Dracula & Gender Trouble by Eleanor King

Dracula � Gender Trouble

BY ELEANOR KING ILLUSTRATED BY NADIA MOKADEM

In Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, the roles of gender are explored as there was a growing sense of anxiety concerning what these roles meant in the Victorian period. Stoker explores the anxieties bound within gender role through the combination of intelligence and passivity in both the female character Mina Murray Harker, and her husband Jonathan Harker. Stoker highlights how the different genders combine these qualities, and also questions who relinquishes control and becomes passive. It is also illuminating to compare these characters and their gender roles with the 1992 adaptation Bram Stoker’s Dracula, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. It is also important to address the reasoning behind Stoker exploring anxieties concerning gender within vampire fiction, and how their roles interchange and hold significance within this genre.

Mina is presented as an educated woman, she has had an independent life before her marriage. She states that she is an ‘assistant schoolmistress’. In Mina having a job, Stoker is demonstrating the new female figure that was arising in the 1890’s, a growing attribute in single Victorian women to seek independence before marriage. Women were, as Emma Liggins highlights, no longer ‘confined to the slavery of home and genteel property’, allowing a ‘remedy for her distress by pursuing paid work’. But once married, women may have been expected to neglect this source of self-sufficiency and become ‘the wife’. This is a concept Stoker explores. Despite being described and portrayed as an intelligent female, who not only has a job but

is also able to ‘keep up with Jonathan’s studies’, Mina is contrastingly presented as passive – shown through her reasoning in aiding Jonathan, ‘so I will be able to be useful to Jonathan’. This highlights the anxiety of women gaining independence and potentially not wanting to give that up when married. This demonstrates how Mina is tailoring her intention to work and gain knowledge in regards to what will be beneficial to her husband and therefore their marriage. This arguably is what makes Mina so attractive to the male characters in the novel – her willingness to tailor her intelligence when required – ‘[Mina] has a man’s brain – a brain that a man should have were he much gifted – and a woman’s heart. The good God fashioned her for a purpose, believe me, when He made that so good combination’.

In the 1992 adaptation of Dracula, Mina is seen to be typing with her diary entry acting as a voice-over, her back to a lavishly furnished room. She is sat straight at an almost empty desk confessing to her diary that Lucy has ‘never minded that I am only a schoolmistress’. The tone of this differs from the text. In the text, Mina is an assistant headmistress, which she almost proudly reminds Lucy in her letter to her, prompting the suggestion that as a woman she is proud of her self-sufficiency. But in the adaptation, it is almost a confession to her diary which warrants embarrassment or shame.

There is a suggestion that compared to Lucy, who holds no job and is presented as wealthy, Mina holds a low rung position to which she cannot compare or pride herself on. Stoker presents Mina as intelligent and therefore desired as she is knowledgeable, yet the 1992 adaptation suggests that Mina is a helpless, poor damsel who is in prime opportunity to be ‘saved’ by wealth and power. The novel highlights the anxiety of women seeking independence, but this is gone in the adaptation, suggesting that the adapters instead chose to focus on the concept of women in 1897 being of lower importance if they were not wealthy rather than the independently driven Mina in the literary text. In a sense, the adaptation only portrays one element of Stoker’s original exploration of anxiety of the female. However, the adaptation includes Lucy berating Mina for using the typewriter, ‘Is your ambitious John Harker forcing you to learn that ridiculous machine?’, suggesting that instead the adaptation sought to highlight the submissive female, rather than the anxiety of the combination of independence and submissiveness that Stoker does.

In comparison, the character of Jonathan Harker is described in the novel as a ‘quiet, business-like gentleman’ who is ‘uncommonly clever’. He is not the domineering masculine hero of typical novels of the time, but a lawyer who is smart and quiet. Where Mina is presented in the text as focusing on her husband, his work and how her intelligence can aid him – Jonathan is presented as a figure who is sexually repressed and submissive. In the iconic scene where Jonathan is at Dracula’s castle and is seduced by Dracula’s three daughters, he describes the experience in his diary as a unforgettable experience, ‘There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips’. In this scene there is a suggestion and a presentation of the sexually repressed man, thus prompting in the reader an anxiety about male submissiveness. In a society where men were thought to be domineering and in control, to have a man reduced to a silent paralysed figure when surrounded by three overtly sexual female beings would have prompted concern. Especially when Jonathan claims that he ‘was a veritable prisoner’.

