Dr. Seward gives his account of Lucy as a vampire in the passage below:<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd she looked, her eyes blazed with unholy light, and the face became wreathed with a voluptuous smile. Oh, God, how it made me shudder to see it! With a careless motion, she flung to the ground, callous as a devil, the child that up to now she had clutched strenuously to her breast, growling over it as a dog growls over a bone. The child gave a sharp cry, and lay there moaning. There was a cold-bloodedness in the act which wrung a groan from Arthur; when she advanced to him with outstretched arms and a wanton smile, he fell back and hid his face is his hands. She still advanced, however, and with a languorous, voluptuous grace, said: — \u2018Come to me, Arthur.\u2019\u201d (225-226)<\/p>\n
Dr. Seward does not portray Lucy in a positive light. In fact, he does not say anything favorable about her. He calls her \u201ccareless\u201d, \u201ccallous\u201d, and \u201ccold-blooded\u201d. He also compares her to the devil and suggests that she is unholy. In addition to describing Lucy in an incredibly negative way, Dr. Seward also describes her as sexual. The word voluptuous gets used twice in this small passage, first to describe a part of her body, her smile, as voluptuous, and secondly to describe her grace. Lucy\u2019s smile is mentioned again later in the passage when Dr. Seward describes it as \u201cwanton\u201d. By describing Lucy as sexual while simultaneously portraying her in a negative light, it suggests that it is unacceptable or incorrect for Lucy to be sexual. Dr. Seward witnesses Lucy feeding on a child, yet what makes him shudder is not this shocking act of vampirism but the fact that Lucy\u2019s smile is \u201cvoluptuous\u201d. To Dr. Seward, Lucy as a vampire is horrifying, not because she is killing children or drinking blood, but because she has become more sexual. A sexual woman was seen as dangerous during the time Dracula<\/em> was written. As stated in Ledger and Luckhurst\u2019s \u201cReading the Fin de Si\u00e8cle\u201d, \u201cthe New Woman…could mark an apocalyptic warning of the dangers of sexual degeneracy, the abandonment of motherhood, and consequent risk to the racial future of England\u201d (xvii). Lucy, by becoming more sexual, has become one of the degenerates that were feared during the Fin de Si\u00e8cle.<\/p>\n Another fear that existed during the Fin de Si\u00e8cle, the fear of the abandonment of motherhood, can be seen in this passage. The description of Lucy \u201cclutching [the child] strenuously to her breast\u201d evokes images of breastfeeding, something tied very closely to motherhood. While breastfeeding nourishes and keeps a baby alive, Lucy is doing the exact opposite of this by sucking blood, and therefore life, out of the baby. Instead of feeding the baby, as a good 19th<\/sup> Century mother is supposed to do, Lucy is feeding on the baby. Lucy tossing aside the baby could be representative of the concept of the abandonment of motherhood. Arthur\u2019s fear over Lucy not demonstrating proper motherly behavior alludes to the fear of the abandonment of motherhood that existed during the Fin de Si\u00e8cle. Just as Lucy\u2019s sexiness was more terrifying to Dr. Seward than her being an actual vampire, we see Arthur moan not in response to Lucy being a vampire, but in response to Lucy tossing aside the baby. It is not Lucy sucking blood that gives Arthur a reaction, but her rejection of proper mother behavior. Dr. Seward and Arthur\u2019s horror at Lucy\u2019s sexiness and rejection of \u201cmotherly behavior\u201d is not individual to Dracula, but rather a cultural fear that is visible in many novels written during the Fin de Si\u00e8cle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dr. Seward gives his account of Lucy as a vampire in the passage below: \u201cAnd she looked, her eyes blazed with unholy light, and the face became wreathed with a voluptuous smile. Oh, God, how it made me shudder to see it! With a careless motion, she flung to the ground, callous as a devil, … Continue reading Fear of the New Woman<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3296,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125359],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2018-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724","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\/3296"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}