Bram Stoker explores Victorian values and fears through his
representation of women in Dracula, showing both harlots and housewives to warn
of the potential dangers that women could pose if they forget their rightful
place in society.
The first woman who is allowed to speak in the novel is ‘a
cheery-looking elderly woman in the usual peasant dress’, who is maternal and
kind. Similarly Mina is presented as motherly and caring, the epitome of the ‘angle
in the house’ through her care for Lucy and the old fisherman, and both Mina
and the Old Woman ask many questions of those they want to care for, with the ‘old
lady’ asking Johnathan if he ‘know(s) what day it is’ and Mina asking Mr Swales
whether all the ‘tombstones can be wrong’. Both women show interest in men who
are vulnerable, with Jonathan about to go to Dracula’s castle and Mr Swales being
a hundred year old fisherman who dies a few pages later, fulfilling their
traditional roles of caring for and showing interest in the menfolk around them.
The ways in which the two women do so is very different, with the old Lady
ignoring Jonathan’s wishes and giving him a crucifix for his ‘mother’s sake’
connoting an universal instinct to protect in women, while Mina asks questions
of Mr Swales, making him feel valued. This maternal instinct stands in stark
contrast with Dracula’s three brides, who despite being his brides have no
children, and Stoker presents them as being the incarnation of all evil. Stoker
uses the sound of a ‘half-smothered child’ to ignite righteous anger and horror
within his readership, with the word ‘child’ connoting all that is innocent and
pure whilst also emphasizing the unnaturalness of the brides as they are anti-maternal
and inhuman. The difference between the care and love shown by the human,
motherly characters and the uncaring beastial vampire characters perhaps
indicates that Stoker feels that if women are not conforming to their
traditional roles of care-givers they
are not human, and the rejection of their maternal instinct is the worst crime
they could possibly commit, and the role of mother and child bearer is a god
given one – anything else is a perversion of nature.
Stoker goes on to further represent women who deviate from
Victorian ideas of sexuality as terrifying and inhuman. This is represented
primarily through Dracula’s vampire brides, whose constant ‘hard soulless
laughter’ as they are about to suck Jonathan’s blood and as they are pulled
back by Dracula mark them out as unwomanly, with the word ‘hard’ highlighting
their complete oppositeness to Mina and Lucy’s softness, and their ‘laughter’
could perhaps connote a link between violence and love, or a fetish, both of
which would be appalling ideas to the Victorians. The fact they have power over
Jonathan initially would also have been frightening, and the ‘hard sharp dents
of two sharp teeth’ are not only scary because he is about to be bitten, but
also because they could be an image of penetration. The reversal of females penetrating
males sets them up as powerful sexual women, and the fact that Jonathan is ‘waiting’
makes him the passive one where it would normally be the female. This could
perhaps relate to Freud’s theory of castration anxiety as the male is not
penetrating the female, and this could suggest female dominance, and a reversal
of what the Victorians saw as the natural order. The fact that there are three
brides also emphasizes their dominance as they gang up on Jonathan, however he
is completely passive and doesn’t try to fight them off, with the fact that he
is in a ‘languorous ecstasy’ perhaps suggesting that he welcomes this, or could
hark back to the biblical story of original sin, with the female corrupting the
innocent male. Furthermore, the fact that Dracula ‘grasps’ and ‘draws’ one of
the brides neck back could indicate the need for punishment of these sexual
women, and that a male figure must intervene and put them back in their place,
using violence if he has to. Stoker leaves no room for sympathy with the brides
despite the fact they are obviously not loved by Dracula, because they feed on
a child they are presented as cruel, animalistic and the antithesis of all that
is good, suggesting that if women are allowed to be powerful, especially
sexually, the consequences will be catastrophic.
Stoker’s representation of women with sexual desires as
whores would be very familiar to his Victorian audience, and he foreshadows
both Lucy’s and Mina’s experiences with Dracula through their interactions with
males, with Lucy wishing that she could ‘marry three men’ and Mina ‘open(ing)
her arms unthinkingly’ to Arthur Holmwood. That Lucy wishes she could marry
three men makes her a polygamist foreshadows
later on in the book where she receives the blood of four different men, three
of whom are not her fiancé, and the fact that she never marries Arthur is
perhaps why Stoker allows her to be fully turned into a vampire, while married
Mina is saved and doesn’t receive any blood transfusions which Arthur says feel
like marriage. Perhaps this is also why Mina is forced to drink Dracula’s
blood, and it could be argued that Dracula is fulfilling Lucy’s repressed
desires that she has already expressed. That Lucy wants ‘three husbands’ could
also reflect Dracula’s ‘three brides’, suggesting that perhaps Lucy was ripe
for corruption, and the fact that she is so ‘sweet’ and ‘pretty’ could perhaps
make it even more terrifying that she has such suppressed desires underneath. Also
if blood transfusions are a metaphor for sex as above, then Lucy effectively is
a whore as she shares the blood of four men and has her blood sucked by Dracula,
in which case she deserves punishment and perhaps this is why she dies. The
fact that women’s sexual desires should be suppressed is also shown through the
pure monstrosity of the three brides, as their freedom has made them ‘cruel’
and ‘soulless’, with Bram Stoker issuing a clear warning that women should
continue to suppress any impure desires.
Through Stoker’s contrast of whores and motherly figures, he
illustrates Victorian fears of female sexuality, depicting the sexually free
brides as terrifying and monstrous, whilst Mina and the Old Lady are presented
sympathetically. Lucy is perhaps the bridge between the two categories, for
whilst she is ‘sweet’ she also has suppressed desires of polygamy, so perhaps
Stoker’s representation of Lucy is a warning to maintain the status quo, and
the male dominance over women is necessary to preserve social order and
Victorian morality.
