Category: 2023 Blog Post

In his book Orientalism, Edward Said defines orientalism as a system of ideas that has many manifestations. One is the style of popular and literary thought that makes a distinction between the “West” and the “East”: the east is everything other: feminine, sexual, lazy, evil, dark, non-Christian. Another is the academic discourse of “Oriental scholars” who seek to define and study “oriental” cultures and codify them for Western audiences.

Because Greece is thought the seat of “the occident,” or the West, the orientalization of Dionea shows how the unfiltered ancient Greek is now so “other” to British culture. The story takes place in Montemirto Ligure, near Genoa in northeastern Italy. Our narrator, Dr. De Rosis, is “a priest-hater and conspirator against the Pope” and writes in French, Italian, Latin, and English (Lee 4). He even denies Evelyn’s invitation to Rome on the grounds that he has become “a northern man,” (Lee 7). Though he is Italian, he remains apart from the people in the village and bears resemblance to an educated man of this English audience’s mileu. This serves to make him relatable and able to otherize both his village (because he is somewhat English-coded and high class) and especially Dionea.

Though the Italian villagers are foreign (they speak Italian and are superstitious), they are characterized as more rustic, whereas Dionea is truly alien. As De Rosis is our only narrator, he and his “northern” perspective alone construct Dionea’s foreignness. The “little brown mite” who washes up on the shore “is doubtless a heathen” because she has no cross around her neck and speaks “some half-intelligible Eastern jabber” with “a few Greek words embedded in I know not what,” (Lee 4). That last part is emblematic of Dionea’s whole existence to De Rosis: Dionea has flecks of recognizable Greekness, but contains something more foreign and mysterious.

When some of Lady Evelyn’s friends, Waldemar (presumably a German) and his wife, come to visit, they decide to use Dionea, representative of an older and more deadly version of Greece, as a model for a beautiful pale Venus statue a-la Venus de Milo. Waldemar attempts to Westernize, or Italianize, Dionea by making her white and marble, but eventually sets fire to the building with both of them in it. I think this was Dionea’s doing, as she has been known to make people do destructive, and Pagan, things in the past, such as buy her potions. Her influence makes him create a “votive pyre,” a dangerous part of Greek religion (Lee 26). Though “northerners” like Waldemar try to “Westernize” the rough and ancient Greece, the terrifying and “oriental” one lurks beneath. There are two Greeces: one Westernized and one Oriental. This Orientalized Greece has so much power because it is supposed to be the very origin of Western civilization, yet is actually sinister.

Here is my source, the first chapter of Said’s book: said orientalism

In the late 19th century mental health was not a widely accepted part of society. Most treatments for mental health consisted of being sent to a hospital where people lived in awful conditions (NHS Choices). Unfortunately, there were few other outlets for people struggling with mental health. For the people of the time who were struggling with finances their possibilities for mental health treatment were likely smaller if their mental health was even considered at all. The problems of the lower class are explored in Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop where the four main characters run a shop due to their money problems. For most of The Romance of a Shop, there is a neglect of mental health that was typical for the late 19th century, however, the minor character, Mademoiselle Stephanie exhibits how financial instability plays a role in mental health.

In The Romance of a Shop, Mademoiselle Stephanie hides the struggle she has with her mental health. Mademoiselle Stephanie is a Frenchwoman who inhabited the first floor of the building where the four sisters worked. In her first appearance, she is described as a gleeful woman who greets with a boisterous “Bon jour!” (Levy 86). This description makes her out to be a cheerful woman yet she is also described as being “sallow” (Levy 86). According to the OED the word “sallow” is often “characterized by a yellowish or pale brown color considered unhealthy-looking” (OED). So despite Stephanie’s happy attitude, this word choice shows that something is going on under the surface to make her have a “sallow” appearance.  This description also foreshadows the event that occurs the next time that the Frenchwoman is mentioned. 

