Bram Stoker's Dracula: Effects of Gender Roles on Dracula’s Victims

Effects of Gender Roles on Dracula’s Victims

Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula highlights the symbols and themes of sexuality which rarely be discussed. In my opinion, the idea of gender role during Victorian time period is portrayed brilliantly in the novel. Through Dracula, the author explores the essence of fear of the Victorian period about women’s changing roles and illustrates about “New Women”. As a symbol of female sexuality, Dracula focuses on the fact that Dracula’s main victims are females.

Dracula’s lines of “My revenge is just begun! I spend it over centuries and time is on my side. Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine – my creature …” (Stoker 267) are the very first time that Dracula directly indicates his focus on female victims. The choice of Dracula’s victims gives the idea on how women were not seen as autonomous individuals by the Victorian society back then. Instead, they were extension of the men whom they were the property of. Dracula prefers not to attack Jonathan but his wife, Mina, profaning and making her unclean.

Mina represents the ideal Victorian model of what women should be; as Van Helsing describes Mina as “one of God’s women, fashioned by His own hand to show us men and other women that there is a heaven where we can enter and that its light can be here on earth.” (Stoker 306). On the other hand, Lucy is described as a voluptuous, pretty woman who receives three proposals from three different suitors. Lucy’s character illustrates how women during the Victorian period time were becoming more sexualized that she once complains to Mina “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?” (Stoker 96). Although each of them holds different views on which of the two categories a woman should take her place in, they both acknowledge the conventional belief that men are more dominant than women in Victorian society. These prove that it makes sense the women are illustrated as a vulnerable