Women's Rights in Dracula Anonymous 12th Grade

“Will you marry me?” Throughout the ages, this life-changing question has been asked billions of times all across the world by both men and women. However, not so long ago during the Victorian era, the idea of a woman asking this question was obscene. Only men were allowed to take the initiative. Bram Stoker subtly explores the idea of gender roles with the horror novel Dracula. Throughout the story, Stoker utilizes several potent symbols in an attempt to argue that women should have no sexual freedom because it would serve as a potentially significant danger to men.

Stoker uses the female vampires in Dracula to suggest that women should not have sexual desires. During the time when Stoker wrote Dracula, the public demonstrated a general fear towards sexualizing women, and Stoker illustrates this conservative mindset in the beginning when protagonist Jonathan Harker enters the castle. When he meets the vampire women, he notes “a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck, she actually licked her lips like an animal, till [he] could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white, sharp, teeth” (Stoker 50). Stoker flips...