성별화된 몸, 그 의미와 잉여의 두께 ― 브램 스토커의 『드라큘라』

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to reinterpret Bram Stoker's Dracula(1897) and highlight the descriptions of, and overall emphasis on the female victims and the actual feeding on their blood. Most critical accounts agree that vampirism both expresses and distorts an original sexual energy, all the while using 'blood' to symbolize sexuality, sperm, and capitalist consumption. These issues are especially apparent in the female characters of Lucy and Mina, two exceptionally beautiful and intelligent women and victims of Dracula's attack. As a reflection of the wave of 'New Women', the two friends, who are described as angels, discuss taboo subjects such as "Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all trouble?"(67) Because of this portrayal, Dracula's attack on Lucy and Mina are justified due to the threat of the women losing their femininity and their perception as the 'Proper Lady' or 'Angel' that was the ideal of feminine behavior in 18th and 19th century Great Britain. With Dracula's attack of Lucy, the novel highlights the overt sexualization of his feeding on their blood. In this respect, Dracula's gender, which is ambiguous throughout the novel to allow for his feeding, as both consumption and as sexual act, on both male and female victims, to further provoke the reader's or main characters' anxiety and hatred. Dracula's sex, therefore, must be made into one that looks just like readers' and the main characters' own. By this reason, Dracula is indicated as 'a man', although 'he' has a talent to turn into everything. In his attack on Lucy, Dracula becomes the gendered male and master over his female victim. In this respect, Lucy becomes an overly desired property. Lucy's victimization and ultimate destruction furthers the male fantasies of conquest and domination of valuable property. In the novel female characters including the female vampires are described persistently as the gendered body on the contrast of male characters. This shows the distribution of power in the relationship between men and women beyond the women as the gendered body. Men must have created a way to make women inferior to them to interpret women who have no energy but only consumptive brain. This interpretation may have been able to divide women into 'others' unlike men. Underneath the dichotomy of male and female, natural and unnatural, human and nonhuman, there exists ultimate distinction between self and other. This is why the female image is maximized as the gendered body.