How are women represented in the first 100 pages of Dracula?

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.