What do Lucy and the Vampire women have in common? Desire. Nowhere is it more clear than when Lucy is about to die or the ladies attempt to drink Johnathan\u2019s blood. What makes them monsters to the Victorian age is that these women control their own sexuality and express their own desire. As Lucy lays dying, she speaks in \u201ca soft, voluptuous voice, such as [Seward] had never heard from her lips\u201d (Stoker, 172). Up until this point this was \u201cnever heard from her.\u201d She was not a monster and then immediately when she has begun to become a vampire, she starts expressing her desire and attempts to leverage it to get what she wants, saying \u201cArthur! Oh, my love, I am so glad you have come! Kiss Me!\u201d (Stoker, 172). She openly tells him what she wants from him before the world, w hen even Mina and Johnathan, married, holding hands in public is considered in bad form, she tries to get him to kiss her before an audience. Her tone as \u201csoft\u201d and \u201cvoluptuous\u201d implies a sensuality which is then seemed to be almost irresistible to Arthur. Similarly, it may be this feeling that women who express their desire are irresistible that is what makes them so scary to Victorian men. As \u201cArthur bent eagerly over to kiss her\u201d just as Johnathan when faced with the vampire women, \u201cFelt in [his] heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss [him] with those red lips\u201d (Stoker, 45). In both cases the men desire and are depicted as powerless against the women, because of their own \u201cdesire\u201d or eagerness. Johnathan even describes his own desire as \u201cwicked\u201d, showing how desire is viewed as bad, and it almost seems as though the typical expected outcome is for women to be the one to deny desire. Therefore, it is seen as monstrous when they do not, as the men seem incapable of it. In fact, the parallels between Dracula and Van Helsing are quite strong. Both grab the one attempting by the neck. Both with previously unimaginable fury for the individual witnessing and both hurl the offender across the room. Almost as though the only thing that can stop those enthralled and giving into desire is violence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What do Lucy and the Vampire women have in common? Desire. Nowhere is it more clear than when Lucy is about to die or the ladies attempt to drink Johnathan\u2019s blood. What makes them monsters to the Victorian age is that these women control their own sexuality and express their own desire. As Lucy lays … Continue reading Dangerous Desire<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4746,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[169398],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2021-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4746"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1917\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}