Published in 2012, Tanya Pikula’s article on “Earnest Men, Virtuous Ladies and Porn” aims to explore the sexualised commodity culture of the Victorian period by providing an alternative reading of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Having stated the novel has a “quasi-pornographic” quality , Pikula comments on the way Stoker exploits sex to draw significance to the hyper-sexual fin-de-siècle practices such as consumption, materialistic production and the rise of the ‘modern’ women in regards to late Victorian advertising.
Looking in particular at the introduction of ‘The New Women’, Stoker depicts the separate spheres via Dracula’s “ravenous female consumers”, Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra. Consumption is evident through the vulnerability of the women against the powers of Dracula himself, where Lucy’s “purity” and “sweet” nature turns into “voluptuous wantonness”. Again, not only does Dracula overpower women directly; he also uses the ‘earnest men’, and …show more content…
Her behaviour and mannerisms where she “blurt[s] out” displays a lack of mannered, feminine restraint, suggesting once more a reversal of roles. Conversely, Pikula’s article makes an observation of the scene where Mina is forced against her will to drink Dracula’s blood which in itself is a role reversal but equally demonstrates the power a male vampire has over a seemingly independent woman. As a result Mina claims to feel “unclean” and depicts the scene to Jonathon Harker where his feelings and response is deemed as more important than her own violation. Similarly the article draws notice to the intentions behind Mina’s writing skills as she obtained knowledge in order to be “useful to Jonathan”. For this reason, as Tanya Pikula suggests, it would seem as though neither Mina nor Lucy are representative of ‘The New
Looking in particular at the introduction of ‘The New Women’, Stoker depicts the separate spheres via Dracula’s “ravenous female consumers”, Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra. Consumption is evident through the vulnerability of the women against the powers of Dracula himself, where Lucy’s “purity” and “sweet” nature turns into “voluptuous wantonness”. Again, not only does Dracula overpower women directly; he also uses the ‘earnest men’, and …show more content…
Her behaviour and mannerisms where she “blurt[s] out” displays a lack of mannered, feminine restraint, suggesting once more a reversal of roles. Conversely, Pikula’s article makes an observation of the scene where Mina is forced against her will to drink Dracula’s blood which in itself is a role reversal but equally demonstrates the power a male vampire has over a seemingly independent woman. As a result Mina claims to feel “unclean” and depicts the scene to Jonathon Harker where his feelings and response is deemed as more important than her own violation. Similarly the article draws notice to the intentions behind Mina’s writing skills as she obtained knowledge in order to be “useful to Jonathan”. For this reason, as Tanya Pikula suggests, it would seem as though neither Mina nor Lucy are representative of ‘The New