PO WER B EYO ND CO M PA RE
Dracula � Gender Trouble BY ELEANOR KING ILLUSTRATED BY NADIA MOKADEM
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n Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, the roles of gender are explored as there was a growing sense of anxiety concerning what these roles meant in the Victorian period. Stoker explores the anxieties bound within gender role through the combination of intelligence and passivity in both the female character Mina Murray Harker, and her husband Jonathan Harker. Stoker highlights how the different genders combine these qualities, and also questions who relinquishes control and becomes passive. It is also illuminating to compare these characters and their gender roles with the 1992 adaptation Bram Stoker’s Dracula, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. It is also important to address the reasoning behind Stoker exploring anxieties concerning gender within vampire fiction, and how their roles interchange and hold significance within this genre. Mina is presented as an educated woman, she has had an independent life before her marriage. She states that she is an ‘assistant schoolmistress’. In Mina having a job, Stoker is demonstrating the new female figure that was arising in the 1890’s, a growing attribute in single Victorian women to seek independence before marriage. Women were, as Emma Liggins highlights, no longer ‘confined to the slavery of home and genteel property’, allowing a ‘remedy for her distress by pursuing paid work’. But once married, women may have been expected to neglect this source of self-sufficiency and become ‘the wife’. This is a concept Stoker explores. Despite being described and portrayed as an intelligent female, who not only has a job but
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