Dracula by Bram Stoker. Bram

¶ … Dracula by Bram Stoker. Bram Stoker's "Dracula" is a classic Victorian-era novel that allows the reader a glimpse into the mores of Victorian England. The novel is a horrific tale of Count Dracula, who lures men and especially women into his lair and turns them into blood-sucking vampires (the Un-Dead), who roam only at night and suck the blood of innocent victims to survive. He is evil, but underlying his evil are the mores of Victorian England, which created sharp stereotypes for women that were nearly impossible to bend or break.

The author gives away much information about Victorian attitudes toward women through his characters. In fact, the novel is often seen as an analogy of the two distinct roles of women in society: mother/wife, or whore. Early in the novel, Stoker makes this apparent when he introduces some of the count's accomplices. Harker's journal notes, "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" (Stoker 45). Throughout the novel this type of division between innocence and "voluptuousness" continues. There is no gray area for the women in the novel, they are either good or bad, virgin or vixen, wife and mother or whore. These are the classes women had to choose from in Victorian society, and the rules were rigid. Once you crossed the line from virgin to vixen, you could never be a true "lady" again.

Stoker introduces the two women, Mina and Lucy, as chaste and good ladies who hold a decent place in society. Mina is a working class schoolmistress, while Lucy is an upper-class lady of leisure. The most either can hope for in their lives is to marry and become respectable wives and mothers. Lucy writes to Mina, "You and I, Mina dear, who are engaged and are going to settle down soon soberly into old married women, can despise vanity" (Stoker 64). Thus, Lucy writes what most women felt in Victorian times. Their only goal was to remain true (pure) to one man, raise children, and be seen but rarely heard. Anyone who strayed from this cultural norm was somehow wanton and suspect.

The theme of voluptuousness continues throughout the novel, and it could be an analogy for "whore." When Lucy succumbs to the count and becomes a member of the Un-Dead, her entire being changes. Stoker introduces her as a wanton vixen. He writes, "Lucy Westenra, but yet how changed. The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness" (Stoker 225). Later, the count indicates what many men must have felt in Victorian times. He sneers, "Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine -- my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed. Bah!'" (Stoker 326). Thus, Stoker indicates women are nothing more than possessions for most Victorian men. They long for a vixen, but because that is evil and unheard of in society, they settle for a pure, chaste woman, and then "own" her throughout their marriage. 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 rather it would not exist at all as morality, since morality and inclinations would coincide" (Mills and Taylor 108). All they advocated was contentment over convention, but it was a radical idea for the time. The couple also advocated the "elevation of women" in society, and recognized the difficulty of being a woman in Victorian society - something which most Victorian men did not understand or agree with at all (Mills and Taylor 109).

Most men held beliefs more like Thomas Gisborne, who urged women to "fulfill their charge" (Gisborne 101), and not share secrets with their servants. Here is another important aspect of Victorian society and women's roles. There were two distinct classes in society, just as the two women in Stoker's novel come from two classes - the working class (Mina) and the upper class (Lucy). It was nearly impossible to move upward between classes, and there was a great difference between women of the working class, forced to work hard for meager wages to support their family, and women of the upper class, who employed the working class women. Thus, females also had class roles to overcome in order to become happier and self-sufficient, and none of this was encouraged during Victorian times. Stoker's novel is a classic, but it also illustrates the difficulties women faced in England and around the world. Thus, Stoker's attitudes mimic most of British society. Even author Gisborne believes that women and men are kept "apart" by Victorian mores, but for the most part, society echoed Stoker's beliefs and values, and women suffered because of them.