{"id":364,"date":"2016-04-07T21:39:32","date_gmt":"2016-04-08T01:39:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/?p=364"},"modified":"2016-04-07T21:42:59","modified_gmt":"2016-04-08T01:42:59","slug":"the-victorian-anxieties-about-vampiric-new-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/2016\/04\/07\/the-victorian-anxieties-about-vampiric-new-women\/","title":{"rendered":"The Victorian Anxieties about Vampiric “New Women”"},"content":{"rendered":"

In\u00a0Dracula<\/em>, there are several scenes featuring a perversion of Victorian ideas. Of these, the scene featuring a vampiric Lucy demonstrates the Victorian anxieties over the notion of the “New Woman.” In this blog post, I will focus upon the idea that Lucy represents a distortion of maternal femininity when the protagonists of the novel encounter her. In this scene, Stoker sets up the encounter by having Dr. Steward state that “When [they saw]… the thing that was before [them was Lucy but] she drew back with an angry snarl [and her] face became wreathed with a voluptuous smile”(225,226). Even then, before she advanced towards the men with a “languorous, voluptuous grace,” she “flung to the ground… with a careless motion… [while clutching a child] strenuously to her breast”(226). As a result of this passage, Lucy the Vampire is portrayed as a perversion of maternal femininity and of Victorian ideals. In an article written by Greg Buzwell, he discusses the idea of how vampires in Dracula<\/em>\u00a0represent Victorian anxieties. Greg Buzwell comments on this scene, stating that “Lucy behaves in a manner that would have been viewed as an affront to both femininity and motherhood” because she was feeding upon a child like an animal. In addition to this, by having Lucy approach the men in a manner that would be compared to a succubus, Stoker shows one of the social anxieties that were present in Victorian Society; sexually liberated women. As a result of these developments, Lucy, through becoming a vampire, acting like a seductress and behaving a predator, reflects upon the negative thoughts that Victorian society had about “The New Woman.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In\u00a0Dracula, there are several scenes featuring a perversion of Victorian ideas. Of these, the scene featuring a vampiric Lucy demonstrates the Victorian anxieties over the notion of the “New Woman.” In this blog post, I will focus upon the idea that Lucy represents a distortion of maternal femininity when the protagonists of the novel encounter … Continue reading The Victorian Anxieties about Vampiric “New Women”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2174,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[123782],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2016-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364","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\/2174"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}