This further explores the anxiety of the effect of the diminishment of masculine power, as ‘this interfusion of sexual desire and the fear that the moment of erotic fulfilment may occasion the erasure of the conventional and integral self informs both the central action in Dracula and the surcharged emotion of the character about to be kissed’. In the adaptation of this scene, the screenwriters stuck closely to the depiction of the scene in the text. Jonathan lays back, allowing the act, seduced by the voices and atmosphere even before the half naked females start caressing him. He mostly remains silent, only forming indistinct cries when the seduction is halted by Dracula as he gives the female figures a baby to consume.

Harker remains as paralyzed as he is when being seduced. When Jonathan returns to England, and to Mina, he is described to have been deeply affected by his experience of Dracula, his daughters, and being confined within the castle. Mina then takes on a more proactive role. Mina describes how ‘All the resolution has gone out of his dear eyes and that quiet dignity which I told you was in his face was vanished’, as the female vampires destroy his capacity to act as an independent man. Mina then takes this opportunity and does what she believes is her duty, and becomes a motherly figure who seeks to heal and protect her husband. She proudly states that ‘we women have something of the Mother in us that makes us rise above smaller matters when

the Mother spirit is invoked’. Through this, readers can see how this is the ultimate role for females, one bound by nurturing others and being passive in their own decisions. But arguably in the way Mina presents it, it is a position of power. She is able to possess that which men cannot, the power to ‘rise above smaller matters’ which seemingly leave men to struggle. This proves to be an anxiety to Victorian society as the motherly figure has been previously deemed passive, but Stoker now sheds a new possibility on this role. One of power and authority, especially over men. This is similar to the other female gender role that Mina brings up in the text, that of the New Woman. According the Mina she sees that ‘men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or accepting. But the New Woman won’t condescend in future to accept; she will do the proposing herself’. This calls into question the female role as determined by their gender significantly, mirroring the rise in the campaigning of women’s rights at the end of the 19th century.

Mina suggests that men and women should be able to see each other asleep, which negates the moral gender roles that society instructs. And the idea that females should be able to propose marriage signifies a refusal of the traditional gender roles too. There is no presence of this in the film, instead Mina is portrayed as a young woman who seeks Jonathan’s love and does not mention this worldly power of being instinctively a mother, nor does she seek to achieve it. This may be because of the films audience. With a large socially and politically charged history of the expected roles females and mothers are expected to adhere to being brought into question regarding rights and independent decisions, to have the central figure claiming that she has a motherly instinct would have angered audiences. Instead in the adaptation Mina symbolises the changing qualities a female can have, from the demure and proper to the sexually aware – a concept that still survives in today’s society.

In exploring anxieties over perceived gender roles, it is also significant to examine how and why Stoker used the genre of vampire fiction. As Erik Butler describes, ‘the vampire’s history is one of mass hysteria, obfuscation, and smoke and mirrors’ suggesting that in using a mysterious figure such as the vampire Count, Stoker was able to balance these themes of anxiety in a story world that was already bound by the nature of confusion. For example, the character of Mina does not reside within a specific female gender role. She interweaves herself throughout the different perceptions of female roles throughout the story. Including the figure of the fallen woman.

A woman who is described as fallen often came from a respectable background, one of class and respect, who then reduces and diminishes her respectability by becoming involved with improper behaviour – often of a sexual concern. An example of this in the text is when Mina is attacked by Dracula, ‘With his left hand he held both Mrs Harker’s hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare breast which was shown by his torn open dress’. The imagery and symbolic nature of this scene highlights the anxiety of how seemingly easy it is for a woman to gain the role of the fallen woman. The image of Mina drawing blood from the Count’s ‘bosom’ suggests role reversal, that the power is at the same time held by Mina as she takes control and blood from a man, and held by the Count as it is his breast that she drinks from. This contradiction in power adds to the theme of gender role confusion. The image of Mina being dressed in white, prompts the idea of purity and virtue, yet this is tarnished by her nightdress being ‘smeared with blood’, not only destroying her virtuous state but her physical representation of it too as it is ‘torn open’.

