Episode 34: The Women of Dracula, Part 1

Written By Stephanie Summar

Lucy Westenra and Victorian fear of female desire

Close-up of Lucy Westenra, a character from "Dracula", showing her face in dramatic lighting. Her mouth is slightly open with a predatory, lustful expression, with one sharp vampire fang visible, protruding below her upper lip.

When most people think of Bram Stoker's Dracula, they picture the Count himself – cape-wearing, fang-bearing, vanting to suck your blood. But as the latest episode of Paranormal Pajama Party reveals, the real horror in this 1897 Gothic masterpiece isn't the Big D himself (sorry, not sorry for that joke). It's Victorian society's collective pants-wetting terror of women who dare to have desires of their own.

The New Woman: A Victorian nightmare (complete with bicycles)

To understand why Dracula focuses so intensely on its female characters, we need to step into the mindset of late 19th-century Britain. The 1890s were a time of massive social upheaval, and nothing was more threatening to the established order than the emergence of the “New Woman.”

The New Woman was essentially everything that made Victorian men reach for their smelling salts. These radical ladies wanted wild things like education and the right to own property – basically the stuff that would make your average 1890s patriarch question everything he thought he knew about the natural order.

What made this movement particularly threatening wasn't just what these women wanted, but how visible they were becoming. The cultural panic surrounding women's changing roles became a full-blown social phenomenon, and Stoker was writing Dracula right in the middle of this anxiety-fest.

 

  • Steph: Before we begin, a quick content warning: Paranormal Pajama Party is a podcast about scary stories and legends, but there’s nothing scarier than the patriarchy.

    When discussing tales in which women are often the villains, we’ll have to unpack some stories in which people are victims.

    This episode explores themes of violence against women, symbolic sexual assault, and repressed Victorian sexuality. It will probably include frequent cursing, an excessive number of fang-related euphemisms, and more uses of the word “penetrate” than I was emotionally prepared for. Please listen with care.

    Say, did you know that Paranormal Pajama Party has a newsletter now? It’s called Lights Out, and it’s where I dig even deeper into the strange, spooky, and subversive stories behind the show. Subscribe now at paranormalpajamaparty.substack.com, and get more whispers, warnings, and weird women delivered straight to your inbox.

    An excerpt from Dracula, by Bram Stoker. For context, a woman named Lucy has recently died, leaving behind her fiance, Arthur, two other would-be suitors, and an eccentric Dutch doctor named Abraham Van Helsing who knows more about her mysterious illness than he lets on.

    29 September, morning..... Last night, at a little before ten o’clock, Arthur and Quincey came into Van Helsing’s room; he told us all that he wanted us to do, but especially addressing himself to Arthur, as if all our wills were centred in his. He began by saying that he hoped we would all come with him too, “for,” he said, “there is a grave duty to be done there. You were doubtless surprised at my letter?”

    “I want you to come with me, and to come in secret, to the churchyard at Kingstead.”

    Arthur’s face fell as he said in an amazed sort of way: “Where poor Lucy is buried?”

    The Professor bowed. Arthur went on: “And when there?”

    “To enter the tomb!”

    Arthur stood up. “Professor, are you in earnest; or it is some monstrous joke?” He sat down again, but I could see that he sat firmly and proudly, as one who is on his dignity. There was silence until he asked again: “And when in the tomb?”

    “To open the coffin.”

    29 September, evening… It was just a quarter before twelve o’clock when we got into the churchyard over the low wall. The night was dark with occasional gleams of moonlight between the rents of the heavy clouds that scudded across the sky. We all kept somehow close together, with Van Helsing slightly in front as he led the way. When we had come close to the tomb I looked well at Arthur, for I feared that the proximity to a place laden with so sorrowful a memory would upset him; but he bore himself well. I took it that the very mystery of the proceeding was in some way a counteractant to his grief. The Professor unlocked the door, and seeing a natural hesitation amongst us for various reasons, solved the difficulty by entering first himself. The rest of us followed, and he closed the door. He then lit a dark lantern and pointed to the coffin. Arthur stepped forward hesitatingly.

