Rise of the vampires

Like all of the other reviews, the San Jose Mercury News (free registration required) loved Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian. But the review also contained this:

If you've never read ``Dracula,'' that great, clumsy novel by Bram Stoker, you really should go do it. And don't think because you've seen any number of film versions of the story that you've really gotten at its creepy essence. The vampire legend reaches back to antiquity, but because it's really about our fear of and fascination with sex, it seems to crop up most in times of repression or anxiety. That may be why it got its definitive treatment from Stoker at the end of the Victorian era. And why the age of AIDS has seen a charnel-houseful of cold-blooded but hot vampires. Think of Lestat and his cohorts in Anne Rice's novels, and the broody dudes Angel and Spike and the femmes très fatales Darla and Drusilla on ``Buffy the Vampire Slayer.'' ``Buffy'' put a feminist spin on the vampire story, which in Stoker's hands had been about imperiled virgins and their doughty male defenders.

There's a lot that is right about the above passage. But the truth is the women in Stoker's Dracula are as much feminists in their way as the characters in Buffy. In several passages, the women are referred to as among the class of "New Woman." From Dracula, Chapter 8:

Lucy is asleep and breathing softly. She has more color in her cheeks than usual, and looks, oh so sweet. If Mr. Holmwood fell in love with her seeing her only in the drawing room, I wonder what he would say if he saw her now. Some of the `New Women' writers will some day start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or accepting. But I suppose the `New Woman' won't condescend in future to accept. She will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will make of it too! There's some consolation in that.

Lucy came from the upper class, of course, which helped give many of the New Women their freedom to behave outside of the societal norms. With her entries on being loved and wanting to love three different men, in another time Lucy would have been at the forefront of the sexual revolution. Mina represented the growing number of women at the end of the 19th century taking employment outside of the home. She worked as an assistant school teacher before her marriage, but she planned to continue working after her marriage as an assistant to her solicitor husband. And throughout the hunt for Count Dracula, it is Mina who supplies most of the rational decisions and quick wits. This post is longer than I intended it to be. But I could not let the description of Stoker's female characters as "imperiled virgins" go unanswered. Lucy and Mina were many things, but they were never as hapless as the Mercury News implies.