Dear readers,
Welcome back. Today, we will be viewing Bram Stoker’s Dracula through the lens of desire. But this time, I’m going to bring in a secondary source of media called Castlevania. For context, Castlevania is a show on Netflix that’s technically considered an anime and based on the 1990 video game Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse. It’s also where my name comes from though I’m regretfully not the hot and unrealistically jacked son of Dracula.
Anyways, it’s really interesting actually how both Lucy from Stoker’s Dracula and Dracula’s wife Lisa from Castlevania are very similar in that both are killed for who they become in the eyes of society and men; Lucy is brutally de-vampirized because the gang in Dracula reasons that Lucy is corrupted now. So they have to take it upon themselves to restore her virginity/innocence. Lucy is indeed fatally beautiful but its more about how her new state of desire as a vampire is taboo in a society where women are expected to be pure, compliant, and essentially the lesser man of the two.
Meanwhile, Lisa is a stunningly attractive blonde-haired white woman like Lucy (coincidence, I think not) but she isn’t a vampire or even turned into one. She is a mortal woman who has a desire to learn the sciences which she then uses to help teach people about science and heal patients as a doctor. Yeah, she’s pretty badass. However, this desire and occupation is just as illicit and consequential as Lucy’s vampire transformation. The Bishop and the church in this show aren’t happy with this science since it goes against their religious community. They decide Lisa is a witch using black magic on the people and hang her on a stake (sound familiar) where she is burned alive. Shocker, religion and a ruthless killing comes into play here too. It seems society doesn’t want beautiful women to be anything other than two dimensional subservients.
Though Lucy is a literal maneater and Lisa is a woman of science, I would argue that the archetype of the femme fatale still connects them for the double standards of gender that they break. Let me elaborate. Isn’t it intriguing that the novel and the tv show parallel with self-acclaimed righteous men? Is it too much to state that the men in Dracula and the church in Castlevania act in a way they think is justified because they’ve convinced themselves that its for the good of society, when really, it’s their ego and personal beliefs getting in the way?? But by god, the minute a woman shows up acting the way she wants because she desires something more, men basically throw a tantrum and cry “OFF WITH HER HEAD!” Well I guess in this case, it would be stab her in the heart or burn her alive… ouch. My point is, Lucy and Lisa disrupt the order of society for being the abnormal woman and the result is their coordinated deaths. Justice for Lucy and Lisa.
Until next time,
Alucard
You draw an interesting parallel here between Lucy and Lisa as both threatening men’s perceptions of how proper women should act. I think there is definitely that sense of uncertainty and fear of women behaving out of the ordinary expectations of them and then being labeled as something magically evil as an explanation. I wonder what is different about Mina, and if there is another parallel to Mina in Castlevania, because she also attempted to act out of womanly character in the novel in trying to help the men defeat Dracula, but she wasn’t brutally murdered like Lucy.