Comparing Gothic Tropes In Carmilla And Bram Stoker's Dracula

This essay will attempt to discuss the two gothic tales ‘Carmilla’ and ‘Dracula’ in relation to cultural contexts in which they exist as being presented to the reader through the gender behaviour and sexuality that is portrayed through the texts. Vampire stories always seem to involve some aspect of sexuality and power.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula illustrated fears about sexual women in contrast to the woman who respected and abided by society’s sexual norms. Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s “Carmilla” represented not only the fear of feminine sexuality, but also the fear of sexuality between women. John William Polidori’s “The

Are there still connections between Bram Stokers famous novel Dracula and modern day society? In Dracula, Stoker expands on many themes that indeed exist today. Not only does he touch on the most obvious theme, sex. He expands on gender division and good versus evil. Some say since times have changed the themes I introduced have changed as well, leaving connections between then and now irrelevant. However, I feel that although times have changed they still have roots from the time of the novel to now. In this essay I will expand on the themes of this novel while connecting them to modern day society, the critical texts I have chosen and will mention later on in the essay are a good representation of the commonalities between the chill, dark Victorian days in which the era that Dracula was written in and modern day.

Stoker’s novel Dracula, presents the fear of female promiscuity, for which vampirism is a metaphor. Such fear can be related to the time in which Dracula was written, where strict Victorian gender norms and sexual mores stipulated

The notion of separate spheres serves to set up the roles of men and women in Victorian society. Women fulfill the domestic sphere and are seen as submissive and emotionally sensitive individuals. Conversely, men are intelligent, stable, and fulfill all of the work outside of the home. In Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, the Count seems to actually embody the fear of the breakdown of such separate spheres. However, Stoker breaks down these separate spheres and the fear associated with their breakdown through the theme of the “New Woman” intertwined with the actions and behaviors of the characters in the novel.

The novel Dracula is a very popular book that was written in the form of Gothic Literature. This novel was written by Bram Stoker in the Victorian Age. A large portion of this piece of writing deals with many famous Gothic motifs. Gothic Literature combines the usual Gothic horror with fiction and Romanticism (Wikipedia). A motif is a distinctive symbol or dominant idea used in literature. So therefore, a Gothic motif is a literary symbol that usually combines fiction with either horror or romance. Bram Stoker’s usage of Gothic motifs not only helps define Dracula as a piece of Gothic Literature, but also helps the reader become better acquainted with what is happening in the novel. Gothic motifs are found in many different forms in pieces of work, and if readers are already accustomed to these motifs, it makes reading Dracula clearer and easier. Stoker uses many different Gothic motifs throughout this novel, but there are only a few that are the more important and stand out from the rest. These motifs are: castles and strange places, power and constraint, and revenants.

In Dracula, Stoker portrays the typical women: The new woman, the femme fatale and the damsel in distress, all common concepts in gothic literature. There are three predominant female roles within Dracula: Mina Murray, Lucy Westenra and the three vampire brides, all of which possess different attributes and play different roles within the novel. It is apparent that the feminine portrayal within this novel, especially the sexual nature, is an un-doubtable strong, reoccurring theme.

Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” is a story about a Vampire named Count Dracula and his journey to satisfy his lust for blood. The story is told through a series of individuals’ journal entries and a letters sent back and forth between characters. Bram Stoker shows the roll in which a certain gender plays in the Victorian era through the works of Dracula. This discussion not only consists of the roll a certain gender takes, but will be discussing how a certain gender fits into the culture of that time period as well as how males and females interact among each other. The Victorian era was extremely conservative when it came to the female, however there are signs of the changing into the New Woman inside of Dracula. Essentially the woman was to be assistance to a man and stay pure inside of their ways.

    Perhaps no work of literature has ever been composed without being a product of its era, mainly because the human being responsible for writing it develops their worldview within a particular era.  Thus, with Bram Stoker's Dracula, though we have a vampire myth novel filled with terror, horror, and evil, the story is a thinly veiled disguise of the repressed sexual mores of the Victorian era.  If we look to critical interpretation and commentary to win support for such a thesis, we find it aplenty "For erotic Dracula certainly is.  'Quasi-pornography' one critic labels it.  Another describes it as a 'kind of incestuous, necrophilious, oral-anal-sadistic all-in-wrestling matching'.  A

