I am reading the edition of Dracula that includes a forward and commentary by Joseph Valente. In his intro, Valente bemoans just how idiotic the vampire hunters are at times in the book and we’ve just gotten to the place where Van Helsing et al are starting to behave like a bunch of dumbasses. It’s almost as if the team’s combined intelligence crumbled at the first sight of a vampire, as things started to get silly at Lucy’s mausoleum. Van Helsing could have killed vampire Lucy when he had the chance but he decided he had to drag Arthur back to see her, thus giving her ample opportunity to suck the blood of another kid. Nice going.
The team’s biggest folly to date, obviously, is deciding that Mina is suddenly too delicate to keep up with all things vampires, even though Van Helsing declared that “She has a man’s brain.” Even though she had been an integral part of putting together the puzzle pieces, Van Helsing and the rest decide that the best thing for her is to treat her like a child–in fact, a child that you don’t respect that much. What’s the best thing for her? To go to bed, all the time.
What disappoints me the most is Jonathan’s newfound desire to keep things from Mina. Even though, after his return from Transylvania, they made a vow of honesty in their relationship, even though she could obviously handle the truth when she read his journal, now he gets all buddied up with Van Helsing and the boys and it’s suddenly “Ooh let’s not bother the poor woman with the truth.” Meanwhile while they’re off playing with the terriers Mina’s getting her blood sucked, and she’s not just “fatigued” and “pale”, she’s crying because Jonathan revoked his trust. Guys, next time you go hunting vampires, take your womenfolk with you and don’t leave them behind in the insane asylum. They might complain but it’s for their own good.
What’s interesting, not to bring this back to the women/men thing in the book once again, is that the more Mina is treated like a weak helpless woman, the more she feels and hence acts like one. She now keeps things to herself in order to avoid upsetting Jonathan and the gang, she goes to bed when they tell her to and she considers her discomfort around Renfield “a new weakness.” I highly doubt she’d be questioning herself this much if she were as much a part of the adventure as she was when all her records were of such necessity to Van Helsing. But now they used what they needed and she’s fading away in more ways than one.
Men! Can’t live with ‘em, can’t drive stakes through their hearts.
Side note: I didn’t know that terriers were enemies of Nosferatu. Gives even more meaning to that classic song “God Loves a Terrier.“
I agree with your comments about how they all of a sudden start treating Mina like a child, but I would disagree with why she starts becoming more withdrawn. I think that after she gets bitten the first time and starts to feel under the weather, she somehow instinctively feels that she shouldn’t be involved any more. And if you remember, it’s Mina who first withdraws, sending a note saying she’s not coming to a meeting, before even giving Van Helsing and Seward a chance to kick her out. But regardless, it is strange that they switch so suddenly from having her be an integral part of the team to becoming the team mascot (wait, or is that the terrier?).
Actually, they kick her out after their first meeting. At the end of Mina’s Journal in chapter 13 Van Helsing says:
“And now for you, Madam Mina, this night is the end until all be well. You are too precious to us to have such risk. When we part to-night , you no more must question. We shall tell you all in good time. We are men, and are able to bear; but you must be our star and our hope, and we shall act all the more free that you are not in danger, such as we are” (pg 290 of the Simon & Schuster edition)
It seems pretty clear to me that they are already kicking her out. And Mina is quite upset saying “it was a bitter pill for me to swallow”.
and by 13 I mean chapter 18
I feel like a prick pointing this out, but I’m doing it to help: in the second sentence, you say “Van Helsing at all”; it’s actually “et al.”.
I think it’s pretty clear that sexual politics is at the heart of the novel’s appeal. How men and women should treat each other, the subversive & uncontrolled nature of attraction, and the painful reality of infidelity are all just under the surface of the vampire-as-metaphor. The transition between women’s traditional roles and their modern ones was in full swing and the novel can be read as testing out where the women (Lucy and Mina) should fit in to the group. Women are both predators and prey in the novel, although I think Mina represents Stoker’s idea of the right balance.
fixed! thankee
I am posting my comment from the forums here because it’s about my frustration with the same developments:
These guys decide that Mina must be excluded from further vampire tracking because it will be too alarming to her. While they are dithering around, she seems to take ill, appearing more and more pale and listless, especially upon awakening. Despite having seen Lucy die after exhibiting IDENTICAL symptoms, and despite the fact that Dracula lives NEXT DOOR, the fact that there might be a vampire problem with Mina doesn’t cross their minds. They keep sending her off to bed alone while they discuss their business.
When they finally get incontrovertible evidence from Renfield that Dracula has gotten to Mina, and they know that Mina is at that very moment her bedroom and that Dracula is out and about (it being night), they rush to her door and have the following exchange:
Quote:
“Outside the Harkers’ door we paused. Art and Quincey held back, and the latter said, “Should we disturb her?”
“We must,” said Van Helsing grimly. “If the door be locked, I shall break it in.”
