for owlshowl
What am I doing wrong that I can't get the lj name to appear in then title? Anyway, this is for lj_owlshowl.
Vampirism as Empowerment: Wilhelmina Murray
Martin McCarvill
0022450
Germanic Studies 487
Section G01
Dr. Peter Golz
November 21, 2003
The sexual power of the vampire has probably attracted more scholarship than any other aspect of the
myth. The sexual fascination the vampire holds for its victim is an important part of the tradition at least as
far back as Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), and the vampiric/sexual awakenings of the great canon of female
victims have commonly contained elements of celebration as well as uneasiness. Bram Stoker’s Lucy, who
can be taken as the archetypal vampiric victim, is a good example. She awakens to knowledge of her
vampiric nature and sexual power simultaneously; sex and horror are tied up together, until the threat of the
sexually autonomous woman is removed with an obviously phallic staking. Christopher Craft’s compelling
“’Kiss Me with Those Red Lips‘: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” reads the novel as an
invasion narrative whose horror derives in general from Dracula’s ability to unsettle social and sexual
structures, and from fear of awakened female sexuality in particular. While a valuable analysis of Dracula,
and probably a telling look into Stoker’s own psychology, readings like Craft’s are complicated by Mina
Harker, who fights consistently and with some success against the role of idealized victim in which Stoker
casts her leaving her. This has made her a good starting point for recent versions of the Dracula myth which
portray the autonomy granted by the vampire-principle in a less negative light. Two recent interpolations of
the Mina character, Francis Ford Coppola’s in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1994) and Alan Moore’s in The
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2000), consciously set out to redeem Mina from the woman=victim
tautology to which Stoker forced her, not completely successfully, to submit. Coppola’s Mina, whom I will
examine briefly, is redeemed by her passion for Dracula, a process of romantic and sexual empowerment
initiated by the vampire, but presented as beautiful (and temporary) rather than horrific. Moore’s more
radical and important take reaches back to the archetypal independent females of 19th-century detective and
adventure fiction and produces a “Wilhelmina Murray” who is specifically and explicitly empowered by her
vampirism. In contrast to Stoker’s Mina, who is doubly fettered by her womanhood and the contagion left
by her pseudo-sexual encounter with Dracula, and Coppola’s Mina, whose autonomy is made contingent on
her sexuality, Moore others and empowers Wilhelmina by means of her vampiric powers and natural
resourcefulness, in more explicitly political fashion that does no violence to either the Mina of Dracula or
League‘s late-Victorian setting.
The Mina Harker of Dracula is in some ways a typical young bourgeois woman: insistent on propriety;
devoted to Jonathan in an undemonstrative fashion; scornful of the “New Women” and, in an ironic
prefiguration, their “appetites” . Van Helsing praises her effusively: “So true, so sweet, so noble, so little an
egoist . . . One of God’s women fashioned by His own hand to show us men and other women that there is a
Heaven where we can enter, and that its light be here on earth” . The frequency with which he returns to this
theme betrays an underlying insecurity: to Van Helsing and Stoker, Mina is the perfect virtuous woman
because she must be. It is to protect this idealized Christian femininity that the vampire hunters fight; they
need a symbol of innocence to inspire them in their fight with the Count, a symbol of corruption. Mina fills
this role capably, and serves the similar structural needs of Stoker as author by embodying ordinary English
decency in a way that the aristocratic and libidinous Lucy Westenra cannot. When Dracula vamps Mina, it is
calculated to horrify in a way that Lucy’s corruption cannot; for a moment, it seems, the invasion narrative is
complete and the invader has achieved dominance. The final hunt for Dracula draws its tension from the
hunters’ constant, obsessive anxiety regarding the progress of Mina’s vampirism. Indeed, this is practically
the only thing exciting about the novel’s last 80 or so pages, when the courage of Mina’s struggle with the
foreign corruption within is stressed (almost hysterically at times by Van Helsing) and contrasted with the
passivity of her husband. Jonathan has been enervated by the Weird Sisters and unmanned by Mina’s
transgress liaison, and does little but mope until the time comes for his revenge. Despite this, his share of the
narrative greatly increases as compared to the novel’s middle section, as we are treated to his dull struggle
to reclaim his manhood.
