ipl-logo

Victorian Sexuality In Bram Stoker's Dracula

94 Words1 Page

The novel reveals a lot of information about Victorian sexuality. Undoubtedly, sex plays a big part when discussing gender roles. In the Victorian era, women who show sexual tendencies or desires are considered impure. When Lucy is sick, Dr. Van Helsing is desperate to supply her with blood. He describes a blood transfer as an intimate transaction. Similarly, Victorian society sees this as intimate. Hence the reason Dracula takes advantage of his victims and arouses their sexuality by sucking their blood. Blood sucking represents the taboo desires and sexual repression of the time

Show More
Related

  • Summary Of Homosexuality In Bram Stoker's Dracula

    901 Words  | 4 Pages

    The essay I chose to compare Dracula with was “Kiss Me With Those Red Lips: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” by Christopher Craft. The essay explains the sexuality in Dracula, desire, gender, and even homosexuality. Craft mentions his essay gives an account of Stoker’s “vampire metaphor” (Craft 108). He highlights certain and very valid points in the story of Dracula that breaks the Victorian gender role, writing, “a pivotal anxiety of late Victorian culture.” (Craft 108).

    Read More

  • What Does Orlok Symbolize Dracula

    970 Words  | 4 Pages

    This stresses the desire for an ideal Victorian woman. An ideal Victorian woman stays loyal to her man and therefore decreases the chance of spreading diseases that make society so fearful. In this way, loyalty would ensure protection from sexually transmitted diseases (contrived from people other than the woman’s husband). Mina, of Dracula, is in this way able to be cured from vampirism. She would not have been so lucky however if she had been bitten by Orlok.

    Read More

  • Gender Roles In Bram Stoker's Dracula

    1350 Words  | 6 Pages

    At first glance, the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker appears to be a typical gothic horror novel set in the late 1890s that gives readers an exciting look into the fight between good and evil. Upon closer inspection, it becomes apparent that Dracula is a statement piece about gender roles and expectations for men and women during the Victorian age. Looking at the personalities, actions, and character development of each of the characters in Dracula bring to light startling revelations about Victorian society and how Stoker viewed the roles of men and women during this time period. To really understand Dracula, it is important to note that this novel was written during a time “of political and social upheaval, with anxieties not just about the

    Read More

  • Desire In Bram Stoker's Dracula

    1160 Words  | 5 Pages

    The horror genre of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, combined with mild eroticism is able to draw in readers due to the fact that Stoker is able to intricately weave suspenseful sexual scenes/scenes of desire throughout the novel—making it clear that

    Read More

  • Suddenly Sexual Women In Bram Stoker's Dracula Summary

    1830 Words  | 8 Pages

    Feminist Reading: Dracula between Beauvoir’s and Roth’s Ideas In her article, “Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” Phyllis Roth argues that Dracula is a misogynistic novel which is obvious in the system of power in which men are dominant and active figures whereas women are just followers and obedient to their system. She draws on Simon de Beauvoir’s idea that “ambivalence as an intrinsic quality of Eternal Feminine”, in order to show that women are victims to men powers. In her chapter, “Myth and Reality”, Beauvoir discusses the way that anybody in the society, specially men, doesn’t do their job in taking a step towards the oppressed women, but to act just like what the system of myth impose them to act.

    Read More

  • Sexuality And Gender Roles In Bram Stoker's Dracula

    858 Words  | 4 Pages

    Lucy is illustrated as someone who is continuously driven by sexual temptations and flirtatiousness. Stoker puts emphasis on her beauty, which is what grabs the attention of men. Lucy ends up getting killed because her sexual openness was seen as a threat to Victorian society. Stoker uses a character like Lucy in his novel to portray that sexually assertive women who try and use their beauty to win over men will not make it in the Victorian culture. On the other hand, when Dracula intimidates Jonathan during his effort to attack Mina, she reacts in the correct matter of what the Victorian culture would want her to.

    Read More

  • Women In Dracula Essay

    696 Words  | 3 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • The Oppression Of Women In Bram Stoker's Dracula

    1218 Words  | 5 Pages

    When Lucy turns into a vampire, it is made a point to describe how she appears and behaves in opposition to the Lucy we were introduced to before her death. With Lucy as a vampire it gives her many virtues she didn’t possess when she was alive. In this novel she is portrayed as a predatory. The importance of being a virgin in the 19th century is perceived through Lucy’s transition into a ‘she-devil’ once Dracula takes away her purity. A person like Lucy, her sexuality is viewed as offensive, is apparent that the gender categories are challenging to gender categories more than

    Read More

  • Violence In Bram Stoker's Dracula

    1461 Words  | 6 Pages

    Bram Stoker, describes one of the verbal taboos of the Victorian era, violence, through the representation of vampires as “monsters” through the point of view of their victims in his novel Dracula. Stoker portrays violence in three distinct categories- physical, visual and psychological. Each one of these categories is described by one of the antagonists in the Novel, with Count Dracula as the physical aspect of violence, his underlings, the female vampires as the visual and Renfield, the patient at Dr. Seward’s mental asylum, as the psychological aspect of violence. This essay looks at the portrayal of such Categorical violence as different renditions of a “monster” and considers why Stoker would segregate violence in such a manner.

    Read More

  • Theme Of Deception In Bram Stoker's Dracula

    778 Words  | 4 Pages

    Dracula’s deceitful traits carry over to his victims that become

    Read More

  • Morality And Morality In Dracula

    1329 Words  | 6 Pages

    During the Victorian period in which Dracula was written, morals and ethics were often strictly enforced. Some of the morals that were upheld had to do with personal duty, hard work, honesty, as well as sexual proprietary. It was very important during this period that one was proper in their sexual behaviors and conventional in whom they had sexual relations with. However, during this period, many authors sought to challenge the ‘norm’ with ideas of reform and change and Bram Stoker was no exception to this. In his novel, Dracula, Stoker provides a critique of this rigidity in his portrayal of Dracula and Dracula’s relationship with Jonathan Harker.

    Read More

  • Female Sexuality In Dracula

    1622 Words  | 7 Pages

    The literature pieces help explore the subject of female sexuality, as time progress the amount of female sexuality increases. Women can desire, they can have aspirations, even though shown as vampires the text still suggests that they are women.   The gothic writing of Victorian era such as Dracula, Carmilla, and Christabel help

    Read More

  • The Importance Of Dracula In Stoker's Dracula

    1253 Words  | 6 Pages

    Word Count: 1188 5. Describe the appearances Dracula makes throughout the novel. What does Stoker achieve by keeping his title character in the shadows for so much of the novel? In Bram Stoker’s 1897

    Read More

  • Fear In Dracula

    811 Words  | 4 Pages

    As Lucy becomes a vampire, she becomes increasingly sexualized. Like the vampire ladies of Castle Dracula, her repressed sexuality comes to the surface, and she becomes the sexual aggressor, women in 1897 weren 't supposed to be the ones to ask for kisses. They were supposed to be

    Read More

  • The Supernatural And Reality In Bram Stoker's Dracula

    1072 Words  | 5 Pages

    In the novel Dracula, author Bram Stoker creates a peculiar situation that pushes the main characters to decipher the supernatural from reality. Originally thought of as a myth, Dracula quickly becomes something more than the supernatural. By slowly building the conflict of Dracula himself, Stoker depicts all stages of the change from believing that Dracula is a fictitious character to being face to face with Dracula himself. As he terrorizes the lives of the characters in the novel, they soon come to the realization that Dracula is more than what they formerly believed, and in actuality he is their harsh reality.

    Read More

More about Victorian Sexuality In Bram Stoker's Dracula

Open Document