The instance when Mina drinks from Dracula’s breast is the strongest example of this; where the reader to this point is accustomed to Dracula doing the “biting”, and suddenly Mina has the power to penetrate a male. Both Lucy and Mina, when they carry out a relationship with Dracula, become sexual beings, as opposed to when they are mortals and are forced to obey the social boundaries of their society. By expressing this sexuality, they become threatening to the men. Mina is intelligent, and despite the strong aversion she has to the “New Woman” or the “Modern Woman”, she is, in fact, a sort of modern woman; connected with modern ways, a schoolteacher with secretarial skills, she possesses a “man’s brain”. It is this very brain, which is ultimately used to aid in Dracula’s downfall.
Stoker’s choose of women as the temptresses may be a warning to the women of the Victorian era to beware about pushing the boundaries of their sexuality. Stoker’s use of structuring emphasizes a women’s role in society at the time, this is the first women that Harker meets in the novel and they are devilish vampires, this implies that the novel appeals to an only male audience and their fantasy of women giving in to their temptations. Harker is simultaneously confronting a vampire and another creature equally terrifying to Victorian England, an unabashedly sexual woman, the evidence for this comes from the implied act of oral sex, ‘The fair girl went on her knees, bent over me, fairly gloating.’ Contextually the fact that Harker becomes the ‘submissive’ and is easily overpowered by their seduction and his own temptation shows the role reversal as women take on the dominating role that a traditional Victorian man is supposed to possess. The fact that Harker is both aroused and disgusted by the Vampires shows the Freudian
The Weird Sister -The three mistress vampires -encountered in Dracula’s castle represent all the qualities of how a woman should not be; voluptuous and sexually aggressive IV. Forward Women A. - “The fair girl went on her knees and bent over me, fairly gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck, she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white, sharp, teeth” (Stoker 50). -mixed feelings men had towards forward women
Her husbands, all five of them were teased with sex, but they had to provide luxuries that she desperately craved for. The underlying theme of The Wife of Bath relates to power struggles rather than spousal equality in marriage. The Wife of Bath gives an insight into a hard working semi-independent woman of the Middle Ages. She is semi- independent because she is dependent upon her husbands for material goods. "In the words of the Wife of Bath, God has given women three talents- deceit, weeping, and spinning" (Power 118).
All of their correspondences suggest a shroud of innocence surrounds them. When Lucy talks about her three marriage proposals, she gets teary-eyed and feels bad for each of the men that she turned down. She has something good to say about each of them, but she tells Mina about her lover for someone that hasn’t told her he loved her back. Lucy is every bit of the lady, with her golden hair and her sweet disposition. These are some of the quality’s that conveys the impression that these three are
Some might even say Shelley ardently agreed with the position in which they found themselves and the securely fixed roles during the Victorian era. Caroline Frankenstein, for example, from the beginning is the embodiment of the idealised female. She is initially presented as the perfect daughter, nursing her father lovingly till his death, and progresses on to the perfect wife, though one might argue that she never ‘progresses’ at all . She remains pale, lacking the life and vigour the men in the book so often posses, and as a result the reader pushes her to the side as a minor character. But although at first Frankenstein may give the reader the impression that women have very little impact in the novel, Shelley slyly uses them to deconstruct the power and control that men had been enjoying for years .
The truth is that many of these decisions that Macbeth makes or follows is based on what the witches told him. One example of this is when Lady Macbeth convinces him to kill Duncan in order to become king. She specifically says, “Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be / What thou art promised. Yet do I fear thy nature / … / That I may pour my spirits in thine ear, / and chastise with the valor of my tongue” (1.5.16-17, 27-28). In this quote Lady Macbeth is thinking about the witches prophecy and how she can make it come true.
Since Lucy had such a large interest in men, she succumbed to Dracula because he was just another gentleman to please her. This shows that Lucy changes her allegiance to men constantly and cannot stay in a committed relationship. Lucy does not even seem to be bothered by Dracula sucking her blood and slowly draining the life out of her. She says, "Dr. Van Helsing had told me [not to remove the garlic], but I would have some of servants to sit up with me now" (175). Lucy acknowledges that she needs to wear the garlic at all times to keep her safe, but it does not seem to dismay her when they fall off.
Dracula diffidently contains gloom and horror. There are wolves howling at the Count’s command, Jonathan gets trapped in a room with the three female vampires, and the females cackle is spooky. The presence of gore also proves that Dracula contains horror. Dracula drinks blood, and to kill the vampires stakes where driven through their hearts. Dracula is Gothic literature
Instead of her being a helpless victim, she is instead taking on the role of a villain and so Carter is challenging the traditional gender role of a helpless female victim in a traditional gothic story; she seduces and murders men, much like the Count in the Bloody Chamber. So that the countess can feed on her prey, ‘she takes them by the hand and leads them to her bedroom’ where she seduces them before drinking their blood; Carter is also now challenging the gender binary and shows the opposite side to the patriarchal constraint of desire. But even so, although the countess has broken out of the female victim role, she now has a new problem of which she can’t overcome, and that is falling in love, and although she finally does, it leads to her death; ultimately it was again the male who helped and hurt her. Carter being a feminist writer has used ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ to show how women don’t need to conform to societies view and instead can take the same role as the men, something not really done often in gothic fiction. So, therefore, unlike in