The Difference Between Good And Evil In Dracula And Frankenstein
The difference between “good” and “evil” is shown with the difference between the women in the novel as they all have different roles.
In Dracula it is shown clearly with the two characters of Mina and Lucy. The former fit the ideals of the Victorian woman while Lucy represents the New Woman. Mina is idealized throughout the novel, as she is an educated woman, whose intelligence is very helpful during the fight against Dracula. She is also loyal to Jonathan as seen in her letters: quote. On the other hand Lucy is seen as more free, especially when it comes to her sexuality. In one of her first letter she laments: “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble? But this is heresy and I must not say it” (p.67), showing how she differs from the social norm of her time as it is not acceptable to have ideals like these. As her sexuality is seen to be evil, she is to be punished for going against the standards of that era. She is later killed by the man who would have become her husband. While in this novel the two women characters seems to be vastly different from each other it is worth noting that it is Lucy, representing the New Woman, who suffer a more fatal fate. According to Carol A. Senf, the approach to women in Dracula “does not stem from his hatred of women in general” but is in fact the characterization of “his ambivalent reaction to a topical phenomenon – the New Woman”(,p.2)
On the contrary, the figure of the woman is absent from Frankenstein. Elizabeth, in Frankenstein, on the other hand is not really present and we only see her from the view of the monster or Victor Frankenstein. She is still shown to represent the pure woman like Mina, however she is not educated like Mina and appears weak. In the end Elizabeth, who embodies a lot of Victorian ideals, still falls victim to the monster and ends up dying, which goes to show that being good will not always save you. But what caused Elizabeth’s death was her link to Frankenstein and she is the one paying for his sins. This show that women can end up becoming evil if they stray from the path of the idealized Victorian Woman.
Women become helpless in front of the evil and their love or lover end up leading to their demise. This is shown in Frankenstein, during the feverish dream of Victor after creating the monster, in which he sees Elizabeth and then his mother. In his dream, Frankenstein “embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death”(p.88). Frankenstein ends up killing Elizabeth by kissing her but this is also similar to the “death” of the two women of Dracula, Mina and Lucy.
The kiss of death that Victor Frankenstein ends up giving to Elizabeth in his dream parallels the kiss of Dracula that turned Lucy and Mina into vampires, leading the former to her death.
