Lucy Westenra in Bram Stoker's Dracula has long been held to be possessed of out of control appetites. She is routinely framed as a sexually voracious woman, perhaps even one of the fin-de-siecle's dreaded “New Women,” whose overweening erotic desire is inextricably linked to the horror of her own vampirism and to the violence of her own demise. Reading Dracula as being at the confluence of uniquely Victorian anxieties regarding gender and sexuality, numerous of scholars have argued that a line in one of Lucy's early letters, “Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?” (XX) betrays her as being hopelessly outside of the acceptable boundaries for female sexuality in her era, often accompanying
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In a number of Stoker's other stories, it is made abundantly clear that women are supposed to be naturally submissive in disposition and that women attempting to be the aggressor in romantic relationships or, even worse, trying to enter the masculine sphere of politics, are to be condemned. In both the short story collection Snowbound (XX) and The Lair of the White Worm ( XX), Stoker has characters make vitriolic asides about the ridiculousness and immorality of suffragettes, and in his Lady of the Shroud, the heroine Teuta Vissarion goes so far as to directly denounce “self-seeking women of other nations [who] seek to forget their womanhood in the struggle to vie in equality with men!” (319) Elsewhere, Stoker is quick to express disapproval at women who have the audacity to pursue male attention, with the entirety of his 1905 novel The Man being concerned with the ill effects of a woman fulfilling Mina's prophecy regarding the New Woman (Dracula 86-7) and taking the initiative to propose marriage to a man. (XX) In addition to this direct criticism of women who trespass into social and political realms reserved for men, Dracula, as so many of Lucy's detractors have rightly pointed out, (CITATIONS) is haunted by the sexual specter of inhuman women who not only deny their prescribed role in society but violently invert it, lustfully approaching men for deadly “kisses” and predating the children a ”good” Victorian woman ought instinctively nurture. (CITE AN APPROPRIATE SOURCE) The three women in the castle and the transformed Lucy are all self-evident examples of this figure, which was one that Stoker would revisit in The Lair of the White Worm, where the ambitious social-climber Arabella Marsh proves to be not only an inappropriate aggressor in
In a number of Stoker's other stories, it is made abundantly clear that women are supposed to be naturally submissive in disposition and that women attempting to be the aggressor in romantic relationships or, even worse, trying to enter the masculine sphere of politics, are to be condemned. In both the short story collection Snowbound (XX) and The Lair of the White Worm ( XX), Stoker has characters make vitriolic asides about the ridiculousness and immorality of suffragettes, and in his Lady of the Shroud, the heroine Teuta Vissarion goes so far as to directly denounce “self-seeking women of other nations [who] seek to forget their womanhood in the struggle to vie in equality with men!” (319) Elsewhere, Stoker is quick to express disapproval at women who have the audacity to pursue male attention, with the entirety of his 1905 novel The Man being concerned with the ill effects of a woman fulfilling Mina's prophecy regarding the New Woman (Dracula 86-7) and taking the initiative to propose marriage to a man. (XX) In addition to this direct criticism of women who trespass into social and political realms reserved for men, Dracula, as so many of Lucy's detractors have rightly pointed out, (CITATIONS) is haunted by the sexual specter of inhuman women who not only deny their prescribed role in society but violently invert it, lustfully approaching men for deadly “kisses” and predating the children a ”good” Victorian woman ought instinctively nurture. (CITE AN APPROPRIATE SOURCE) The three women in the castle and the transformed Lucy are all self-evident examples of this figure, which was one that Stoker would revisit in The Lair of the White Worm, where the ambitious social-climber Arabella Marsh proves to be not only an inappropriate aggressor in