Comparing Sexuality and Power in Dracula and Buffy the Vampire Slayer E

Comparing gender and Power in Dracula and Buffy the vampire Slayer At depression glance, Joss Whedons Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the hour-long TV series which premiered in 1997 and is now in its troika season, bears little resemblance to the book which started the vampire craze -- Bram fire-eaters Dracula, published a century earlier. And yet, looks can be deceiving. Although the trendy -- and often skimpy -- habit and bandied about pop-culture references of Buffy clearly mark the series as a result of a far different culture than that of the Victorian England of Dracula, the underlying tensions of the both texts are far similar than one might think. Beneath the heighten differences in the treatment of their heroines, the two texts converge in similarly sturdy anxieties about gender and sex. Unlike other latter-day adaptations of the vampire invention -- such as films like The Hunger and Anne Rices Interview with a Vampire novels -- which actively shatter accepted tenets o f vampirism, such as the danger of temperateness or crosses to vampires, Buffy relies heavily on the guidelines for vampirism established by Stoker in his novel. In Buffy, as in Dracula, vampires can be killed by require sunlight and harmed by holy water and crucifixes (Golden 125). When, for instance, Buffys crucifix necklace touches her vampire buster Angels chest, it leaves a burn-mark similar to that left on vampire-defiled Mina Harkers forehead by application of a Holy Wafer in Dracula (Angel Stoker 302). And unlike the sympathetic portrayals of vampires advanced in Rices novels and in the 1960s guck opera Dark Shadows, the vampires shown are not good or horizontal human. They are, in the words of Buffys Watcher Giles demon at the c... ...sitive depiction of their sexual relationship. For Mina, however, renunciation of Draculas evil must include the renunciation of her own bodily needs and desires. The roles played by social mores and conceptions of gender and sexuality are, in the end, more than incidental. Indeed, the difference between Victorian England and 1990s America causes the pestilent -- but significant -- valuation of the connections between good and evil and women and sexuality in two in many ways similar texts. whole kit and boodle Cited Golden, Christopher and Nancy Holder. The Watchers Guide. modernistic York Pocket Books, 1998. Leatherdale, Clive. Dracula The Novel and the Legend. East Sussex, England Desert Island Books, 1985. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. New York Signet, 1992. Whedon, Joss, creator and executive producer. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Twentieth Century Fox Television, 1997.