Mademoiselle Stephanie’s financial instability plays a part in her mental health issues and this leads her to do something that is almost deadly. The sisters become disturbed after hearing a lot of noise coming from where Mademoiselle Stephanie lives and later Frank tells them this: “I have merely come to tell you that nothing terrible has happened. It seems that the poor Frenchwoman below has been in money difficulties, and has been trying to put an end to herself” (Levy 93). In his own telling of the events that occurred, Frank undermines the severity of Mademoiselle Stephanie’s suicide attempt by telling the sisters that nothing terrible has happened. Although he later shows that he has been crying there is an overall casual nature to the event showing how much pain like this was meant to be concealed. 

After this occurrence, Mademoiselle Stephanie reverts back to her happy attitude and puts on a brave face although she is still suffering. When Gertrude later sees the Frenchwoman she is back to the chipper person that she used to be and this disturbed Gertrude given what she knows, “The woman’s mincing, sallow face, with its unabashed smiles, sickened her” (Levy 95). The words “mincing” and “unabashed” contribute to the description of Stephanie from before as they describe her as someone who is happy. However, Gertrude knows she is suffering and the “sallow” aspect of Stephanie’s face is more prominent in a way that clashes with the happiness she pretends to have. After this, the Frenchwoman disappears and is never heard of again. 

Stephanie was struggling with some mental health issues due to the financial struggle that burdened her, but she had no outlet that could assist in processing this struggle. This explains why she puts on a happy face and smiles through her pain. This instance with Mademoiselle Stephanie embodies what mental illness can be like for some people even in current times since poor people likely have no way to afford mental health treatment and instead must suffer alone. With this novel, Levy begins to acknowledge the lack of mental health treatment in the late 19th century and how there was no room for mental health issues if you were financially unstable. 

 

Works Cited

“19th Century Mental Health.” NHS Choices, 21 May 2014, www.ashfordstpeters.nhs.uk. Accessed 7 Oct. 2023.

Going off of our discussion in class, I want to continue the conversation illuminating the overlap between Dionea and Dracula. Obviously, Dionea incorporates supernatural and mythological elements similar to how Dracula includes myth and superstition, but as we pointed to, the overlap is much more profound in the characterization throughout these two stories and the polarized spectrum constituting protagonists vs antagonists.

To this point, understanding Dionea becomes all the more complicated. Particularly through narration, does this story have quite a unique approach towards its presentation of narrative. One could say that Dionea is the protagonist, the main character whom we divert much if not all of our attention too. This is not entirely the case though, as Dr. De Rosis is the narrator, and the perspective guiding the entire story. His opinion of Dionea, though seemingly cruel and illogical, is a lens that we as readers are forced to understand her through.

Dracula follows a similar form of narration, though, rather than just one narrator, there are many in this novel. Many narrators preoccupied with one person: Dracula. Similarly to Dionea, we are never offered Dracula’s perspective. Instead we are provided with others who, maybe you could argue, share cruel opinions of the vampire.

To further compare the characterization of Dionea and Dracula, it’s not hard to see how their characterization is constituted in dehumanization. Dionea is consistently referred to as a “creature” (Lee 11), while Jonathan consistently refers to Dracula as a “lizard” (Stoker 31). These comparisons, while seemingly just minor jabs towards the antagonist (yes Dionea is not an antagonist per say but is treated as one by the narrator), illuminate what can be interpreted as xenophobic narrators fearful of difference.

Gertrude is the driving force behind the Lorimer sisters’ transition from recently orphaned and newly poor to working-class fortune seekers. In her push for their independence, she embodies many of the qualities of the “New Woman”. Gertrude is also deeply intuitive, and cares with her entire being for each of her sisters’ wellbeing, wanting what was best for them within each of their individual means, according to society’s subjective lens. Beyond this, keeping in mind Gertrude’s own relatively young age, she was also reentering into a world from a new location, social class, and motivations. Beyond her protectiveness towards her sisters, she was facing a new understanding of self as someone almost “less-than”, compared to her previous standing and company. This self-consciousness is the beginning of her antipathy towards Sidney Darrell, but not the entirety of it – nor even the true root cause of its further development.