“May it not frighten her terribly? It is unusual to break into a lady’s room!”"
The lack of judgment exhibited by these characters throughout the book is astounding. That Dr. Seward seems ready to release Renfield after each rational conversation, despite having witnessed weeks of alternating rational and mad behavior is but one example. I hope Mina recovers and talks some sense into them.
I think this is a symptom of a Victorian author writing for a Victorian audience: it could be that the pause outside the bedroom door for what is,really, a ridiculous bow to decorum was to reiterate to the tame audience that there is just cause for such shocking behavior. Perhaps this acknowledgment tempered some criticism for Stoker. Moreover, it also heightens the contrast between the mannerly action of the gentlemen and the scene witnessed upon entering the room.
[...] maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on the boys for seeming so dim-witted. It would be pretty difficult to accept that there is some mustachioed, shape-shifting creep [...]
I agreed up until the point when they had witnessed Lucy’s transformation and had reviewed all of the collected notes. By the time they exclude Mina, all of the essential facts about Dracula’s supernatural abilities have been shown and accepted. Also, Mina’s symptoms are so similar to Lucy’s that it seems a bit thick to not consider that it might be vamping.
Wow, I just wrote some of the exact same things on my blog….I agree with what everyone says about how asinine all the men are acting by making Mina sleep all the time.
Although I was confused by one thing, and I’m posting this question here because maybe you folks could help out. Why can Dracula get into Mina’s room? I thought that Van Helsing said that vampires can only enter homes that they are invited into. I was also confused about this with Lucy, but since Drac sucked her blood out in the graveyard first, I figured that he must have had enough power over Lucy that she invited him into her room at night. But Mina certainly never did such a thing. So how does Dracula get in? Does it have something to do with the fact that she’s staying at Dr. Seward’s house, which is attached to the asylum, which is also maybe attached to Drac’s house, so it’s like one big campus?
I think it was because Seward’s home and the asylum are all part of one big house, and Renfield was persuaded to invite Dracula into the house.
I was happy to read others had a problem with the men folk. They literally put the brains to bed. Ship these guys a case of V8.
That’s great you’re reading the version with a foreword by Joseph Valente, and I will once again plug his book Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood as perhaps the best critique of literature I’ve ever read. In it he explains the actions of these characters, each as an allegorical representative of some sliver of society, in both a political framework as well as the framework of Stoker’s psychology. The actions of the men in this scene are best understood when considering that they are each in a doppelganger relationship with Dracula. Dracula does not cast a reflection or a shadow because he IS the reflection and the shadow of each character in this novel. Even the carters that Jonathan bribes to track down the boxes all have a supernatural thirst. Every character is complicit in the vampirization. The vampire hunters, then, can all be seen as vampire helpers in their own way. Nearly every effort they take serves more to aid the Undead than to thwart it. The transformations they are going through as characters are the pendulum swings along the arc of a doppelganger. They are becoming what they pursue. The clearest indicator of this, to me anyway, is Jonathan. He begins the novel as a fairly ineffective, soft, acquiescing youth and throughout his ordeals becomes older, harder, sterner, more remote, and withdrawn. His progression in physical appearance alone is the reverse of Dracula.
That Dracula and Mina share the marriage bed, and enact a ritual reenactment of the two-become-one marriage/consummation activities we assume Jonathan and she have shared, only furthers this doppelganger relationship. Remember, she is complicit in her victimization here when she says “I did not want to hinder him.” After his speech, an inverse of wedding vows, he compels her to drink his blood in return. She has the choice of suffocating there, but instead chooses to drink, chooses to marry him. This action not only reinforces the marriage motif, but is also an inverse of her major role in the group as a mother. By drinking from his breast she chooses to be his child, solidifying the role she’s now already been initiated to as her protectors have been treating her like a child. However, by his drinking from her, she retains some of that maternal nature which has been her strongest characteristic yet. Even in the midst of this horrible scene, she still mothers Jonathan when she says “Do not fret, dear…”
At the end of this marriage/consummation/rape/nursing scene, we see the sun beginning to rise. This is a time of day along with noon and sunset discussed by Van Helsing to be when vampires can change their forms. Here we see Harker change to a white haired man with a deep stern grey countenance, a mirror image of the man he met in Transylvania. This is one of my favorite scenes ever written, and has been since I was in high school. Now that I see Dracula isn’t an external force of doom, but rather and internal force of each of these characters externalized in a doppelganger, I love it all the more. It makes it so much darker to think that instead of merely being caught off guard and victimized by some monster, that instead you beget the monster and are complicit in your own victimization. How do you destroy something when all your actions, whether to destroy it or not, aid it by your complicity? If the monster is your own dark reflection, how can you destroy it without destroying yourself?
[...] followed by exclamation points are piling up in the margins of my copy. As Claire wrote in her main page post for Oct. 21, damn them! The whole dismissal of Mina after they couldn’t praise her enough [...]