Early Gothic women were presented as weak, foolish, helpless, lost and treated badly by their male counterparts. They were submissive and oppressed under a strong patriarchal dominancy.
Women were often placed in distressful situations and threatened by a powerful and implusive male character or in need of a powerful male to protect her.
In contemporary gothic, women are depicted in two extremes, either the submissive of old or a new position that see's them as the dominant character in the story. The revolutionary change was seen strongly in Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' where the naive and innocent Lucy was transformed into a lethal, voluptuous and seductive vampiress. This new persona given to women undermined the foundations of male-dominancy seen prior.
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