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

Comparing Sexuality and Power in Dracula and Buffy the lamia Slayer At first glance, Joss Whedons Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the hour-long TV serial publication which premiered in 1997 and is now in its third season, bears little resemblance to the book which started the lamia craze -- Bram Stokers Dracula, published a century earlier. And yet, looks canister be deceiving. Although the trendy -- and often skimpy -- clothing and bandied about pop- civilisation references of Buffy clearly mark the series as a product of a far different culture than that of the priggish England of Dracula, the underlying tensions of the two texts are far similar than one and only(a) might think. Beneath the surface differences in the treatment of their heroines, the two texts run into in similarly problematic anxieties about gender and sexuality. Unlike otherwise latter-day adaptations of the vampire legend -- much(prenominal) as films like The thirstiness and Anne Rices Interview with a Vampire novels -- which actively shatter accepted tenets of vampirism, such as the danger of sunlight or crosses to vampires, Buffy relies heavily on the guidelines for vampirism establish by Stoker in his novel. In Buffy, as in Dracula, vampires can be killed by direct sunlight and harmed by holy water and crucifixes (Golden 125). When, for instance, Buffys crucifix necklace touches her vampire boyfriend 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 soap opera Dark Shadows, the vampires shown are non good or even human. They are, in the words of Buffys Watcher Giles behemoth at the c... ...sitive depiction of their sexual relationship. For Mina, however, renunciation of Draculas evil must hold the renunciation of her own physical needs and desires. The roles played by loving more s and conceptions of gender and sexuality are, in the end, more than incidental. Indeed, the difference amongst Victorian England and 1990s America causes the subtle -- but significant -- valuation of the connections between good and evil and women and sexuality in two in many another(prenominal) ways similar texts. Works Cited Golden, Christopher and Nancy Holder. The Watchers Guide. New York Pocket Books, 1998. Leatherdale, Clive. Dracula The impudent 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.