The Treatment of Women in Bram Stokers Dracula Essay -- Dracula E

The Treatment of Women in Bram Stokers Dracula In reading Bram Stokers Dracula, I find the treatment of the two main female characters-- Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker-- oddly intriguing. These two women are two opposite archetypes created by a lodge of baneened men trying to protect themselves. Lucy is the Medusa archetype. She is physically attractive, and wins the boldness of any man who comes near her (e.g. Arthur, Quincey, Jack, and Van Helsing). Her chief quality is sottish beauty, but her sexual desire is repressed and not allowed to communicate. And yet some(prenominal) the spiritual office and the sexual side are in her, and when the extensive repressed sexuality finds a vent, it explodes and takes over completely. In other words, she is modify into the completely voluptuous female vampire precisely because her sexual side of personality had been completely buried by her Victorian education. Her repressed egotism needs such expression that when Dracula came along, she went out to greet him, and thus invited him into the house (by opening her window to the bat). He is her vent for sexual expression. When Lucy becomes a vampire herself, John Seward describes her as follows She seemed like a nightmare of Lucy as she lay there the pointed teeth, the bloodstained, voluptuous mouth -- which made one tingle to see -- the whole carnal and unspiritual appearance, seeming like a roguish mockery of Lucys sweet purity (252 ch.16). And for this voluptuous Lucy he has no grace the remnant of my love passed into hate and loathing had she then to be killed, I could have done it with savage delight (249 ch.16). But why this office? I believe it is the aggressive sexuality that the vampire Lucy displays that ... ...in excluding her from their undertakings, and include her again. However, presently that she is infected with vampire blood and is capable of reading Draculas mind, the men both(prenominal) fear and need her. They are forced to accept her in the everyday realm, but the quest is to eventually rid her of evil influence and set her purity again, that is, to turn her back into the virtuous woman who will bear on in the dominion of the home and not pose a threat to men. The end of this novel is the restoration of a world as the Victorians realize it the vampire destroyed, the women rid of their evil sexual desires and kept out of the grave world outside their homes, and the men safe and free in a male-dominated world, playing their exclusive gallant, intelligent, and adventurous roles. Text Cited Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Ed. Glennis Byron. Peterborough Broadview, 1998.