O’Hara 2QSQ #12 – 11:20:23

PART 1: PREPARING FOR DISCUSSION

SOURCE IDEAS:

“The figure stopped, and at the moment a ray of moonlight fell between the masses of driving clouds, and showed in startling prominence a dark haired 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…My own heart grew cold as ice, and I could hear the gasp of Arthur, as we recognized the features of Lucy Wesenra. Lucy Westenraa, but yet how changed.The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness”(199-200).

“And the physical descriptions of Lucy reflect this greater ambivalence: early in the story, when Lucy is not yet completely vampirized, Dr. Seward describes her hair “in its usual sunny ripples”…; later, when the men watch her return to her tomb, Lucy is described as “a dark-haired woman”. The conventional fair/dark split, symbolic of respective moral casts, seems to be unconscious here, reflecting the ambivalence aroused by the sexualized female. Not only is Lucy the more sexualized figure, she is the more rejecting figure, rejecting two of the three “sons” in the novel.The section of the book ends with her destruction, not by Dracula but by the man whom she was to marry” (549).

SYNTHESIZING COMMENT/ANALYSIS:

These two passages come from the novel and the criticism pieces from the back of the book with the article “Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stroker’s Dracula” by Phyllis A. Roth. I found these two interesting and converging on this idea of monstrosity in this well-known theme of dark vs. light and the flipping of characteristics with good vs. evil. Still, this added layer comes in with ideas surrounding women’s sexuality as monstrous. From the novel, it is clear that Lucy is more flirtatious, perhaps sexually forward, than Mina. When we see her take on the form of a vampire, that is the characteristic emphasized, making that significant distinction between sweetness and purity and cruelty and wantonness, which I thought was something interesting to look into further.

QUESTION:

I am also interested in looking more into the idea raised in the second quote regarding the significance of Arthur being the one to kill Lucy or release her from this Un-Dead in-between state — also, why the Professor is so intent on his doing so. Also, might there be a critique on why Lucy is the first female Vampire victim as opposed to Mina, and what that might say about this idea of the anxieties toward women’s sexuality in the context of monsters?

PART 2: IN-CLASS WRITING RESPONSE (NAME:__________________)