The Reading Given To Students
These theorists caution against the simplicity of interpretations and reject the view that Dracula is either misogynist or feminist. For then it is not possible to state if stoker was supporting and/or challenging the conventional Victorian middle-class view of a women. In the text, the women are naturalised (violentlyreturned to their passive place in society) and sexual threa is dissolved into a sentimental vision of maternity. Many contemporary feminist theorists have noted that the novel does celebrate the energy, potency and power as well as freedom bestowed on women as they are vamped and that a sympathetic view of the limitations of women's roles and choices afforded by Victorian society is established in Stoker's fiction. This is shown when Mina is deprived of a role in the hunt for the vampire. This exclusion is seen as reaffirming masculinist power and atonomy. The men stop infomring mina of their activities, leavinbng her frustrated and helpless in the dark. This is an error: in the dark is exactly where the vampire is most likely to find her.
Christopher Craft's essay 'Kiss Me with Those Red Lips' presents the scene of Harker's temptation as an example of feminine passivity that engages with the anxieties of the time. For Craft, the fearful confusion of gender categories is embodied in the actual vampire mouth, the soft inviting orifice which delivers only a piercing bone. What Jonathon Harker might be fearing, when he is prisoner at Dracula's castle, is a kind of rape. This is because the vampire fangs have been viewed as a penile echo. Dracula then can be seen as representing displaced homosexual desire.
Christopher Craft's essay 'Kiss Me with Those Red Lips' presents the scene of Harker's temptation as an example of feminine passivity that engages with the anxieties of the time. For Craft, the fearful confusion of gender categories is embodied in the actual vampire mouth, the soft inviting orifice which delivers only a piercing bone. What Jonathon Harker might be fearing, when he is prisoner at Dracula's castle, is a kind of rape. This is because the vampire fangs have been viewed as a penile echo. Dracula then can be seen as representing displaced homosexual desire.