism. The Victorian culture is focused around the male dominance of women and their belittlement reputation is evident in scenes throughout the story. Finishing with a ‘moral’ of the story concerning these “New Victorian” views. Though Dracula makes up the horror part of the novel, the true ‘terror’ lies in the development of female sexuality and their gender roles.

In Victorian society, women were limited to their gender roles. Practically, there are

two paths they can choose to forgo, she can either be a mother or a wife otherwise she is considered to be a whore. Even though the two main lady characters in this story, Mina and Lucy are pure and dependant on their husbands, both have an inner secret desire of dominance in both gender roles and sexuality. Mina is working at “children of Light” as a secretary; these jobs were a man’s job then. Lucy had three suitors along with wanting to break social boundaries. Because Lucy had drawn three suitors due to her good looks, she had a sexual appetite that could not be met. This was a threat to the men and therefore, she was destroyed. “… in the coffin lay no longer the foul Thing… her destruction was yielded as a privilege to the one best entitled to it…her face of unequalled sweetness and purity…” (Ch.16) before her death, Lucy was a threat to male power and ruling. Her death returned her to an innocent state, having a pure look on her face assuring the men that the women are exactly who they should be. Despite, both women were the ideal Victorian women, as Van Helsing says about Mina “She is one of God’s women, fashioned by his own hand to show us men and other women that there is a heaven where we can enter, and that its light can be here on earth. So true, so sweet, so noble, so little and egoist…” (Ch.14) Had he known of their inner sexuality, he would be terrified, for they went outside the social norm in Victorian Era for having ‘forbidden’ thoughts.
Stoker brings out many fears in Dracula, the most outstanding are perhaps the males’ fear of being feminine and the fear of women in general.

Both, the characters in this novel and the readers experience these fears, for the exchange of gender roles is simply ‘forbidden’. In this novel the female characters are shown as being sexually aggressive, and the results of their aggression vary in the novel’s three main sexual scenes: Lucy’s final death at the hands of the brothers in altruism, Jonathan being seduced by Dracula’s three brides/sisters, and Mina drinking blood from Dracula’s chest as Jonathan lies powerless close by. Lucy’s death, which was caused by three men who once desired to marry her. This was a consequence of her sexuality being released. She begins as a good woman with hair of “sunny ripples” (Ch.12) who is labeled sweet and pure. Furthermore, being contaminated by Dracula, the word used to describe her is “voluptuous.” In her transformation as Woman in White, she becomes dark haired, symbolic as good versus evil. As non-motherly, she pulls children to the cemetery and throws a baby “callous as a devil” (Ch.16) to the ground. The men’s reaction to Lucy’s transformation is divulging. When Van Helsing informs Seward of what he intends to do with Lucy’s “Un

Dead” body, Seward writes: “It made me shudder to think of so mutilating the body of the woman whom I had loved. And yet the feeling was not as strong as I had expected. I was, in fact, beginning to shudder at the presence of this being, this Un Dead, as Van Helsing called it, and to loathe it” (Ch.15). The desire that Seward felt for Lucy has turned to hatred, and now there is no turning back. In the scene where Jonathan is sexually attacked by the three brides/sisters of Dracula. Jonathan’s craving for the sexually aggressive women who go down on him is certainly not acceptable for an engaged Victorian man hoping to become a gentleman. In fact, he desires and dislikes the women at the same time: “I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips” (Ch.3) Though the concept that woman can be sexual is an essential one, the women of Dracula are allowed no middle ground and are not necessarily empowered. Knowing he has Mina as his fiancé back home, it is made clear that he does desire the three bides/sisters and is ‘forbidden’ in the Victorian Era. Jonathan later writes in horror: “I am alone in the castle with those awful women. Faugh! Mina is a woman, and there is nought in common. They are devils of the pit!” (Ch.4). Nevertheless, we find that the four women have more in common than Jonathan had assumed, and that Mina does have the ability to be like them. Dracula’s women, unfortunately, cannot be sexual without being cruel. The vampires themselves seem to be confused about genders because being a male, Dracula creates a ‘vagina’ in his chest for Mina to drink. “His right hand gripped her by the back of her neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white night-dress was smeared with blood…a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink.” (Ch. 21), female vampires signify women sexuality along with vampirism which cover a men’s fantasies. Men lose their power over women once women realize they are capable of harnessing their own. Thus the real fear in the book is not death, darkness, or vampirism but the loss of female innocence, a trait that would be extremely valuable to men in the Victorian Era

The fear in this novel is not the nature of creatures and vampires, but the destruction of female purity. The men in this novel display selfishness, for they do not want to be near the outsiders. When looking at Lucy, even before she became a vampire, she outburst in sexual behavior and flirtatiousness “why can’t they let a girl marry three men’, or as many as want her, and save all trouble? Put this heresy and I must not say it” (Ch.5) when she gave this to Mina, it shows that Lucy is secretly waiting to break Victorian social expectations. This energy also becomes apparent when Lucy is sleepwalking. As she leaves at night to meet Dracula in the churchyard and is detected by her friend Mina, her savior is worried for “her reputation in case the story would get wind” (Ch.8) Still, while asleep, Lucy is repeatedly able to get in contact with the Count, which is making her grow weaker and weaker due to her loss of blood. Both Lucy and Mina are pure and innocent of the world’s evil, and dedicated to their men. But Dracula threatens to turn the two women into their opposites, into voluptuousness women, a word which he repeatedly announces. Once Lucy is transformed into a vampire, Van Helsing’s men see no other option but to destroy her, in order to return her to innocence, and to a more socially reputable state. The men keep a good eye on Mina after Lucy’s transformation, worried they will lose another pure Victorian woman. The threat Dracula brings upon changing the women becomes a conflict that lies upon women’s sexuality. In combination with power, if women were sexually open, men would be terrified for their own safety, just like the men in this novel.

One of the many restrictions by social customs that is discovered in Dracula is connected to sexuality. Thus, with Stokers novel, though it is a vampire story filled with fear, horror, and evil, Dracula is a hidden story of bottled-up sexual values of the Victorian Era. This novel shows how the Victorian Era transforms into the ‘New Victorian Era’. Stoker’s novel Dracula states the fear that the male dominated society has in regards to a females role. In the novel, the female vampires decline to follow any gender roles proposed by society, instead they disobey and empower female dominance, making both male and females equally dominant figures in their society. A female from the ‘New Victorian Era’ would read this novel and realize that these women within Dracula are the main heroines who are initially against the exploitation of women from the male population.