Feminism In Dracula

Phyllis A. Roth is feminist critic who seeks primarily to explore the role that gender plays in literature. In ENG 216 we learned, a feminist critic would most likely first look what the given text reveals about the way it considers women and the concept of femininity: does it challenge or does it uphold patriarchal ideologies? An assumption feminists have is that the world is structured around patriarchal ideologies - that is, biased in favor of men to the detriment of women.
In Phyllis A. Roth’s article, Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, she argues the “pre-Oedipal focus of the fantasies, specifically the child's relation with and hostility toward the mother, and to indicate how the novel’s fantasies are managed in such a
They are the same person telling of two different outcomes. Lucy the more sexualized women is more desirable therefore she must be killed. Mina on the other hand is like the mother to the men. In the novel, Dracula, there appears to be two distinct types of gender roles that exist. There is the “good girl” versus the “bad girl”. Mina Harker plays the role of the “good girl” by sticking to her assigned gender roles, being nurturing/motherly, and by being chaste. Lucy Westenra and the three vampire brides of Dracula play the role of the “bad girl” because they step out of their assigned gender roles, they express desire, and are promiscuous. However, Roth claims that “although the novel appears to position Lucy as the “bad” woman and Mina as the “good” woman, in reality it is deeply conflicted about both women, both revering and fearing them” (Shannon 1). Mina Harker is seen as the “good girl” when she is described as the mother figure to the men and has christian values by staying pure until her marriage to Jonathan. She is seen as the “bad girl” when she is talked about having a ‘man’s brain’ and works alongside the men to defeat Dracula. Lucy is seen as the “bad girl” when Roth talks about the large number of men who have given her blood transfusions. When she is destroyed and put to rest and has a beautiful face Lucy is seen as the “good girl”. In the end Mina is saved as a reward for her goodness. Lucy
Roth could have used to support her thesis about female sexuality in Dracula is by including the scene where Van Helsing encounters the three female vampires. Roth mentions the scene where Jonathan Harker encounters the three female vampires. To strengthen her case she could have mentioned how the female vampires made Van Helsing feel too. When Van Helsing goes to kill the three vampires when he looks at the one female vampire he feels desire just like Jonathan did. Van Helsing states, “she was so fair to look on, so radiantly beautiful, so exquisitely voluptuous, that the very instinct of man in me, which calls some of my sex to love and to protect one of hers, made my head whirl with new emotion” (Stoker 320). Again the word voluptuous is used in the novel. Voluptuous referring to the “bad