Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman to Stoker’s Dracula: You’ve Come a Long Way Baby, or Have You?

Abstract

Two gothic novels written a century apart, Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman; or Maria (1796) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), grapple with powerful issues in the lives of their characters and their fictional worlds. Both appear as fin de siècle novels, and their anxieties deal with the stability of society and its institutions. In Wrongs these anxieties centre on women’s autonomy, the nature of marriage, and patriarchy’s power. In Dracula they focus on the need to restore Christian belief and establish the institution of marriage as the ultimate reward. In setting these two gothic novels side by side, we see that Wollstonecraft’s 18th-century gothic vision is meant to critique traditional views of women and the patriarchy that supports them; whereas Stoker’s later 19th-century tale looks to re-establish the familiar patterns and institutions of a declining religious and gender status quo.