Representation Of Women In Dracula

Mina, in ‘Dracula’ is portrayed in numerous ways; but she embodies the ideal woman of the era in every respect. She is prudent, intelligent, caring and above all humble. However, she can be considered a liminal woman. Whilst she isn’t portrayed as weak, which is proven when she uses her telepathic connection with Dracula to outsmart him, at the end of the novel, neither is she quite the ‘New Woman’ yet as her loyalties lie with Johnathan and her baby, as a loving wife and mother. The men in Mina’s life have admiration for her devotion and empathy towards them; which is proven when she comforts Arthur and “felt this big, sorrowing man's head resting on me, as though it were that of the baby that someday may lie on my bosom, and I stroked his

hair as though he were my own child”. The use of the simile when comparing him to a “baby” suggests Arthur is vulnerable and it’s Mina’s job as a woman to comfort him. The fact that Arthur is able to cry in front of her shows a transgression of boundaries; Victorian men were taught in schools to suppress emotions and any schoolboy caught crying would usually receive brutal punishment. Van Helsing describes her as “So true, so sweet, so noble, so little an egoist and that, let me tell you, is much in this age, so sceptical and selfish.” The use of the anaphora suggests that she is constantly a good woman. The use of the sibilance gives it a harsh sound which could suggest that being a woman was hard in 1897. Victorians would have considered her to be a faultless woman as she represents their values in many ways, one being that she is always dressed appropriately. This is because she wears very normal clothes compared to Lucy who wore low-cut and revealing clothes. As pointed out by Levin “A woman could not show her legs or even say ‘leg’. Even pianos had ‘limbs’ and those (wore) fluffy coverings so as not to be seen. (Neither) ‘Leg’ nor ‘breast’ could be spoken in polite company”.

Similarly, In ‘The Snow Child’, due to the clothing she wears, Carter creates an illusion that the Countess is a dominatrix and a femme fatale as “she wore high, black, shining boots with scarlet heels, and spurs.” The use of the colour scarlet represents danger, which could foreshadow how dangerous the Count is, it could also connote anger which could highlight how angry and frustrated she is at being treated unequally to her husband. Mary Kaiser writes, “The Countess is also a pornographic image in relation to the Count. She belongs to him because she has significance as Countess only in relation to him as Count.” The Countess’s reliance on her husband is demonstrated when she allows the Count to “thrust his virile member into the dead girl”. The use of the adjective “virile” emphasises that the Snow Child is only there to satisfy his masculine desires. Which shows that even when the Countess does not agree with what he does, she is not in a position to stop him due to the oppression of females. The Count himself represents the corruption of men and their inability to control their inner desires no matter how unacceptable they are. Cristina Bacchilega calls the 'Snow Child' "a masculine fantasy, a frozen image without a real life of her

own. From a literary perspective, the Count is in the position of author; he has the power to say something and make it happen. The girl is a helpless character, unable to control her destiny.” This could be said for all women in that time period as men were “in the position of the author” Bacchilega goes farther to state that, “like the Marquis in ‘The Bloody Chamber’, the Count is a pornographer. He clothed, imagines and then creates a sexual image of a naked woman that he can deflower and in fact defile.” Which could suggest that the nakedness of the girl puts her in a position of vulnerability as she doesn’t have the safety of clothing like the Count does.
The three vampire women in ‘Dracula’ are very different to Mina. Harker makes this contrast clear when he records in his diary that “I am alone in the castle with those awful women. Faugh! Mina is a woman, and there is nought in common. By Harker saying that there is ‘nought in common’ he’s implying that if they aren’t the ideal embodiment of a woman then they aren’t woman at all. They are devils of the Pit!” Described as “Impure, radical and evil” by a critic; they represent everything that Victorian society was fearful of due to their overt sexuality. The vampire women are free from Victorian repression; which means they’re highly sexualised and free to act upon their sexual desires. The women are overtly sexual, behave promiscuously and actively seduce anyone they desire despite being ‘sired’ and ‘married’ to Dracula. Johnathan writes “The fair girl went on her knees, bent over me, fairly gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive.” The kiss from the vampire is described in very sexual terms, the use of “thrilling” and “repulsive” is an oxymoron which could suggest that she finds it thrilling to tease him this way and he finds it repulsive. An unfaithful woman in this period was considered a criminal; adultery was illegal and women who were guilty of this were often abandoned by their husbands which resulted in them being left with nothing and shunned by their community, family and friends. Women were expected to be virginal and pure until marriage and shouldn’t be promiscuous, according to Victorian courtship laws. Stoker connects hyper-sexual women with vampires, and vampirism is linked to evil, so it could be argued that Stoker is linking female sexuality with being evil. From a psychoanalytical perspective this links to Freud’s Madonna and Whore Theory- which was the concept that some men in relationships have an inability to maintain sexual arousal and look for it in other women and they view women as saintly virgins or debased prostitutes. Men like this desire a woman who has been degraded, the whore, while they cannot desire the respected woman, the Madonna. Freud wrote “Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love." which could explain why Mina is loved and respected by the men but the vampire women are only desired by the men. Van Helsing calls her “one of God’s women, fashioned by his own hand to show us men and other women that she is a heaven. When he mentioned that she’s one of “God’s women” it could mean that she’s there to set an example to women like Lucy and the vampire brides in the way they should be behave. Clinical psychologist Uwe Hartmann in 2009 stated that the complex "is still highly prevalent in today's patients" which shows that even though this was over 100 years ago, sexuality hasn’t changed. In Victorian times, a woman wasn't expected to actively seek a relationship with a man, she would have to wait until he showed interest in her. Due to this Harker, describes them as monsters and though in his first-person narrative, develops the vampire brides to present what is unacceptable behaviour for women. Similarly in Angela Carter’s ‘The Company of Wolves’, the girl is attracted to the incubus who killed her grandmother. She ignores the tell-tale signs of him being a man-wolf hybrid, one of them being his “flashing wet teeth". Carter implies that he isn’t what he seems from the beginning and the use of the adjective “wet” makes it sound as if he’s drooling over her like a dog with food. This emphasises his animalistic alter ego and creates the image of the bloodthirsty canine in the reader’s mind. This links with the vampire women as they’re also animalistic and bloodthirsty which is proved when one of them “actually licked her lips like an animal” emphasising that their behaviour is abnormal. The traditional gender role is reversed—the woman is the sexual aggressor, and Jonathan is the submissive one.

