CRITICAL QUOTES: Dracula & The Bloody Chamber
- “I suppose that evert book of the kind must contain some lesson but I prefer that readers
should nd it out for themselves” Bram Stoker 2006
- “dracula embodies the fear of the unknown and he personi es the ‘nothing in the darkness’
that keeps children awake at night” Steve Roberts 2006
- “Blurs the line between man and beast” Punter
- “dracula is dangerous because he expresses his contempt for authority… through his sexuality”
Carol A Senf
- “Stoker’s gothic is quintessentially victorian; the worst horror it can imagine is not dracula at all
but the released, transforming sexuality of the good woman” Gail B Gri n
- punter says that “gothic texts of the tine repeatedly produce powerful and sexually aggressive
fences as aliens or monstrous, setting them in opposition to the ‘pure’ women in an attempt to
stabilise gendered identity”
- sigmund Freud says that the uncanny is “that class of the frightening that leads back to waht is
known of old and long familiar” sigmund freud
- “uncannily straddling the borders between life and death an thereby undoing a fundamental
human fact” Botting
-
- “if the new woman was autonomous, with personal, social, and economic control over her own
life, she was also something to be feared” Kathryn Boyd in Making sense of Mina
- Keridiana Chez says that the vamperella’s “rampant sexuality” represents the ‘new woman’ as
that is what society wishes to destroy from women (eg meaning that is the element of women
that they are trying to take away)
- “Stoker’s reaction to the new femininity is to kill o the foolish virgin and marry o the wise one”
Steve Roberts
- “the novel clearly falls into two parts, each half entered around a di erent type of woman”
Stephanie Demetrakopoulos
- Aidan day also recognises the “two competing desires for freedom and engulfment”
- ^ idea that the text presents the paradox of what it is to be human which is to align with society
or to fo what we want
-
- “gothic tales are a vehicle for ideas about psychological evil”
- “the actions of the vampire women in their seduction of Jonathon Harker represent newfound
anxieties about the emergence of the new woman” and he described “the new woman” as a
woman who “challenged the prevailing notions of victorian womanhood” Ben H Wright
- Dracula allows Stoker to create a “laboratory space” to carry our “experiments” on female
characters ultimately achieving an “imaginary vengeance” agaisnt the rising power of women.
Fredric Jameson
- Rubin says that “women [in some societies] are frequently kept in their place by gang rape
when the ordinary methods of masculine intimidation prove insu cient”
- traditional ctional “punishment for female sexual transgressors… [is] the immediate loss of
social status” Cora Kaplan (eg when Luc looses her sexual power when she is “truly killed” as a
vampire
fi fi ff fi ffi ff ffi ff
- “I suppose that evert book of the kind must contain some lesson but I prefer that readers
should nd it out for themselves” Bram Stoker 2006
- “dracula embodies the fear of the unknown and he personi es the ‘nothing in the darkness’
that keeps children awake at night” Steve Roberts 2006
- “Blurs the line between man and beast” Punter
- “dracula is dangerous because he expresses his contempt for authority… through his sexuality”
Carol A Senf
- “Stoker’s gothic is quintessentially victorian; the worst horror it can imagine is not dracula at all
but the released, transforming sexuality of the good woman” Gail B Gri n
- punter says that “gothic texts of the tine repeatedly produce powerful and sexually aggressive
fences as aliens or monstrous, setting them in opposition to the ‘pure’ women in an attempt to
stabilise gendered identity”
- sigmund Freud says that the uncanny is “that class of the frightening that leads back to waht is
known of old and long familiar” sigmund freud
- “uncannily straddling the borders between life and death an thereby undoing a fundamental
human fact” Botting
-
- “if the new woman was autonomous, with personal, social, and economic control over her own
life, she was also something to be feared” Kathryn Boyd in Making sense of Mina
- Keridiana Chez says that the vamperella’s “rampant sexuality” represents the ‘new woman’ as
that is what society wishes to destroy from women (eg meaning that is the element of women
that they are trying to take away)
- “Stoker’s reaction to the new femininity is to kill o the foolish virgin and marry o the wise one”
Steve Roberts
- “the novel clearly falls into two parts, each half entered around a di erent type of woman”
Stephanie Demetrakopoulos
- Aidan day also recognises the “two competing desires for freedom and engulfment”
- ^ idea that the text presents the paradox of what it is to be human which is to align with society
or to fo what we want
-
- “gothic tales are a vehicle for ideas about psychological evil”
- “the actions of the vampire women in their seduction of Jonathon Harker represent newfound
anxieties about the emergence of the new woman” and he described “the new woman” as a
woman who “challenged the prevailing notions of victorian womanhood” Ben H Wright
- Dracula allows Stoker to create a “laboratory space” to carry our “experiments” on female
characters ultimately achieving an “imaginary vengeance” agaisnt the rising power of women.
Fredric Jameson
- Rubin says that “women [in some societies] are frequently kept in their place by gang rape
when the ordinary methods of masculine intimidation prove insu cient”
- traditional ctional “punishment for female sexual transgressors… [is] the immediate loss of
social status” Cora Kaplan (eg when Luc looses her sexual power when she is “truly killed” as a
vampire
fi fi ff fi ffi ff ffi ff
