lucy and mina in victorian england when essay

Accord, Afterlife, Literary Theme, Fictional

Excerpt via Essay:

Lucy and Mina

In Victorian Britain, when Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, the vampire was used as a sign for, and a lot more, society’s sexual taboos, which includes overt female sexuality. No place is this thought better discovered than in the characters of friends Lucy Westenra and Mina Murray. In Stoker’s book, Sharon is sign of the improper female, normally the one who is coquettish and flirtatious and leads to sexual involvement in the male. Sl?ktens is her opposite. She is the ideal Even victorian woman whose function is usually to be chaste and supportive of her husband to be. Mina’s attraction to guys is always certainly one of potential better half or mom. These tips were somewhat diluted in the 1931 film version to generate a horror tale with fewer moral and even more thrill, although the flirtatious young lady still dies and her less sex counterpart continue to survives. Inside the novel, the queue between good and evil tends to be ambiguous. Even apparently decent people can make selections which bring about destruction. In the film, these kinds of moments of ethical ambiguity will be removed for making it very clear who are the heroes and who are definitely the villains, outlining why Sharon who is potentially the most complex character inside the novel is definitely marginalized and why Mina’s role in bringing about the demise of Dracuala is equally downsized.

Although they fulfill the same ends, the Lucy in Tod Browning’s Dracula has small in common with all the one in Stoker’s novel. The film should go as far as to improve her name from Lucy Westenra to the more Anglo Lucy Weston. Later that night, the Count makes its way into her room while she actually is asleep to feast on her blood. Inside the novel, Sharon leaves her bedroom in a hypnotic state of hypnosis after the Count calls to her from very far. One of the rules of the vampire legend is the fact no goule may enter a residence unless he can invited in. In Stoker’s story, this scene can be pivotal because, though in a hypnotic express, Lucy continues to be responsible for her actions. Your woman chooses to leave her bedroom and visit the monster exterior. In Browning’s film, her culpability can be removed since Dracula makes its way into her bedroom through no-fault of her own. She is clearly patient and Dracula is plainly monstrous other.

Similarly, the blood transfusions that Lucy must endure as a result of the men to keep her alive are changed via a series of nights to a day of procedures. In the book, all these transfusions take place in Lucy’s bedroom. She’s extremely fragile and sitting near death upon her bed, disheveled and in her nightclothes, anything no man but her husband should ever manage to witness. In a way, the transfusions are both lifesaving and representational of a violation. Weston, alternatively, has most her procedures on the same working day and it is dubious that those whom gave their particular blood were her suitors. This Lucy dies within an operating theater with a number of doctors and an audience in attendance. There may be nothing intimate about these transfusions.

Once the animal is useless or immortal as the situation may be, Sharon becomes red-lipped and sensuous; a once somewhat genuine being now filled with lust both intended for blood as well as for sex. Goule Lucy is first witnessed Dr . Seward and described as using a “languorous, sexy grace” (Stoker 188). A woman desirous of your man’s touch is as unpleasant as a lifeless woman coming back from the serious. She calls out to her fiancee, “Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to my opinion. My hands are starving for you” (188). It is just permissible to murder the vampire Sharon after we witness her making sex advances toward Holmwood. Once she is slain, her betrothed Arthur stakes her with a large bit of wood, spear like her and making her bleed a lot, such as could have occurred prove wedding night.

Lucy Weston does not include these occasions in the film. Rather than see Lucy as vampire, the viewer is definitely presented a newspaper document reporting that the “Woman in White” is usually attacking children. When wondered about this woman, Mina reveals that it is Lucy and that when the two women met Sharon took around the look of the hungry dog. The end of Lucy’s tale is advised through the terms