Mina Quotes Flashcards
“When we are married I shall be able to be useful to Jonathon”
Gothic melodrama of Harker’s journal is relieved by the gossip and flirtation of Lucy and Mina’s exchange of letters. Mina is employed, seeking self improvement and perfecting her secretarial skills to be useful to her husband. Her independence and power is limited to the containment of marriage, where only through a man’s guidance and management she is able to convey her intelligence and ‘usefulness’.
“It must be so nice to see strange countries”
This comment, regarding her fiancé’s travels, is ironic evidence of her naivety given the perils that are threatening her Jonathon. Mina and Lucy’s correspondence contrasts sharply with the terror filled entries in the first part of the novel.
“I must attend my husband!”
Here we see a taste of Mina’s ideal of marriage. She’s such a tender, maternal person that she nurtures everyone - very stereotypical for a woman to do. Also poises as a huge contrast for her demise into vampirism when she instead of “attending” to her husband is flirting with Van Helsing.
“Why, this beats even shorthand! May I hear it say something?”
Technology excites Mina: to see a real phonograph. Posed as a fear for Victorian audiences, due to the embedded fear of rising technology at the time of the fin de siècle. Where the first telephone was developed in 1876, and increasing developments in technology, such as the telegram, the telephone, caused Victorian prescriptivists to fear the demise of the English Language, especially for enabling the access of this for the rising middle class, intellectual female demographic, who patriarchal men feared would cause them to dismiss their role as a mother, and wife, for this newly founded independence. FEAR OF THE NEW WOMAN!
“Man’s brain, woman’s heart” - Said by Van Helsing about Mina
Mina is now acting the role of the homemaker. She brings an archetypal feminine touch to all the proceedings of the group as they define their task, and yet has the intellectual capacity that of a man, perhaps we see Stoker’s feministic approach as we see Van Helsing approaching Mina’s powerful brain in a positive light, instead of being threatened by it.
“Her white nightdress was smeared with blood”
While there is an overt physical horror in this image of Mina being violated, what is arguably more disturbing is the colour imagery which symbolises the sexual emancipation of Mina. The fact that her “white nightdress” has now been “smeared with blood” conveys how the blood of Dracula which is old, antiquated and primitive blood has stained Mina’s innocence and “white” purity. There is a worrying suggestion of Dracula feeding on her. Grotesque parody of the Holy Communion. Vulnerability and stained purity of Mina represented by her stained dress sets up Dracula as a threat that is very much external.
“Mark of shame”, “unclean! Unclean! Unclean!”
Mark of Cain: God’s promise to offer Cain divine protection from premature death with the stated purpose of preventing anyone from killing him: in a perverse light, as the gift of immortality comes at a price: the burdens of vampirism.
Dracula has managed to mark Mina with a sign to show that her honour has been touched, and now that she has been contaminated with vampirism, she is religiously and psychologically “unclean”.