From the first, Gertrude dislikes Darrell, saying to her sisters, “how can one be expected to think well of a person who makes one feel like a strong-minded clown?” (117). Darrell made Gertrude feel lesser for her position and her perceived poverty, and introduced a sense of shame for doing what she had stubbornly made her livelihood. But this is not the only factor in her dislike – from the start, she was suspicious of his character. “He is this sort of man; —if a woman were talking to him of—of the motions of the heavenly bodies, he would be thinking all the time of the shape of her ankles” (110).

This suspicion and dislike are not one-sided; indeed, Darrell describes her to Lord Watergate as the “dragon-sister” when discussing his desire to for Phyllis to sit for a portrait (131). Though not the culmination of their interactions, when Gertrude and Darrell meet at the party when the subject of Phyllis being his muse is brought up, Levy writes: “It was an old, old story the fierce yet silent opposition between these two people; an inevitable antipathy; a strife of type and type, of class and class, rather than of individuals: the strife of the woman who demands respect, with the man who refuses to grant it” (131). It is in this moment that the conflict between them is enlarged and pointed at specifically for the reader; it is in this moment of tense confrontation that their antipathy is made greater than two individuals, and becomes the contradiction between the New Woman and the old guard.

Gertrude, who is described upon first meeting as not beautiful; who is not the oldest or youngest or truly the middle child, but instead the writer and the worker. The one attribute continually accredited to her is “clever”. It is important to note that Gertrude occasionally has unpredictable bouts of propriety, perhaps alluding to the conflict among women at the time on a more internal level than the conflict between each of the sisters and their differing interpretation of the proper social expression of womanhood.

In Gertrude’s silent battle with Sidney Darrell, there is an “inevitable antipathy” – one of “type and type” and “class and class”, where Levy takes us beyond the individual and into broad categorization. Where class is most typically attributed towards the differentiation between wealth and means of access, it can also be related to a sense of propriety – not just according to the social norms of the times, but according to a sense of decency and the elegance (or lack of) associated with it (i.e. “classy”). Type can be a term which differentiates between groups of people: the types of people where one conforms to or embodies one thing, and someone else another. Type could also allude to gender; one type of person can be masculine, and the other feminine.

This “inevitable antipathy”, beyond the individual, as Levy says, is instead between the social standard of interactions between man and woman: “the strife of the woman who demands respect, with the man who refuses to grant it”. This phrasing, which speaks to me as one of the most impactful lines I encountered in The Romance of a Shop, alludes to Levy’s own opinions not just on the controversy surrounding the conception of the New Woman, but on the deeper, social way of interpreting the deference expected of a woman interacting with a man, especially as a new type and class of woman is emerging onto the social scene, appropriating masculine roles in society and the respect that comes with it.

On pages 19-20, I was interested in how the passage seems to scrutinize the sexually suggestive admiration women have towards each other when women in 19th-century literature often share intimate, emotional interactions and relationships. For example, in Dracula, one of the key differences between Lucy and Mina’s letters to each other versus those between the men is their dramatics toward each other, like calling each other “Dearest” in their letters and the deep emotion with which they speak about each other, which can be interpreted as sexually suggestive and is expected of women and not of men. However, the narrator in Dionea claims women should not share this emotional admiration as they are expected to be responsible for curbing their husband’s sexual urges toward other women. I also found it interesting in the story how the doctor describes the extraordinary nature of Dionea’s beauty and the anticipation that the men will not be able to control themselves, leaving it to their wives to keep them in line. The doctor then becomes appalled that Gertrude encourages Waldemar to sculpt Dionea; perhaps he feels the spell of Dionea’s beauty, coupled with her other witchlike traits, is influencing Gertrude too, which might suggest a disapproval of homosexual desires between women. 

One reason I feel this passage could hint at the disapproval of homosexual desires is how Waldemar expresses his lack of determination to sculpt Dionea. He says “Leave the girl alone” to his wife, asking why he would be bothered with the “unaesthetic sex”, as the only woman he sculpts is his wife (Lee 20). I found this piece to be intriguing because it exemplifies the rejection of seeing women expressing sexual desires toward other women and creating a contrast between Gertrude and her husband. The doctor expects Gertrude to be the voice of restraint and chastity, claiming “a wife’s duty is as much to chasten her husband’s whim as to satisfy them”, thus through the contrast of Waldemar’s lack of interest in sculpting Dionea, he suggests Gertrude has failed as a wife by encouraging that another woman would be a good model for her husband rather than satisfying him herself and restraining him from sinful sexual acts (Lee 20). Additionally, the doctor claims Gertrude has committed some kind of sin for being so adamant about her husband sculpting another woman, insinuating that sculpting another woman is synonymous with adultery. 

