Mina is that you? By Haley Aguilar

  In the film adaptation of Bram Stokers Dracula by Francis Coppola, the relationship between Mina and Dracula is transformed from one-sided to that of a serious love interest. In the novel, Mina is a strong-minded and cunning woman but in the movie, the audience is suddenly lacking that aspect of her character and in its place is a weak, submissive damsel. There are only a few real moments that Mina is seen as strong when she is with Lucy and begins typing on her typewriter and the other when she first meets Dracula. She brushes off his attempts to speak to her, at first, and then suddenly she is apologizing for having a mind of her own.

  Mina’s romance with Dracula in the movie illustrates Hollywood’s idea that there always needs to be a great romance in a story for it to be compelling. The novel love that Dracula has for Mina is not enough for a movie audience because it is not reciprocated the way that it is in the movie. In the movie, Mina becomes enthralled with Dracula and cheats on Johnathan with him, not physically, but she surrenders her heart to Dracula, which in many ways is worse. Mina portrays the damsel very easily in the movie. Her character falls from a good representation of the new woman to a poor representation of the angel in the house. I say a poor representation because of her easy infidelity with her fiancee and her obvious sexual desires which in those times were unacceptable.

  Mina is put on a pedestal by Van Helsing in the novel because she was cunning enough to portray herself to them as the angel of the house while simultaneously showing them bits and pieces of what Van Helsing referred to as a “man brain”. However, in the movie, she is seen as nothing more than another object of lust as further proven by her first interaction with Van Helsing in the movie when he literally just looks her up and down without speaking to her then dismisses her as if nothing has just happened. It is also shown later when she is with Van Helsing as she is transitioning, she is easily able to seduce him, even though he knows of Johnathan and what Mina is becoming.

  Johnathan is missing from Mina for nearly the entire movie which is another major difference from the novel that was made to allow for Dracula and Mina’s romance to come to fruition. I do not believe that it would have survived had Mina had the constant reminder of Jonathan’s presence because, at the end of the movie, Dracula’s thrall is only lessened by the reminder of her then husband. The scene that is read as a threesome between Mina, Dracula, and Johnathan in the novel is altered to include only Dracula and Mina and I believe that in doing so, it made the moment all the more intimate. Mina completely surrenders herself to Dracula at that moment, making the decision to join him which may not have been the case if Johnathan had been there. In order to make Mina the all consumed by love woman, they had to remove the true object of her affections.

  Mina is a very complicated character in the novel who is reduced to an object of sexual desire in the film. Her great love with Dracula serves the purpose to further break it away from the novel in means of its plot. Her true intelligence is never showcased nor hinted at, leaving only her beauty as her main characteristic for the audience to recognize her by.

Mina vs Lucy - Angel of the House vs the New Woman

Throughout the novel Dracula women, more specifically Lucy and Mina, are portrayed in contrasting ways in order to represent two extremes in regards to Victorian Women: the “Angel in the House” and the “New Woman”.

Angel in the House	The New Woman
Women are expected to join in a monogamous relationship and have children. Mina demonstrates this ideal by marrying Jonathan Harker and later having his child. As mentioned in the last chapter, “It is an added joy to Mina and to me that our boy’s birthday is the same day as that on which Quincey Morris died,” (326). Mina fulfils her role as a woman not only by having a mutually exclusive relationship with him through marriage, but also by bearing him a child, a son no less.	Lucy never formally gets married before she dies and has trouble choosing a man to marry. She writes to Mina telling her of her three proposals (57) and whines, asking, “why can’t they let a girl marry three men or as many as want her and save all this trouble,” (60). Lucy mentions little about any plans to have children and the only interaction with children that she has in the novel is when she becomes a vampire and feeds off children. As the novel states, “During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a ‘bloofer lady’, (159). Instead of having children of her own Lucy begins to prey on children, draining the life of them instead of bringing life to them. In both ways Lucy represents a direct contrast to Mina as not only does she not want to settle down with just one man and have his children, but she wants to marry more than one man and shows no apparent interest in having children. In fact, she hurts children instead of having them.
The Angel of the House of the ideal woman also spends her time exclusively in the domestic sphere. Once she is married Mina is almost always at Jonathan’s side, bound to follow him except when he and the other men go, in which case she is left alone. The one time Mina leaves the home is when she is chasing after Lucy, which she wants to keep quiet, because she writes, “not a soul did I see; I rejoiced that it was so, for I wanted no witness of Lucy’s condition” (88). This could refer to Lucy sleepwalking, or the fact that she is walking around at night in just a nightgown and without any shoes. The shock is not only that Lucy is barely dressed and sleepwalking, but also that she is out of the house and barefoot, likely to get herself into trouble. Mina does as she is supposed to and looks after her friend, only leaving the house in an extreme case, and all the while worried about the virtue and safety of her female friend Lucy.	Lucy is a lot more likely to leave the house than Mina and does so on her own quite often, even if she is sleepwalking. As mentioned in the column to the left, one night Lucy, sleepwalking, leaves the house, the domestic sphere. Although Lucy is unable to control her trips outside, she still leaves the home and in conditions that would have been shocking to any passerby and no doubt shameful, hence why Mina worries that someone will see her friend in such a state.

- Courtney Sellars