Dracula is a novel written by Bram Stoker during the late 1800’s. The book starts out with Jonathan Harker, who is a smart young business man, who wants to travel to Count Dracula for a business ordeal. Many locals from the European area warned Jonathan about Count Dracula, and would offer him crosses and other trinkets to help fend against him. Mina, who is at the time Jonathans soon to be wife, visits to catch up with an old friend named Lucy Westenra. Lucy gives Mina an update on her love life telling her how she’s been proposed to by three different men. The men are introduced as Dr. Seward, Arthur Holmwood, and Quincey Morris. Unfortunately for her she will need to reject two of the men, and Lucy ends up choosing to marry Holmwood. Later on after Mina visits Lucy, Lucy starts to sleep walk, becomes sick, and then finds out she has bite marks on her throat. Due to this incident, another new character is introduced who happens to be Van Helsing. As the novel progresses, lady vampires are introduced and Lucy is eventually turned into one of the lady vampires as well. With the introduction of female vampires, the novel Dracula turns into a sexual and sensational novel by Bram Stoker. The female characters in the book are overly sexualized to where we can compare it to how women are viewed from back then in history to today’s world.

In Carmilla, Sheridan Le Fanu uses vampires to identify and challenge gender roles of women in the Victorian age. From the outset, Carmilla and Laura’s relationship appears to transcend mere homosocial characteristics; Carmilla awakens sensations in Laura which she has never known before because her sexuality has always been suppressed. This suppression is inherently motived by the dominant ideology in Victorian culture that lesbianism, and homosexuality more generally, are “unnatural” forms of sexuality. According to Colleen Damman, “as a woman, Carmilla can only claim her sexuality after death” (). This is an interesting statement because it provides context for the idea that vampirism is the only way Carmilla can express her own carnal desires; She too is then subject to the constraints of Victorian culture. This to say that, for Le Fanu, the only way to have an open discussion concerning homosexual desire is to employ the vampire. Bearing this concept in mind, by analyzing certain key passages and elements of Carmilla and by applying some modern conceptualizations on gender and sexuality, one can see that Carmilla and Laura are merely byproducts of a period rife with sexual desire, frustration, and tension.

The relationship that exists between gender, sexuality and sexual practice is one that is not static, but is ever changing and shifting dependent upon the society in which it exists (Brickell, 2007). This essay aims to describe how Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula, presents a “characteristic, if hyperbolic, instance of Victorian anxiety over the potential fluidity of gender roles” (Craft, 111-112), whilst also inverting and subverting conventional Victorian gender patterns through the characterisation and portrayal of the vampire women residing in Count Dracula’s castle, Mina, and Lucy as well as the ‘feminine’ passivity and submissive depiction of Jonathan Harker.

In the late 19th century, when Dracula by Bram Stoker is written, women were only perceived as conservative housewives, only tending to their family’s needs and being solely dependent of their husbands to provide for them. This novel portrays that completely in accordance to Mina Harker, but Lucy Westenra is the complete opposite. Lucy parades around in just her demeanor as a promiscuous and sexual person. While Mina only cares about learning new things in order to assist her soon-to-be husband Jonathan Harker. Lucy and Mina both become victims of vampirism in the novel. Mina is fortunate but Lucy is not. Overall, the assumption of women as the weaker specimen is greatly immense in the late 19th century. There are also many underlying

Dracula is a novel that indulges its male reader’s imagination, predominantly on the topic of female sexuality. When Dracula was first published, Victorian women’s sexual behaviour was extremely restricted by social expectations. To be classed as respectable, a women was either a virgin or a wife. If she was not either, she was considered a whore. We begin to understand once Dracula arrives in Whitby, that the novel has an underlying battle between good and evil, which will hinge on female sexuality. Both Lucy Westenra and Wilhelmina “Mina” Murray embody two-dimensional virtues that have been associated with female. They are both virgins, whom are innocent from the evils of the world and that are devoted to their men. Dracula’s arrival threatens those virtues, threatening to turn Lucy and Mina into the opposites, noted for their voluptuousness, which could lead to an open sexual desire.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a story that narrates the association between a woman and a small group of men led by Professor Abraham Van Helsing that counteracts with Count Dracula. The Count Dracula travels from Transylvania to England to change human beings into something they refer to as, “foul things of the night like him, without heart or conscience, preying on the bodies and the souls of these (they) love best” (p. 223). The author utilizes the epistolary format in the short story (Cranny-Francis 38). Today, Dracula is the most loved epistolary works written in the nineteenth century but representing the current situations in the society. Literary the term epistolary stories represent novels written from various sources documents such as newspaper clippings, letters, and journals (McNally 18). Bram Stoker achieves the effects of using the epistolary style in conveying the characters inner states through different story setups and broad descriptions that develop the conscious self and the context (Cranny-Francis 64). The paper analyzes the gender roles as depicted in the short story by Bram Stoker.