Time and time again Van Helsing and the other male characters in Dracula keep extremely important information from the women in their lives. The first example is John Seward arranging Van Helsing to attend to Lucy’s illness, while specifically not arousing “any suspicion in Mrs. Westerna.” While Seward and Van Helsing have good intentions by keeping the details of Lucy’s illness from her, since Mrs. Westerna’s heart being weak enough that “a shock to her would mean sudden death,” the lack of information spells disaster later in the book when Mrs. Westerna throws out the garlic flowers Van Helsing left in Lucy’s room. Without the garlic flowers that bar Dracula from entering, Lucy is vulnerable once more to blood loss via vampire, and perishes shortly after. Even further, the “shock” which kills Mrs. Westerna involves Dracula, with him commanding a wolf crash through the window. <\/p>\r\n
Even after this negligence kills Mrs. Westerna and Lucy, Van Helsing seems ready to repeat the same experience with Mina. Van Helsing’s opinion that Mina may have “her heart… fail her in so much or many horrors,” is especially<\/em> foolish since Mina was already<\/em> involved in the investigation, having already read Jonathan’s diary and compiled all the documents pertaining to Dracula. She shows no signs of having had any more troubles of the heart than her male companions. Moreover, she has been and continues to be extremely useful on the logistics side of tracking down Dracula. By shutting Mina out of the Dracula investigation, the men are actively shooting themselves in the foot twofold\u2013 losing both such a logistical powerhouse, and <\/em>leaving Mina vulnerable to Dracula’s attentions without her being able to recognize the signs of what is happening to her.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n From this evidence, I believe that this book has a great fear of women: specifically women with any form of power, and this reflects the anxieties of the time period where female gender norms were shifting and changing without men being able to control it. By keeping the women of Dracula uninformed, they stay controllable, though they are also able to be controlled by other men like Dracula himself. Only by becoming fully informed and empowered do women become monstrous.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Time and time again Van Helsing and the other male characters in Dracula keep extremely important information from the women in their lives. The first example is John Seward arranging Van Helsing to attend to Lucy’s illness, while specifically not arousing “any suspicion in Mrs. Westerna.” While Seward and Van Helsing have good intentions by … Continue reading Misogyny Kills<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5335,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[169399],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2023-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2723","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\/5335"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2723\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}