Mina's Role In Dracula By Bram Stoker

Mina’s Role in Dracula

Multiple characters are woven together by Bram Stoker in his novel Dracula. The novel begins with Jonathan Harker who travels to Castle Dracula where he confronts many frightening situations. Harker’s fiancée is the character Mina Murray. Mina is the most complex character in the novel along with being the best friend of Dracula’s first victim, Lucy. Mina has a direct relationship with each character in the novel. Moreover, she is essentially a never-ending contradiction. While she exemplifies the Victorian woman, she is equal in intelligence and bravery to her male counterparts. Mina is both a Victorian woman and a New Woman. Mina is also a vampire who can pass as a human. The dichotomy within her roles as a woman

helps explain the mystery of how she can hide being a vampire. In order to understand this mystery of the novel , the reader must understand Mina as both a Victorian woman and a New Woman.
To introduce Mina as a Victorian woman, we need to describe her character. In Stoker’s novel, Mina is presented as the prototype of the ideal Victorian woman. Almost her whole existence is devoted to her future husband, and she aspires to become a good wife and mother, the “angel of the house.” Her fiancée, Jonathan Harker, during his business in Transylvania, refers to her only sporadically, in connection with cooking recipes and other wifely tasks, suggesting her preoccupation with marriage and the household. Also, in the correspondence between Mina and her friend Lucy Westenra, marriage is a frequent topic of conversation and seems to be everything they dream of. When Mina is finally married to Jonathan, she writes in her diary that she is “the happiest woman in all the wide world” and that her life will consist of “love and duty for all the days of [her] life” (Dracula 140). This focus on marriage is linked to her strong sense of duty towards others and, most of all, Jonathan. When writing about being married, she mentions the “grave and sweet responsibilities [she has] taken upon [herself]” (139). Her sense of duty also entails the keeping up of appearances. The fact that Mina deduces that Lucy cannot be sleepwalking outside the house because she is only wearing a nightdress comically underlines this characteristic trait. However, Mina obviously senses that these Victorian norms are somewhat too strict, as she writes that “you can’t go on for some years teaching etiquette and decorum to other girls without the pedantry of it biting into yourself” and decides to allow Jonathan to take her arm in the street. (222) Thus, while Mina fully complies with Victorian expectations, she seems to question the benefit of adhering to these strict guidelines.
Mina’s dichotomy as a Victorian woman is emphasized through her characterization as a strong and often overflowing emotional character.

Mina seems to have a disposition to cry; for example when the old man she meets in Whitby talks of his own death, she writes that “It all touched [meher] , and upset [meher] very much” (100). One time she admits to becoming hysterical when talking to Van Helsing (238). However, her fit of hysterics is far less severe than that of Van Helsing earlier. This is noteworthy, since women were the ones who were supposed to suffer most from hysterics. Later on, this reversal of gender roles is taken further when, as soon as the male characters encounter emotional crises, Mina remains the stable one. After comforting one of the men, she writes in her diary that crying often helps, yet she herself has stopped crying in order to support the men. She even keeps up superficial cheerfulness when she herself is worried. She decides to repress her own feelings in order to support and comfort the male characters. Her mothering instinct therefore establishes her as an emotional haven and a source of faith for the men. She writes in her diary, “[T]here is something in woman’s nature that makes a man free to break down before her … without feeling it derogatory to his manhood” (294-5). Thus, while she represents the secure home that Victorian men expected to find in women, she accomplishes this by taking on the more stoic, emotional role assigned to men.

A further

conundrum within Stoker’s Mina is her chastity and modesty. Contrary to Lucy with her polygamist tendencies (i.e. desiring to marry three men), Mina seems decidedly innocent and morally superior. She does not exhibit any kind of physical attraction towards Jonathan (not to mention any other person). However, her chastity is questioned when she writes about Dracula’s seduction and mentions that she “did not want to hinder him” (370).
Mina is an intelligence woman.

Also, Mina is never envious of Lucy’s beauty and popularity with men but rather admires her friend. Her intelligence and practical skills contribute to the usefulness that is expected of Victorian women. She knows shorthand and typewriting, but most importantly, she has knowledge of Cesare Lombroso’s theories about criminals. Likewise, Mina seems quite modest when Van Helsing notices her outstanding intelligence, writing that “speaking to this great, learned man, [Van Helsing] [she] began to fear that he would think [her] a weak fool” (240). Furthermore, Mina keeps reproaching herself in her diary for being silly and naïve. However, she seems quite conscious of her husband’s title and social rank. Jonathan mentions in his diary that Mina would not like him to be called a clerk even though he is already a solicitor: “Solicitor’s clerk! Mina would not like that. Solicitor” (25). Later, in her own diary, Mina writes that she is proud to see her Jonathan “rising to the height of his advancement” (231). While the surface of Mina’s character befits her image as the prototypical Victorian woman, there are suggestions throughout the novel that something more complex, and perhaps less pure, is lurking

underneath.
Mina, as the ideal Victorian woman, serves as an example of the prevailing gender roles at the time. Women were supposed to marry, have (preferably male) children and support their husbands. Lucy is also influenced by these norms, as she is disappointed not to have received a proposal at “almost twenty.” Generally, Mina and Lucy are the women of Dracula “upon whom the men project the ideals of Victorian womanhood” (Rosenberg 8). At the time Dracula was written, the emergence of the “New Woman” was challenging traditional gender roles. As Punter and Byron mention, the New Woman was characterized by her “demands for both social and sexual autonomy,” which includes sexual independence and taking up male professions (231). The women in Dracula, however, ridicule the New Woman, a kind of behavior that seems to have been conditioned by the male characters’ opinion. Mina and Lucy are decidedly not fully autonomous. On the contrary. Mina is a schoolmistress, an “accepted occupation for women of the period,” and her goal is to follow the traditional Victorian role model (Rosenberg 9). Yet, if we take Mina’s important part in hunting Dracula and Lucy’s flirtatious behavior into account, we might establish the argument that both Mina and Lucy exhibit tendencies that hint at social and sexual autonomy, respectively. Therefore, each of Stoker’s women finds her own way of breaking from Victorian gender roles that is a more moderate way of emancipation than the radical feminism of the New Woman.