Female Sexuality During The Victorian Era Essay - 2230 Words

The Victorian era held a strict standard toward the women, especially regarding their responsibilities as home-makers and their expression of sexuality. At the time, woman was considered inferior to her male counterpart in families and her main responsibilities included obeying her husband and bearing and caring for their children. The Victorian society, in general, saw lust and sex as taboo subjects in public. This view was held even stricter against women of the time and society viewed women as not having sexual desires in total; their only desires should be those of their husband’s. (Podonsky) Many novels touched upon this topic of female sexuality in the era, including the infamous Dracula first published in 1897. Dracula is an epistolary novel written by Bram Stoker accounting the move of Count Dracula, the main antagonist, from Transylvania to England to obtain feeding resources and the protagonists’ journey to destroy him. Through vampirism, Bram Stoker expresses in Dracula the discontent of both men and women regarding the constrained female sexuality during the Victorian era by using sexualized female characters and recording male character’s reaction to them. To begin with, Lucy is one of the characters that Stoker uses to show the repressed female sexuality during the Victorian era. At the start of the story, Stoker portrays Lucy as a sweet, innocent, upper-class girl, the representation of how society expected women to behave. Many people fall for Lucy’s charm,Show MoreRelatedThe Victorian And Post World War I1590 Words   |  7 Pagesgoverned by ideas of the sex dichotomy. The division between the two identities of the man and the woman permeated through the Victorian era and developed a template for prospective gender constructs. The Victorian woman, expected to preserve purity and domesticity, was portrayed with a repressed sexuality. 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Gender roles are also determined by the prevailing cultural norms. Gender stereotypes also alters the the attitudes, traits, and behavior patterns of males and females. Gender stereotypes on the basis of sexism, or the prejudiced beliefs that value males over females. Common forms of sexism in today’s society include gender-role expectations, such as expecting women toRead More Sexuality in Aubrey Beardsleys Story of Venus and Tannhà ¤user925 Words   |  4 PagesSexuality in Aubrey Beardsleys Story of Venus and Tannhà ¤user Aubrey Beardsley wrote The Story of Venus and Tannhà ¤user during the fin de sià ¨cle, the end of the Victorian Era. This decadent work, following Baudelaires credo art for arts sake first of all, portrays sex and sexualities in a playful manner. In addition to mocking conventional Victorian moral codes, and parodying pornographic conventions, The Story of Venus and Tannhà ¤user also supports Foucaults idea that the Victorian Era