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Compare Stoker and Carter’s focus on female sexuality
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A comparison between Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' and Angela Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber'
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Compare Stoker and Carter’s focus on female sexuality NO AO2In Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ and Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’, female sexuality is
portrayed as dangerous and useful. Although their portrayal of female sexuality is different,
they both present it as being a product of their society, conditioned to feel a certain way and
abide by specific social rules. In this essay, we will be exploring the way female sexuality is a
condition of the environment and context the women are set in.
Throughout ‘Dracula’, Bram Stoker presents female sexuality as something to fear, making the
female characters dangerously seductive. The weird sisters and Lucy are the main symbols of
this, with Mina being their contrast as an icon for the perfect Victorian woman and the ideal of
male and female spheres. Stoker introduces us to the weird sisters who live in Dracula’s castle
showing them represent all that was seen as wrong with female sexuality. They have the ability
to control a man and use him for their own pleasure, as well as being able to reduce him to
something the Victorian audience would have seen as pathetic. In Ray Cluley’s article “Fearing
Female Sexuality in Dracula” he mentions how “these women have the power to strip a man of
his masculinity” which to a Victorian reader would have been terrifying due to their strict social
expectations of a man being strong and powerful and women being passive to men; In this
scene, the roles are reversed. The fact that a female could so easily reduce a man to submission
simply with their ‘voluptuousness’ and promiscuous sexuality would have been shocking.
Women were meant to be pure and virginal, a complete and utter contrast to the weird sisters
who, to a modern audience, embody raciness, empowerment and the excitement of a female
being able to express herself. In chapter 3, as Harker is being taken over by the women, he says
“I lay quiet, looking out under my eyelashes.” He is passive and allows them to continue with
whatever they want, being feminised and written to sound almost female. Cluley also mentions
how “Harker finds them simultaneously ‘thrilling’ and ‘repulsive’, illustrating a patriarchal
hypocrisy regarding women’s sexuality” which is a perfect summary of the image of the weird
sisters and their meaning in terms of what society would have seen as morally right and wrong.
They are described as sublime characters who thrill Harker, a threat to him because of their
physical ability to emasculate him. On the other hand, Carter presents the females in her short
stories as empowered by their sexuality as we see in “The Company of Wolves” where the girl
“rips off his shirt” and “laughs in his face”. She has some sort of control over her situation and
uses it to her advantage, becoming sexually aware of herself as The Lady is in “The Lady of the
House of Love” who lures men into her house for her own benefit. In some cases, Carter
subverts the passive voice of women in the fairytale genre, sexually liberating them but
arguably still having their sexuality as something to fear.
The importance of physical appearance in relation to female sexuality is seen in both ‘Dracula’
and Carter’s short stories. Carter uses female physical appearance too as the men in some of
her short stories objectify women and value their beauty over everything else. We see this in
‘The Snow Child’ most prominently as the Duke wishes for “a girl was white as snow...as red as
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