Preview

Sexual Impression Of Women In Bram Stoker's Dracula

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
182 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Sexual Impression Of Women In Bram Stoker's Dracula
the vampire sisters represent the deficiency of the other regal women in the novel. Whereas Mina and Lucy are models of what society deems to be full of this purity and virtue. The sisters of night are seen as aggressive, showing signs of being voluptuous, and insatiable. Examine the positions in which the vampires assume over Harker suggests to a sexual act, and due to this display of female sexual aggression, it both attracts and repulses Harker. The systematic ideas of what woman should be vs what you want a woman to be so you can gain pleasure play contested roles. In this Victorian society they prize and reward female virginity and domesticity, the sexually adventurous vixen is bound to be the subject of fantasy. Due to these same rigid

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    In the article “Girls Just Wanna Have Fangs” Sady Doyle proposed the idea that teenage girls are the main reason the Twilight series made its big debut, though clearly to Sady the series and the girls did not deserve this much negative attention. Doyle discusses many points in the article a big part of it is that girls play such a huge role in the progression of the series success.…

    • 441 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Sexual Objects In Dracula

    • 334 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The frequently used concepts in Dracula to objectify women as sexual objects, gives the reader an insight into Stoker’s ways on implementing the Victorian male imagination and society’s extremely rigid expectations for a female. In the Victorian era, the women had only two scarce choices to choose from, either be a virgin – which basically consisted of being a role model of purity and innocence – or a respected wife and mother. If women did not met these socially acceptable standards they were either seen as a harlot who had no self-respect or did not deserved any respect whatsoever. Men commonly in the Victorian era, as Bram Stoker regularly refers to, strongly believed to have a higher stand that any other women, Limiting women was very common…

    • 334 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In Bram’s Stoker’s Dracula (1897), one of the main motifs present throughout the whole piece is Catholicism. Catholicism does not only appear as a motif but also as a major theme in the novel. On the books, Broker was known to be a Protestant, however after releasing his novel Dracula, he was considered of being “a closet Catholic cloaking his dangerous views in a relatively safe literary medium” (Starrs, D. Bruno). Even though the novel portrays Anti-Christian values and beliefs, Bram Stoker was able to use different methods in his novel to show how the Catholic beliefs were useful as a protection towards evil, and to be able to compare the powers between good and evil.…

    • 604 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Despite this quality, they still do not think that she should come along with them on their trip to seek out and kill Dracula. Instead, they leave her at home to sit in her room and wait to hear if any of her friends have been harmed or killed. They also ask that she acts as the secretary during their meeting, a job which she most likely brought on herself by volunteering to write up everyone’s journal entries beforehand. Mina does seem to think of herself in these same sexist ways, although she does her best to turn away from it. When Quincy accidentally shoots the window to try and kill the bat, Mina is the first to cry out, and she shames herself for being such a coward. Despite these leanings toward sexism, I feel that Stoker did a pretty good job at creating a strong female character given the time period that he wrote…

    • 561 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    A topic often brought up in class discussion throughout the semester was sexuality and the many aspects involved; changing my personal perception of sexuality. In September I believed sexuality was just the act of sex and or being promiscuous, but it’s a much broader subject. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter is a re-mastered version of the fairy tale Blue Beard with a sexual spin. It perfectly depicts the ideal image of sexuality to one who is more innocent than someone more experienced then alters it and shows us its variations after they’ve gained experience. This essay will explore the deception, dominance and violence surrounding the sexual relationship between the heroine and Marquis. Angela explores the aspect…

    • 481 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    When Dracula transforms women into vampires their bodies and mindsets change. The vampires are “fair as can be, with great wavy masses of golden hair and eyes like pale sapphires” (Stoker 38). Their minds become seductive and sexual, and their bodies become voluptuous, causing men to fantasize and desire their kisses and touches. It was perceived as evil for a woman to embrace her sexuality back in the Victorian time period because it symbolized her gaining power and taking control away from the man. In Harker’s case, he is afraid yet bewitched by the three women as they take command and seduce him into sexual behavior that typically he, the male, is used to leading. These sexual encounters lead Harker to feel subjugated by the women, which in that time period was unheard of and taboo. Later in the novel when Van Helsing is about to kill the three vampires, he opens their boxes and becomes infatuated with their appearances. He immediately notices how they are “so fair to look on, so radiantly beautiful, so exquisitely voluptuous, that the very instinct of man in [him]…made [his] head whirl with new emotion” (Stoker 372). By allowing a notable intelligent doctor to become entrapped in these women’s power to seduce, Stoker is revealing how dangerous they can be to society. He describes the vampires as lustful and emphasizes that…

