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Gothic Literature: An Analysis Of The Role Of Women In Literature

1763 Words8 Pages

Women in literature represent many things. They are sometimes omnipresent and protagonist, but also feared, dangerous and often completely forgotten.
The role of women throughout the History of literature is quite representative and relevant to understand the Historical moment. Gothic is no exception. In Gothic fiction we find different kinds of women, which embody the views of society towards women in the late nineteenth-century in England and Ireland. Thus we find strong, innocent and pure women like in Stoker’s Dracula, but also dangerous and powerful ones as we can see in Le Fanu’s “Carmilla”. However, we also could talk about some novels in which the role of women has disappeared completely, as we can appreciate in Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of women in these texts, paying special attention to Stoker’s novel, and to draw an overview of how they were represented in the society of the nineteenth-century. Freeman claims in his essay “E. Nesbit’s New Woman Gothic” that ‘the treatment of gender and sexuality’ is an important issue in the Victorian Gothic, ‘with plentiful analysis of the fear of feminism and the New Woman’ (454). We can see this both in “Carmilla” and in Dracula. Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) play an essential role. As a matter of fact, the only male vampire in the text is Dracula himself, and all the other vampires that we can find in the novel are female. Senf argues that we

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