Mina, on the other hand, despite being the centre of all this activity, is largely reduced to a spectator
until the penultimate scene. She spends most of the final section under hypnosis, and even the information
gleaned thereby is suspect, as the hunters worry whether having been seduced by Dracula once, she is now
merely his puppet. Stoker has spent a great deal of time stressing Mina’s intelligence and helpfulness, but
now she must be neutralized so that the men can have their merry chase. The vampiric blood in her
designates her as unreliable and an invalid, bereft of the ability to protect herself.
The irony is that the men have done very little to convince the reader that they deserve to win. Readerly
sympathy with them derives first from sympathy with Mina; if they defeat Dracula she will be cured of her
vampirism. One cannot help but feel the vampire hunters’ insistence of Dracula’s fiendish cunning to be
somewhat defensive when the long record of their bumbling is considered. Van Helsing’s ridiculous cloak-
and-dagger secrecy has been in good measure responsible for Lucy’s death. Time and again, when the men
are confused and discouraged, Mina shows them the way forward, not by her example, but by practical
action. Despite Van Helsing’s lifetime of combat against creatures like Dracula, he relies almost entirely for
his intelligence on Mina’s typewritten observations and her compilation of the information the others bring.
At least twice at the end, it is only Mina’s keen mind that foils Dracula’s escape. It must be remembered that
when Mina requests that Van Helsing hypnotize her, she is fighting for her life using the only avenue of
action to which she has not been denied access by the men.
Van Helsing glibly praises Mina’s man’s brain--a brain that a man should have were he much gifted--and a
woman’s heart” . And yet it is Mina’s perceived “woman’s heart that makes the men reluctant to put her
“man’s brain” to work, to allow her the dignity of defending herself; this almost causes her downfall. Despite
having proved her deductive faculties, she is closed out of the boys’ club of hunters. “Tings are quite bad
enough for us, all men of the world, and who have been in many tight places in our time; but it is no place
for a woman” is Dr. Seward’s absurd take on the situation the day before Dracula slips past their defences
and forces himself on Mina while her husband sleeps beside them. Stoker seems to feel secure in the manifest
rightness of this position, even when it approaches the ludicrously tragic. The day after Dracula vamps Mina,
in a scene that is almost farcical, Van Helsing succeeds first in drawing Mina’s attention back to the fact that
the Count “banqueted heavily” the previous night, and then in the space of a single page, placing the Host
on her forehead, he manages to burn her excruciatingly, brand her, and call her mind back yet again to her
unholy state. Van Helsing appears painfully inept, and Mina’s reaction to his “banquet” remark is composed,
cool, and displays a new hardness that is far from angelic:
[“]These stupid old lips of mine and this stupid old head do not
deserve it so; but you will forget it, will you not?” [Van Helsing]
bent low beside her as he spoke; she took his hands, and looking
at him through her tears, said hoarsely:--
“No, I shall not forget, for it is well that I remember; and with
it I have so much in memory of you that is sweet, that I take it all
together. Now you must be going soon. Breakfast is ready, and we
must all eat that we may be strong.”
In contrast to Van Helsing’s sentimentality, Mina, with predator’s blood coursing through her, is focused
on the hunt. Indeed, the modern reader is tempted to conclude that it is really Mina who masterminds
Dracula’s downfall, saving her own soul and avenging Lucy’s. She uses Van Helsing’s specialized
knowledge, Godalming’s money, and Seward and Quincey’s special skills and physical prowess to overcome
the special impediments--her womanhood and the contaminated victim status that she has acquired by
trusting the men to protect her--that limit her ability to take direct action and press her into passivity.
But how would Stoker’s reading public have received a less passive heroine? His other writings,
particularly later works such as the startlingly demented The Lair of the White Worm (1911), fluctuate
between prurience and prudery; he was “prude and pornographer at once, each of these impulses apparently
exacerbating the fury of the other” . Dracula is a gothic romance with themes of twisted sexuality; the
strong female character will inevitably be misused if introduced into such a narrative. There existed,
however, well-established alternative models in popular fiction which presented female independence and
unconventionality in an acceptable way.
