Discuss the following statement in light of ‘Dracula’: Women must either conform to society or face social expulsion.’

Conservative ideals of women appraise conventional piety to encourage such ideology, and in doing so, naturally demonise any contrary versions of womanhood to the status quo. The archetypal chaste women, at the forefront of the Victorian epoch, clashed with the dawn of the ‘new women’ bought by the fin de Siecle period. Most evidently Harker’s dichotomous portrayal of Mina Murray, the ideal modest Christian wife , with Dracula’s hyper-sexualised “voluptuous” wives, alludes to the conventional Gothic trope of a damsel in distress versus the rebellious femme fetal. Stoker, being a proponent of Victorian Christian orthodoxy aims to channel the Gothically characteristic themes of fear and terror, to warn society against the dangers transgression results in. Indeed, the beastly atavistic depiction of the vampire woman “eating a baby”, enforces this terror, likening immodest women to monsters.