Lucy is the representation of men’s fears of the suffrage movement- the 'New Woman'.

This is demonstrated when she says “men like women, certainly their wives, to be quite fair as they are; and women, I am afraid are not always quite fair as they should be.” Here Lucy is expressing her desire to break free from the patriarchal society. Lucy isn’t like Mina when it comes to being motherly; and her lack of maternal instinct excludes her from being the ideal woman of the Victorian era. She clutches a child to her chest, but instead of feeding the child, which would be expected of a woman, she feeds on it. When she is interrupted by the men in the graveyard, she "flings the child to the ground, callous as a devil.” The use of the word “fling” suggests her complete disregard of human life and shows her to be doubly deviant, a sociology theory that by rebelling against the expressive role a woman is supposed to demonstrate, she will be harshly treated by society. The use simile in “callous as a devil” suggests that she’s been tempted to give into her desires just like Eve in the bible. As a consequence she’s portrayed as an unmanageable, immoral woman who preys upon innocent children. This could be an allusion to Jewish religion stories about Adam’s first wife, Lilith. Lilith was a woman who snatched children and devoured them so she could stay young and beautiful. She was created as Adam’s equal in the eyes of God, however, she refused to submit to him so God created Eve. This

could have been used as an excuse in past society to make sure a woman wouldn’t argue with her husband because she could be replaced, like Lilith was. Being bitten by Dracula unshackles Lucy from her metaphorical Victorian handcuffs leading to an eruption of her sexual desires that she’d been taught to repress. The reader notices this in Arthur’s journal “In a sort of sleep-waking, vague, unconscious way she opened her eyes, which were now dull and hard at once, and said in a soft, voluptuous voice, such as I had never heard from her lips:—"Arthur! Oh, my love, I am so glad you have come! Kiss me!" When Arthur mentions that her eyes were "dull and hard" it could be argued that the old Lucy has gone and has been replaced by the new Lucy. Women in 1897 wouldn’t directly ask for kisses, Lucy was supposed to have waited for Arthur to kiss her. According to Victorian courtship laws, the only way that upper-class Victorian women could asked to be kiss would be by signalling with their fan; opening and shutting their fan would mean that the she wanted to be kissed. We see Stoker ridicule Lucy and other ‘New-Women’ by showing how they would be unfit mothers and bad wives as they aren’t following the traits of a typical woman of the era. We also see how Lucy and the other vampire women are punished for being overtly sexual. This is evident when Lucy creates her new image as her idea of the new woman and suggests the idea of a woman being allowed to marry as many men as they want. Stoker dismisses this as a useless idea even though it is acceptable for Dracula to have multiple wives. In Victorian society, although polygamous marriages were illegal, they weren't uncommon. Craft says that in the Victorian period, “a woman was better off dead than sexual.” Which is supported when Van Helsing’s men destroy Lucy, to return her to a purer, more socially respectable state. This links to Angela Carter’s ‘The Erl King’, who refers to the young Heroine, on a number of occasions, as a rabbit. He shouts, “Skin the rabbit” when she takes her clothes off; skinning rabbits requires a knife, therefore would make this action allude to a phallic symbol relating to the Erl King’s masculinity. He even goes as far as to bite the narrator's neck, just like Count Dracula. The neck is an erogenous zone, and so biting here suggests it would be pleasurable. Also, biting is typically animalistic behaviour, it’s ironic that he refers to her as a rabbit when he is the one displaying inhuman behaviour. However, in contrast the narrator is one-step ahead of him and plans to kills him. Harriet Kramer Linkin calls her "a highly sophisticated consciousness." because she is mature and knowledgeable at the time of the story. The narrator is more complicit than Carter's other narrators in her imperilment and consequent subjugation by the Erl-King.”