Monica Newell 11-21-12 English 202-02 Stoker vs. Female Sexuality Bram Stoker’s Draculapresents three types of women in Victorian society. Lucy Westenra represents the rapidly declining and rather vapid British aristocracy while Mina Murray-Harker represents the prim and proper population of the Victorian middle class. The third type of woman is rather shown andtold: the readers are presented the three vampire women presented throughout the text are the hyper sexualized women throughout Victorian society while the readers are told about the ‘New Woman’ through Mina’s journal entries. In Dracula, Stoker argues that Victorian women should remain in the home as helpers for their husbands and stay pure and chaste; he condemns female sexuality as dangerous and destructive . Bram Stoker’s Draculawas written during near the turn of the century, where many changes had begun to occur in society. “The temporal setting was not coincidentally selected, but it was prudently chosen.It was a time of radical change,the change of women’s role in society. Women grew more and more independent from male dominion and that again altered their attitudes as well as their behavior. As a result, men experienced the ‘New Woman’ (coined by Sarah Grand, a radical feminist novelist) that almost entirely appeared weird —if not even preternatural—to them” (Bohme, 2) . Stoker argues against these changes,and argues in his book that the ‘New Woman’ of the day , the women who wished to advance their place in the world and improve their status in society among their fellow male citizens, were rather dangerous to the status quo of society. He argues this through the character Mina Murray-Harker, the fiancé and later wife of one of the heroes of the novel . “Some of the `New Women' writers will some day start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or accepting. But I suppose
the `New Woman' won't condescend in future to accept. She will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will make of it too! There's some consolation in that” (Stoker, 225) . This section of Mina’s journal entry shows just how Stoker feels about the idea of female sexuality and the ‘New Woman’. The idea of pre-marital sex was taboo throughout that of the aristocracy and that of the middle class during the strength of the Victorian period. However, Stoker (in this section of his novel) states through his character Mina that all the ‘New Woman’ wants to do is to “see a man sleep” before being married. He also argues that should the ‘New Woman’ movement prove to be successful, then women would be proposing to men rather than the traditional way. Yet the condescending tone in Mina’s words shows how Stoker believes women incapable of successfully proposing at all.
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