    • 771 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Bloody Chamber Essay

    • 761 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The text uses the occurrence of sex as an act of aggression, erotic brutality, and dominance in which the male partner is seen as sadistic and the female partner is seen as oppressed. This is portrayed by The Marquis’ wives, both past and present, as he objectifies them by placing them on display, enabling him to manipulate and mold them to satisfy his perverse erotic tastes. Additionally, all of the female roles are unnamed, only referred to by jobs for example the Mother, the Opera Singer, the Evening Star Walking on the Rim of Night, and the Romanian Countess (Carter 1990: 4), drawing attention to the idea of gender inequity as the women are not worth of a name (Barry 1995: 126). The act of sexual objectification by The Marquis lends itself to interpretation as The Bloody Chamber depicts the darker side of sexual relationships, exploring the essentialist idea that men and women are different beings. The text symbolizes the inequality between men and women in the ‘[m]ost pornographic of all confrontations’ (Carter 1990: 8), through the satirical images by Felicien Rops, where a fully clothes man is sizing up a naked women as though she is “a lamb chop” (Carter 1990: 8). From the…

    • 761 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    In the Tales from the Thousand and One Nights the women are represented as fraudulent, cunning characters using their sexuality to their benefit. Some of these women are portrayed as deceitful harlots, while others honestly use their sly wits and beauty to their advantage to obtain what they desire. In the time of the Tales, female sexuality was prevalent, so it’s not absurd to read about all the infidelity and sexuality in these stories; however it is interesting to see how each female character uses that to her benefit. Some women show to be evil minded while others have good intentions.…

    • 1291 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    In Frankenstein, by Mary Shelly, Victor creates a monster who murders his loved ones. Victor could have prevented two of the female deaths but chose not to in both of the events, which provided proof that women were not of importance. By allowing all of the female characters to die, Mary Shelly was displaying how women were so disposable. In this paper, I will provide details on how women were seen and treated during the book.…

    • 985 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The second wave of feminism directly followed the first wave. It occurred during the mid-1920s up until the 1990s and was focused on challenging and expanding biologically gendered assumptions, such as women's' traditional societal roles and their sexuality. As a result, sexuality and violence against women became major areas of concern. The traditional role of woman as sexual objects renders them susceptible to non-consensual sexual activity, such as rape. Margaret Atwood’s short story “Rape Fantasies” demonstrates the misconceptions concerning rape. The story is narrated by Estelle, who discusses her coworker’s lunch stories of their ‘rape fantasies’ to a man at a bar. She adds humour to the fantasies in an attempt to disguise her discomfort…

    • 334 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Its reference to the main story of the Arabian Nights, the story of Scheherazade, rather poses general questions on the representation of sexuality concomitant with the balance of power this implies. As sexuality in the Islam is a subject to negotiation and collides with the approach to it in the Western society, it is easy to see Habibi as criticism to the Arabic world. But more than seeing an attempt of enforcing a western view on the reader with regards to this topic, the focus should be…

    • 1806 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    In Dracula, Bram Stoker incorporates a mental hospital into his novel by having Dr. Seward manage a mental hospital in England. In Dr. Seward's diary, he talks about the daily life and strange activities of his new patient, Renfield. In order to restrain Renfield, Seward and his assistants use a strait waistcoat many times: "He [Renfield] was still in the strait waistcoat and in the padded room, but the suffused look had gone from his face, and his eyes had something of their old pleading."…

    • 166 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    “A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the inkpot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing”. Thus thought Mrs. Grimsditch, a housekeeper in Virginia Woolf’s sixth novel “Orlando”. Being a woman of the Elizabethan era, she quite obviously was ignorant to the advantages of education. The English Renaissance however, saw a marked increase in the numbers of women writers. While few works are known to have been published by women in England before 1500, over one hundred works were composed or translated by Englishwomen between 1500 and 1640. Though this is an impressive increase, it was, of course, a mere fraction of the thousands written by men. During Shakespeare's time, changing social, economic, political, technological and religious factors affected literacy and the practice of writing for both men and women. The advancement of capitalism segregated the private and public spheres of work and home, causing a gendered division of labour in which men left the household to make money, while women stayed home to manage the domestic affairs. This rise of professionalism was part of the humanist movement which emphasized the potential, freedom and dignity of "Man." The Elizabethan era brought the Renaissance to England. Elizabethan women from wealthy and noble families were sometimes allowed the privilege of an education. But the above privileges that were provided to women are not to be misinterpreted as being for their upliftment in society. They served a rather opposite purpose. An Elizabethan woman would have to learn the intricacies of governing a household, and becoming skilled in all housewifely duties. Her polished personality would be an added advantage to her husband’s status and good name. Her education…

    • 1929 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    Critically assess Judith Butler’s notion that gender is not a primary category, but an attribute, a set of secondary narrative effects. Your answer should make reference to Sally Potter’s film Orlando.…

    • 1081 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    “Rape Fantasies,” by Margaret Atwood is a short story about the narrator, Estelle, recalling to an anonymous male a controversial conversation she has with a group of her female co-workers during their lunch hour. Estelle is critical of her female peers’ rape fantasies; however she fails to see the fallacies in hers. Estelle portrays herself as a heroine who tells stories to threatening males to compel them to not assault her.Atwood uses a temporal setting, a feminine first person point of view, irony, and allusion to warn readers of the vulnerability that comes from naivety and the downplay of rape.…

    • 1251 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Powerful Essays