Nosferatu and female rationality

Just saw Nosferatu and it's going to age like milk. From women having to let go of their emotions to embrace masculine rationality and the use of punitive sex, it's shit.

I went to the cinema last night to watch Nosferatu, a loose adaptation of Dracula by Bram Stocker starring nonbritish actors with comical British accents such as Lily-Rose Depp. I am part of the minority of casual film enjoyers who did not like this movie. This is not a movie review, so I won’t go into an elongated rant about the reasons but I’ll give you the cliff notes: there was no tension, I thought the acting was laughably bad (the shitty accents didn’t help) and I didn’t like the grey tint of the movie, and thought the camera angles were sometimes artsy but uninspired. There you go casual movie fan, get angry at me in the comments, I can’t wait and am quaking in my Versace go-go boots.

However, while I’m not here to give you a long movie review that goes against the grain, I want to talk about Nosferatu, Dracula, and the tragedy of the most famous gothic novel in terms of its female representation, when the gothic movement was championed by women writers such as Ann Radcliffe and Mary Wollstonecraft who both published in 1792, The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Vindication of the Rights of Woman.¹

In The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft discusses the middle-class woman. She believed that women were encouraged to be ‘weak artificial beings’ by a society that discouraged female strength of any kind outside of the home. She wished women developed their rationality instead of their sensibilities to be more productive members of society. How pre-capitalism of her.

Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho shares a similar belief, meaning that she thinks imagination is the gateway towards agency, but that imagination needs to be tempered by rational thought. The dissonance between sensibility and rationale plays a huge part in all of Radcliffe’s oeuvre, in which the supernatural phenomena encountered by her female heroines have perfectly rational explanations.

Now, you might be wondering why I’m taking so long exposing the female point of view of the gothic genre when Nosferatu and Dracula are famously written by men and the perfect film bro excuse for a night in. But I want to take you on a journey to discuss the overly sexualized character of Lily-Rose Depp, a character who bows to her emotions throughout the entire story, only to win against her sensibilities and nerves, to save the day with an élan of rational thought with punitive sex.

Ellen, Lily-Rose’s character, is a young married woman living what appears to be marital bliss with her new husband who’s whisked away to a faraway land for his job, with the promise of bettering their social standing in society with the gain of a large sum of money and a permanent job at his notary office. Ellen suffers from night terrors and sleepwalking, having vague premonitions about the dooming future awaiting herself and her husband.

The character of Mina and Bram Strocker’s Dracula starts in a similar place, she’s also a newlywed, and her husband is also sent away to Count Dracula’s home for a notary reason. She however doesn’t suffer from night terrors and sleepwalking just yet, this will only occur after her first encounter with the Count, who once back in good old England has taken her best friend’s life, and infiltrated himself in her every waking thought.

These two women start the novel as demons chained to the rhythm of their emotions. Insecure newlyweds whose parting with their beloved is hard to handle. Both of them are of a fretting nature, led by a stereotypical female sensitivity only written by men, for women to aspire to. I’ll get to that point later.

As the movie and the book progress and their paranormal illness takes over as they’re slowly being possessed by Nosferatu and Dracula respectively, knowing their every move and sleepwalking to him in Mina’s case, these characters are shaken with an élan of rationality uncharacteristic of female characters of the time. No longer are the women relegated to the role of the crying wife with nothing to do. Both take agency, and their fate into their own hands to fight for their survival and the survival of those they love.

In Dracula, Mina spies on the Count as the good guys make their way across the European continent to kill him, to save her from certain death. In Nosferatu, Ellen has to choose between all of her loved ones' deaths or being Nosferatu’s bride. Ellen ends up deciding to kill Nosferatu during a blood exchange (it’s a sex metaphor, of course, it is) letting him meet his end as the sunlight’s rays light his skin aglow.

So yes, both of these women embrace their agency and become key characters in their own stories by embracing rationality. For once, women are at the forefront of a male-written story, however, it’s not for the best.

You see, in Dracula, Mina is constantly reminded of how different she is, of how rational she is, compared to other women. She takes notes like a secretary on a typewriter as the cast of saviors make plans to kill Dracula, even as she is the one plagued with certain death. She’s always being told that she’s an upstanding woman, that she’s the best woman they have ever encountered for she doesn’t let her gloomy fate take over her body in fits of hysterics like other women.

This line of thinking is dangerous. Do I even need to tell you why? Okay, I will, women should be allowed to be emotional. Women shouldn’t have to choose rationality above emotions to be patted on the back by men. A woman is always forced to choose where men don’t have to. To have modern media projecting rationality as the one thing to aspire to as women is dangerous for what if some of us lead with emotions? We don’t pick and choose what speaks the most naturally to us. Making decisions based on emotions and gut feelings instead of rational lists can make sense for some people and who are we to judge?

A woman embracing the rationale is a way for her to become more of a man. Rationality is typically a male trait in stereotypical trains of thought and classic novels, and a woman shouldn’t have to let go of her femininity to succeed in a novel, or in real life.

I don’t understand why studios decided to redo Nosferatu. I didn’t see the first one because I’m not a boring film bro, but I don’t see how they ‘revamped’ the original story. It doesn’t feel more feminist. Lilly-Rose’s body is heavily sexualized (to the point where even my mother pointed it out) and she has to let go of her sensibility to save the men around her, a saving she does with sex, because sex is the only thing a woman can do. To spoil you, she even dies at the end when she uses sex outside of her lawful marriage to save her husband and her loved ones, she’s killed by the story because it’s immoral for a woman to use sex to get her way, it’s immoral for a woman to have sex outside of her marriage, and it’s immoral for a woman to have sex all together, so she perishes.

The conclusion is, don’t blame women for having sex in the modern day, don’t blame women for having emotions, and don’t blame women for their intuition. Nosferatu will age like milk.

From Marseille with Love,

*vapes away*

1. Feminism and the Gothic: a brief history by Dr Claire Knowles: https://library.unimelb.edu.au/asc/whats-on/exhibitions/dark-imaginings/gothicresearch/feminism-and-the-gothic-a-brief-history