Every year Dracula daily revamps interest in the novel and every year I have to be reminded of the utter buffoonery and misogyny that pervades every modern adaptation that romanticizes Dracula and his predation of women in the name of being âsubversiveâ while completely cutting out or sidelining his predation of men (namely Jonathan) because all of a sudden when heâs assaulting and robbing men of their agency itâs not sexy or sympathetic anymore and we canât include Jonathan (one of the most interesting and unique and ACTUALLY subversive male characters in gothic literature) because heâs not âmanlyâ enough
And letâs go into this further. Because what also pisses me off is people do this and defend it by claiming it gives the female characters (chiefly Mina) empowerment and agency where they didnât before. But they DID! Thatâs the whole thing!!!! They had an astounding degree of agency and respect and happiness BEFORE Dracula came into their lives and robbed them of it.
Lucy lived happily with her loving mother, had her pick of three lovely suitors, was given full freedom to choose whom she would spend her life with and has that decision respected by all the men involved, who all admire and care for her so much that they remain devoted friends to her (and I mean REALLY genuine friends) up to and past the point of her death where they risk their lives to avenge her and put her soul to rest.
Mina is in an unusually healthy, loving, devoted marriage to a man she completely adores, again with a bright future ahead of them both. Jonathan constantly thinks of Mina, compares almost all women against her, and is absolutely utterly in love with her. Mina and Jonathan regularly subvert Victorian expectations of a married couple in that they deeply love and respect one another to the point of flouting âproperâ Victorian customs by being affectionate out in public. In fact, the one time Jonathan decides to play the traditional man and ignores Minaâs wishes to leave her at home while he goes hunting vampires w the other men, he is IMMEDIATELY punished by the narrative! Draculas predation of Mina starts that night because she was left behind, and in response Jonathan affirms and reaffirms his total devotion to Mina above the other men for the rest of the story. In the third act of the novel while the team is trying to stop Minaâs slow turn to vampirism, Jonathan not only explicitly tells us the reader through his private journal entires that he will LITERALLY go against god if Mina is turned and damn himself to be by her side in hell rather than kill her if she becomes a vampire, he is unsubtle enough about it that the other men genuinely worry about where Jonathanâs loyalties will lie if they fail in killing Dracula and saving Mina.
So when adaptations pose that either of these women were just your typical trapped, bored, sexually frustrated poor Victorian traditional ladies looking for an out until bad boy Dracula comes to sexually liberate themâŚ. Motherfucker they were ALREADY about as liberated as female characters written by a man in the 1800s could get. Lucy is introduced to us as a young woman flush with bright and happy futures and her pick of the litter for the life she wants to lead until Dracula kills her and takes that from her. Mina marries her childhood sweetheart who literally prioritizes her over God and is building a business with him before Dracula nearly ruins her life permanently.
Not only is claiming that dracula is an agent of the female characters agency just completely antithetical to his role in the original narrative as a blatant serial THEIF of womenâs freedom, from the brides to the peasant mother to Lucy to Mina, itâs literally less subversive than the fucking source material
