The Gothic Femme Fatale in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Abstract

   Since its emergence in the eighteenth century, the Gothic genre has functioned as a literary means for many writers for expressing fears and anxieties including those related to gender ideology in Victorian era. The genre operates as a means for many writers to demonize powerful or seductive women. The femme fatale is seen as a moral threat or a disease to the Victorian society because she was represented as being outside of the parameters of the feminine ideal of a respectable Victorian society. The first theoretical part focuses on the Gothic genre as a literary means used by Victorian writers to represent the social anxieties of the era, mainly women who go beyond gender norms. The next part is about the modern femme fatale that bears many similarities with the older biblical figures. This article depends on the analysis of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s female characters who are the personification of some cultural fear. It deals with the femme fatale as a female villain and their Gothic representations in these novels. This paper focuses on the Gothic genre that is used as the literary tool through which Stoker and Dickens attempt to represent the femme fatale.