Bram Stoker: Final Thesis

For the book, read here. For my final thesis on the basis of my reading, click on the link below.

Stoker wrote Dracula at a vulnerable time in the development of Europe – before the fight for suffrage for women began and just after the industrial revolution had begun to affect the way the society conducted its affairs. The Victorian society tried hard to fight the change modernity threatened to bring – seen most prominently in their treatment of female sexuality. Women in Victorian times were seen as passive and submissive partners expected to suppress and refrain from expressing any form of sexual desire. It was unheard of for women to be sexually assertive in any way – an act that was deemed unnatural for a decent lady.

Jonathan Harker describes the effect of Dracula’s brides to be ‘both thrilling and repulsive’, and ‘honey-sweet’ but ‘offensive’, hinting at Victorian men’s mixed views of female sexual expression – while it was rare and thus tempting, it was from a Victorian gentleman’s viewpoint ‘pure evil and animalistic’. The novel goes on to insinuate that a woman’s sexuality was associated with evil, like in Eden where a woman’s unrestricted desires caused man’s fall from grace.

Lucy and Mina are shown as examples of Victorian virtue in threat from modernity which might allow women to be sexually expressive. Lucy, who laments not being able to accept all proposals is successfully corrupted by Dracula through exchange of blood, representative of seed, and becomes ‘voluptuous’ and ‘diabolically sweet’, thus causing the very men who wanted to marry her to destroy her to return her to her chaste and virtuous state in her death. When Mina is tainted with Dracula’s blood, the men give everything to stop her from transforming into a sexually assertive being, an evil incarnate in their eyes, existing only to seduce and corrupt them.