English Extension: the Gothic and Dracula

Explain how and why Dracula by Bram Stoker is valued.
The depiction of women and their role in society is still pertinent today. Dracula reflects the attitudes towards gender expectations which embodied the values at the time.   The new notion of ‘New Woman' was a 1890s feminist movement that was in its infancy by the end of the Victorian era, and it challenged the gender expectations to accept a new direction for women in society. Dracula is a story that displays both adulation and contempt for women by means of Lucy and Mina. The two are presented to the reader as being the closest of friends yet they contrast, portraying them as ‘doubles’. Both, however, exude qualities of the 'New Woman', although Mina, was the ideal, Lucy was the woman who represented the more primitive virtues of femininity. Lucy is fickle and silly but sexually progressive in the story. She is flirtatious, leading on the advances of three suitors and poses the question to Mina in a letter "Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many want her, and save all this trouble?” The exclusive pronoun ‘they’ comes to represent society while her ‘girl’ suggest that she is trying to lessen the threat to the patriarchy through the child-like reference to her gender. She is ambivalent regarding her attitudes towards the three suitors; she wants them all for different reasons. Whilst this is happening in England, Harker is doing his best to resist the predations of the highly eroticised female vampires, in Dracula's castle. In both incidents, it is the women who are dictating the progress of the intimacy. Between the three vampire sisters and Lucy, Stoker is very much appealing to the general Victorian fear of female sexuality and ‘the other’. It has been a device that many Gothic writers have employed - the inversion of the gender roles. These female characters of Stokers are aggressive, hungry and seem to be, through their vampiric predations, trying to enslave the men who have always...