“hmm so these women abandon their ‘motherly’ duties of raising children and staying in the home

More than that! When Lucy is turned into a vampire, she feeds on children. She turns into the very opposite of the motherly feminine ideal. The same is true of Dracula’s brides, who feed on a baby in one of the early chapters. Dracula, by contrast, feeds on adults. He shows an interest in Jonathan (bisexual? Eww, that’s not natural!—side note, Stoker himself was likely bi) but most of his attention is focused on women like Lucy and Mina. The expectation of a gentleman being a chivalrous protector of ladies is inverted.

There’s also the fact that Lucy, who early in the book expresses her wish to marry all three of the men who proposed to her:

Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?

It’s the very sexually-forward woman who ends up succumbing to vampirism and being killed for it. But not before receiving the bodily fluids from all three of those propositioners—plus van Helsing. The sexual undertones of the blood transfusions are hardly subtle, but this also ties into another major theme of the book, which is how powerful modern science and technology can be as a tool to defeat strange unnatural superstition.

We’ve recently been doing a Dracula bookclub over at [email protected], reading through each diary entry/letter/newspaper clipping on the day it is set. We are, as we speak, amid the section between when Lucy has died and arisen as a vampire, but before she has her final death at the hands of the crew of light. In fact, as soon as I’m done with this thread I’m gonna go and do today’s reading, and I think that might be Lucy’s last. edit: I was wrong. Lucy unlives for another night…or two…