Similarly to The Monk and Frankenstein, Dracula deals with birth and pro-creation. This is conveyed through Dracula, who creates vampires through his infectious and venomous bite. As males, both Frankenstein and Dracula demonstrate that man does not need the aid of the female to create a new life. According to John Allen Stevenson, “The tale horrifies because the vampire’s manner of reproduction appears radically different and because it requires the women who already belong to these men” (142). In a sense, these texts highlight deformity of man creating new life as both Frankenstein and Dracula create monstrous and deformed life forms. As Stevenson puts it “Dracula is most fundamentally concerned with both distinguishing the differences between the way vampire “monsters” and “good, brave …show more content…
However, Dracula counteracts this idea with the introduction of the New Woman idea. During the Victorian era, it created debate about gender. Women at this time were seen as submissive to their male counterparts. According to ‘The Woman Question’ in Greenblatt’s work, “Woman was meant to be valued, instead, for other qualities considered especially characteristic of her sex: tenderness of understanding, unworldliness and innocence, domestic affection, and, in various degrees, submissiveness” (1608). Dracula reverses the idea of the ever prevalent “angel in the house” (1608). However, Mina still embodies an aspect of this character through her loyalty to Jonathan. But moreover, it is her choice to stand by Jonathan, which demonstrates her rising power as a woman. John Ruskin in his essay “Of Queen’s Gardens” asserts that men and women “are in nothing alike, and the happiness and perfection of both depends on each asking and receiving from the other and what the other can only give”: the powers of a “true wife,” he felt, made the home “a sacred place”