    Van Helsing said to me, “You were with me here yesterday. Was the body of Miss Lucy in that coffin?”

    “It was.”

    The Professor took his screwdriver and took off the lid of the coffin. Arthur looked on, very pale but silent; when the lid was removed we all looked in and recoiled.

    The coffin was empty!

    “Yesterday I came here before sundown, for at sundown the Un-Dead can move. I waited here all the night till the sun rose, but I saw nothing. It was most probable that it was because I had laid over the clamps of those doors garlic, which the Un-Dead cannot bear. Tonight before the sundown I took away my garlic. And so it is we find this coffin empty. But bear with me. So far there is much that is strange. Wait you with me outside, unseen and unheard, and things much stranger are yet to be. So”—here he shut the dark slide of his lantern—“now to the outside.” He opened the door, and we filed out, he coming last and locking the door behind him.

    Oh! but it seemed fresh and pure in the night air after the terror of that vault.

    …In silence we took the places assigned to us close round the tomb, but hidden from the sight of any one approaching… Never did tombs look so ghastly white; …never did tree or grass wave or rustle so ominously; never did bough creak so mysteriously; and never did the far-away howling of dogs send such a woeful presage through the night.

    There was a long spell of silence, a big, aching void, and then from the Professor a keen “S-s-s-s!” He pointed; and far down the avenue of yews we saw a white figure advance—a dim white figure, which held something dark at its breast. The figure stopped, and at the moment a ray of moonlight showed in startling prominence a woman dressed in the cerements of the grave.

    We could not see the face, for it was bent down over what we saw to be a fair-haired child. The Professor’s warning hand kept us back; and then as we looked the white figure moved forwards again. It was now near enough for us to see clearly, and the moonlight still held.

    My own heart grew cold as ice, and I could hear the gasp of Arthur, as we recognised the features of Lucy Westenra. Lucy Westenra, but yet how changed. The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness.

    Van Helsing stepped out, and, obedient to his gesture, we all advanced too; the four of us ranged in a line before the door of the tomb. Van Helsing raised his lantern and drew the slide; by the concentrated light that fell on Lucy’s face we could see that the lips were crimson with fresh blood, and that the stream had trickled over her chin and stained the purity of her lawn death-robe.

    We shuddered with horror. I could see by the tremulous light that even Van Helsing’s iron nerve had failed. Arthur was next to me, and if I had not seized his arm and held him up, he would have fallen.

    When Lucy—I call the thing that was before us Lucy because it bore her shape—saw us she drew back with an angry snarl, such as a cat gives when taken unawares; then her eyes ranged over us. Lucy’s eyes in form and colour; but Lucy’s eyes unclean and full of hell-fire, instead of the pure, gentle orbs we knew.

    At that moment the remnant of my love passed into hate and loathing; had she then to be killed, I could have done it with savage delight. As she looked, her eyes blazed with unholy light, and the face became wreathed with a voluptuous smile. Oh, God, how it made me shudder to see it! 

    With a careless motion, she flung to the ground, callous as a devil, the child that up to now she had clutched strenuously to her breast, growling over it as a dog growls over a bone. The child gave a sharp cry, and lay there moaning. There was a cold-bloodedness in the act which wrung a groan from Arthur; when she advanced to him with outstretched arms and a wanton smile he fell back and hid his face in his hands.

    She still advanced, however, and with a languorous, voluptuous grace, said, “Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come!”

    There was something diabolically sweet in her tones—something of the tingling of glass when struck—which rang through the brains even of us who heard the words addressed to another. As for Arthur, he seemed under a spell; moving his hands from his face, he opened wide his arms.

    She was leaping for them, when Van Helsing sprang forward and held between them his little golden crucifix. She recoiled from it….

    Never did I see such baffled malice on a face; and never, I trust, shall such ever be seen again by mortal eyes. The beautiful colour became livid, the eyes seemed to throw out sparks of hell-fire, the brows were wrinkled as though the folds of the flesh were the coils of Medusa’s snakes, and the lovely, blood-stained mouth grew to an open square, as in the passion masks of the Greeks and Japanese. If ever a face meant death—if looks could kill—we saw it at that moment.

