Earn Transferable Credit & Get your Degree. [3] Lydia, the heroine of Trades of the Flesh, proudly announces to her now-married lover that, thanks to her erotica, she has obtained a veritable room of her own in which to write: “this place might not be much […], but it’s mine, or as close to mine as I can get” (Booth 302). [2] For critiques of Twilight’s sexual politics, see, e.g., Jennings and Wilson; Kane; Platt. Stoker, Dacre and Ian Holt. At the boring end, Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape, Essex’s Dracula in Love, and Elaine Bergstrom’s Mina (1994) all cast Jonathan Harker as far more repressed than his wife ever is, although Saberhagen’s Harker is never more than a stopgap before Mina reunites with Dracula. Sturgeon-Dodsworth 175-76), for the greater good, Dracula in Love and the other Dracula romances insist that the heroine’s monstrous erotic past is the necessary prologue for her marital future—even if, as in Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape, true erotic satisfaction only happens when Mina enters her undead future with the Count. During this time, Harker is kept as a prisoner of Dracula. Mina, bright and a heart of gold, pushed her way through the power of Dracula and maintained her inner holiness. One night, amid feelings of uneasiness toward Mina’s recent behaviour, Van Helsing and Seward break into her room to find Jonathan unconscious and Mina drinking blood from a gash in Dracula’s chest. You can test out of the Unlike Mina, whose discovery of her sexual potential drives the Dracula-Mina romance plot, Lucy appears to model a late-twentieth or twenty-first-century model of women’s sexual autonomy. The disadvantaged male Other is himself objectified in the Victorian frame of reference, and thus becomes an appropriate mate to the women who occupy an analogous position. 107-33. While in some ways these figures resemble the so-called “New Hero” of late twentieth-century romance, a self-assured figure who winds up exploring the possibility of “emotional connection” with the female protagonist (Zidle 26, 27), the relationships, figured as equal partnerships, may or may not involve sexual activity, and often redefine the nature of mental and physical strength. Far from celebrating the substitution of “romantic passion” for a lost religious faith (Hallab 121; cf. A final note tells us that seven years later, all is well. For the brutalized heterosexual women in these novels, then, full autonomy requires the advent of a new masculinity, often represented as exotic or otherwise non-normative. Still, she is consigned to wait at Dr. Seward's while the men seek out and destroy the many coffins that Count Dracula has imported and hidden in properties around London. “It felt like nothing I had ever felt before,” she muses of her own interior, “soft and smooth, and empty and full at the same time, a moist cushion of a cave” (Essex 46). Once fully awakened by [End Page 2] the vampire, Mina’s experiences emphasize erotic pleasure, romantic egalitarianism, and individual liberty in the context of her free choice of motherhood and monogamy, in sharp contradistinction to her Victorian inheritance, which insists on male control of women’s bodies—in bed and out of it. 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