Honors Thesis Archive

AuthorKathryn Wetterstroem
TitleSucks to Be a Woman: Shifting Responses to Feminism from Dracula to The Historian
DepartmentEnglish
AdvisorsMichael Mattison, Scot Hinson, and Brooke Wagner
Year2021
HonorsUniversity Honors
Full TextView Thesis (492 KB)
AbstractReading Dracula, you are given characters who show personalities which a modern reader would deem strong and agentic qualities, but the men in Dracula and perhaps Stoker himself, do not seem to think that way. The venom of the vampire is like a parasite, making these women more “masculine” but also sickly and animalistic. They are turned into monsters which in the end must die, as with Lucy, or be cleansed like Mina, likely out of commentary on the types of equality desired by the New Woman and the stereotypes created for these women. Dracula made the vampire popular and created a character which is memorialized even today, but it is flawed in more ways than one, the villainization and victimization being such a flaw. As a response, Elizabeth Kostova commented on these flaws. The Historian is a completely different story, but the villain is mostly the same. He has the same origins and the name at least, but this Dracula doesn’t care about who he hunts and really, he is more of an intellectual monster than an animalistic one. The women are not the ones being attacked by the author for their mixed masculinity and femininity; they are free to be just people living in their own times and reaping the benefits of the feminist progression they are existing with. The Historian uses adaptation to let these women act in such a way while connecting to a story of old that worked against persons such as the new woman. The thesis discusses how adaptations, such as The Historian, have the power to progress classic stories into a contemporary frame, vampire stories having an increased opportunity due to the immortality of the characters at hand, and demonstrate the shift in society and feminism through the generations. Through The Historian, such a progressive inter-textual conversation is shown: it progresses Dracula into a contemporary context that speaks to a westernized concept of feminist progression allowing for the women to be further removed from villainization.

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