Dracula: Critics

Question 1

William Hughes

Answer 1

William Hughes
patriarchal society = Mina’s destiny is to be a mother

(DON’T AGREE: BUT she produces a baby, as well as ordering the novel)

Question 2

Robert Frost - Role of women

Answer 2

Robert Frost
women = virginal victims AND
illustrate the contradictions and ironic tensions in Victorian society

Question 3

Oscar Wilde

Answer 3

Schaffer
Dracula represents Oscar Wilde’s trial:
fears, secrecies, repressions, and punishments

Question 4

Carol Senf - Reverse-colonialism

Answer 4

Carol Senf

Harker becomes frightened only when he realises he is assisting Dracula to England

Question 5

Robert Frost - Mina’s role in ‘Dracula’ compared to she-vampires

Answer 5

Robert Frost

- Mina is the antithesis of the she-vampires, she is a Victorian virgin set on an idealised pedestal

Question 6

Glennis Byron - role of female vampires

Answer 6

Glennis Byron

• Female vampires represent a rejection of maternity in their preference not for feeding but rather feeding ON a child
• savagely reject the woman’s central role as mother

Question 7

Jennifer Fleissner

Answer 7

Jennifer Fleissner
- Mina’s passage from typist to vampire victime to wife and mother is a perfectly natural, even necessary, trajectory in the development of a modernised femininity
Why?
- in period during which Dracula was written, typewriting became increasingly viewed as an acceptable part of a middle-class woman’s life
- Mina is only the messenger for information - her shorthand/typewriting is training for her role as a mother who transmits information to her child needed to enter the wider world

Question 8

Carol Senf - Unconscious development of Lucy’s rebellion

Answer 8

Carol Senf
- During the day, Lucy never admits her rebellion about the restraints placed on women, but at night her rebellion surfaces as she wanders around Whitby in her sleep and meets Dracula

Question 9

Phyllis Roth

Answer 9

Phyllis Roth

• only relations with vampires are sexualised
• only when Lucy becomes a vampire, she is allowed to be “voluptuous”
• yet she must have always been so considering her effect on men and Mina’s descriptions of her
• vampirism = sexuality

Question 10

psychoanalytical perspective - what vampirism disguises

Answer 10

vampirism is a disguise for greatly desired and equally strongly feared fantasies

Question 11

Glennis Byron - The staking of Lucy

Answer 11

Glennis Byron

- the staking of Lucy provides the most brutal enactment of the restoration of gendered boundaries

Question 12

Carol Senf - Two dimensional characters of ‘Dracula’

Answer 12

Carol Senf

• all characters are youthful and inexperienced (except Van Helsing) and are 2D
• only distinguishing characteristics are their names and their professions

(DON’T AGREE: e.g. Dr Seward has emotional breakdowns, shows jealousy, is self-critical
- product of social repressions)

Question 13

Carol Senf - Biased narration

Answer 13

Carol Senf
- question narrators’ reliability:
Harker suffers nervous breakdowns;
Lucy exhibits schizophrenia;
Seward occasionally questions the sanity of their mission, and his diary entries about Renfield indicates his realisation of the narrow margin between sanity and insanity: “It is wonderful, however, what intellectual..power lunatics have”
- Lucy’s death could be easily attributed to the blood transfusions
- Dracula is tried, convicted, and sentenced by men (including 2 lawyers) with no opportunity to defend himself

Question 14

Carol Senf - Dracula is an internal threat

Answer 14

Carol Senf
- a vampire cannot influence a human being without that person’s consent (cannot enter dwelling w/out being invited in)
- thf. Dracula is internal not external threat
Renfield’s desire for immortality;
Lucy’s desire to escape repressive society;
Desire of all characters to overcome restraints of religion and law