In Dracula by Bram Stoker, there are two main female characters, Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra. Stoker used these two characters to represent the two different roles of women during this time. Lucy, as the innocence and sexual. Mina represents as the perfect Victorian woman. As she dutifully studies and helps her husband, Jonathan Harker. On the other hand, Lucy is represented as the way woman if they lust too much in society in the late 19th century. In this essay I will discuss the roles that Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra have in Dracula, how similar and different they are and why was Lucy Westenra the first to fall under Dracula’s spell?
In Dracula, Mina is known as the “New Woman”, she is an independent, resourceful and intelligent. Compare to Lucy, where she is a tradition innocence woman who stays home and works as a housewife or is needed to be taken care of. Mina helps her fiance later to be her husband, Jonathan Harker with his work. Compare to Mina, Lucy is a lot
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more attractive, and is able to get the attention of three suitors, Arthur Holmwood, Quincey Morris, and John Seward. With her innocence trait, Lucy also does not want to choose one of the three suitors and she wish and question why she cannot have all three of them. Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as wanting her, and save this trouble?” (Stoker 49). Whiling Mina has no problem with picking anyone because already has Jonathan and is faithful to him. Mina and Lucy are very similar because of their innocence and sweetest. Lucy is present also more sexual than Mina, similar to the three vampire women but not too overly sexual. Being overly sexual or lusting others is impure for a Victorian woman in the 19th century and even now in the 21st century. I believe that Stoker wrote Lucy, to see how the woman is represented as “good” and “evil” and how easily a woman can change from being a “good” and pure to an “evil” and impure. Both Mina and Lucy do become victim to Dracula plan as they both get bitten by him. But Mina did not lust for any other men but her husband. She also did not want to hurt anyone. “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 is light can be here on earth.
So true, so sweet, so noble…”(Stoker 154), this said by Van Helsing as he praises Mina for her being a sweet and innocent woman. From this quote, Mina stands as a model for women and men during this time and even now. Stoker as wrote Mina to be a mother figure in Dracula, as she cares and helps Lucy when she sleepwalks and when she takes care of her husband when he got out of Dracula’s mansion. Later in Dracula, Mina also falls victim from Dracula and becomes the second female victim in the novel. Dracula attack and target Mina because she is the love of Jonathan Harker. She was also attacked because she did not have protection to stop Dracula because the men did not think Dracula would attack her. Mina did not become a vampire like Lucy was because the men knew how to stop and kill Dracula before Mina was able to become a
vampire. When Lucy falls to Dracula plan and becomes a vampire, she also became to be what would be if they act opposite to an innocence woman, an “evil Victorian woman”. A woman that lust and desire for people or things. Before she turns into a vampire, Lucy does not want just one suitor but all three of them because of her pure qualities, as she complains to Mina about how she cannot take all three men, “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as wanting her, and save this trouble?” (Stoker 49). Lucy believes how a wife and women should act towards men, “A woman ought to tell her husband everything. Don’t you think so, dear?” (Stoker 47). When Lucy turns to Vampire Lucy, she does not lust for men but for children as well, this is the opposite of Mina roles as a mother figure. As a mother, you love, protect and nurture your child but in the case of Vampire Lucy, she feeds off of them, the opposite of a mother and more like a monster. “With a careless motion, she flung to the ground, callous as a devil, the child that up to now she had clutch strenuously to her breast, growling over it as a dog growls over a bone. The child gave a sharp cry and lay there moaning”(Stoker 172). Lucy was Dracula first female victim in the novel and was the first to fall to become a sexual vampire. I believe that Lucy was the first one to fall was because she was at the wrong place at the wrong time. But in the end, you could say that Dracula was granting Lucy wish by trading her humanity for a monster, by turning her to a vampire because she was able to be with all three of the suitor by the blood transfusion. It was also a punishment for lusting and wanting more than one man. Another reason why I think Lucy fell into Dracula plans, was because of how Lucy was being treated. No one knew of Lucy “sickness” and it was not something that can be solved through science but through religion.
...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.
