Fourth Year Winner: The Evolution of Dracula and the New Woman: Misogyny, Eroticism, and Female Sexuality in Stoker's Dracula and its Descendants

WRIT 4720, Print Culture and the History of the Book. CD: Dominique O’Neill.

Abstract

Carlyn Atkinson’s “The Evolution of Dracula and the New Woman” investigates Bram Stoker’s iconic text through the lens of late 19^th century Victorian attitudes towards feminism. Stoker embodied the fear of changing social mores in the form of eroticized female vampires, and Atkinson’s well-written paper carefully traces how Stoker presents his version of a monstrous “New Woman.” Her well-researched and referenced work explores how key characters in the text represent a “corruption of women’s morality,” and Victorians’ fears of infectious diseases and ideologies that could infect anyone, even the most respectable and proper.

The author’s clear prose and smooth organization enable her to demonstrate how, over time, vampires have come to represent the juxtaposition of fear and desire: a potent combination as irresistible for the Victorians as it is for 21^st century readers. Atkinson concludes by noting how “vampire romances” form their own subgenre, and frequently feature female characters fully in control over their own sexuality: self-reliant, self-aware persons, needing no man to thrive.