Gender Roles In The Victorian Era

The Victorian Era, a time period spanning from the early nineteen hundreds to the beginning of the twentieth century, was marked by a set of cultural ideals that greatly differed from today’s standards of living and social interaction. These standards usually concentrated on how one should act in public to uphold their honor and decency. Furthermore, the Victorians considered it inappropriate to mention sex in any shape and form. This tendency is present in the literature of the time. Novelists concealed all sexuality in their novels, which could be removed from print if they were not considered proper. Thus, authors wrote subliminal sexual messages into their novels and used them to to reinforce the importance of purity and proper behavior.
This shift created horrible living conditions with contrasted with the idealized version of society that the Victorian’s imagined. Many women were not able to afford to maintain their children and thus infanticide was common. This and many cases of privileged women committing suicide after killing their children led Victorians to refine their understanding of the motherly instinct. They began to believe that violence and motherhood went hand in hand. What today would be called postpartum depression, at that time was considered mania. This played into Dracula because as Stoker wrote it, there was a great contrast between the nurturing Mina Harker and the child killing vampires when he writes, “If my ears did not deceive me there was a gasp and a low wail, as of a half smothered child. The women closed round” (Stoker 42). However the vampires are not representative of child murderesses. Instead they are a representation of instinct without reason. In the Victorian male’s mind, women were highly unpredictable and could do anything if not constricted by social bounds and bonded to a husband. Unlike Dracula,the female vampires do not have much logic or reason, they do whatever they feel like doing and are only controlled by brute force. Thus Stoker is trying to show the importance of societal bonds in a woman’s
Due to the rise in literacy and the postal revolution women were beginning to understand the importance of rights. Flora Annie Steel, for example, “[became] increasingly disillusioned with the Society’s.... Become a member of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies” (Goodwin 452). She then became a member of a club designed specifically for female authors and worked on feminist literature. Despite the fact that so many women were fighting for the right to vote, the right was not given until after the Victorian Era. This delay occurred because in Victorian culture, women were subservient to men and considered less capable and intelligent than their male peers. There was little opportunity for growth since prior to marriage a woman had to be concerned with being a presentable and proper lady and after marriage her rights and abilities were greatly constricted by her husband and family duties. In the early twentieth century, however, a new generation matured. This generation was accustomed to lower class women working in factories and being social workers and reformists. Thus they were more open to allowing female suffrage than their Victorian counterparts. Although Dracula does not deal with the issues of suffrage, the autonomy shown by the vampires is the type of autonomy that led up to being given the right to vote. The vampire women were not controlled by society or by a man,