Abstract
This paper discusses the influence of feminism in the classic Victorian novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. The New Woman is a feminist ideal that appeared in the 19th century, more specifically amidst the rise of the first wave of feminism. The method of research used in this study covers close reading of the source material and analyzing the characters of the novel through the perspective of the New Woman ideals. The female characters in Bram Stoker’s Dracula portrayed the New Woman characteristic to some degree. Women’s independence, intellect, hyperfemininity, and hypersexuality, are some of the aspects of the movement that go against the norm and values of women in Victorian Britain, such as Mina’s “man’s brain” and Lucy’s hyperfemininity, while the Brides of Dracula provide contrast as the oppressed women with their submissive and compliant attitude towards him. Without erasing their representation of these New Woman ideals, Mina and Lucy also portrayed the complexity and dimensionality of being a woman in the Victorian era; their beauty and appeal were praised while their more “unwomanly” aspects present some threats towards men.
Highlights
Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published in 1897 and set in the Victorian era; and at that time, people still lived in a patriarchal society, and they had a strong male dominance culture
Though the present paper focuses on the representation of the New Woman in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, which is different from the previous papers, all of them are still related to the feminist idea that appears in the novel and the women characters
Data collection consists of the primary data, or the object material of this research is the literary work itself, Dracula and the feminist and the New Woman idea is the focus of the arguments in the research
Summary
Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published in 1897 and set in the Victorian era; and at that time, people still lived in a patriarchal society, and they had a strong male dominance culture. A British Library article, Gender Roles in the 19th Century, written by Kathryn Hughes in 2014, stated that “Women were considered physically weaker yet morally superior to men, which meant that they were best suited to the domestic sphere.”. It means that women were expected to do household chores and compensate for the moral taint of the public domain, and women’s influence in the household was used as an argument against giving them the right to vote. Marriage and motherhood were seen as an obligation rather than a choice. Women had financial and sexual disadvantages, experiencing marriages and social status inequalities, and significant differences in terms of rights and privileges. Women were not offered the opportunity to study further, and it was believed that studying was against women’s nature and they were only seen as an ornament. As observed by Kent (1990), “women were so exclusively identified by their sexual functions that nineteenth-century society came to regard them as ‘the Sex’”. (p. 32)
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