Louise Cole's Blog - Posts Tagged "bram-stoker"
From Dracula to Twilight
The urban fantasy market is filled to the razor-sharp teeth - puns intended - with vampires. Vampires in fiction have always equalled sex. Their sexual allure, great beauty, physical grace and magical control mean they combine raw animal magnetism with that staple of romance novels, alpha dominance (which as all women know is supposed to make us weak at the knees).
But since Bram Stoker's Dracula, vampire novels have rather lost their bite. The reason? Our attitudes to sex have changed dramatically. And not just to sex but to female sexuality.
In Stoker's novel - and if you haven't read it, really, really do - Dracula embodies everything which has turned away from God. And the quickest way to damn a woman? Get her turned on. In all his guises - mind control, turning into bats and wolves and his obsessive desire for Mina Harker - Dracula represents a gateway to all the things Victorians held most taboo. Bestiality, obsession, illicit (ie unmarried) sexual relations, even homosexuality. Even the 'three sisters' bring up all kinds of issues of group sex, and incest, although, of course, the greatest sin they commit is being sexually forward, predatory women.
In Dracula, for women to embrace the intense sexual magnetism of the vampire is to be damned. But what the Victorians really believed was that for a woman to embrace sex as anything more than her marital duty was to be damned - to be unnatural and to risk not just her soul but her sanity. This was an era which loved to drug and institutionalise women who did not fit within their prescribed roles with the right amount of happiness.
So what about today's vampires? From Twilight to True Blood, we see the attitudes to women's sexuality loosen and the message become that 'smart' women can withstand unfettered sexual enjoyment. There are still plenty who end up as prey, and relationships still tend to be cast as needing 1. love and 2. a dominant male for the heroine to get her happy ending.
It makes you wonder how far we've really come, when these novels often still accept and even fetishise certain male behaviours such as dominance and possessiveness.
I'm not judging. People do not necessarily choose books which explore or represent how they want to live. But for my part, I'm enjoying the new wave of fantasy and YA literature which frees women from expectation and judgement. That shows women making choices without having to justify or condemn themselves, and shows their sexual choices as no one's business but their own.
Equality. That's got the right bite to it.
But since Bram Stoker's Dracula, vampire novels have rather lost their bite. The reason? Our attitudes to sex have changed dramatically. And not just to sex but to female sexuality.
In Stoker's novel - and if you haven't read it, really, really do - Dracula embodies everything which has turned away from God. And the quickest way to damn a woman? Get her turned on. In all his guises - mind control, turning into bats and wolves and his obsessive desire for Mina Harker - Dracula represents a gateway to all the things Victorians held most taboo. Bestiality, obsession, illicit (ie unmarried) sexual relations, even homosexuality. Even the 'three sisters' bring up all kinds of issues of group sex, and incest, although, of course, the greatest sin they commit is being sexually forward, predatory women.
In Dracula, for women to embrace the intense sexual magnetism of the vampire is to be damned. But what the Victorians really believed was that for a woman to embrace sex as anything more than her marital duty was to be damned - to be unnatural and to risk not just her soul but her sanity. This was an era which loved to drug and institutionalise women who did not fit within their prescribed roles with the right amount of happiness.
So what about today's vampires? From Twilight to True Blood, we see the attitudes to women's sexuality loosen and the message become that 'smart' women can withstand unfettered sexual enjoyment. There are still plenty who end up as prey, and relationships still tend to be cast as needing 1. love and 2. a dominant male for the heroine to get her happy ending.
It makes you wonder how far we've really come, when these novels often still accept and even fetishise certain male behaviours such as dominance and possessiveness.
I'm not judging. People do not necessarily choose books which explore or represent how they want to live. But for my part, I'm enjoying the new wave of fantasy and YA literature which frees women from expectation and judgement. That shows women making choices without having to justify or condemn themselves, and shows their sexual choices as no one's business but their own.
Equality. That's got the right bite to it.