Especially after 1860, courtesans or demi-mondaines became more and more accepted as part of polite
society. These women were drawn from all backgrounds, but catered to an almost exclusively aristocratic
clientele; known as “Great Strumpets” or “Grandes Horizontales” , they were widely admired by young girls
of the upper and middle classes, and their fashions and mannerisms were slavishly imitated. In contrast to
widespread concerns about immorality among lower-class streetwalkers, the Great Strumpets were seen as
attractive and daring to have so audaciously escaped social norms. They had wealth, influence, and freedom
from social bounds. Empowered by their sexuality and othered by their work, they were free to engage in
traditionally masculine activities such as shooting, gambling and training horses. They were living
embodiments of a female escape fantasy.
Francis Ford Coppola sets his “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” in a lush fin de siecle of decadence and barely
repressed eroticism, and portrays female characters (Mina, Lucy, the Weird Sisters) in a way that is indebted
to the Great Strumpet concept. Coppola’s Dracula (Gary Oldman) is presented specifically as an agent of
sexual unsettlement and liberation, who became a vampire when he cursed God for letting his beloved die in
the 15th Century. Although “Count Vlad” is the indirect agent of the “awakening” of Mina (Winona Ryder)
the process is mediated by the fact that she chooses to be vamped by him. The film’s tagline, “Love Never
Dies,” is the key to Coppola’s central theme: Mina is trapped in a passive female gender role, betrothed to
the passionless Jonathan Harker (played by the wooden Keanu Reeves in an inspired bit of casting), but her
attraction to Dracula (who is figured consistently in terms of animalism, not undeath) gives her the courage
to make love to him illicitly and assert her sexual autonomy. Like the Strumpets, her freedom derives from
her desirability; however, perhaps reflecting the sensibilities of a late-20th-century audience, the only freedom
that concerns her is the freedom to love whom she chooses. This sets her apart from Lucy (Sadie Frost),
whose expression of lust without concern for “true love” aligns her even more closely with the Strumpet
figure. Mina‘s downfall, in contrast to Lucy’s libidinous excess, is romantic and heroic: her freedom only
exists in the realm of love, and therefore dies with the death of her lover. Mina and Dracula are presented
sympathetically as lovers and the “Crew of Light” ambivalently as well-meaning but repressive and repressed
agents of a sexless status quo; but the narrative structure remains very similar to the novel, with the only
important difference being that Mina is allowed to taste freedom before Dracula’s expulsion and the vigilant
re-assertion of her passive role.
The independence that Mina’s talents and admirability deserve, then, needs to be made uncontingent and
intrinsic to the character. Or such is the project of Alan Moore in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Moore ignores the sex-based empowerment of the Strumpets and reaches back to a parallel tradition in
Victorian fiction with clearer affinities to Mina: popular detective and adventure fiction. William Burton's
"The Secret Cell," published in New York in 1837, featured a professional female detective known as
"L____;" this story predated by four years Edgar Allan Poe's famous Chevalier Dupin of "Murders in the
Rue Morgue." Moreover, where Dupin was an aristocratic dabbler, L____ was a professional private
investigator when the idea of a woman having a profession at all was still more than a little shocking. In
Britain, the first recorded female detective story was William S. Hayward's "Revelations of a Lady
Detective" (1861). These female detectives were generally of a type; cool, collected, upright, honest and
clever. Certainly the most famous was Frederick Wright Hume's Hagar Stanley, who closely prefigures
Moore's Miss Murray in her toughness and abrasiveness. Hagar of the Pawnshop, the Gypsy Detective
(1898) introduced Hagar as a half-English, half-Romany (Transylvanian?) girl, contaminated by the foreign
like Mina and a firm and upright defender of English values. Hagar's foreignness and Gypsy blood likely
helped the audience accept her aggressive behaviour in defense of her honour, as when, faced with the
persistent unwanted attentions of a Romany man, she boxes his ears without a moment's hesitation.
Closely related to the female detective was the "adventuress," the female equivalent of the heroic protagonist
of the "adventure fiction" typified by H. Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain. A good example of the
adventuress is Irene Adler, the antagonist of the Sherlock Holmes novel A Scandal in Bohemia (1892).
