Dracula, Mina Harker, and the Victorian New Woman
Illustration by Robert M. Place, Published by St. Martin’s Griffin as part of The Vampire Tarot
The Gothic Lit Collection
Historical Background:
A “New Woman” rose during the Victorian Era. As the bicycle came into common use, she had greater independence and freedom. Her supporters noted her intelligence and rationality. Her mastery of modern technological marvels like the typewriter and the phonograph garnered her the respect of her peers. She fought for rights, for recognition of her intrinsic dignity, and for acknowledgement of the strength she brought to society.
Now the Good Stuff:
Mina Harker represents the intellectualism of the Victorian New Woman, and is a manifestation of Bram Stoker's support of modern Victorian femininity. The variety of New Woman that Mina represents, however, is not the only one. One faction of New Women laid claim to a bolder sexuality than many Victorians were comfortable with. Their detractors saw them as corrupting and tempting, and temded to overtly sexualize them, rather than regarding their sexuality as one facet of their character. Mina is not that. Mina Harker is representative of Stoker’s approval of the New Woman as divorced from sexuality, and still in a subservient role.
Mina is accomplished in, or at least interested in, everything technical and technological. She’s a typist, she uses shorthand, and she has worked as a teacher's assistant. Mina, fascinated by the phonograph, a machine which she has never seen prior, makes immediate use of that invention to organize the group's investigation of Dracula. In so doing, she creates a linear timeline of events that lays bare Dracula's movements and motives, allowing their amateur investigative team to pursue rational action. In short, her mind is as logical and rational as the machines she studies.
The group investigating Dracula’s doings in England are in the most danger when Mina’s husband and his friends question her strength and try to consign her to a traditional home-bound role. This, if nothing else, is a sign that Stoker thought the men of the British Empire and the United States were more survivable with the mental and professional aids of this new type of middle-class woman.
On her face, Mina Harker is an example of the New Woman, and a fine proof that Stoker approved of such a person. Below that surface, however, lies Stoker’s more complex, and likely subconscious, commentary on women in western society. He still wanted them to be an aid to the men in their lives, rather than having wills and desires of their own.
Mina learns shorthand and typing in order to help Jonathan, her eventual husband. Yet when Mina and Jonathan's benefactor dies, leaving them his fortune, she turns her attention to running the household while Jonathan goes to work without her.
Mina’s characterization isn’t simply that she chooses to stay home when she and her husband inherit money. She is characterized as strong, brave, rational…and submissive. Mina saves the day in the group's investigation of Dracula, but throughout the book she accedes to every decision made for her by the male-dominated investigative group of her husband and his friends. More than that, while Mina is highly logical, she is also deeply maternal, not at all sexual, and makes appeals to emotion even when simple facts are on her side.
When the men tell Mina to go to bed rather than accompany them on their investigative efforts, she goes. When Mina realizes Dr. Seward's phonograph diary could be useful typed out, she appeals to Dr. Seward, not by explaining her reasoning, but through emotion, pointing out that she’s already laid her soul bare by giving Seward her diary, all her letters, and her husband's diary. When Arthur dissolves into tears and lies weeping against her, Mina compares him to a child.
What defines Mina is not only these characteristics, but also what she is not. The closest Mina comes to expressing an appreciation for sexuality is a demure blush and a chaste kiss. Mina is everything this near-sexless version of the New Woman represents (as opposed to the more radical, sexualized and sexual version), but she is these things in service. In service to her husband, in service to the group fighting Dracula, in service to the human race in ridding them of an evil. In this, Mina is not radically changing the traditionally soft, emotional, and servile way women were portrayed. Rather, she keeps that role with the times in which she lives. She is updating a pattern, rather than cutting a new one. She is copyediting, not rewriting.
While Bram Stoker was, in many ways, supportive of the less radical, more cerebral New Woman, I believe this respect was linked to his mother. Bram Stoker's mother, Charlotte, often wrote newspaper articles that championed the rights and dignity of women. A conflation of the maternal and the idea of female dignity and women's rights likely imprinted on Stoker’s mind. The New Woman (the version of which Stoker approved) was a champion, in her way, of rights for women, but simultaneously she was soft, yielding, and comforting rather than challenging. As the image of Charlotte Stoker was linked to the idea of the female dignity for Bram Stoker, the ideal New Woman could never be sexual.
Mina Harker was one version of the New Woman: a woman with wages and intellect, curiosity and strength, who would be an asset to any group. But she was an asset almost more than she was a person. Mina was so selflessly, righteously, purely perfect that I wonder what she wanted for herself. This strain is woven through literature and life. The good woman, the good mother, the good daughter, puts others first. The self is sacrificed. In Dracula, Mina Harker is a pillar of strength and a hero. But at the end, not of the story, but of her life, I wonder what she would have left of herself.
