Bram Stoker's Dracula is undoubtedly one the most consciously sentient and hyperbolic literary incarnations of the excessive fear of women's sexuality that still survives with a vast legitimacy for its content today. Much like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein the novel is satiated with the fear of the modern technology and scientific advances of the industrial era to superannuate the need for morality. Unlike Frankenstein, however, what Dracula is most suffused with is the fear of the progressiveness of an era to challenge the patriarchal power structure that so defined Victorian society. Every possible corner of the book is exhausted with the phallocentric motifs of successive generations of men believing in their "divine" Christian autonomy over the reproductive rights of women. This fear of women still exists today but takes on new, more dangerous pervasive and politic forms.
[...] Dracula and Fear of Female Sexuality Bram Stoker's Dracula is undoubtedly one the most consciously sentient and hyperbolic literary incarnations of the excessive fear of women's sexuality that still survives with a vast legitimacy for its content today. Much like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein the novel is satiated with the fear of the modern technology and scientific advances of the industrial era to superannuate the need for morality. Unlike Frankenstein, however, what Dracula is most suffused with is the fear of the progressiveness of an era to challenge the patriarchal power structure that so defined Victorian society. [...]
[...] The men travel to Dracula's homeland and much to their fear it is discovered that Dracula has been “taking the life out of which in its sexually implicit linguistic implications suggests a carnal defiling of her as the blood is the direct metaphorical conduit to sexuality. Their fear is realized in one of the novels most debated scenes in which the men find Mina drinking from a wound on Dracula's breast as her own husband lies unconscious on the bed. [...]
[...] Stoker's explicit and sentient use of sexual description and imagery in the novel makes the fear and hatred of women almost laughable in its pellucid evocation. Today, however, the subliminal diglossia that teaches the hatred of women is much more surreptitious and protean. Sharply in contrast to the hermetic containment of female sexuality in Stoker's novel, today women are overtly sexualized and marginalized and taught to abnegate themselves to adhere to this new rigid and mass produced mold of womanhood. Unlike the men in Stoker's novel who fear the animal instincts ascertained [...]
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