    [MUSIC]

    Steph: Hi! I’m Steph, and this is Paranormal Pajama Party, the podcast that brings you classic ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales. Together, we’ll brush the cobwebs off these terrifying tales to shed some light on their origins and learn what they can tell us about the deep-rooted fears society projects onto women.

    Tonight, we’re sinking our teeth into the social anxieties lurking beneath one of the world’s favourite horror classics and a book that's been adapted approximately eight billion times – Bram Stoker's Dracula. But obviously, since this is Paranormal Pajama Party and you just heard my whole spiel, we're not here to talk about the Count, or as I’ve been calling him, the Big D. Instead, we're focusing on the women of Dracula and what they tell us about Victorian panic over issues like… well, women enjoying the Big D.

    I’m so sorry, but that is far from the last middle-school maturity-level sex joke this episode will have. I can’t not do it! That’s what she said! 

    Anyway, here's something to chew on: Dracula may be a novel named after its male villain, but 80% of the vampires in the book are women – the three so-called "Brides" in the Transylvanian castle, Lucy Westenra, and her BFF Mina Harker, who technically never goes full vamp, but gets pretty darn close.

    The reason for this gender imbalance isn't a coincidence. It's because Dracula isn't really about vampires. I mean it is, but anyone even remotely familiar with the concept can tell you that vampires are sex. Come on. The seducing? The sucking? The penetrating? So it’s not hard, pardon the pun, to read Dracula as a story about Victorian men collectively losing their minds over the idea that women might have sexual desires of our own.

    Dracula is an epistolary novel, told through letters, diary entries, and newspaper clippings, and the in-story explanation for the way those materials have been gathered is very interesting, but we’ll get to that later.

    If it’s been a while since you cracked open Dracula – or if you, like most people, know it more from pop culture than the actual book – here’s a quick, blood-soaked refresher.

    We open with the diary of Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, travelling to Transylvania to help a mysterious nobleman, Count Dracula, purchase property in London. Things go sideways when Jonathan realises that something is… uh… very wrong with the Count. Is it his hairy palms? His strange teeth? The way he can crawl head-first down the outside of his castle wall like a giant gecko? Hmm. Something about him is not quite right.

    Soon, Jonathan realises he’s not a guest at Castle Dracula – he’s a prisoner. While searching for a way out, he encounters three unnamed women who are beautiful, seductive, and literally bloodthirsty. They attempt to seduce and feed on him, but Dracula stops them, claiming Jonathan is his to deal with. Things get worse and worse for Jonathan until eventually he discovers that the evil Count has left him to the wicked women and fucked off to his new home in the civilised Western world.

    Drac makes his way to England on a ship, killing the entire crew one by one along the way and eventually leaping to shore in the form of a giant wolflike beast.

    Meanwhile, back in England, we meet Lucy Westenra: beautiful, cheerful, and adored by three suitors – Arthur Holmwood, Dr John Seward, and Quincey Morris, who is an American cowboy, because why not. She accepts Arthur’s proposal, but remains close with the others. Her friend Mina is also introduced here: She’s a schoolteacher, practical and intelligent, engaged to Jonathan and working hard to improve herself through shorthand and typing. Mina hasn’t heard from Jonathan in a while, but eventually a letter comes from Hungary, where Jonathan is alive! Barely. Recovering from a narrow escape from Castle Dracula. She rushes there to help him heal.

    But then Lucy starts sleepwalking along cliffsides and through the unconsecrated parts of graveyards, which is basically like ringing a vampire dinner bell. She grows pale and weak. Strange marks appear on her neck. Despite the best efforts of Seward and the legendary Professor Abraham Van Helsing – who’s called in when things get dire – Lucy dies. Sort of. She rises again as a vampire, preying on children in the night. The men who loved her band together to track her down and kill her, staking her through the heart, cutting off her head, and framing the entire ordeal as an act of salvation.

