The Treatment of Women in Bram Stoker's Dracula While reading Bram Stoker's Dracula, I found the treatment of the two main female characters - Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker - particularly intriguing. These two women are two opposing archetypes created by a society of threatened men trying to protect themselves. Lucy is the archetype of Medusa. She is physically attractive and wins the hearts of every man who approaches her (e.g. Arthur, Quincey, Jack and Van Helsing). Her main quality is sensual beauty, but her sexual desire is repressed and forbidden to communicate. And yet, the spiritual side and the sexual side are in her, and when the long-repressed sexuality finds an outlet, it explodes and completely takes over. In other words, she is transformed into a completely voluptuous female vampire precisely because the sexual side of her personality has been completely buried by her Victorian upbringing. Her repressed self needed such expression that when Dracula arrived, she came out to greet him, then invited him into the house (by opening her window to the bat). He is her outlet for sexual expression. When Lucy herself becomes a vampire, John Seward describes her thus: She looked like a Lucy nightmare as she lay there; the sharp teeth, the bloody and voluptuous mouth - which made one shudder to see - the whole carnal and unspiritual aspect, resembling a diabolical mockery of Lucy's sweet purity (252; ch. 16). And for this voluptuous Lucy, he has no pity: “the rest of my love has turned into hatred and disgust; if she had then had to be killed, I could have done it with wild joy” (249; ch. 16). But why this attitude? I believe it is the aggressive sexuality displayed by the vampire Lucy that... middle of paper ... excluding her from their companies, and including her again. However, now that she is infected with vampire blood and able to read Dracula's thoughts, men fear her and need her. They are forced to accept her into the public domain, but their quest is ultimately to rid her of evil influence and restore her purity, that is, to transform her into a virtuous woman who will remain under the domination of the home and not of one's home. pose a threat to humans. The end of this novel is the restoration of a world as the Victorians knew it: the vampire destroyed, the women rid of their evil sexual desires and kept away from the dangerous world outside their homes, and the men safe . and free in a world dominated by men, playing their exclusive roles as gallant, intelligent and adventurous.Text citedStoker, Bram. Dracula. Ed. Glennis Byron. Peterborough: Broadview, 1998.