Woman is the door to the supernatural. While "Dracula" rewrites the Christ myth, the movie returns to a highly traditional, Christian understanding of Woman. The Christian interpretation of Mother Eve and the Virgin-Mother Mary provide the options for women characters in the movie. Woman is the sexual carrier of Sin for Man, the one who condemns and enslaves Man to his bestial nature. Or, Woman, saves Man to his eternal spiritual destiny. Hollywood's own take on women confines this movie. What is so surprising for a movie in the late 20th, post-Christian century is how utterly traditional the options are. Like "The Last Temptation of Christ" the solutions remain so "orthodox."
The problem for Christianity as well as most Western culture is the place of women in relationship to life. For Hollywood this means that female stereotypes can be packaged to sell. The supernatural, so the ancient theory goes, is a special place that women have greater access to than men. For Hollywood, Woman is both seductress and savior of the consuming Male.
The opening scene portrays the devoted passion of mythical Woman. Elisabeta is a true wife, a soul mate, full-blooded and sexual. Subsequent scenes break this mythical unity into fragments and assign the various roles to a variety of women characters. Together they constitute a whole Woman. From the film's perspective such wholeness is no longer possible.
She-vampires, naked, foreign, seduce and devour Jonathan Harker. Sex becomes feasting. The scene alludes to male fears of women's unbridled sexuality. Dracula as consuming male, appears as a shape-changer, a werewolf, a beast. Dracula as werewolf is no longer recognizable as a human male. The women remain women.
The she-vampires are other. They are Eastern, non-English speaking. The foreigner invades and passes on sexual disease. They attack wrists, breasts, groin. They hold Jonathan in a cruciform posture. The stigmata of the modern cruciformed Man come from the lust of Woman. The horror shaped by the American fear of foreigness.
Woman becomes in this mythology a fearful doorway to Death. Lucy exemplifies the modern woman who willingly if weakly submits to the supernatural.
Lucy is, as Mina observes, a virtuous girl with loose ways. The camera shows her as a desirable sexual object. She knows what men want. Red hair down, shoulders bare, breasts heaving she is the media stereotype of Woman who sells everything from beer to automobiles. Mina is by contrast buttoned up. Her hair coifed into a bun. Titillated by the Arabian nights, she lacks sexual imagination.
Dracula as a werewolf rapes Lucy, then falls to her neck. Mina discovers them. Stops the consummation. The garden setting alludes to Christ in the garden. The rape occurs on a stone seat, suggestive of the slab that occurs in Christ's tomb in other Jesus movies. The stone crypt, later Lucy's grave, looks much like the tomb entrance. Here the symbols point toward Lucy's ultimate resurrection as vampire. The deflowered virgin bride of Dracula, she is garishly buried in her white wedding dress.
Mina herself teeters on the brink of entry into the supernatural world of sex, sin, and death. She does not fall. At Dracula's begging she releases him from his lifeless body. She, the only woman he has ever loved beheads him, giving him the transcendent peace of a death that releases the soul to its higher calling.
The moment of death brings on the blossoming of spring, the return of light to Castle Dracula. It is perhaps a return to the Garden of Eden, the garden of creation as implied in the ceiling mural. Within the movie Mina is both the Savior and eternal Virgin Bride. Is this some new world?
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