Primal Urges and Civilized Sensibilities: The Rhetoric of Gendered Archetypes, Seduction, and Resistance in Bram Stoker's Dracula

Abstract

If there hadn't been women, we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat because we made civilization to impress our girlfriends,” claimed Orson Welles (qtd. in Gossett 20). This quotation is typical of a “gendered ideology,” which dichotomizes male and female natures by associating that which is civilized with the feminine, and that which is uncivilized with the masculine. That ideology underpins the belief that it is the social role of women to provide a calming effect on male aggression through setting and reinforcing boundaries concerning “appropriate” male behavior. This results in an expectation that a woman in an intimate heterosexual relationship should take on a kind of mothering role, limiting the threat posed by the man's essentially masculine nature.