Mina the perfect Victorian Woman

In his book Dracula, Stoker utilizes Mina as the perfect example of how a Victorian woman should be. During the Victorian period, women were held to a high standard and were supposed to behave a certain way. Mina is one of the main characters in Stoker’s book, and she possesses all the important features of a Victorian women.

The reason why such high standards were given to women during the 19^th century is in some part due to Coventry Patmore and his poem “The angel of the house”. Patmore describes his wife and assures that she is the perfect wife because of her big love and devotion to him. Every woman had this idea the “Man must be pleased” (Patmore) and Stoker makes sure to portrait Mina this way too. The reader can see how Mina tells Lucy in one of her letters that she has been working very hard learning how to type so that she can “Keep up with Jonathan’s studies”(86) and how she wants to “be useful to Jonathan” (86) when they get married. Mina wants to please her husband and wants him to be proud of her, just how any Victorian woman wanted to. Mina not only tries to be helpful to her husband but also to the other men that are trying to capture and kill Dracula. Mina tells Van Helsing “I may be of service, since you can hypnotize me” (367). She wants to help as much as possible and in reality, she is much braver than what the men think she is.

The ideal Victorian woman was supposed to be pure, modest and refined. Stoker describes Mina in many of his passages as pure and innocent. Jonathan states that while Mina sleeps she seems “sweetly like a little child” (366). This is shows the way Jonathan sees Mina, he doesn’t see her as a sexy woman, rather he compares hers to a child, someone that is considered to be pure and requires to be taken care of. Mina herself feels ashamed and not worthy of Jonathan, she says “Unclean! Unclean! I must touch him or kiss him no more” (324) when she realizes that she had been drinking blood from Dracula.

Even though men had very high standards for women during the 19^th century, it seems that they also underestimated women in many ways. Throughout Stoker’s book the reader can see how the men, especially Van Helsing, made comments about how surprised they were about Mina’s amazing skills and intelligence. For example, Van Helsing in admiration admits: “She has a man’s brain …And woman’s heart” (Stoker274) this statement explains how men only thought women have a good heart but were not as equally smart. Men only expected women to be caring and loving but never smart or thoughtful, like Mina was. Mina’s intelligence seem to be the reason why men can make it so far in many moments, Van Helsing even acknowledges it by saying: “Our dear Madam Mina once more is out teacher. Her eyes has seen where we are blind, now we are on the track once again and this time we may succeed” (Stoker 394). Mina was able to solve the mystery of how Dracula made it back to his castle, and how he traveled by water. All the men were able to keep going and come up with a new plan to get Dracula thanks to Mina’s genius discovery.

 Stoker takes all the features of a perfect Victorian woman and applies it to Mina, one of the main characters in his book Dracula. Not only does Mina have the characteristics of how Victorian women were during that time period but he also makes her intelligent and thoughtful, something that men in the Victorian period never expected women to be.