Lucy Westenra - The Bram Stoker's Dracula's Cosmopolitan Daughter of Modernity

Mouthful ain't it?

To say that Lucy Westenra the decoy female lead of Dracula inspires feelings would be about the most obvious thing to say in the world. From her sexy comedic appearance in Dracula Dead and Loving It, to her more dramatic portrayals such as in the first Universal and Hammer Dracula movies, Lucy is a character who appears again and again throughout the history of Dracula movies.

A seemingly innocent girl, she falls prey to Dracula quite early on and is easily hypnotized and desecrated by him. The entirety of the second act of the story is all about trying to save her from the inevitable doom that awaits her.

Charming and funny, one can see why men would love her, why so many would literally give their blood for her. A great lover of people, she’s gabby, friendly and warm and otherwise utterly alive.

While she lacks the wit and profoundity of thought, the wisdom and piety of Mina Harker, she makes up for it in seeming physical beauty, popularity and wealth. If Mina is Betty Cooper, Lucy is Veronica Lodge.

And like Archie, most of the guys have eyes only for Lucy, until she’s well a corpse. At that point everything changes.

But before we get to that there’s two main points we really must attack Lucy on. Two major character flaws that must be torn open and discussed; the first is the fact that she’s a shameless flirt.

Okay, I’ll shame her; she’s a bit of a slut. At least in Victorian terms. In a single day the ‘trio’ as I like to call them (Seward, Arthur and Quincy), all propose to Lucy. All three fell for her, and came to long for her. Certainly, Bram Stoker was poking fun at Austen (the entire York setting, the romance, the drama, it is replete with nods and mocking undertones), however there’s something interesting that he’s doing here.

He’s also setting up Lucy as a kind of opposite to Mina. This sort of differenciation and contrast between the two boils down to this; Mina is pious and traditional, she’s a faithful wife while Lucy is the one who likes to dance, flirt and is more ‘fun’ as some might say.

It is Lucy who pities Seward when she friendzones him, agrees to kiss Quincy after having consented to be Arthur’s wife. In a way, she’s showing thematically how susceptible to the ‘outsider’ to the seduction of the ‘devil’ or ‘dragon’ she is. Certainly she can be sweet, but she’s also superficial and not very faithful to the man she loves.

Did she choose Arthur because he stirs her soul and heart or because he’s safe? While I prefer to read the book from an idealistic perspective and think she really did love Arthur, every once in awhile doubt creeps into my mind. I wonder; if she can claim to love only Arthur, how could she go around snogging with another man, his best friend with nary a thought to how Arthur might react?

It is strange, and weirdly very modern. Doubtless the fools out there would say they’re in a ‘poly’-something relationship except they’re not. Arthur is entering into this relationship as a member of the nobility. That is to say he’s a landed gent who hopes to continue his lineage, he’s looking for a mother to his children, not an ‘exciting roll in the hay’. Quincy was looking for a wife also but let it go, and yet he also kisses her so he’s not without blame.

Lucy even jokes half serious about marrying all three, which should send some alarm bells. Commitment is not her strong suit. She’s ultimately quite flawed and foolish like a lot of young women. One can honestly see in her the average ‘white liberal’ woman of the modern day Anglosphere.

And yet there’s something very dear, very tragic about her. She IS beautiful in a way, and does have some lovely tender moments.

The second major flaw that she has other than her semi-adulterous nature is the fact that she has trouble with faith in a way. This may sound odd but it is interlocked with the first, as the faithless are often those who struggle with faith in others (and in the divine).

Van Helsing asks her to have confidence in his wisdom, in his intelligence and yet Lucy hesitates and struggles a few times, disliking the stench of the garlic. She also trusts in her foolish short-sighted mother with whom she shares a strangely antagonistic and supportive relationship with all at once (antagonistic in that thematically it is her mother who ultimately dooms her).

But still Lucy persists in being one of the sweetest people around to Mina, to Seward, to Van Helsing.

This sweetness and I imagine innocent nature is twisted once she becomes a vampire. Once she has become the fourth of Dracula’s monstrous brides, she takes to preying upon the children of London. Hounding them, devouring their blood and otherwise acting not unlike a serial-killer or rapist.

The Vampire’s Bite is rape. Therefore what should we suppose she is doing to them in a literary manner? This in spite of her doubtless love for children.

One could perhaps make a commentary here about how the reporting of rape cases involving female school-teachers has suddenly shot up throughout the Anglosphere and other parts of the Occident. It is very peculiar, but it seems that still some persist in trying to normalize this sort of predatory behaviour.

Lucy’s behaviour post-vampirism is therefore interesting thematically if horrifying. Between her and Mina one could detect almost a key political difference, a major split that need not be defined (as everyone knows where I’m going here). Tragic and now devoid of her sweetness, Lucy seeks to target Arthur is stopped and ultimately destroyed.

But here we must also draw attention to a major part of the story; Arthur is a landed gent, with the name Arthur the same as King Arthur. That great hero to boys everywhere in the Anglo-Celtic world, whom is an icon in some ways of innocence and fidelity, piety and courage. And it is he that the vampire-Lucy targets specifically.

Certainly, he’s her lover but still, if she can tarnish him and what he represents she’ll have tarnished something sacred of the masculine or so it feels. What is more come to think of it; she’s unfaithful and cosmopolitan just as Gwenevere is, who can be contrasted with the other women Arthur gets with in the myths (sisters not counting) who mother his children who are at least mostly faithful to him.

It happens also that Lucy is destroyed by Van Helsing the oldest member in the group, something that bears noting because it is often the elderly who cling most tightly to tradition, to what came before and regard change with suspicion (not always but often). Lucy is cosmopolitan, she’s urban, she’s hip and all that ‘jazz’, but Helsing is old represents the ‘Old World’ and thus his slaying in brutal fashion of the undead corpse of the ‘icon of feminine sweetness’ has to mean something.

Over-all Lucy is a character wtih a lot of symbolism attached to her and a lot of imagery one could portray her with. Certainly she’s sweet in life, but also feckless, immature, foolish and prone to instant gratification all of which are traits that inevitably made her ripe for the ‘plucking’ for the invasive outsider as represented by Dracula.