Dracula’s Women

When I decided to reread Bram Stoker’s Dracula, what I wanted to know was whether I could experience horror as I did when I read the novel first as a schoolboy more than half a century ago. I had tried to experience spiritual feelings while attending certain Christian and Hindu religious functions, and failed. Nothing happened whatever. On the contrary, I was struck by the sheer absurdity of many of the rituals and their mumbo-jumbo.

Dracula had a similar impact when I revisited him last week. The milieu of vampires made me smirk, not shrink in horror. I still remember how darkness horrified me when I read the novel as a boy. I remember being scared of an imagined cloud of mist that crept in through the open window of my bedroom, and metamorphose into a vampire that would sink its canines into my neck.

No, even the dark spirits fail to touch me anymore. When gods vanish from your life, the devils do too, I guess.

What caught my attention as I reread Dracula now is the New Woman in it. The novel eloquently illustrates the Victorian notions of women as either the ‘Angel in the House’ or the ‘New Woman.’ The Angel in the House is the submissive, domestic, and asexual ideal that existed in the Victorian male fantasy, while the New Woman is the independent, intellectual, and potentially dangerous modern woman. Mina and Lucy are Dracula’s specimens for each respectively.

Lucy initially appears as the Victorian idea of the woman: beautiful, sweet, and somewhat passive. But she reveals her sexual appetite early enough in the novel with her remark: “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her?” Three men had proposed to Lucy that day.

Recall Sarah Grand’s character, Evadne Frayling, in her novel The Heavenly Twins published just four years before Dracula (1897). Evadne refuses to consummate her marriage after discovering her husband has a “dissolute” past – he had venereal disease. Evadne was a shocking challenge to the Victorian double standard that allowed men to be promiscuous and expected women to be pure. 

Bram Stoker’s Lucy was a similar challenge to the Victorian male fantasy. So she became a vampire by succumbing to the charms of Count Dracula. Mina, on the other hand, has a “man’s brain… and a woman’s heart,” as another character in the novel describes her. That is, Mina is also a New Woman, but a balanced one: her brain is put on a leash by her heart. It is interesting to note that Bram Stoker makes Mina berate the New Woman’s urge to “do the proposing herself” (instead of letting her man do it, as is the custom).

Lucy’s sexuality is overt, transgressive, and voluptuous, while Mina’s is chaste, maternal, and domestic. The latter is acceptable to the Victorian man. Lucy’s fate, consequently, is to be executed with a stake driven into her heart so that her “purity” would be restored. Mina, though infected by the vampire’s blood, will be saved and rewarded with a new life and marital bliss with her ideal Victorian man.

Women can be modern and intelligent, Stoker suggests, provided they remain subservient to men and traditional values, like Mina. However, if a woman seeks sexual freedom, like Lucy, she becomes a monster that society must violently suppress. 

The Victorian Woman

Women in India and Kerala

I was tempted to make a comparison between the Victorian women and their counterparts in my country, particularly my home-state of Kerala.

When Stoker’s men were driving a stake into heart of the New Woman in England, India was burning women on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Well, the Sati system was banned by the British government in India in 1829, but cultures don’t reform themselves overnight. Child marriage was another nemesis which killed many young girls on their marital beds. Many of these evils were overcome by rules and regulations eventually, but it is still a man’s world (and rather brutally so) in India.

Kerala had another history. While the Victorian England kept its women hidden inside the corset, Kerala’s Hindu society insisted on the lower caste women going bare-breasted in public. Yes, it was a rule strictly implemented by the higher caste men in Kerala with the official sanction of the King of Travancore. If any woman refused to obey the rule, she had to pay a Breast Tax to the government. In practice, however, even the tax wouldn’t save the woman; she had to bare her breasts (and more, obviously) before the upper caste men. It took nearly fifty years of riots and petitions, and pressure from the British government, for the Maharaja of Travancore to issue a proclamation in 1859 to grand Kerala’s lower caste women the right to keep their breasts to themselves.  

One of the reasons why many Hindus chose to abandon their religion and embrace Christianity or Islam in Kerala was this breast-obsession of the upper caste Hindu men in the state. Today, when the BJP is laying siege to the state with the claim that they are bringing back a glorious culture, it would be pertinent to be reminded of some of the ‘precious glories.’

Kerala's Thiya woman in 1909
Photo from Wikimedia

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