Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?

Lucy writes a letter to Mina about the three suitors who have proposed marriage to her. She feels guilty for having to disappoint two of them, but her frivolous suggestion of polygamy would have shocked her society in the nineteenth century. She shows a flirtatious bent not quite up to Mina’s virtuous standard, nor does she view marriage as seriously.

Lucy frets at the postponement of seeing him, but it does not touch her looks; she is a trifle stouter, and her cheeks are a lovely rose pink. She has lost that anemic look which she had. I pray it will last.

Mina writes in her journal about Lucy’s reaction to the delay of Arthur’s visit when his father gets sick. Even in stressful situations, Mina admires Lucy’s natural beauty but still worries about her in a maternal way. Lucy’s beauty as well as her childlike vulnerability make her the ideal victim for Count Dracula.

Poor Lucy seemed much upset. She was restless and uneasy all the time, and I cannot but think that her dreaming at night is telling on her. She is quite odd in one thing: she will not admit to me that there is any cause for restlessness; or if there be, she does not understand it herself.

Mina describes Lucy’s behavior after they attended the funeral of the ship’s captain. Mina does not know that Lucy has become the Count’s victim, and Lucy herself does not know the cause of her ailment. Lucy’s passivity and failure to share her concerns with Mina or anyone else allow the Count to continue taking advantage of her.

I suppose it is that sickness and weakness are selfish things and turn our inner eyes and sympathy on ourselves, whilst health and strength give Love rein, and in thought and feeling he can wander where he wills.

Lucy writes in her diary after Professor Van Helsing performs the first blood transfusion on her. She finally feels healthy again and sees her period of weakness as “selfish” even though she was physically unable to care for anyone else. Her feelings here show how selfless an ideal wife was meant to be at the time of the novel.

Lucy Westenra, but yet how changed. The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness.

Dr. Seward observes Lucy as a vampire in the graveyard. Out of all the characters in the novel, Lucy changes the most, though not of her own volition. While in life she was seen as sweet and pure, as a virtuous woman should be, now she seems evil and sexualized. The Count turned her into the exact opposite of the ideal nineteenth century woman.

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