Female Characters In Dracula

Female characters in “Dracula”
The purpose of this paper is to explore a topic that has been discused in class: the differences between the two female characters in “Dracula” and what each of them stands for. Dracula is a novel written by Bram Stoker in 1897, and his might be one of the most famous and known vampires in history. The story is divided in different sections, each one of themcontaining an entry that belongs to the character's diaries or letters, which have been put all together in order to obtain a story that follows a timeline. The novel focuses mainly on five different characters who discover the real monster behind Count Dracula and try to finish him: Jonathan Harker and his wife Mina, Arthur and Lucy, Van Helsing, and Doctor Seward.

Bram Stoker explores a contrastbetween the two female characters of the story, a contrast which is portrayed through the letters and diary entries in the novel and which shows two very different types of woman. Lucy and Mina have been friends since they were little and we learn about this relationship very early in the novel because of the letters that the two characters write to each other, but they have two completely differentpersonalities. They are both described as beautiful young women, but the difference between them is that Lucy is portrayed as very sexual and atractive, while Mina is the very representation of the Victorian woman. In order to see their differences, we will describe each one of the characters and compare their personalities.

Since the beginning of the book, Lucy is portrayed as a beautifulwoman who is willing to find a husband, but who, at the same time does not want to have to choose between all of her suitors, but to have them all for herself. On one of the letters, she confesses this desire to her best friend, and she asks her: “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?” With this comment, which is very close to the idea ofpromiscuity, the reader can already hint what this character portrays: a figure that men cannot resist to because she represents the idea of desire and sexuality, and everything that is not pure. One

more element that adds to this whole idea is that Lucy walks in her sleep, something that was strongly connected to fullfiling sexual desires. She is the first victim of Count Dracula, and she is theonly character in the novel in which we can see the transformation from human to vampire. The moment she turns into this creature, she is described as a voluptuous woman who has lost all of her innocence, and who is trying to attract men with her sensuality. In one of the scenes where the men go to the cemetary in order to find out wether she is a vampire or not, she tells her husband: “Come to me,Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you.” Lucy is a danger to men because she is a temptation to them who is able to make them loser their self-controll with her sexual apetite. She is portrayed as a woman whose soul is impure and therefore corrupt, and this is related to the idea of religion and how she cannot be saved. When these men find out that she has turnedinto a vampire, they cannot do anything but to end with her life once and for all. Her soul becomes infected, and with this female character Stoker shows the depiction of this kind of behaviour during the time. Women were supposed to be innocent and pure, faithful to their husbands, and if they did not fall into this category, they could not be saved.

On the other hand, Mina represents theopposite of Lucy: she is an intelectual woman who is very independent but at the same time faithful to her husband. She is described by Van Helsing as a woman who is “so true, so sweet, so noble”, and she is the one who comes up with the idea of recolecting all the different diary entries and documents in order to organize the story so that everything is clear. It is because of her devotion to her...