In addition, the scene construction adds to the image of Mina having become the fallen woman as she is in bed, with her husband Jonathan laying beside her ‘face flushed and breathing heavily as though in a stupor’ as she is described to be ‘kneeling on the near edge of the bed facing outwards… By her side stood a tall, thin man, clad in black’. The positioning of the three characters physically demonstrates this anxiety of the fallen women, turning away from her husband towards sin and sex, as represented by the count ‘clad in black’.

However, in the film Mina is presented as something beyond this. She is presented as a woman who is on the precipice of that which makes her the Fallen Woman, and that which makes her a Femme Fatale – another gender trope that caused anxiety – a female who is sexually aware, and thus predatory and dangerous to men. The first image in the scene of Mina becoming sexually aware is when Mina and Lucy run through the maze as it rains, suggesting sensuous abandonment, followed by Mina and Lucy sharing a kiss, cementing this portrayal of Mina as a femme fatale – much like the female vampires, whom in the novel Jonathan seeks solace in knowing they are nothing like Mina. As this scene continues, Lucy sleepwalks into the maze as the storm reaches its peak to which Mina follows, seeing Lucy having sex with a beast

like figure. In Mina capturing this act she becomes aware, arguably then becoming a femme fatale as she made aware of sexual conduct – made all the more significant as she does not show disgust, especially as the man is presented as a beast. Also, it is interesting to compare the scene in which Dracula attacks Mina to the adaptations portrayal of it. Firstly, the Count does not appear in flesh immediately in the 1992 film. Instead there is a flow of green air through the open window that infiltrates the bed in which Mina sleeps , creating the illusion of invasion and corruption. Mina calls out for ‘her love’, which is the adaptation is suggested to be the Count, she awakes and Dracula appears upon her – creating a more sexual dynamic to the scene then the one Stoker described. Also, unlike Stoker, the drinking of blood from Dracula’s breast is seen to be something of pleasure for Mina as she cries out ‘Please! I don’t care. Make me yours!’ This heightens Mina’s role as a femme fatale figure, taking her beyond the fallen woman as Stoker presents her as.

For Stoker, the exploration of the anxiety of a woman becoming subject to sin, thus becoming a fallen woman, held enough significance for him in regards to what Mina represented as a female character. But for the 1992 adaptation, the female gender role is less bound by duty as this is not the case for the society watching. Women were more liberated in the 1990s, allowing a more explicit demonstration of female corruption, especially if the female willingly submits to it. This theme of women taking on different gender roles, and the anxiety this creates on the possibility of it happening in society, is what makes vampire fiction. For as Butler described, in the figure of the vampire the theme of smoke and mirrors and hysteria are opened up, allowing Stoker to focus on gender anxiety in a fictional, symbolic sense. After all, ‘the word ‘Dracula’ in Stoker’s novel designates not only a literary personality, but also a creeping process of invasion and corruption’ especially for gender roles. Butler believed that this was important for Stoker, and his main inspiration, as ‘the power of Dracula lies in the fact that the novel sums up, within the space of a few hundred pages, diffuse fears and tensions in the society for which it was written, and gives them a single moniker’. However, whereas Jonathan arguably acts in the same way as Mina does when she is attacked, because of the preconceived gender roles, his behaviour is exempt.

In conclusion, the combination of both intelligence and submission differs between Mina and Jonathan. Mina represents the anxiety of the New Woman who is able to

be independent from men, yet is aware of the Motherly instinct that can overpower a male’s capability. Whereas Jonathan represents the anxiety of a man who is repressed and how this can lead to utter submission caused by fear, a destructive trait, as seen in the film adaptation. However in the adaptation there is no presence of the desire to gain intelligence for the character of Mina, but instead a pressure to submit to other pleasures. Overall it is the genre which allows Stoker to explore these anxieties as the genre itself is focused on confusion, angst of what is accepted and the shapeshifter nature of humans, especially employed when focusing on the different roles of woman that Mina takes on in both the adaptation and the original text.