Breaking of Gender Roles in Dracula

With all the talk in the novel surrounding the masculine and the feminine, calling Lucy and Mina “little girl” and the idea that only "the blood of strong men" is useful, and the clear lines that seem to then distinguish them, that Van Helsing loses himself to a “womanly” fit of hysteria in Chapter XIII, laughing and crying, unable to control himself and his emotions. He even goes so far as to close the blinds so that no one outside of the carriage could see him in this state, for fear of being judged, not just for his laughing after a funeral, but also for his sort of “feminine” moment of weakness, something not expected of the strong Dutchman, the foreign hero and expert that has swooped in to save Lucy and the people of London from the evil Count.

Stoker here seems to be playing with gender roles and stereotypes, questioning them in his novel as they were being questioned in Victorian society, as seen with the rise of the New Woman that was mentioned earlier on and then again with Van Helsing, who Seward even tries to “be stern with him, as one is to a woman under the circumstances”. Although the roles seemed to be pretty rigid in Victorian times, Stoker seems to suggest that those boundaries were not as strong as people would like to think, as he plays with, inverts and even reverses certain aspects within his characters. Women were not just innocent, pure “little squirrels” as evidenced by Lucy’s vampiric/sexual awakening and Mina’s venturing into the masculine working world with her husband, and men were not always strong and heroic, as Jonathan weakens to both the female vampires and the Count, and then becomes almost entirely unstable. There is this sense that the ideal that society lives by is one that cannot be lived up to, despite the fact that it is expected of all the characters, and when Dracula arrives, the facade shatters, as the seductive vampire picks apart all the stereotypes one by one in both the men and the women, but it is also then revealed as a facade to begin with.