The Role Of Mina In Dracula

Dracula features behind the lines, the chaos of this gender confusion and one of the main characters, Mina, is a vivid illustration of this. Beyond all, she is the orthodox woman, “Mina indeed acts and is treated as both the saint and the mother…….She is all good, all pure, all true.” (Roth, 31). Since the beginning, Mina has strived to portray herself as the perfect wife and the best potential mother by displaying her motherly instincts sporadically throughout the novel. She is impatient to get married and serve her husband, Jonathan when she writes, “When we are married I shall be able to be useful to Jonathan, and…..write….on...the typewriter.” (Stoker, 62). Without hesitation, she marries Jonathan in Hungary despite his illness and nurses

She has man’s brain—a brain that a [gifted man possess]” (Stoker, 250). Due to the conventional notion, Van Helsing could not see a “woman’s brain” to be as competent as Mina’s brain was. And many critics from the late 20th century seem to agree with Van Helsing, like when George Stade states “What enables...[Mina]... to resist Dracula…. is that she is not entirely a woman. Morally speaking, the most important component [brain] in her makeup is masculine….[Mina] does not have the primitive and criminal brain of Dracula…[but] the brain of a man” (Stade, 214-215). And that is not the only ‘masculine’ part of her, aside from her thirst for knowledge and aptness for deduction, her repugnance towards crying in public is almost too mannish. She is the one who loses her friend, is impured and dying because of Count Dracula’s attack, and it is only fair that Mina has every right to be profusely distressed about all those miserable events in her life. Nevertheless, she perceives that display of this anguish, in the form of tears, would make her look weak in front of the men, a rather traditionally masculine trait. As she writes in her journal, “There now, crying again!....I must hide it from Jonathan, for if he knew that I had been crying twice in one morning—I, who never cried on my own account, and whom he has never

As Stade states “Women are...much more susceptible to Dracula because….[women’s] beauty is skin deep....[women] are crazy, criminal, selfish...sexy, half-evolved monsters of appetite….A woman needs a husband to keep her in line.” Though Stade observes, that Mina is pure and “clean” on the exterior, she is a typical woman whom he describes above, i.e; as a wild animalistic being who allegedly needs “protection” of a man; her father, brother than her husband and eventually her son(s) to keep her on the right “path” and guided by the better being, the male. Stade also believes that without her husband and the others, Mina would never have the chance to escape vampirism. As a female, despite the outstanding traits she shows in the novel, she would never be able to outplay Dracula and would surely end up a vampire herself just like Lucy and the Vampire