{"id":1018,"date":"2023-09-21T16:17:01","date_gmt":"2023-09-21T20:17:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/?p=1018"},"modified":"2023-09-21T16:17:01","modified_gmt":"2023-09-21T20:17:01","slug":"beware-the-new-woman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/2023\/09\/21\/beware-the-new-woman\/","title":{"rendered":"Beware the \u201cNew Woman!\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like most women written by men, the women in <\/span>Dracula<\/span><\/i> by Bram Stoker are shallow and lack character development. One can argue that Lucy is a round character, because she turns into a vampire, but is that really character development or a poke at the \u201cNew Woman\u201d by Bram Stoker? According to Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst in <\/span>Reading the \u2018Fin de si\u00e8cle,\u2019<\/span><\/i> the \u201cNew Woman\u201d can be interpreted\/read two ways: a more positive image of sexual liberation and independence or the negative aspects of breaking social norms such as motherhood and the nuclear family.<\/span><\/p>\n

In <\/span>Dracula<\/span><\/i>, Mina is a symbol of what is good about the \u201cNew Woman;\u201d she works but is still a dutiful, loving wife, while Lucy symbolizes the moral and sexual corruption of the \u201cNew Woman.\u201d Mina writes, \u201cWe women have something of the mother in us that makes us rise above smaller matters when the mother-spirit is invoked\u2026\u201d (Stoker, 245) Stoker uses the imagery of the mother to paint Mina positively according to social norms of the time; she always thinks of her husband, she wants to be a mother and she works, but not too much that she neglects her tasks as a woman. He uses the word \u201cspirit\u201d and \u201cinvoked\u201d combined with \u201cmother\u201d to further claim that all women have this innate motherly sense, as all humans have spirits (if that is what you believe, if not call it gothic and go with it), which contrasts Lucy’s actions when she eats a child, furthering Lucy as the extreme negative outcome of the \u201cNew Woman.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A few pages before, Stoker writes, \u201cShe seemed like a nightmare of Lucy as she lay there; pointed teeth, the bloodstained, voluptuous mouth \u2013 which it made one shutter to see \u2013 the whole carnal and unspiritual appearance, seeming like a devilish mockery of Lucy’s sweet purity.\u201d (Stoker, 228) Although the first quote is not a direct description of Mina, the two quotes have very different tones, clearly contrasting the women as the two aspects of the \u201cNew Woman.\u201d Specifically, the description of Lucy’s mouth is very sexual, utilizing creepy words such as \u201cpointed,\u201d \u201cbloodstained,\u201d \u201cvoluptuous\u201d and \u201ccarnal,\u201d harking on the sexual corruption aspect of the \u201cNew woman.\u201d In a long winded way, Stoker is saying Lucy is no longer pure. If the reader still did not pick up on the implicit, Stoker explicitly states, \u201c…a devilish mockery of Lucy’s sweet purity,\u201d creating a relationship between the evil and \u201csweet\u201d Lucy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Through the contrast of pure Mina and corrupt Lucy, Stoker cautions against the \u201cNew Woman\u201d in the Fin de Si\u00e8cle era. Stoker uses sensationalism to provoke curiosity of the corrupt imagery of vampires and Lucy-turned-vampire to show the dangers of the abandonment of gender roles, specifically motherhood in the Victorian Era. Ledger and Luckhurst note that the double standard of the \u201cNew Woman\u201d brought forth \u201c..productive sites for thinking through the articulation of gender with other significant markers of identity.\u201d (Ledger and Luckhurst, 18) So, some positive social change was made as a result of the \u201cNew Woman\u201d, contrasting Stoker\u2019s negative depiction of the movement in <\/span>Dracula<\/span><\/i>. Although Lucy is not a direct \u201coutspoken attack on male sexuality,\u201d as self proclaimed novelist, Sarah Grand is described as by Ledger and Luckhurst, still Lucy and her vamperic, child eating, motherhood abandoning, sexual advances are a threat to Victorian culture as Bram Stoker knows it. (Ledger and Luckhurst, 17)<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like most women written by men, the women in Dracula by Bram Stoker are shallow and lack character development. One can argue that Lucy is a round character, because she turns into a vampire, but is that really character development or a poke at the \u201cNew Woman\u201d by Bram Stoker? According to Sally Ledger and … Continue reading Beware the \u201cNew Woman!\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5240,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125361],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2023-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5240"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1018\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}