As a matter of a fact, when Lucy dies, the men feel great distress and have nowhere else to turn but to Mina. In order not to show weakness in front of the other men, the Englishmen each individually “express [their] feelings on the tender or emotional side,” and confess their anguish for Lucy’s passing (Stoker). To the men, Lucy was only a companion whom they barely knew, but to Mina, Lucy was a lifelong friend. Mina’s loss of Lucy was profound, however, she held her emotions in check and through strength and perseverance she never shed a tear. Moreover, Mina is often portrayed as stronger physically than Jonathan when Dracula emits his wrath upon them. Even though Mina is the one suffering, Jonathan cannot physically handle Dracula’s wrath as he turns “white as death, and shook and shivered,” even though he has yet to sacrifice anything and Mina has sacrificed almost everything and continues to persevere (Stoker). Jonathan’s signs of aging signify that even though Jonathan is a man and supposed to be strong, the stress and anguish derived from the events lately has taken a physical toll on him. However, Mina is the one directly affected by Dracula and aside from the effects of Dracula’s hypnotic spell, Mina was portrayed as happy and youthful. Last but not least, Catherine Eckel, a member of the National Science Foundation and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, conducted a study involving
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;
In Dracula, Bram Stoker explores the fantastic image of a sexually dominant woman within a patriarchal society. The battle between good and evil within the novel very much hinges upon feminine sexuality: Lucy and Nina are embodiments of the Victorian virtues, which Dracula threatens to corrupt,
“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...
The Victorian England setting and culture of “Dracula” by: Bram Stoker attributes to many stylistic components and character behaviours in the novel. One of which is the behaviour and actions characters express that are a result of sexual repression. In Dracula, sexual repression is best expressed by the character’s desire to create. This desire is exemplified by the way Dracula creates other vampires, Lucy’s sexual desires, and the men’s expression of aggression. The creation of other Vampires is evident through events including Dracula’s aggressive encounters with Lucy and Mina, and the fact the Dracula is building up a Vampire army. Lucy’s sexual desires are exemplified through her longing to have sex with multiple men and how she compares
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...
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...
...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.
In reading Bram Stoker's Dracula, I find the treatment of the two main female characters-- Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker-- especially intriguing. These two women are two opposite archetypes created by a society of threatened men trying to protect themselves.
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...
In Bram Stoker's Dracula , Mina is intrigued by the idea of the "New Woman". This "New Woman" is not subject to men and the rules of society in Victorian England. This notion of the "new woman" is that she is more independent and isn't subject to the man but is instead an equal. Mina says "... I suppose the 'New Woman' won't condescend in future to accept. She will do the proposing herself." By this, she envisions women will forego tradition and take over some of the roles previously done only by men.
Mina Murray was engaged to Jonathan Harker and when Dracula kept him prisoner, the Count wrote letters to Harker’s boss and pretended to be Jonathan and to inform his boss and his fiancé that things were going good with his business trip. The Count was giving Mina and Jonathan’s boss false hope and keeping Harker prisoner at his castle. Dracula would even dress up in Harker’s clothes and mail the letters so it would not arise any suspicion. The Count seemed to only focus on turning women into vampires and he used the men to lure the women into his trap. Therefore, that is why he was keeping Jonathan alive. Everything Dracula did was made with lots of forethought. Such as when Lucy a young woman who also was a friend of Mina was mysteriously getting ill and sleep-walking during the night no one knew what was happening to Lucy because she would get sicker after they discovered she was sleepwalking. Lucy was sleep walking because she had gotten bite by Dracula and every night he called to her so he could feed off her again. He also made sure she was alone and waited a few days before attempting to suck her blood again. Although, Dracula was a smart man in his cunning actions he could not hide the fact that something evil was
In Dracula the vampire symbolises an invasion of innocence, reflecting increasing sexual anxiety amongst the women of the 19th century England. Lucy’s letters portray a childish manner in reference to sexual desire , she writes “I love him, I love him, I love him!”, this tone seems hyperbolic and her idolisation of her suitor after brief encounters shows sexual eagerness. This is because she gives limited information about Arthur except his role in society, however she describes interaction with her other suitors Quincey and Dr Seward in detail in her letter. Comparatively the relationship of Mina and Jonathan seems mature, throughout throughout the opening journal entry Jonathan makes reference to Mina, in his memoir he notes “get recipe