During the Victorian Era, society prevented women from making their own living, which caused an inescapable dependence upon men’s income; “Barred by law and custom from entering trades and professions by which they could support themselves, and restricted in the possession of property, woman had only one means of livelihood, that of marriage” (Kent 86). Therefore, no matter what the women desired, most were predestined to become wives due to their economic reliance on men.
Bram Stoker, either willingly or unwillingly, used his novel Dracula, to further portray the stereotype that women are inferior to men. In the novel Dracula, Bram Stoker conveys the stereotype that men are superior to women. In the Victorian Era, men believed that they were smarter and more capable of achieving more. In Dracula, Van Helsing was speaking to Jonathan Parker when he said "A brave man's blood is the best thing on this earth when a woman is in trouble. You're a man, and no mistake."
Helsing is inferring that only a man can help when a woman is in trouble, and that women are incapable of defending themselves because they are weak and simple-minded. In addition, Van Helsing is portraying women to be mistakes by God. Van Helsing later said "Mina has a man's brain – a brain that a man should have were he much gifted – and a woman's heart. " Van Helsing believes that women are dumb, and men are astute, and capable of doing more. When a woman is bright, Helsing believes that her brain is a man's brain and is deserved by a man.
Van Helsing is also inferring that women have better hearts, and that in the end, they will choose to do the right thing. Men believed they were smarter and able to reach higher heights than women, who were meant to stay home, cooking, cleaning, and taking care of kids. On the whole, in the novel Dracula, Bram Stoker commonly mentions sexism and how it was incredibly common during the Victorian Era. Bram Stoker incorporated sexism in his novel in a myriad of ways, but he essentially writes about men having property over a woman once they marry.
The other two conventional ideas that Stoker mentioned were; women had to be housewives because there weren't very many jobs open to them, and women were never allowed to travel without men. This matters in most women’s lives, there is a multitudinous amount of human beings today that believe women are inferior to men. This can effect how much money women make or how they are treated. Women get paid 77% what men make for doing the same job. Some women can't have a career because they have children, so they have to stay at home as housewives.
