#or have I been watching too many of doofenschmirtz's

[qqueenofhades]

This is going to seem really random, but did you ever watch Phineas and Ferb? Seeing your thoughts on Dracula regarding Lucy, particularly about being vulnerable due to societal expectations, my mind keeps going to Dr Doofenschmirtz trapping Perry in the dining car of a train by using societal conventions.

I have not, so I can't speak to any comparison here (though the mental image of Dracula as Dr Doofenschmirtz is making me cackle). However, I did have this post a couple days ago, which was talking about the same exact thing: how gender politics are actually presented in Dracula, vs. how they are assumed to be presented in both popular adaptations and academic analyses. I have definitely encountered the "Dracula is misogynistic because the Victorians were misogynistic and thus Stoker punishes Lucy and rewards Mina for fulfilling their supposed social roles" take a lot before, but as myself and others are pointing out, that angle.... doesn't really exist in the text? Or at least, while elements of the patriarchical Victorian attitude absolutely do exist, they also don't work, or at least don't work more often than they do. As I noted in the other post, every time the men make decisions for Mina in order to "protect" her, it immediately backfires and they need to include her again, and this happens several times. Likewise, even Van Helsing's well-meant attempt to protect Lucy by not telling her OR Mrs. Westenra (RIP) anything is backfiring, because for all his 800 PhDs, he doesn't talk to anyone! He doesn't trust them to understand what he's doing, his most usual partner (Seward) literally runs an insane asylum, and the tension between "rationality" and "insanity" (or rather, the social fear of being perceived as such) is putting them all in a lot more danger than they have to be!

So yeah. It's not that Victorian social conventions and gender/sexual expectations don't exist in the book; obviously they do. And it's not as if there aren't attitudes and interpretations that reflect Stoker's own social class and position, because there are. But it's been nice to see people realizing that Dracula is both a gothic horror novel and a study of traditional Victorian social behaviors and attitudes in a way that often shows them not working! Jonathan is far too painfully middle-class English to kick up a fuss about escaping Drac's castle, even when he realizes that something's up; Van Helsing won't tell anyone the smallest thing that might help them because he's afraid of being thought Insane; the men try to keep Mina out of things to Protect Her and that backfires; Lucy's ordeal of being constantly attacked and victimized by an obsessive, abusive man is clearly characterized as horrible and not at all a case of Tee Hee Blurred Lines; the three men in love with her are not made into some sort of implication that she's a Slut, and all are applauded by the narrative to do everything they can to help. People not listening to the working-class Romanians get straightaway into trouble, because they're English and therefore automatically assume that they know everything.

Anyway, without getting into too many spoilers for the latter half of the novel, I will say that the reason our heroes are ultimately able to pull together and do something about the Count is because they DISCARD all these not-working social ideas and restrictions. They have to talk to each other, they have to share information freely, they have to include Mina and indeed rely predominantly on her, Van Helsing has to come down off his Only I Can Fix This high horse, etc etc. While they're still trying to follow the rules about how to be a Good Victorian, they're pretty much powerless. It's only when they stop doing that (and act in ways that are held up as more admirable and effective by the narrative) that they finally make progress. And because the novel is so carefully written and plotted, with thematic echoes and parallel narratives often within the same day, I don't want to just say "oh it was an accident, Stoker didn't know what he was doing." I like it because it reflects the point I try often to make, as a historian, that just because you know what the overall rules or collective social conventions were in a certain period, you can't assume that they applied to everyone individually without exception, or that they were never challenged or questioned or internally criticized. So just saying that "Dracula as a novel is obviously misogynistic, the end, because the Victorians were misogynistic, the end" misses the point on a lot of levels, and I'm glad that Tumblr is actually getting this. Seeing as it is, uh. Not really known for doing nuance most of the time.