    As Lucy dies, Jonathan and Mina, now married, return to England. Mina is the one who’s compiled all the different characters’ journals, letters, newspaper clippings, and phonograph transcriptions into one coherent record, essentially shaping the narrative of the novel. This act – gathering and ordering information – gives the group the tools they need to fight Dracula. She also endears herself to each of the men in different ways, earning their love and respect. They love and respect her so much, in fact, that they cut her out of their vampire revenge plans to protect her fragile little lady brain.

    But when the men make their first attack against the Count, Dracula doesn’t run away, wolf-tail between his legs, like they think he will – he retaliates. He attacks Mina, forcing her to drink his blood and creating a psychic link between them. Out of necessity, she’s further isolated from the group – this time because anything she knows, Dracula can know. The good news is that anything Dracula knows, Mina now also knows, but only when she’s hypnotised. Van Helsing begins to use her connection to Dracula to track his movements, treating her like a human walkie-talkie, which only gets worse as her vampiric curse progresses.

    The heroes have slowly destroyed all of Drac’s London hideouts, forcing him to flee back to Transylvania. Determined to put a stop to this, the group gives chase with Mina in tow – half victim, half asset. It’s her insight that leads them to the right path in time. At the castle, Van Helsing destroys the three vampire women, and the others intercept Dracula in his coffin on the road just before he can escape. In a final violent confrontation, Jonathan manages to cut Dracula’s head off just as the sun is setting, and his monstrous body crumbles to dust. Sadly, Quincey has been mortally wounded and dies. But with Drac’s death, Mina, who was THIS CLOSE to succumbing to vampire cooties, is freed from their psychic bond and order is restored.

    We know this because in the epilogue, Mina and Jonathan have had a son, named after the men who helped bring down Count Dracula. And everyone presumably lives happily ever after, except for all the people who died horribly.

    So before we take our own stab at the Count, let's get our bearings. Irish novelist Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897. The 19th century was drawing to a close and the world looked very different than it ever had before. The British Empire was at its height, industrialisation had transformed society, Darwin had blown up everyone's worldview, and women were starting to demand basic human rights. It was chaos, I tell you. Chaos!

    These right-demanding women were part of the first wave of feminism, and known to their Victorian peers as “New Women”. You may remember the season 2 episode about Sarah Whitehead, the ghost of a Georgian-era spinster who still haunts the Bank of England today. The New Woman emerged as a late-Victorian reaction to the confining gender roles that doomed women like poor Sarah.

    The term "New Woman" was coined in 1894 by writer Sarah Grand to describe independent women seeking radical social change. The New Woman wanted nothing to do with the Cult of Domesticity, which confined women to being passive angels of the house and removed them from public spheres.

    Instead, she wanted education, career opportunities, property rights, sexual autonomy, and control over her own life. The New Woman did revolutionary stuff like... riding a bicycle. Yeah, it turns out bicycles were vitally important to the feminist movement. They gave women unprecedented mobility and forced the issue of more practical clothing, and eventually even… [gasp] pants.

    So you can bet your bloomers that the New Woman was hugely controversial. Doctors claimed that education would damage our reproductive organs. The Catholic Church warned that higher education threatened "traditional womanhood." People worried that women’s increasing independence would lead to the downfall of civilisation itself. The intense public debates surrounding this first wave of feminism became known as “The Woman Question”, which is very funny to me. Imagine a world where we all get together to debate what to do about men and all the stuff they want. Ha!

    It's definitely worth mentioning that the New Woman was primarily a white, middle-class phenomenon. Working-class women, immigrants, and women of colour were largely excluded from this movement. Higher education was still a luxury even for upper-class women, and inspiring calls to join the workforce are less enticing if you’ve already been working outside the home for economic survival all along.