The critical commentary of Gertrude’s desire to have her husband sculpt Dionea while suggesting disapproval of same-sex desires or sexually suggestive admirations also hints at a desire for non-monogamy that is also shamed. The doctor mentions that “other women may think it right to humour their husbands”, but he urges that it is unacceptable for a wife to toy with the idea of her husband being intimate with another woman with her consent (Lee 20). Overall, it seems the creation of art between two people, the artist and the model, is perceived to be an inherently intimate interaction that is not acceptable for a woman’s husband to be partaking with another woman.

Cristopher Craft talks about gender, sexuality, and the breakdown of patriarchal customs in his essay “Kiss Me with Those Red Lips.”
These are all topics which can be examined through the lens of Dracula but sexuality, specifically homosexuality/homosocialism, is a topic which is shown through different relationships in the novel. In my analysis of the relationship between Dracula and Jonathon Harker, there is an obvious line which is being towed between homosexuality and homosocialism. Before delving into the specifics of their interactions, it is important to note that the main representation of a “sexual action” in this novel is through the sucking of blood. Craft questions, “Are we male or are we female? Do we have penetrations or orifices? What are the relations between blood and semen, milk and blood? Furthermore, this mouth…is the mouth of all vampires, male and female” (Craft 446). These questions blur the line of the difference between sex as we know it and the sucking of blood as another form of sex. Craft is showcasing that with Dracula and vampires, the transfer of bodily fluids regardless of what it is, represents a sexual action.

Although the only transfer of blood happens between Dracula and Mina/Lucy, subsequently Lucy and the children, there are moments where blood comes into play for Dracula and Jonathon. Jonathon states, “at that instant I saw that the cut had bled a little, and the blood was trickling over my chin…When the Count saw my face, his eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury, and he suddenly made a grab at my throat” (Stoker 23). In this moment, the Count is tempted by Jonathon’s blood and with the grab of his throat, almost close to completing the action of sucking his blood. Although this attempt is stopped because of Jonathon’s use of the crucifix, it is interesting to note that this could be Stoker’s way of stopping the interaction from becoming homoerotic. At the same time, there wasn’t any hesitation with Dracula sucks Lucy and Mina’s blood. There seems to be a clear directive of the blood sucking actions between man and woman throughout the novel as Jonathon is almost attacked by the three lady vampires under Dracula. Yet Dracula intervenes during this instance saying, “How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it?…This man belongs to me! (Stoker 34). This possessiveness over Jonathon is another piece of evidence towards the possible homoeroticism between them. Because of the patriarchal traditions at the time, the vampires sucking Jonathon’s blood would be the “natural” transaction but Dracula stops this which promotes the idea that he wants to suck his blood himself.

Even when Dracula drinks Lucy’s blood it is noted that he is actually drinking the blood transferred from the Crew of Light. Craft continues to challenge the understanding of sexuality in Dracula when he states, “another instance of the heterosexual displacement of a desire mobile enough to elude the boundaries of gender…only through women may men touch” (Craft 448). Even though by the end of the novel, there is no distinct sexual interaction between two men through blood, there is ample evidence showcasing the underlying homoeroticism. Craft’s text challenged the usual convention of heterosexuality and brought about a new perspective which Dracula can be seen through in order to understand how homosexuality can be placed in literature during this time.

“Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!” (Stoker 25). This is one of Dracula’s first comments to Johnathan Harker, provoking unease from the Englishman. However, from a non-Vitorian perspective, there is nothing inherently evil about Dracula’s wistful appreciation of the wolves’ wild beauty. In her article “Dracula: The Unseen Face in the Mirror,” Carol A. Senf alleges that the epistolary format of the novel unfairly maligns its titular vampire, giving too much responsibility to the biased Victorian narrators. “The problem, however, is that these perfectly ordinary people are confronted with the extraordinary character of Dracula… [Stoker] adds a number of humanizing touches to make Dracula appear noble and vulnerable as well as demonic and threatening; and it becomes difficult to determine whether he is a hideous bloodsucker whose touch breeds death or a lonely and silent figure who is hunted and persecuted” (Senf 424). Almost in answer to Senf’s concerns are the works of Anne Rice: Interview with a Vampire and its sequel The Vampire Lestat. The format of the first book directly opposes Dracula’s structure, as it is framed as an interview from the vampire’s point of view, one that the vampire himself acknowledges as an opportunity that he desperately needs.

People are good at inventing their own forms of evil. As Rice’s more self-aware vampire describes his irritation at a priest’s “’immediate and shallow carping about the devil; his refusal to even entertain the idea that sanctity had passed so close,’” he points out that, “‘People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil.,’” because, ‘”Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult’” (Interview 13). To Van Helsing, bastion of civilization, Dracula is most valuable as a surmountable symbol of the evil that must be hunted. Rather than putting energy into masking and policing their own desires, “Becoming like Dracula, they too would be laws unto themselves—primitive, violent, irrational—with nothing to justify their actions except the force of their desires. No longer would they need to rationalize their ‘preying on the bodies and souls of their loved ones’ by concealing their lust for power under the rubric of religion, their love of violence under the names of imperialism and progress, their sexual desires within an elaborate courtship ritual.” (Senf 428) Best of all, the opposing force of Dracula’s greater Ultimate Evil validates the “lesser evil” that the team hunting Dracula falls victim to. Dracula then becomes purely evil in the narrative because that is what the narrators require from him. Johnathan quickly forgets Dracula’s sad, quite assertion that “’I, too, can love’” (Stoker 46); he learns to ignore any evidence of a soul.

Rice’s contribution flips the script and forces the narrative to truly follow and learn about the vampire. The darkness and foreignness that the vampire inherently represents cannot be pushed to the side. Even narrator of Rice’s Interview with the Vampire has a distinct accent which the interviewer placed but couldn’t mark (Interview 5). Even after centuries, the vampire is still the eternal wanderer, or as Dracula puts it, the eternal stranger: “’Well I know, that did I move and speak in your London, none there are who would not know me for a stranger… a stranger in a strange land, he is no one; men know him not—and to know not is to care not for”’” (Stoker 27). And despite Johnathan’s reassurance that Dracula “’speak[s] English excellently!’” his first assessment of Dracula’s accent is to record the impression: “excellent English, but with a strange intonation,” (Stoker 22), revealing that he does indeed consciously mark Dracula’s otherness. As an outsider, these characters can safely be eternally shunned, as Lestat describes: “’You sense my loneliness… my bitterness at being shut out of life. My bitterness that I’m evil, that I don’t deserve to be loved and yet I need love hungrily. My horror that I can never reveal myself to mortals’” (The 310). This speech does not describe someone who is evil: it describes someone who has been told that he is evil. He believes himself to be evil, unworthy of love, and unable to connect with humanity, and yet his desire for love and bitterness at being shut out proves the opposite. He is still just as much a person. He, too, can love.

Dracula explores various aspects of good and evil in unique ways. Carol Senf, in an article titled “Dracula: The Unseen Face in the Mirror,” argues that the people who vow to destroy Dracula at any cost are not much different from him in terms of their behavior. 

Senf’s main argument that Dracula revolves around the similarities and differences between good and evil reveals a lot about the characters’ actions. Using this interpretation, it is clear that while the main characters, especially Mina and Quincey, aim to destroy Dracula in the name of good, they perpetrate many of the same actions that he does. For example, Senf argues that “Lucy’s death might just as easily be attributed to the blood transfusions,” yet Dracula is blamed for Lucy’s death (425). She also argues that “Mina acknowledges her complicity in the affair with Dracula by admitting that she did not want to prevent his advances” (425). Her ultimate conclusion, therefore, is that by pledging to destroy Dracula by any means necessary without even concrete evidence of his wrong-doing, and resorting to illegal actions to do so, puts the main characters on the same moral level as Dracula himself. This argument certainly has support in the novel. For example, Van Helsing suggests that “…if we can so treat the Count’s body, it will soon after fall into dust. In such case there would be no evidence against us, in case any suspicion of murder were aroused” (Stoker 313). The fact that erasing evidence was considered necessary lends support to the idea that the main characters knew that they were in fact committing at least some form of crime by destroying Dracula. Their complicity and moral grayness are further supported by the fact that the only comparable crime to what they were doing was murder. In this way, Senf’s article highlights some of the moral hypocrisy of a group of people who plot to kill a person or person-like creature in the name of good. 

