In Defence of Mina Harker the OG Evelyn O'Connell & Matriarch of the Dracula Hunters Fellowship
A MUCH Needed Defence
In the story of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, there is no character held up in as much reverence as Mina Harker. None who shine quite so brilliantly, and none who devote themselves so utterly and completely to the cause of destroying Dracula as Mina (none save Jonathan). Yet there is none whom have been more ill-served by the different adaptations or more twisted, deconstructed and what not, as her character has been distorted into the complete opposite of what she was traditionally.
And what was she traditionally? Was she a sex-addicted kitten who hides Dracula in the basement away from her husband like in Hammer? Was she the imbecilic figure from the 90s, obsessed with a corpse? Was she some sort of reincarnated lover? Or here’s one that academics love; she was wed to Dracula when he had her drink his blood. This last claim is ridiculous and makes no sense, and everyone knows it, the only reason these sort of ideas exist is the notion that vampires represent sensuality. They do to an extent but rather they are representative of over-indulgence in base pleasures, with the idea of the vampiric bite and transformation process being a form of rape. Anyone who say otherwise is trying to sell you something, let’s just be honest.
Mina is none of these things. She is treated almost as a stand-in of sorts for the Virgin Mary, or at least this seems the level of reverence that her friends hold her in. She is in truth the female Queen of Love archetype, for whom her friends risk all for, and naturally has her lover/husband who is the greatest of all the heroes assembled before her. It is to her, that they pledge allegiance and homage to, she is also the female Lover Archetype, with Jonathan being the male one, as they come as a pair and are each other’s primary motivational factor in the narrative.
The story is supposed to be a love-story and is one that sees Mina put front and centre after Jonathan Harker’s escape from Dracula’s ‘Enchanted Castle’. In the Austen styled middle part we see that Lucy is a little less mature, more popular and quite a bit more impulsive than the restrained, genial Mina. Mina is however a much more fiercely romantic woman who longs for only one man; Jonathan.
Where Lucy might have had her head turned by the prospect of going abroad, Mina thinks little of it and only of Jonathan’s health and the need to be by his side, when she receives news he has collapsed and is in an old convent.
At this point in the story, we can discern that Mina’s motivating factor is Jonathan, and with him calling for her it shows in turn that who is the only one who could comfort him after the traumas inflicted on him by Dracula? Mina.
They are married, and she is entrusted with the care of his old journal, from his time when he was imprisoned. This is also a metaphor for him entrusting the whole of his past, his weakness, his very weakest hour when he was partially unmanned in a sense by Dracula. And how does Mina react? She is touched and disgusted by Dracula, and feels both pity and an even greater sense of devotion to her husband when she finds out the truth.
Horrified when she discovers later how impulsively Jonathan threw himself into the hunt and the fight itself against Dracula, she is at once awed by her indomitable husband’s strength and courage even as she is dismayed. Hers is the nature of Andromache who fears terribly that something terrible may befall her Hector.
Should we scorn her for this? Should we scorn Jonathan for his own actions? No. Stoker clearly modelled her after the likes of Andromache, or Penelope from the Odyssey, and other more world-savvy and matured women like them and also endowed her with the cunning and brilliance of an Irene Adler (Stoker was a fan of Doyle’s).
Mina is not only in this way the Lover archetype, but also a woman who feels a strongly protective love for her man, and a sense of loyalty to him and their friends. So sweet is she and wise that the man treat and love her as they might an older sister, and come to revere her above even Lucy (whom they all cherished very deeply). Van Helsing all but adopts her, and is adopted by her and Jonathan, as a second father of sorts with Helsing later on in the epilogue telling their son how wondrous the two are.
Now, this ending apparently is the sort of thing that many academics despise, and have sought to twist saying that Quincy Harker is the son of Dracula. Quite how is something even the most imbecilic mind would wonder about, as it makes no sense whatsoever. How could an animated corpse (Nosferatu) possibly produce sperm and knock up a woman is beyond me. Also if we think about the dates, and the likely themes and how Jonathan and Mina were an ahem active and very eager couple, it would be more likely that if she were pregnant at the end of the story, it would have been Jonathan who knocked her up before Dracula so much as attacked and violated her.
The important thing about Mina having a son is that the son by being bequeathed Quincy’s name is taking into himself the spirit of Morris, not Dracula. What is more is that this is supposed to represent a new beginning, it is thematically the Spring after the Winter spent in Transylvania and after the shadow of the Vampire has passed. Dracula is the winter, Jonathan the summer so to speak and Quincy Harker the spring to an extent.
So that Dracula has been defeated and utterly destroyed, by Jonathan so that in place of dead things new life has sprouted, and this is the legacy of not only the Harkers’ but of Quincy Morris. If Mina gave her son that name it was to honour that man who saved her husband, kept him from being too reckless and also to honour one of the ‘knights’ who joined himself to the cause and saved her very soul. Why would she name her son Quincy, to honour Dracula? There is something missing to this brand of logic that only an academic could conjure forth.
The truth is that if Jonathan can be defined by the virtue of Valour, Mina is defined by that of Love.
She has not only an abiding love for her husband and her surrogate father Helsing, but also a special bond with each of the men.
Arthur Holmwood is only able to weep when in her presence, and it is she who takes up the role of sister-in-law of sorts to him, helping and nurturing him after he has lost his father, mother-in-law and lost his wife (who was also violated and perverted into a monster). Honestly the level of trauma he has had to endure, makes him one of the most pitiable characters in the whole of the story.
