Stoker's 'New Woman'

IV.I. The “New Woman”

„I believe we should have shocked the ‘New Woman’ with our appetites“ (Stoker 103)

Victorian traditional women are submissive wives who should love, honour, and amuse her husband, manage the household and raise children. Gender rules were strictly determined “aiming to control by defining and delimiting the nature and roles of the sexes in a manner that particularly constrained women.” (Punter and Byron 231). Women complained throughout the century, and by the late Victorian period the concept of the “New Woman1”( dodaj fusnotu na google wordu u final verziji - Grand is credited for coining the phrase ‘New Woman’ (Senf, 66) was created. This idea represented a threat to the conservative society of that time. Nelson
“Through the sexually liberal character of Lucy Westenra, Stoker depicts the fear of his contemporaries concerning the increasingly dangerous familiarity of women with their sexuality” (Lukić and Matek 86); such women threatened the patriarchal centred society. In the beginning, Lucy was more of a traditional woman than Mina. She never realised what was happening around her, showed no interest in new technology and had no thoughts about her future life besides to get married. She seemed as if she was always in her own world. “Lacking maturity and self-awareness, Lucy nonetheless shares the New Woman’s desire for sexual equality” (Senf 68) by telling Mina in her letters about the three proposals she received “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?” (Stoker 69). She is blonde, innocent, and even childish; therefore Dracula manages to seduce her. He visits her multiple times by night to drink her blood. After Dracula drank too much of her blood, Dr Van Helsing tried to save her life with a blood transfusion; she received blood not only from her fiancé Arthur Holmwood, but also from Quincey Morris, Jack Seward, and Abraham van Helsing. Blood symbolises, as I have already explained, sexual intercourse. Lukić and Matek explained, in their work Monsters in literature, that the blood transfusion was the last chance to save her life, and a wish to regain control over the slow, but continuous collapse of the Victorian society (137) *u fusnoti napisati kako sam prevela citat I napisati izvorni oblik citata na hr. Lucy’s transformation into a vampire is symbolises the transition of Victorian women into rebellious and self-confident “New women”. “The once shy and “pure” young woman, naïve in her beliefs and attitudes was now replaced by a creature whose presence now emanated