Conan Doyle used the term "adventuress" to describe her knowing that to his audience, it was a loaded term
signifying brilliance, unconventionality, a taste for excitement, and outsider status; Adler, for instance is
foreign and a demi-mondaine.
This is the tradition upon which Moore drew for his Wilhelmina Murray character. League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen is a fanciful tribute to the literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries and a
landmark work in the emergent genre for which several names have been proposed, but which seems to be
entering general parlance as "steampunk" (see also William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference
Engine and Moore's retelling of the Jack the Ripper story, From Hell). Steampunk as a genre is
characterized by a fictionalized, often high-tech and science-fictive 19th-century setting against which
nostalgias are indulged and modern anxieties played out; Moore's approach is to imagine a fin de siecle
fantasy London in which the work of fiction writers of the period is conflated. Thus, in 1898, a mysterious
young woman named Wilhelmina Murray stands at the English Terminus of the uncompleted Dover-Calais
Bridge to meet with Campion Bond, Special Agent of the Crown on Her Majesty's Secret Service. Bond
enlists Miss Murray (she is called by her maiden name throughout) to assemble a covert military unit
consisting of Allan Quatermain, Captain Nemo, Henry Jekyll and his alter ego, the Invisible Man, and
herself. As Bond notes, "[t]he British Empire has always had difficulty distinguishing between her heroes and
her monsters.”
Miss Murray's history is not immediately revealed to the other characters, but her identity with Mina
Harker is clearly intended to be apparent to the reader. There is the name; and Bond on page 3 makes
reference to her having been "ravished by a foreigner." This is in the context of a discussion about her
unnamed "former husband" and Wilhelmina having "reverted to her maiden name.” Within three more
pages, we have been transported via Nautilus to Cairo, where Wilhelmina has left a knife in the back of a
would-be rapist and rescued the opium-addled Allan Quatermain, hurling abuse at him all the while as he
struggles to pull himself together. Clearly this is a very different Mina from Stoker's. The reader can
speculate as to whether this is an alternate version of Mina, as Stoker left the Harkers happily married a
mere year before the events of League; certainly the few times Jonathan is alluded to, Miss Murray is
scornfully dismissive. She has apparently been scandalized and excluded from society as a result of her
encounter with Dracula; she muses to Nemo that "[W]e are both made strangers in our homelands. Exiles . .
. " (FN). At the same time, this scandal has apparently qualified the seemingly unremarkable Miss Murray to
lead the League. Interrogated by Nemo as to her qualifications to be leader of a group of such dangerous
men as himself and Quatermain, she turns his queries gently aside: "Dangerous men? Why Captain, you have
no idea,“ she says, stroking the blood-red scarf which later proves to hide the garish scars of her
assault by Dracula. Possibly this is a world in which the Crew of Light failed to slay the Count; in any case,
Miss Murray's scorn for her ex-husband clearly extends to men in general. "In Heaven's name be a man, sir!"
she cries, bespeaking past pain. "You play your little games with your elephant guns and your submersible
boats, but one raised voice and you hide like children!“ Substitute "crosses and garlic" for “guns and
boats” and she might as well be addressing Van Helsing and his crew. She is hard, humourless, "maddening"
and "waspish" to Quatermain and Bond.
Miss Murray is in fact considerably more than that. Although provided with a more competent crew than
Van Helsing and the vampire hunters, is it still Miss Murray who consistently shows them the way forward.
As they investigate the happenings Bond is concerned with, a new invasion narrative develops; the source
of the threat to Britain is hidden in the Chinese opium dens of Limehouse. Miss Murray deduces the secret
hideout of the foe, modelled on Saxe Rohmer's Fu Manchu but called "The Doctor" for copyright reasons)
showing the same kind of deductive skill and attention to seemingly insignificant details as the trainspotting
Mina in Dracula. Reinforcing Miss Murray's connection to the detective tradition, the real enemy turns out
to be Sherlock Holmes' nemesis Moriarty, and it is Miss Murray who plays the decisive role in foiling him.
