Date of Award
2024
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
English
First Advisor
Cheryl Price
Second Advisor
Jason Price
Abstract
Charlotte Brontë’s early Victorian novel Jane Eyre (1847) enjoys a steady history of feminist interpretations. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) is perhaps the best-known. Andrew Weiler sees Jane Eyre as a feminist Christian bildungsroman, and Micael Clarke finds the “feminist ethic” in the Grimms’ “Cinderella” tale in Jane Eyre (708).
However, Bram Stoker’s late Victorian novel Dracula (1897) has generated more varied responses, ranging from ambivalence, as noted by Carol Senf, to highly feminist, to highly anti-feminist. Feminist readings include that of Stephanie Demetrakopoulos, who remarks, “Stoker’s attempt at feminism in this novel is explicit” (104), and other critics, including Karen Winstead and Jordan Kistler, who assert their interpretations by analyzing Mina, Van Helsing, and Jonathan. Alternately, Phyllis Roth notes that Mina “holds in contempt” the ‘New Woman’” (113); Victoria Margree and Bryony Randall note, “Dracula has gained a reputation for being one of the most misogynistic texts in a frequently anti-feminist genre” (221). Finally, Nina Auerbach finds that Dracula and later vampire stories “collaborat[ed] to restore the patriarchy they had menaced” (“Introduction: Living with the Undead”).
Entering this debate, I argue for a feminist interpretation of Dracula that is reached by an approach not yet identified by current scholarship: comparing the pairs of women from Jane Eyre to those of Dracula as counterparts: Jane to Mina, and Bertha to Lucy. Drawing from feminist theory of Gilbert and Gubar, Sara Ahmed, and Stacy Alaimo, I examine characters’ wills and effects of their environments; I argue that the literal and figurative vampiric infection in both novels can be read as a type of environmental illness in which “blood… is a poison” (Hughes 194) and in which the true infection is not madness associated with vampiric women, but rather, the masculinist social domination that labeled it so.
Recommended Citation
Howard, Bethany, "Madwomen in Attics, Madwomen in Tombs Feminist Counterparts in Jane Eyre and Dracula" (2024). Theses. 24.
https://roar.una.edu/theses/24