However, Senf’s argument overlooks a few key aspects of the nature of Dracula that somewhat undermine her analysis. For example, while stuck in Dracula’s castle, Jonathan sees a woman outside yelling “Monster, give me back my child!” (41). She is then attacked by a group of wolves. The obvious logical conclusion here is that Dracula killed her child and then sent wolves to kill her. This event continues in various iterations throughout the story, where Dracula attacks innocent people and anyone who stands in his way. By the end of the novel, Dracula has killed countless people himself and through his other servants like Lucy. The group of main characters then commits their only murder to destroy the creature who has taken countless lives. While Senf is correct that Dracula is “tried, convicted, and sentenced by men…who give him no opportunity to explain his actions,” the main characters clearly didn’t view it that way (Senf 425). Mina writes in her journal “But to fail here, is not mere life or death. It is that we become as him, that we henceforward become foul things of the night like him, without heart or conscience, preying on the bodies and the souls of those we love best” (223). Mina, Jonathan, and their friends felt a moral imperative to destroy Dracula before he could hurt any more people. Dracula was a threat that needed to be destroyed, like an aggressive animal that needs to be put down, not a person who also has feelings. One could argue that this makes them more morally repugnant because they don’t care about this creature that clearly has some human-like emotion, but in the end, they only wanted to destroy what could have been an even more dangerous threat if they’d waited and tried to get Dracula to “explain his actions.”  

Content warning (how do I keep getting myself in these situations?): genital mutilation, bad doctors

Dracula wants and expects us to trust the experts. In a scene from Seward’s diary, Van Helsing explains that Lucy is “Un-Dead” and that the only way to save her is to put a stake through her heart while she sleeps (with some garlic for good measure).  Keep in mind that this “Un-Dead” paradigm, and, in fact, most paradigms about the Vampires are information Van Helsing has supplied. Seward is initially upset: “It made me shudder to think of so mutilating the body of the woman whom I had loved. And yet the feeling was not so strong as I had expected. I was, in fact, beginning to shudder at the presence of this being, this Un-Dead, as Van Helsing called it, and to loathe it. Is it possible that all love is subjective, or all objective?” (Stoker 214, emphasis mine). He admits that he has accepted Van Helsing’s theories. It is a gradual process, but eventually Seward says he would kill the vampire Lucy “with savage delight” (225).

Stoker’s handling of Lucy’s treatment is in some ways analogous to those of hysteria. Take this account from 1844: a young, middle-class Frenchwoman is thwarted in a love-match by her parents and noticed symptoms that her doctor diagnosed as hysteria. They included irregular menstrual periods and convulsive attacks which led to a “lethargic coma.” The doctor treated her with topical oils and “vaginal douches of anti-spasmodic drugs.” She awoke later with only a vague memory of what had happened, and her senses restored (Hellerstein 111). Treatments for hysteria also included genital stimulation and leeches to the vulva (112). These doctors have levied a diagnosis and used it to perform invasive and violating experiments and procedures to cure their patient. In this way, these proceedings would have been somewhat familiar to a Victorian audience.

Other feminine diseases were more peculiar to the anxieties of the day, and their treatments more horrific (and not in a fun way). William Acton, expert on VDs in the fin de siecle, mentions in a footnote that a rival expert’s cure for nymphomania is to cut off the clitoris (Hellerstein 177). As we see with this and the leech treatment, too much sexual arousal in a woman calls not only for violation but mutilation. Lucy’s staking is a violating procedure if I ever saw one. Arthur’s lack of reticence shows how wholeheartedly he endorses Van Helsing’s recent explanation that doing this will save Lucy’s soul. Staking Lucy and destroying the clitoris of a nymphomaniac, for example, do the same thing: they brutalize a woman to save her from the horrors of a big appetite, whether that be for blood or sex.

