Arts and Humanities Commons^™

“Mirrors Can Give Us Space To Imagine…” Representations Of Gender And Sexuality In Bbc’S Dracula (2020), Riana S. Slyter

Theses and Dissertations

What follows discusses how BBC’s Dracula uses character representations, scripted dialogue, and narrative to challenge and perpetuate the dominant ideologies of our society. Dracula exposes the tensions in the growing cultural acceptance of, but also increased resistance to, the fluidity of gender and sexuality in contemporary western culture. I contextualize representations of women and queer characters in Dracula with the broader issues of gender and sexuality in our current socio-political environment. Queer horror looks at Dracula as a text that arouses cultural anxieties concerning sexuality, while also attempting to illustrate fear within queer communities and subcultures. In many ways, the …

Recording Angels: Examining Female Narrators In Vampire Fiction And Film, Jacqueline T. Bashaw

College Honors Program

Authors of vampire fiction often grapple with the shifting gender norms of the late nineteenth century. They explore these shifting tensions through the creation of complex narrative structures, some of which incorporate female narrators. By making these women narrators, these authors carefully consider female perspectives and the authority women can wield, both as narrators in their respective texts, and as women in late nineteenth-century British society who were confined to rigid gender roles. The narrative tension that arises between the narrator and the text then allows these authors to use literature to explore and theorize about broader societal tensions.

This …

Psychosexualism In Victorian Literature: A Psychoanalysis Of Jane Eyre And Dracula, Heather Marie Ward

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

My thesis consists of historical facts and literary analysis and is made up of three chapters. In the first chapter, I look at two varying elements of psychosexualism, the emotional and the physical, and discuss how each can be applied to Jane Eyre and Dracula. The chapter also contains an explanation for the term psychosexualism and provides a brief history of: the Victorian notion of hysteria and spermatorrhea, the twentieth-century classifications of love and sex addiction, as well as the twenty-first-century to Histrionic Personality Disorder and Sexual Sadism Disorder. The second chapter provides an analysis of Jane Eyre, specifically looking …