Dracula New Woman

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The androgynous nature of Lady Macbeth represents the characteristics of the ‘New Woman’, when she exclaims “unsex me here” () in her soliloquy. She is calling upon the supernatural to allow her to distance herself with her instinctive cultivating nature, as gains her sexual fulfillment from power. Lady Macbeth wishes to strip herself of feminine weakness and replace it with masculine features, to support her husband. Ziegler portrays the conflicting character of Lady Macbeth, as “barbaric and passionate [and] domesticated and caring”. Lady Macbeth still anticpates the role of a perfect wife through her abundance of support for her husband, despiete the distressing images “take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers”() as she associates…show more content…
Stoker portrays Dracula as the threat of colonialism to the moral standards of Victorian society; the threat exists when he transforms the female characters into vampires and releases their carnal desires. Therefore this represents the dangers of the ‘New Woman’ who are portrayed in the novel as evil; the lust for sex was associated with the women’s delirium, this is shown as Stoker uses animalistic imagery to describe Lucy as she id referred to as “voluptuous” () and dark-haired this gives her beastlike features, and it is for this expression of female sexuality that she must be destroyed by the traditional thinking men such as Van Helsing. Roth saw that “vampirism is a disguise for greatly desired and equally strongly feared fantasies”. Stoker further shows his characters seeking strange pleasures outside marriage through the exchanging of bodily fluids, as to traditional as Foucault argues this would have been classified as a “grave sin” and “debauchery”. Therefore this insubordination of the female sexuality is personified through Dracula as both female and male figures in the novel are affected by him. However Mina’s disposition to accept the rapacious sucking Dracula’s blood embodies that male domination was the social norm, as during the act she “did not want to hindr him” (Stoker 306). Coleridge uses the character if Geraldine who holds supernatural elements, “in the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell” (Coleridge 267); this theme of mysticism is shared in ‘Kubla Khan’. Palmer argues that the “imagery of witchcraft represent[s] female resistance to hetero-patriarchal conventions” and that “wicked witches were created by evil men” Therefore it is the suppression of males who wish to make a villain out of women, who do not conform to the traditional patriarchal women. Geraldine has exerted a supremacy over Christabel as a young woman who is exploring her sexuality as throughout the
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