Subversive Sexuality and the Decline of British Society: The Demonization of the Victorian New Woman in Lady Audley's Secret, She, and Dracula

Abstract

This study uses degeneration theory to examine the demonization of the sexuality in New Woman characters in two interconnected representations of social decline, national and biological. Mary Elizabeth Braddon's 1862 sensation novel Lady Audley's Secret, Henry Rider Haggard's 1887 imperial romance novel She, and Bram Stoker's 1897 gothic horror novel Dracula each portray a female character whose sexuality plays a key role in her New Woman status. Despite their differences, the overt sexuality in all the novel's female characters can be read as the New Woman's attack on the social and domestic constructs of marriage and family, creating a subversion of the male power-base so fundamental as to produce texts that punish or "correct" their New Woman characters, therefore diminishing any threat to the existing social order. However, rather than portray the New Woman as either monolithically monstrous or liberating, all the novels contain elements of promise mixed with anxiety, signaling an ambivalence towards the New Woman that is clearly displayed in the fiction of the fin-de-siècle.