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영어

This study explores gentlemen's fear of degeneration in the Victorian society in the late nineteenth century, which the New Woman appears. It examines the attitudes of gentlemen, who embrace the new century's progressive ideas replacing the old suppressive Victorian traditions in the nineteenth century. As a symbol of late Victorian anxieties concerning the stability of the Empire, Dracula may be identified as a foreign threat intending to destabilize the British world order. He inverts the Victorian gender code, as the former passive woman becomes an active agent, voluptuous and sexually demanding, whereas the male becomes sexually attracted by those women thus turning into a passive agent waiting to be seduced. As such, Dracula well shows the anxiety that the future of British civilization may be endangered and also reflects gentlemen's coping with the crisis.