Top 10 Portrayals of Lucy Westenra
When I did my list for Mina Harker, the leading lady in Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” I said that Mina was intended by Stoker to be the ideal “New Woman”: a strong, willful, intelligent working woman who takes up the charge against the vampire scourge in the story, and proves to be just as capable - if not more capable - than most of the men in the book. However, Mina is not the only other major female character in the story: there is also Lucy Westenra, Mina’s best friend in the original novel.
Lucy is intended to be the polar opposite to Mina: if Mina is the strong and proactive female who takes command, Lucy is the young lady of privilege who embodies a wholly different standard. Lucy is richer than Mina is, and has lived a much more sheltered life; she’s essentially a little Victorian princess, always worrying about fashion and her love life. She has no less than three suitors all vying for her attention, and it’s telling that Lucy chooses the man she picks (Arthur Holmwood) largely based on his good looks. It’s therefore no surprise that, when Dracula comes a-calling, Lucy is the first to die: Mina takes charge and is able to survive to the end, but the more passive Lucy is an out-fashion-ideal on its way out, and is destroyed by the vampire accordingly.
HOWEVER, what’s most interesting about Lucy is the way Stoker presents her as a character. While all of the above is true, Lucy, in the novel, isn’t depicted as unlikeable. In fact, quite the reverse: Lucy’s three suitors are all friends, and they and she all remain friends after she makes her choice. She doesn’t lord anything over Mina or others in the novel with her privileged status, and while she can seem a bit airheaded, there’s no malice in her heart at all. She’s essentially a pure innocent, an angel on Earth. Lucy is everyone’s favorite person: someone virtually everybody in the novel comes to care about in a very short time. This makes her death, and then her transformation into a vampire, all the more horrifying and tragic: she is a warning of the kind of danger Dracula presents to not only Mina, but to all of England. Once Lucy is turned, she goes from a sweet and tender-hearted little princess to a savage beast who preys on children and seduces men to their doom.
Just like Mina, over the years, different interpretations of Dracula have reinvented Lucy’s character in a number of ways. And, just like Mina, many of them completely change what made the Lucy in the novel who she was. However, her basic role in the story - the woman whose death and change serves as a warning to the other major characters, and spurs the heroes to action - always remains constant. With that said, here are my Top 10 Favorite Portrayals of Lucy Westenra!
10. Carmen Guerrero, from “Spanish Dracula.”
In both of the early Universal films from 1931, Lucy is a very minor character. She only appears briefly in two scenes before being killed by Dracula offscreen. Later, she is seen in her newfound vampiric state; only in the Spanish Dracula version does she actually get killed, however. In the English release, the scene where Van Helsing and Jonathan Harker (or “Juan,” as the Spanish version calls him) was cut for censorship purposes, leaving Lucy’s fate ambiguous. The Spanish version, however, doesn’t mess around: Guerrero’s Lucy isn’t staked onscreen, but the scene with her death is still handled, in a tasteful-for-the time fashion.
9. Frances Dade, from the 1931 Film.
While Carmen Guerrero’s Lucy gets the dubious honor of…you know…actually DYING in the final film, Frances Dade is one of the first people I think of when I think of Lucy as a character, and this is all it really takes to boost her higher. One of the things I love about Dade’s Lucy is her chemistry with Mina: in real-life, Helen Chandler (Mina’s actress) and Frances Dade were actually good friends, and while their time onscreen together is very brief, you do feel that friendship come through, in my opinion. The Lucy in both of these films is actually depicted as being a character with a bit of a dark side: she is entranced at first sight with Dracula, which makes the fact she’s the one he kills off first - transforming her into one of his wraith-like, soulless Brides - rather ironic, in hindsight.
8. Clarabelle Cow, from Disney’s Dracula, Starring Mickey Mouse.
As I said on at least one or two lists past, what I love most about the graphic novel of “Disney’s Dracula” is that you can tell the people who made it really read and understood the original book. There are lots of bits of humor you’ll only understand if you actually read the story. Clarabelle’s casting and depiction as Lucy (or rather, “Clara-Lucia”) is a chief example: just like in the book, Lucy is depicted as being everybody’s favorite person. All of the men are enamored with her, talking about how charming and beautiful and glamorous she is, and even Mina admits to feeling envious of Lucy’s many feminine virtues. This is hilarious contrasted with the fact Lucy is being played by Clarabelle Cow, of all characters, and…well…just look at the page here to get the joke from that point on. XD
7. Sadie Frost, from the 1992 Film.
In Francis Ford Coppola’s somehow-highly-accurate-and-yet-not-remotely-accurate-at-all film version of the story, Lucy is drastically changed in personality. Instead of being a virtuous, angelic girl who is corrupted by Dracula’s evil, Lucy is depicted as already being a bit of a dangerous character from the start. She’s a hormonally-driven young lady who seems to enjoy toying with men’s hearts and wants to sleep with as many hot young studs as possible, and has a somewhat darker, more biting sense of humor. She’s depicted as bisexual, and even tries to “get it on,” as they say, with Mina! She’s not necessarily EVIL, but her ultimate demise and transformation is treated less as “tragic corruption,” and more a sort of “condemnation for her sins”: her sex-seeking ways lead to her becoming a monstrous parody of her former self, as her carnal desires and carnivorous appetites become intermingled.
6. Fiona Lewis, from the 1973 Film.
A somewhat common trope throughout Dracula adaptations and reimaginings is the idea of one of the ladies Dracula targets being the reincarnation of the Count’s long-dead wife, from before he became a vampire. Usually, the woman who gets this treatment is Mina…but in the version that started this trope (as far as I can tell), it was actually Lucy! In the 1973 TV film, made by Dan Curtis, Jack Palance’s Dracula goes after Lucy first as a way of trying to reunite with his bride, believing her to be his long-lost wife (though whether this is true or not is left somewhat ambiguous). I actually like this much better than versions that make Mina the bride, as it makes Dracula’s pontifications on vengeance following Lucy’s death more meaningful, and it makes more sense for him to go after Lucy first in this instance. However, while Lewis plays her role excellently well, I think it’s ultimately the narrative choices I’ve described that make her more memorable than anything else.