Lucy’s symptoms are not completely analogous to either of these “conditions,” and I think diagnosing her is beside the point. Dracula asks us questions of what trusting a diagnosis and treatment path can lead people to do, and how and why people are diagnosed with illnesses in the first place. Apart from the mentally disturbed, Acton says that women feel little to no sexual desire, and little sensation in the clitoris. The only sexual pleasure, and it is slight, is felt in the vagina. Also, “loose women” are faking their sexual appetites (Hellerstein 177-8). This is the scientific truth to Acton and women who do not follow this are unnatural and probably ill. It sounds like lunacy to the modern reader, but in his day, he was highly respected. Though he was an “expert” and a “scientist,” he is obviously a product of his time. The hysteric, the nympho, and the vampire were all born of Victorian anxieties, as we explored Christopher Craft’s claims about Dracula as an anxious text.

Below are my sources. The book is called Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women’s Lives in 19th Century England, France, and the United States, edited by Erna Olafson Hellerstein, Leslie Parker Hume and Karen Offen.

Hellerstein Documents Victorian Women Part I

Hellerstein Documents Part Two

Reading Dracula has surprisingly brought up many questions around religion, race, gender and much more. One article that added interesting context to Dracula was the excerpt from Emily Gerard titled Transylvanian Superstitions. In this article from Emily Gerard, she introduces the concept of the living vampire who is “the illegitimate offspring of two illegitimate persons” and having a “flawless pedigree will not ensure anyone against the intrusion of a vampire into his family vault” because whoever the vampire feeds on is doomed to feed on other innocent people (Gerard, 332). This introduces the basis for how Dracula came to be which is being the “bastard” child of two other “bastards” and how he operates by “intrusion” on the purity of someone’s bloodline through sucking and feeding on his victim.

This context in useful in analyzing one of Dracula’s victims named Lucy. Lucy was killed by Dracula leading to the band of men “exorcising” her but her death and the violence at her grave, portrayed Lucy as contaminated by impurities spiritually and physically. The body of Lucy at the grave was described as a “foul Thing which had taken Lucy’s shape without her soul” and “a nightmare of Lucy as she lay there; the pointed teeth, the bloodstained, voluptuous mouth…the whole carnal and unspiritual appearance, seeming like a devilish mockery of Lucy’s sweet purity” (page 221). Therefore, in this description Lucy’s body is shown as invaded by a “Thing” and became a devil because Dracula has feasted on her. From Gerard’s reading, it is understood that vampires are or become flaws within a bloodline. This description of Lucy upholds the notion of vampires being able to compromise the purity of a person spiritually and physically by reducing a person to a “carnal and unspiritual” entity in need of an exorcism. Ultimately, causing a “mockery” of even the most innocent and/or sweet person by taking complete possession of the body thus disrupting purity on every facet of a victim.

However, there are also undertones of misogyny during Lucy’s transformation and exorcism. Prior to becoming a vampire, Lucy experiences the blood transfusion using the blood multiple men and she also expresses the desire for multiple men. In the Journal of Mina, Lucy’s friend, she talks about the existence of “New Women” in relation to Lucy where women will “won’t condescend in future to accept; she will do the proposing herself” (chapter 8). Mina expresses more modern ideas of marriage and companionship and Lucy’s actions have displayed the existence of the “New Women” that bends gender roles in marriage. While this may seem positive, Lucy’s untimely death which comes in the following chapters suggests the longevity of the “New Women” might not be the best. Meaning that by challenging traditional heterosexual marriage roles by taking charge in acts like proposing or being enticed by multiple men will lead to an “unspiritual” existence since Lucy’s soul was replaced by a vampire’s hunger and will.  In making Lucy the first victim, Stoker makes the “New Woman” comparable to that of a 2^nd generation “bastard” because both are flaws within a bloodline or more accurately a disruption in the order of things.