Themes and Concepts in Dracula
Themes and Concepts in Dracula
I’d like to consider Gothic fictions’ virtuous women: the heroines of sensibility. Born from the eighteenth-century discourse of sensibility[2] (the study of the correlation between emotional stimuli and physical responsiveness), these fictional heroines are fair-haired and virtuous, whose goodness illuminates the “forces of darkness”; they are hostages to villains, often in the guise of malevolent father figures; they rely on protection from ‘paternal’ figures, namely brothers and suitors; and their susceptibility to a dangerous world often leaves them physically incapable of movement or resistance. These heroines are doubly trapped—in castles or dungeons, and in their own bodies. The woman of sensibility featured in hundreds of Gothic novels in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is reprised in Dracula as Lucy Westenra (before she becomes a lustful vamp); and is revised as Mina Harker. Like the traditional Gothic heroine, Mina is praised for her beauty, sensitivity, compassion (she even pities Dracula); she is surrounded by men who try to protect her from evil; she is saved in the end. However, Mina differs from these traditional heroines: she has what Van Helsing calls a “man’s brain . . . and woman’s heart” (Dracula 234)—she combines the traditional feminine attributes of emotional responsiveness with masculine logic. She is, within cultural limits imposed on women, active: she subverts, to an extent, ideas about female capability by hiding her typing—the work which leads the men to Dracula—within her embroidery workbasket, concealing her ‘real’ work within the bounds of conventional ‘women’s work.’ Moreover, Stoker emphasizes her importance to the group by showing how, when the men try to ‘protect’ her by leaving her ignorant of their plans, she is attacked by Dracula: they can only follow his movements when Mina is included in the hunt. Like Frankenstein’s Elizabeth, most vulnerable when least informed, Mina’s real status as the key to the men’s success is contingent on her knowledge. Women of sensibility, both Shelley and Stoker tell us, are most useful when most informed: a somewhat radical position in nineteenth-century culture.
Buffy would seem to be light years away from the more typical Gothic heroine. However, there are aspects of Buffy which, on closer inspection, don’t seem so different to her hysterical foremother. These similarities seem to congeal around Buffy’s twin status as adolescent and Slayer, and cast shadows over Whedon’s claims that, after watching “a lot of horror movies that starred pretty...