Hypocrisy In Bram Stoker's 'Dracula'

Lucy’s transformation from the traditional Victorian woman to a impure Victorian woman began as soon as she became Dracula’s first victim. Her once innocent beauty became more dark and sexual, changing her purity into evil. Her transformation can be seen by the passage, “The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness” (Stoker, 324). The idea of a “new woman” was a

Sexual allegory is combined with victorian culture and violent monsters, a dichotomy of human instincts. Stoker also captures the constant battle between traditionalists and supporters of modernity. Stoker wraps up this thought experiment in the trappings of a horror novel in order to best show off the monsters he designed. With its ability to have inspired countless vampire progeny across literature and film, Dracula is a work that combines fantasy elements with relatable thematic struggles in a way that will allow it to live

When Van Helsing stopped Arthur he didn’t understand what to do or say . Lucy’s behavior shows that an evil force was making her not act pure or virginal anymore . She doesn’t really know what is going on because she is not herself and Dracula has taking over her mind and soul . Lucy also shows the theme of sex by being dominant towards Arthur instead of being the submissive one . At the end of “Dracula” Stoker shows an huge example of the theme sex when Count Dracula was found by Van Helsing , Jonathan , and Dr. Seward standing beside Mina .

Stoker also characterizes Lucy as sexual when Dracula turns her into a sexual vampire and she goes to the dark side. As she is sick, Arthur gives her a blood transfusion to try to help her become better but when it does not work, she is stabbed in the heart to go back to her original beauty and die. Lucy in the book shows how the ideal Victorian woman can so suddenly turn into the bad, evil, sexual woman that was unacceptable. Throughout the novel, Bram Stoker showed in detail what was considered to be the ideal Victorian woman through the character Mina. He also showed how women were sexualized, misbehaved, and evil through the behaviors of Dracula’s three daughters.

In Victorian society, women had the choice between two roles: the pure woman or the fallen woman. Bram Stoker plays with these anxieties revolving around female sexuality – he follows the gothic tradition of innocent damsel in distress against looming evil. The narrative structure Stoker imploys to the text through intertextuality reveals multiple point of view distinguishing a duality in Lucy - her true self and 'thing'. In order to cope with Lucy’s worsening condition, the male authoritative figures of the text assign a duality present in Lucy to make sense of her shifting from “pure woman” to “fallen woman”. Stoker exhibits in the structure of the multi-faceted narrative how certain characters are unable to cope with the duality present

For instance, the very first sentence of Hollinger’s essay starts off with this quote, “As Stephen Neale suggests, an intimate relationship seems to exist among the filmic presentation of the horror monster, the castration anxiety it evokes, and the cinematic representation of the female form.” (Hollinger pg. 243 of the Monsters book), in which she uses to intrigue the reader and to give the reader an idea about the work. Hollinger tells the reader that Neale thinks that the usual origin of a monster in a film is due to a relationship that went wrong and also claims that men are more vulnerable to certain anxieties. The placement of her reference to Neale’s essay allows the reader to conduct an idea of what the essay is going to be about and makes the reader think about what is more threatening between feminine monsters or masculine monsters. I think it was creative of her to reference a well-known philosopher and that she was able to use it to have the reader thinking about movies they’ve watched and figure out whether they’ve actually seen any movie at all with a feminine monster and if they did, then they’d compare them to the masculine monster causing the reader to think even more!

Jonathan travels to Transylvania and meets Dracula, who discovers a picture of Harker's fiancée, Mina and believes that she is the reincarnation of Elisabeta. Dracula leaves Jonathan to be ravished and fed upon by his vampire brides. As Dracula sails to England with boxes of his native soil. His arrival is

Indeed, the work condemns the expression of sexuality, particularly deviant sexuality, as in the case of Lucy, who is eventually destroyed and transformed into a voluptuous vampire. Dracula is the immoral foreigner; he contains and conveys a sexually transmittable disease, perhaps akin to syphilis in its internal and external transformation of the afflicted. In this novel, Stoker stands by the ideal woman, Mina, who resists temptation and becomes a submissive and dedicated wife and mother. Finally, Abraham Van Helsing and his group of men defend the patriarchal pillars of society and try to contain, at all costs, the sexually dominant behavior that attempts to contaminate society. The anxieties surrounding and permeated by the characters of the novel emulate a literary culture inspired by Gothic literature.

The persona Dracula is also different than commonly considered: She has a hairy, moustached man with a wolfish demeanour who is constantly known as childish and unholy by Van Helsing; a considerably retreat from a dashing[a]: jaunty; smart; chic; romantic; gallant, ancient sensuality of modern vampires. The story, will, however have a variety things for someone to think about such as sexuality, gender roles, capitalism, immigration and homophobia all of that can be found and developed through close reading of the written text message. Dracula by Bram Stoker is considered to be the very embodiment of gothic novels. It is a classic story of mythical creatures, supernatural and mysterious events, omens and visions, apocalypticism, threatening creatures, romance, darkness, emotion and all the elements a gothic novel ought to include. A single of the things medieval novels concentrate on are supernatural and mysterious events.

Throughout the story, Bram Stoker illustrates how they are incorporated, this can be shown through; the sheer cold-heartedness, and malignant behavior of Count Dracula, which leaves the audience to speculate what causes such behaviors. Bram Stoker allows the reader to understand that Dracula isn’t presumed to be a happy going book and therefore indicates how the reader should fathom the story. Dracula is a tale with various amounts of archetypes. The more predominant ones are; The mother figure, the mentor, the antagonist, the loss of innocence, and life and death. To begin with, in the story Mina Harker is known as the mother figure, this can be seen with the love, compassion, and support that she caters and advises others when they are agitated.