And it is Mina who attempts to reach out to him, who seeks to provide kindly words and a sense of warmth. As a kind of sisterly figure to him, she not only grounds him, comforts him but also helps him to have someone to commiserate with over the loss of Lucy.
Her own innate fondness for him, is that of a sister who saw a man who not only gave all that he could to her younger, impetuous sister, but also a fellow sufferer. Someone who loved Lucy and knew her better than anyone else, and so lost almost half of herself when Lucy perished, so that only Jonathan and Arthur could possibly understand what she has had torn from her.
Then there is the bond with Seward, whom was the first physician who tried to help Lucy. The love he has for Lucy is one that makes him embarrassed and sheepish, but contrary to some of the depictions where he’s an old man, Seward is a young man burning with no less passion than the likes of Quincy & Arthur. Mina and Seward develop an interesting bond, wherein the Doctor comes to admire her not unlike a child with his mother or a younger brother with his eldest sibling. He also interestingly holds Jonathan in high regard and looks on him like a hero.
Seward interestingly enough, almost feels like the youngest in the group but also one of the older ones (save for perhaps Van Helsing).
As to Quincy he is ever a knight in shining armour or a home-grown cowboy from Texas, one who lives and breathes for adventure. His is a spirit that cannot live without adventure, and so he’s one of them that does revere Mina but he looks on her as almost a sister-in-law like Arthur, as he regards the men of the group as brothers, and is one of the first to swear to help lay her to rest. He does so with utter sorrow in his heart, and honestly he’s a lot like Rick O’Connell from the Mummy, so that Quincy has a very unique bromance of sorts with Mina.
She clearly dotes on him (else why would she name her son after him?) and is very evidently grateful that of all the warriors in the group, he does the most to rein in Jonathan’s recklessness.
Mina is mother, sister, wife and guardian to this rag-tag group of ‘knights’ and in the pre-modern sense she is lady fair for them to rescue from the Dragon. But this does not mean she is helpless or does not wish them to slay Dracula. If anything, she’s even more gung-ho for it than they are, always offering encouragement, pushing them towards destroying Drac and even memorising all the routes to Transylvania to make it easier to slay him and attack his home.
She acts at a few points like Helsing’s deputy, so that she demonstrates her desire for justice by transmitting his orders and taking down his words and scribing them for everyone.
All this in mind how could anyone claim she is in love with Dracula? They can if they seek to undermine the character and pervert her into something she never was.
We must also remember that her reaction towards being informed that she is going to become a Vampire is one of horror, and involves her reacting like a rape victim. To romanticise this, is to romanticise the very worst act a man can inflict on a woman, and that’s the crux of the problem. Mina overcomes her violation, as does Jonathan with the end of the story being euphemism for the conquest of such a terrible, heinous crime. This is in complete contrast to how the Hollywood types would have us depict this part of the plot, and the themes of the story.
What is more is that as has been noted in the comment section of the Jonathan Harker essay, Mina displays considerable intelligence. Rather like Evie from the Mummy, in nature she is adorable and playful at times, and very intelligent but make no mistake she is not there to outshine her husband but rather to shine alongside him with equal light. And I think this is how Mina the character would want it, as she does adore Jonathan.
There is much more romance and idealism in the Dracula novel by Bram Stoker than people realise, or many have realised.
The previous essay;
Maybe, but I think you're leaving out a lot. Mina is largely how they defeat Dracula too, and I think the fascination with the lady turning into a vampire is where a lot of people get the distortions from. I mean they hypnotize her and use her to read his mind among other things. Some fanfictions make her stay a vampire seemingly solely out of a Twilight/Anne Rice-esque desire to let her keep her powers in exchange for what she went through and/or out of a horror toward the powers she developed herself, which is where I think a lot of the really negative depictions come from.
And I mean in Dracula it is depicted that vampires are objectively unholy, unlike in Twilight where they seem to be a mutant race who sparkles but doesn't really have anything to do with good vs. evil other than needing to procure blood very carefully and not let their powers get to their heads, or in Anne Rice where they are descended from Set and some of them seem to be struggling to be good which developed into the game Vampire: the Masquerade. So I think there's very much a common interpretation of, if Mina didn't have some element of evil, she wouldn't be turning into a vampire, and they wouldn't be hypnotizing her and using her that way. But a lot of the more sensationalistic interpretations are definitely going way beyond what would ever be reasonable, probably just because people get so pulled into the horror element of the fact these people have to use the semi-vampire to beat the vampire and it's a woman who basically has most of the power as well. I mean in terms of seeing Dracula as violating her, I think lots of people have a sense of horror in that they see it almost as her having the likelihood to violate the vampire hunters. But even though I haven't finished the book yet, I find this post convenient because I haven't finished it yet (and I didn't start it because of you either) I think it does her dirty to basically portray her as a whore or whatever regardless of how malicious she might actually be intended to be. I mean, it might be sort of like Tolkien in a way, every story is about a fall. But I doubt Bram Stoker is an uncomplicated chivalric story either even if those elements are probably present and overlooked.
This post by Esoterik Espionage is probably too far in the other direction, I don't think I believe Bram Stoker was just some evil Illuminati guy or something either based on what I know about him and his books, but there are definitely sort of "occult" elements as well. I mean, it's literally a horror book about vampires and magic, but also a lot of it sounds like it was based on real lore.
https://esoterikespionage.substack.com/p/the-conspiracy-can-of-wyrms-part
Thanks for being a voice of (good) reason in this essay. It holds true to the original rather than the rubbish of so-called academics. A better term is epidemics.