    Dracula – the book, not the vampire – actually directly references the New Woman, but in a bit of a cheeky way. Mina writes in her journal about eating so much at tea she would’ve shocked even a New Woman. Then she admires Lucy sleeping sweetly across the room and imagines a time that these crazy feminist writers will suggest that men should actually see a woman sleeping before they propose marriage! Imagine! Then she snarks that the New Woman would probably do the proposing herself, anyway, basically dismissing the entire concept.

    To really understand why independent women terrified Victorian society so much, we need to talk about Social Degeneration Theory – which is really just 19th-century racism and classism dressed up in a lab coat.

    When Darwin’s On The Origin of Species came out and evolution began to be more widely considered a valid scientific theory, it really freaked people out. By theorising that we’re descended from apes, it blurred the line between human and animal. It also spawned a number of other related theories, all vaguely based around Darwinian concepts. If we accept that species can evolve, wouldn’t it also be true that a species, including humans, can devolve?

    Enter Social Degeneration Theory, which suggested that civilisation was in biological decline due to inherited traits and “bad habits.”

    Industrialisation kicked off urbanisation in a big way, creating crowded cities with poor working-class housing and sanitation. Conditions like foetal alcohol syndrome and congenital syphilis were prevalent, but medical experts didn’t have enough information about them. It certainly appeared that these might actually be hereditary behavioural problems, leading naturally to the conclusion that corrupt moral behaviour in one generation caused mental illness and disease in the next.

    Social Degeneration Theory was a blend of pseudo-science and social prejudice, and unfortunately, it had staying power. It became the intellectual foundation for eugenics, scientific racism, and, oh, Naziism. Cool!

    So what does this have to do with women? Everything. The theory positioned women's sexuality as both a symptom and cause of societal decline. A sexually “pure” woman was civilisation's cornerstone – she held nice, honest households together and birthed strong, healthy babies. A sexually autonomous woman, on the other hand, was sure to bring about the end of humanity.

    Dracula – the vampire, not the book – literally embodies these anxieties about degeneration. He's a foreigner who infects English women with a bodily fluid, transforming them into violent sexual predators. The novel equates female sexual desire with animalism and disease. Van Helsing and his dude crew aren’t just fighting a vampire – they’re fighting to preserve the gender status quo, and Mina, who’s eschewed the New Woman as too forward, is the figurehead they rally behind.

    But despite her pooh-poohing the movement, it’s important to note that both Mina and Lucy embody some aspects of the New Woman. Lucy expresses sexual desire, which we’ll talk about in a moment, and Mina is purposely applying herself to build up her professional skills. She already works as a schoolmistress, and now she’s learning shorthand and typing so she can assist her husband at his law practice. What’s interesting, though, is how the book rewards these two female characters for their small stabs at autonomy.

    Lucy begins as the quintessential Victorian maiden – beautiful, sweet, and so socially desirable that three men propose to her in a single day. She's the perfect sacrifice-in-waiting: blonde, innocent, and utterly marriageable. But beneath her proper, pure exterior lurks something threatening – desire.

    After the triple proposal, Lucy writes a letter to Mina that reveals her fatal flaw. She expresses her true devastation that she has to hurt two of the men she cares about deeply by accepting another: “Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble? But this is heresy, and I must not say it.”

    This was indeed Victorian heresy. Lucy doesn't just want to be chosen; she wants agency, options, and perhaps most dangerously, multiple partners.

    The punishment for such thoughts begins when she starts sleepwalking around like a real skank. For real, though, that’s how Victorians would’ve interpreted it – female sleepwalking was historically associated with sexual looseness and uncontrolled female bodies, and wandering around in nothing but a nightie would have been positively scandalous during a time of many, many layers of clothing.

    These nighttime wanderings take her straight to the Westenra family graveyard, where Dracula first attacks her. In Victorian literature, you're never just sleepwalking through a cemetery – you're practically whispering, “Come hither” to Satan himself.

    As Lucy weakens in the wake of her nighttime vamp attacks, the men around her scramble to save her through a series of blood transfusions. Arthur, her fiancé, goes first, but the rest of the men – including Van Helsing – also give her blood, although they don’t tell Arthur about it. To be clear, these transfusions are definitely coded as sexual exchanges – the men who loved her are literally putting themselves inside her, one after another. 

