Lucy And Mina In Bram Stoker's Dracula

In Victorian England, women were seen as the weaker sex. The whole gender was assumed to be less intelligent, more fragile, and almost always in need of a man to be the knight in shining armor. This theme can be seen in Bram Stoker's Dracula, in which two women are shown in completely different lights, suggesting that Stoker himself was a forward-thinker of his time. Lucy and Mina are two characters that have been best friends since childhood. They were raised together and care very much for one-another, though they differ in views and barely ever act in the same ways. While Lucy showed the conventional stereotypes of the Victorian English woman, Mina broke free of that role, and went beyond hackneyed cliches to be a well-rounded and respected

character in the original story of Dracula.
In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Lucy Westenra is weak, sexualized, and dependant on the people around her, making her an obvious cliche of the Victorian woman. Lucy was the first prey of the Count once he reached England, so she was physically weakened by the nightly attacks of Dracula. However, the reader also needs to realize that, as a patient, Lucy didn’t go to extraordinary measures to make herself well. She followed many of the doctors orders, but had a tendency to be very passive, and let anyone from a professional such as Doctor Van Helsing, to someone with no medical experience, such as her own mother, make crucial decisions about her well-being. One instance of this is when Lucy assured Doctors Van Helsing and Seward that she would keep a wreath of garlic flowers around her neck while she slept, to ward off her mysterious sickness (Stoker 113), but in the night, her mother “took them all away and opened a bit of the window to let in a little fresh air” (115). We saw in this passage that Lucy isn’t a very opinionated person, and would rather let others make decisions for her, even if they’re on the matter of her own health. Throughout the novel, Lucy is actually referred to as a “poor girl” about every ten pages. Her weakness even extended beyond her death, when Van Helsing expressed that, though he was afraid to meet Dracula in the night, he wouldn’t find much trouble with an undead Lucy (173). Even as a blood-sucking, unholy monster, Van Helsing believed he had nothing to fear from Miss Lucy, proving that she is a very ineffective character as a whole.
No one expected anything dangerous or interesting from Lucy, but every character that came into contact with her, including Mina, felt the need to protect and save her.

Mina was the first to be heroic towards Lucy, when she essentially scared Dracula away while he was drinking from Lucy’s neck (79). Lucy had a need to be saved because Dracula could easily control her. Each time she sleepwalked, it wasn’t simply her medical condition. The action was a product of Dracula’s control over her every night. His powers dominated her mind so easily because Lucy wasn’t a particularly intelligent character, and definitely didn’t have a strong mind and will. She even found it hard to make the decision of who she should marry and wrote to Mina, “why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her” (50), to whine about the number of suitors that adored her, instead of just being happy that she was in love with Arthur. The men in the novel are also constantly trying to save Lucy, even though they don’t do the best job of it. She was given a total of four blood transfusions throughout the novel, each coming from a different man but starting with Arthur (106). Even though the transfusions were obviously just temporary solutions to Lucy’s ailings, the men continued to feel heroic each time they gave her blood, because they’d saved the “poor girl” for the time being. When men weren’t saving or doting on Lucy, she was talking about them in glorious ways and declaring them as

wonderful beings. She once wrote to Mina, asking “why are men so noble, when we women are so little worthy of them?” because both Quincy and John had proposed to her, and that was apparently so noble that Lucy didn’t feel worthy of them anymore. Also in the novel, Lucy’s beauty is overplayed, and there are definitely more mentions of her appearance than there are of Mina’s. As she was dying, Van Helsing made sure to brush her hair before Arthur came in to see her, cutting the time that Arthur and Lucy would have together before she passed away, just so she could be more pleasing to Arthur’s eye. After she died, when she had become a vampire and was feeding off of children as the “bloofer lady”, Lucy’s beauty was shown as dangerous and wicked; “The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness” (180). Arthur, instead of being foolish in moving closer to Lucy, was described as “under a spell”. This supports the Victorian idea that a woman’s sexuality should remain hidden because of how dangerous it could supposedly be.
In stark contrast with Lucy, Mina shows traits such as bravery, intelligence, independence, and is generally respected and even looked up to by the other characters in the novel. From the first moment we met Lucy, we could see her intelligence. She mentioned in her first letter to Lucy that she was very busy with her job as assistant schoolmistress, and had been practising writing in shorthand, a skill that become immensely valuable later in the story. Once Jonathan returned home, she also had the intuition to read his diary, because even though he pleaded with her not to, Mina could see that whatever was within it was crucial to not only her husband's health, but possibly to their safety, as well (148). Mina didn’t even stop there. Once she read her husband's account of his stay with Dracula, she transcribed his journal for if they might need it in the future (152). From her letters and journal, we can also tell that Mina was more of a forward-thinker about the roles of men and women in society when she wrote about the New Woman, saying “I suppose the New Woman won’t condescend in the future to accept; she will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will make of it, too!” (77).This proposes the idea that, though Mina finds no folly in being a woman, she believes that some roles generally given to men would be better executed by her own gender.
In addition to her intelligence and independence, the respect of the male characters in Dracula is also a vast difference between Lucy and Mina.

Mina was treated as an intellectual, especially by Van Helsing, who claimed twice in the novel that “She has a man’s brain--a brain that a man should have were he much gifted” (201), suggesting that Mina was smarter than most men. Van Helsing also called Mina clever and brave on many occasions, though he only ever described Lucy as being poor and sweet before her death. The group that was hunting Dracula by the midpoint of the novel is made of Mina and five men, though Mina was generally the one to take charge when they hit a stand-still in their chase of the monster. She was the one that first suggested Van Helsing hypnotise her to discover Dracula’s location, and when the information she provided wasn’t enough, Mina researched maps and contemplated strategies to surmise what actions her enemy may have been taking in order to make a swift return to his home (304). When she presented this information to the men, they all seemed speechless, except for Van Helsing, who addressed her as their teacher. This was when her mind was muddled by Dracula’s infection, and even with that, Mina was able to form plans that the men of her party never would’ve come up with. Mina’s bravery showed on many occasions, but most prominently when she spoke about herself after drinking Dracula’s blood. She showed a great understanding for her situation, and

spoke up about what really need to be said. Mina wasn’t afraid to talk about her death in the future, and went as far as making the men promise to kill her if she transformed fully into a vampire, so that her soul could be released to God, and to assure that she would do no harm. But in the same instant, she assured them all that she wouldn’t be giving in to the disease that sought to change her (284). Mina wasn’t the same as Lucy when she became sick. Instead of depending on others to heal her, she took it as a challenge, and fought whenever she could to be free of Dracula’s curse. She even counseled the men to make sure they didn’t reveal too much about their hunt for Dracula, so he wouldn’t learn information that was sensitive to their chase (279). While Lucy was sick, she referenced Shakespeare’s Ophelia in her journal, mentioning that she felt peaceful after a transfusion with “virgin crants and maiden strewments” (114). Mina in her sickness reminds me much more of Dylan Thomas’ poem, in which he writes “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
In conclusion, Lucy showed the conventional stereotypes of the Victorian English woman, while Mina broke free of that role, and went beyond hackneyed cliches to be a well-rounded and respected character in the original story of Dracula. Lucy was a much more needy character, who supported the Victorian ideas of what a woman should be, while Mina was a well-rounded and interesting woman, suggesting that women aren’t as two-dimensional as the Victorian era permitted them to be. The novel's characters see this, as well, and though they don’t compare Lucy and Mina directly, they obviously treat the two ladies in very different ways. Though both women were thought of dearly by each character, Mina was allowed to flourish in things such as intelligence and bravery, while all Lucy was given was kindness and beauty.