The Treatment of Women in Bram Stoker's Dracula Reading Bram Stoker's Dracula, I find the treatment of the two main female characters, Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker, particularly intriguing. These two women are two opposing archetypes created by a society of threatened men trying to protect themselves. Lucy is the archetype of Medusa. She is physically attractive and wins the heart of every man who approaches her (e.g. Arthur, Quincey, Jack and Van Helsing). His main quality is sensual beauty, but his sexual desire is repressed and he is not allowed to communicate. Yet in her there is both the spiritual and the sexual side, and when the long-repressed sexuality finds vent, it explodes and takes over completely. In other words, she is transformed into the completely voluptuous vampire precisely because her sexual side of the personality has been completely buried by her Victorian upbringing. Her repressed self needs such expression that when Dracula arrived, she went to greet him and then invited him home (opening the window for the bat). He is her outlet for sexual expression. When Lucy becomes a vampire herself, John Seward describes her as follows: She looked like Lucy's nightmare as she lay there; the sharp teeth, the voluptuous mouth stained with blood - which made one shudder to see - the whole carnal and non-spiritual appearance, which seemed a diabolical mockery of Lucia's sweet purity (252; ch.16). And for this voluptuous Lucia he has no pity: "the rest of my love turned into hatred and repugnance; if she had then been killed, I could have done it with wild pleasure" (249; ch. 16). But why this attitude? I believe it is the aggressive sexuality that the vampire Lucy displays that... middle of paper... in excluding her from their endeavors, and including her again. However, now that she has been infected with vampire blood and can read Dracula's mind, men fear and need her. They are forced to accept her into the public sphere, but the quest is to finally free her from the evil influence and restore her purity again, that is, transform her back into the virtuous woman who will remain in the domain of the home and pose no threat to men. The end of this novel is the restoration of a world as the Victorians knew it: the vampire destroyed, women freed from their evil sexual desires and kept out of the dangerous world outside their homes, and men safe. and free in a world dominated by men, playing their unique gallant, intelligent and adventurous roles. Text cited Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Ed. Glennis Byron. Peterborough: Broadview, 1998.