    Later, Arthur says that he believes that he and Lucy’s blood being joined together truly made them married in God’s eyes. So ironically, Lucy's polyamorous fantasy came true, but only as she was dying and without her consent.

    Despite these “marriages,” Lucy deteriorates. Without explaining himself, Van Helsing begins to employ mysterious folk cures, including placing garlic flowers around Lucy’s room and neck. While conscious, Lucy clings to them tightly, trying to be a good girl. Unconscious and awake to her increasingly corrupt nature, she flings them from herself. In her final moments, Lucy’s two sides battle for her body – alternating between her normal sweet self and her predatory, sexualised self. She begs Arthur for a final kiss that he almost provides, only to be flung away by Van Helsing, who’s now convinced of what she’s become –  a “voluptuous” undead creature.

    When the men find vampire Lucy a week after her human death, she's carrying a child she's been feeding upon – a grotesque inversion of Victorian maternal ideals. Instead of nurturing children, she consumes them. Instead of being passive and desirable, she actively hunts, which repulses them. Her “sweetness and purity” transform into “voluptuous wantonness.” The men, who were so eager to marry her, no longer call her Lucy. They refer to her as “the Thing” – she’s transgressed so far beyond acceptable femininity that they no longer recognise her as human.

    The resolution of Lucy’s punishment for daring to have a sexuality is Victorian sexual politics at its most transparent – she must be violently corrected through male intervention. The staking scene is disturbingly sexual:

    “The Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam. But Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it…”

    This is sexual violence disguised as heroism. Arthur, compared to a hypermasculine Norse god, penetrates the writhing, screaming Lucy until she's subdued. The act is completed by decapitation (where they’re quite literally separating her pure mind from her corrupt body) and filling her mouth with garlic, figuratively silencing her. And it’s only through this brutal triple act – penetration, decapitation, silencing – that Lucy is returned to her “unequalled sweetness and purity.”

    The message couldn't be clearer: female sexual agency requires violent correction. Where Dracula is eventually killed through symbolic castration, Lucy faces symbolic rape – the former threat to maleness eliminated, the threat to proper femininity punished and purified.

    Lucy Westenra's true sin wasn't being attacked by a vampire – it was daring to voice desires beyond Victorian limitations. Just like so many of the fictional women we discuss on this show, her character arc is a perfect cautionary tale: from innocent maiden with secret longings; to victim who was asking for it, the way she was mostly undressed; to blood-drained invalid; to sexually-aggressive monster; and finally to violently mutilated corpse. That shock is exactly the point – male-controlled female sexuality is the only acceptable outcome for Victorian readers wanting a return to normalcy.

    Lucy’s destruction isn’t just a punishment – it’s a ritual of restoration. For the men who loved her, driving a stake through her heart isn’t only about saving her soul. It’s about reclaiming their power, reasserting control, and reestablishing order. What better way to bounce back from a crisis of masculinity than to gang up, wield your phallic weapon, and symbolically purify the woman who made you feel things? Bros before hoes, am I right?

    It’s no coincidence that after this scene, the boys are back in business – bonded, decisive, and ready to chase Dracula out of London and back to his Transylvanian lair. This is the moment they stop being anxious suitors and become righteous crusaders.

    Lucy, in other words, wasn’t just offed – she was offered.

    If purifying Lucy is what it takes for the boys to feel like men again, I’ve got some very bad news about what’s coming for the other women of Dracula.

    And believe me — it’s enough to make your blood boil.

    [MUSIC]

    Steph: It’s time for lights out at the Paranormal Pajama Party. You know, Dracula isn’t just the most famous vampire – he’s the prototype for nearly every other bloodsucker that came after him. There’s so much graveyard dirt to dig through in this novel that I had to bring in a little help from my favourite Dracula-inspired monster.

    Over to you, sir.

    "One podcast episode! Two podcast episodes! Ah-ah-ah!"

    That’s right, it’s a two-parter.

