The Vampire What Boundaries Does the Vampire Threaten...

The Vampire What boundaries does the Vampire threaten? Written by Amanda Turner Discuss possible answers to this question with reference to at least two critical or theoretical essays and at least two tellings of the Dracula story._______________________________________________ The Vampire in Dracula threatens the very existence of Victorian England. Stoker constructs the vampire as an embodiment of threat by surpassing his Gothic novelist predecessors to bring the threat of the Gothic home to Victorian England (Arata 119). This in turn crosses the boundary between what is foreign and what is national; and dually East and West. Dracula is open to many†¦show more content†¦Once infected by Dracula, Lucy becomes sexually overt and aggressive; and is portrayed as a monster and a social outcast. She transforms into the ‘Bloofar Lady and feeds on children making her the maternal antithesis as well as a child molester (Jones, p. 87). In order to rectify Lucy s condition she is sexually overpowered by her fiancee Holmwood; he penetrates her to death with a stake through the chest, a staking which is overtly sexual i n interpretation, as the thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam.........He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper (Stoker p. 241). This sexual innuendo restores the Victorian balance of sexual penetration from the female domain back its accepted station within the male domain. Showalter interprets the killing as a gang rape, done with impressive phallic instrument (p. 181). Those serial transfusions which, while they pretend to serve and protect ‘good women, actually enable the otherwise inconceivable interfusion of the blood that is semenShow MoreRelatedRhetorical Analys is Of Monster 1191 Words   |  5 Pagesbeginning of the book Monster Theory: Reading Culture , entitled â€Å" Monster Culture (Seven Theses) † , Jeffery Jerome Cohen tries his best to detail to his audience why monsters are symbolic of those things which e xist on the edges of culture. What monsters are changes according to the ideas and convention s most disruptive to any given culture at any point in time. In the process of making his argumen t, Cohen uses logos, pathos and ethos to connect with his audience, whom he perceivesRead MoreMetamorphoses Within Frankenstein14861 Words   |  60 Pagesproletariat running amok, or what happens when a man tries to h ave a b aby without a woman. Mary Shelley invites speculation, and in the last g eneration 1 has been rew arded w ith a great d eal of it. How far we wedd ing guests h ave attended to what Frankenstein has to say and how far simp ly and unashamedly bound it to our own purposes is a moot poin t. Still, the fact that it can be — has been — read to mean so many things in its comparatively short lif e is what makes the novel especiallyRead MoreRastafarian79520 Words   |  319 Pagesprivileging of lighter-skinned people was standard practice. Rastas were confronting so many of these long-held notions and so were bound to face a great deal of resistance. What Edmonds manages to do here is offer us a way to appreciate the importance of Rastafarianism as a religious phenomenon that is consistent with much of what happens when religious groups and movements grow and develop. Indeed, there is a remarkable logic to the development of Rasta that deï ¬ es the notion that it is a movement