Bloody Chamber Comparison: Female Characters

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Female Characters

Similarities

  • Female sexuality is a key focus: (Lucy and the Vampire Women) and meekness is quickly established as a "feminine trait" w/ Mina and the bride in the Bloody Chamber (links between the Bloody Chamber and Lucy's tomb and the red marks on their foreheads). "passivity is not an intrinsically virtuous trait, even in women" - Day
  • Mothers are presented as strong if they are separate from societal expectations. The foreign women who demands "monster give me back my child" and is subsequently eaten by wolves vs. the mother in BC who "scandalously, defiantly beggared herself for love" and shoots her daughter's husband.
  • Similarly women controlled by societal expectations are often meek and have very little control. Lucy's mother dies of shock and is kept apart from the action (a common idea for Stoker's contemporaries)and the elderly women in the wolf stories whose "bones" "clatter" under the bed and the woman who transforms into a werewolf are potentially Carter commenting on the oppression of younger women by their mothers/grandmothers in society (they are often equated with marriage and religion) links to 2nd wave feminism and Carter's childhood

Differences

  • Female sexual agency is celebrated in Carter whereas it is supressed in Stoker as a form of devolution with the vampire women and Lucy being pacified at the end and Mina fulfilling the role of the Victorian wife especially relevant in Ford Coppola's adaptation with the different cuts of the women's dresses (Lucy exposing décolletage in snake dress while Mina's initially has a high neck)
  • Sexuality in Carter is used as a tool for women (availability of the pill and other contraception as part of female lib movement) vs. in Stoker it's considered a subversion of the focus on sex within a Christian marriage in order to reproduce. Dracula's reproduction alien and dangerous (supernatural subverting science/religion fin de siècle fears and ideas of blood and syphilis)

Overall comparison

Overall in both texts the main focus of female characters is as sexual beings, however in Carter this is often celebrated whereas in 'Dracula' it is presented as a dangerous societal transgression that must be supressed. This may be due to the emerging ideas of the 'New Woman' coined by Sarah grand in fin de siècle society which encouraged "good" eugenics and selective breeding for the bettering of society. The New Woman was an upper middle class woman who was "useful" to her husband and often educated, this is reflected in Mina, who later has a son with Jonathan in direct contrast to Lucy, who preys on children after her relationship with Dracula. Dracula is a "regressive inhuman otherness" (Botting)

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