    To learn more about Dracula, the New Woman, or the time Thomas Jefferson got so upset about degeneration theory that he insisted on sending a stuffed moose to France, check out my sources in the show notes.

    Also, guess what? I started a newsletter! It’s called Lights Out, and it’s chock-full of more whispers, warnings, and weird women from the Paranormal Pajama Party podcast. My first post is about how Willy Wonka is absolutely a witch. Or at least the only example of male hagsploitation I can think of. You can read it now and subscribe to future newsletters at paranormalpajamaparty.substack.com.

    I’ll be back in two weeks with more Dracula-related spine-tingling tales and critical discussion. Next time: Mina Murray and the men.

    In the meantime, don’t forget: Ghosts have stories. Women have voices. Dare to listen.

Lucy Westenra:
the perfect Victorian sacrifice

Lucy Westenra begins the novel as Victorian society's golden girl – beautiful, sweet, and so desirable that three men propose to her in a single day. She's blonde, innocent, and utterly marriageable. Basically, she's every Victorian mother's dream daughter-in-law. But beneath this perfect exterior lurks something that reeks of the New Woman and would have sent contemporary readers straight to their fainting couches: genuine sexual desire.

After receiving her triple proposal, Lucy writes to her friend Mina with a confession that seals her doom: "Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?" This polyamorous fantasy wasn't just unconventional – it was Victorian heresy of the highest order.

The punishment for such scandalous thoughts begins immediately. Lucy starts sleepwalking through graveyards in nothing but her nightgown – behaviour that would have been interpreted as the Victorian equivalent of posting thirst traps on Instagram. These nighttime wanderings lead directly to her encounter with Dracula because apparently having desires is literally asking for evil to waltz into your life.

Social Degeneration Theory:
pseudo-science meets peak Victorian anxiety

The anxieties surrounding the New Woman weren't just cultural – they had a shiny veneer of “science” thanks to Social Degeneration Theory. This intellectual train wreck emerged after Darwin's work on evolution and basically suggested that if we could evolve, couldn't we also... devolve? 

The theory positioned women's sexuality as both a symptom and cause of civilisation's supposed decline. A sexually “pure” woman was civilisation's cornerstone, while a sexually autonomous woman was basically the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rolled into one bicycle-riding broad. Dracula literally embodies these fears – a foreign invader who infects proper English ladies with his bodily fluids, transforming them into sexually aggressive predators. It’s… not subtle.

The "cure" for female desire
(spoiler: it's violence)

Once Lucy becomes a vampire, she embodies everything Victorian society feared about unleashed female sexuality. She's no longer the passive, nurturing ideal – she's actively predatory. The men who once adored her can barely recognise her as human, which tells you everything about how narrow their definition of acceptable womanhood really was.

What happens next is where Stoker's sexual politics become impossible to ignore. The staking scene is loaded with violent sexual symbolism, and the aftermath is equally telling. Suddenly, the male characters are energised, bonded, and ready to take on the world. Lucy's violent “purification” doesn't just restore her to sweetness – it restores their sense of masculine authority. It's almost like the whole thing was designed to make them feel better about themselves.

Why this still matters: the patriarchy bites

Dracula isn't really about vampires – it's about Victorian men having a collective nervous breakdown over the possibility that women might want things. The novel's obsession with female vampires (a whopping 75% of the bloodsuckers are women) reflects deep-seated anxieties about changing gender roles and women's increasing independence.

Lucy Westenra's tragic journey – from innocent maiden to blood-drained victim to sexually aggressive monster to violently mutilated corpse – serves as the ultimate cautionary tale.

As we’ve heard a lot on this show, the real horror in classic literature often isn't the supernatural monsters – it's the very human fears and prejudices lurking beneath the surface. Dracula remains genuinely terrifying not because of its vampire, but because it reveals a society so threatened by female autonomy that it would rather see women destroyed than free.

And that's scarier than any cape-wearing count could ever be, even if he can crawl face-down down a wall like a lizard.

Sources

Stephanie Summar
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