Lucy and Mina
In Victorian England, when Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, the vampire was used as a symbol for, among other things, society's sexual taboos, including overt female sexuality. Nowhere is this idea better explored than in the characters of friends Lucy Westenra and Mina Murray. In Stoker's book, Lucy is symbol of the improper female, the one who is coquettish and flirtatious and sparks sexual interest in the male. Mina is her opposite. She is the ideal Victorian woman whose function is to be chaste and supportive of her future husband. Mina's attraction to men is always one of potential wife or mother. These ideas were somewhat diluted in the 1931 film version to make a horror story with less moral and more thrill, although the flirtatious girl still dies and her less sexual counterpart still survives. In the novel, the line between good and evil tends to be unclear. Even supposedly decent people can make choices which bring about destruction. In the film, these moments of moral ambiguity are removed to make it clear who are the heroes and who are the villains, explaining why Lucy who is potentially the most complex character in the novel is marginalized and why Mina's role in bringing about the demise of Dracuala is equally downsized.
Although they meet the same ends, the Lucy in Tod Browning's Dracula has little in common with the one in Stoker's novel. The film goes as far as to change her name from Lucy Westenra to the more Anglo Lucy Weston. Later that night, the Count enters her bedroom while she is asleep to feast on her blood. In the novel, Lucy leaves her bedroom in a hypnotic trance after the Count calls to her from afar. One of the rules of the vampire legend is that no vampire may enter a residence unless he is invited in. In Stoker's story, this scene is pivotal because, though in a hypnotic state, Lucy is still responsible for her actions. She chooses to leave her bedroom and go to the monster outside. In Browning's film, her culpability is removed because Dracula enters her bedroom through no fault of her own. She is clearly victim and Dracula is clearly monstrous other.
Similarly, the blood transfusions that Lucy...
Dracula The novel "Dracula" was written by Irish author Bram Stoker in 1897. Set in nineteenth-century Victorian England and other countries of the same time, this novel is told in an epistolary format through a collection of letters, diary entries etc. The main characters include Count Dracula and a small group of men and women led by Dr. Van Helsing. Count Dracula is the antagonist character of the novel, and is
Women counted for little, but not everyone agreed with these Victorian standards. For example, J.S. Mill and Harriet Taylor, a couple who flaunted convention of the time, advocated happiness above all and divorce when necessary (which was unheard of in Victorian times). They write, "If all persons were like these, [happy] or even would be guided by these, morality would be very different from what it must now be; or
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Dracula, By Bram Stoker Bram Stoker is considered to be the world's most famous horror novelist. Though he has produced a number of short stories, essays and novels, his classic novel Dracula, published in 1897 remains to be his most praised and admired work. Dracula is a story, which focuses on a Transylvanian vampire that comes to London. One of the most pressing themes in the novel, Dracula focuses on the
Dracula There are numerous themes and motifs present in Bram Stoker's "Dracula," such as sexuality, femininity, Christianity, superstition, and ancestral bloodline, to name but a few. However, perhaps one of the most obvious themes surrounds sexuality and femininity. Stoker's "Dracula" can be seen as a sort of Victorian male "Harlequin" novel, filled with adventure, intrigue, and damsels in distress. And much like the Harlequin type novels for women today, Stoker's novel has
The girl is freed from her captor, but only at the cost of the life and soul of the young priest: the power of Christ merely served to anger the devil -- it did not subjugate him; such would have been too meaningful in the relativistic climate of the 70s. The 70's sexual and political revolutions were intertwined to such an extent that hardcore pornography and Feminist politics appeared on
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