A brief postcript on Dracula and gender

[cimorene]

A couple of days ago I tried to find old text posts from dracula daily's heyday on Tumblr, but I found it impossible due to the fact that people who create fanfic drabbles and fanart in the Dracula fandom use this freely as a fandom tag and I couldn't wade back through it successfully. I only kept looking for about an hour before I gave up, but I did find a post where an asker said something like,

There is no female character treated worse by adaptations than Lucy Westenra. Every single adaptation completely rewrites her to make her an evil whore basically.

And the answerer agreed and provided a bunch of examples of egregious details of this phenomenon in various film adaptations, adding that this slanderous misreading of the text is also popular in criticism.

I tried a brief websearch after that and found about five essays or blog posts doing exactly what the answerer says here before I stumbled on this fascinating paper: Rethinking the New Woman in Dracula by Jordan Kistler.

Abstract: The existing canon of scholarship on Dracula asserts that the sexually aggressive female vampires are representative of the New Woman, and thus are evidence of Stoker’s conservative reaction to changing gender roles. In contrast, this article offers a reinterpretation Dracula in the light of key writings of the New Woman movement which sought to demonize the Victorian marriage market because of its creation of a class of female parasites: idle middle-class woman entirely dependent on fathers and husbands. A close reading of key sections of the novel demonstrates that the female vampires are characterized as traditionally subordinate Victorian housewives, in contrast to the positive presentation of Mina Harker as a New Woman. This reading reveals a text that argues that work for women is the only antidote to the degeneration inherent in traditional womanhood, through which women are reduced to nothing more than their biological functions.

Comments

[stranger]

Yes to "Rethinking..." I never really tried that kind of analysis of Stoker's Dracula, but as commentary on Victorian gender roles, Absolutely Yes, that's the problem.

Present-day women within marriage and otherwise have been viewed through this lens, but the huge majority of them handle childrearing and/or household management details, *and* a paying job -- a "middle class" wife or daughter is not generally idle at all -- and it doesn't start to address working class women's burdens.

[cimorene]

You mean the concerns of middle class women in the developed world and hence the question of being housewives or not has been taken as the dominant thread of popular discourse in the developed world, or at least the Anglophone world, and that this middle class with women who didn't work outside the home and also had servants was a Victorian situation that largely died out after the 1950s, with middle class housewives after that time doing a great deal of frequently menial domestic labor, to say nothing of all the working class women who worked all along?

[stranger]

Yes, that's the thing I was getting at. The newly visible class of rich bourgeois (that is, people who owned enterprises but not land) has rather defined the Victorian era and after at least to WWI, less so but still a factor up to WWII. These wives were the only class of women who didn't have hands-on domestic labor or (at the upper end) domestic management of a large household or estate.

And, of course, home-making and child-rearing have been virtually invisible to (male) economists, and they're very grumpy about trying to "add" those into the economy now, when day-care is a necessary industry, instead of leaving it all to invisible women, the ones who aren't idle.

[cimorene]

LOL, yes. Although this particular time period also probably gave rise to the most women who, as a result of all the servants, were able to abstain pretty much entirely from raising their children, which wasn't all that rare apparently, although devoting a lot of time and effort to them was probably still the norm.

[cimorene]

According to this paper and its reading, the Victorian feminists writing on the New Woman advocated women being educated and working to earn their own livings and be useful, but not against marriage, and Mina stands as the model of this New Woman, educated and never idle - she works as an assistant schoolmistress before her marriage, then deliberately learns shorthand, typewriting, and train schedule trivia in order to support her husband's work as a solicitor in their married life. This is still just a pale ghost of the "second shift" of working mothers who do all their own housework in late 20th c. feminism however (or the work of working class women in her time). She isn't wealthy and intends to marry on very limited income, which would mean doing at least some of the menial work herself, but they inherit a fortune right after their marriage so this doesn't come up.

[stranger]

Of course, the only reason to educate women or even let them educate themselves, is to benefit their husbands (and children). I would guess the Victorian feminists were framing it this way, but thinking of the women themselves too.

[cimorene]

Yeah, I think it isn't the ONLY reason for them - it's for spinsters too. But they very much incorporated a lot of eugenics and Intelligent Woman Improving the Race and stuff like that. The modernization of woman, for many or most of them (although there were certainly outliers not quoted in the paper there, I mean, there had to be right? Besides, this is at the time of the Rational Dress Movement, which was already in some places a bit more progressive than that), was definitely still feeding into the betterment of the Family and thereby the Nation.