Moore is initially coy about revealing the extent to which Miss Murray has been physically altered by her
encounter with Dracula, but she certainly possesses vampiric strength, and, in her love scene with
Quatermain, it is strongly suggested that she might possess vampiric bloodlust as well . The execrable
film version of League is far less subtle on this score, representing Miss Murray as a fully-fledged vampire,
complete with flight, the ability to shift shape, and aversion to sunlight.
Miss Murray's position as leader of the league is thus justified by her intelligence and the vampiric blood
which Stoker used to disarm her and make her a helpless invalid. And yet, despite having been othered by
Dracula and let down by English manhood, Miss Murray remains very much a middle-class English girl at
heart, concerned (ludicrously, given her companions) with keeping up an appearance of respectable
normality and taking Nemo, the colonial rebel, to task for his lack of loyalty to the crown: "I think you'll find
it's our Empire.“ Apolitical Mina Harker has been transformed into a strident imperialist, but she is not so
much concerned with British political power as with the preservation of British values from invasions of the
foreign similar to the one that destroyed her own former life. She rebukes Hyde in particular for his
bloodlust and lack of self control, setting up a contrast with her own stiff upper lip in the face of her
implicit hunger, and exhibits a hold over Hyde similar to Dracula’s control over Renfield and the
Transylvanian wolves.
Maud Ellman has noted that Dracula has mythic qualities: "there is no development of character, no
complexity of thought , , , to distract us from the elementary components of the myth . . . . That Stoker's
characters are flat and largely interchangeable is all the better, because their mythic function is never
befuddled by the nuances of personality.“ Film and comic books, of course, excel at the production of
myth. Coppola's and especially Moore's Minas take Stoker's character, stalled halfway to personhood with
no more than a slight attempt at real character development and psychological tension, and reduce her
wholly to a cipher. Coppola's myth of tragic love de-emphasizes Mina's unique and admirable qualities and
makes her into a generic tragic lover. Her connection with the vampire principle, Dracula, allows her
temporary freedom of action, but when the vampire, the principle of freedom and unsettlement is removed,
she is once again trapped in her bourgeois life. Moore locates the vampire freedom-principle in Mina,
empowering her in an intrinsic and irrevocable way and liberating the essence of Stoker's character.
Wilhelmina Murray is not the hapless victim of Dracula, denied the means of self-defense; she is an ordinary
Englishwoman, infected by the monstrous, but in the tradition of another comic-book
vampire/protector/outsider, Blade, enabled by this infection to defend England and Englishness from further
incursions of the monstrous (the second volume of League concerns the invasion of London by HG Wells'
Martians). Vampirism is thus used as a symbol of female empowerment in the face of victimization, and
Wilhelmina Murray the middle-class (super)hero is a fitting redemption and expansion of Stoker's Mina
Harker onto a truly iconic and mythic scale.
Works Cited
Coppola, Francis Ford, dir. “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Columbia Pictures, 1992.
Craft, Christopher. “’Kiss Me with Those Red Lips‘: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Byron and Glennis, eds., Dracula: Contemporary Critical Essays (Houndmills: MacMillan, 1999), 93-118.
Harrison, William H. A Fanfare of Strumpets. London: WH Allen, 1971.
Moore, Alan, and Kevin O’Neill. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen vols. 1 and 2. La Jolla, California: America’s Best Comics, 2000 and 2003.
Nevins, Jess. “Fantastic Victoriana.” www.geocities.com/jessnevins.vics.html. December 11, 2002.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Vampirism as Empowerment: Wilhelmina Murray
Martin McCarvill
0022450
Germanic Studies 487
Section G01
Dr. Peter Golz
November 21, 2003
The sexual power of the vampire has probably attracted more scholarship than any other aspect of the
myth. The sexual fascination the vampire holds for its victim is an important part of the tradition at least as
far back as Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), and the vampiric/sexual awakenings of the great canon of female
victims have commonly contained elements of celebration as well as uneasiness. Bram Stoker’s Lucy, who
can be taken as the archetypal vampiric victim, is a good example. She awakens to knowledge of her
vampiric nature and sexual power simultaneously; sex and horror are tied up together, until the threat of the
sexually autonomous woman is removed with an obviously phallic staking. Christopher Craft’s compelling
“’Kiss Me with Those Red Lips‘: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” reads the novel as an
invasion narrative whose horror derives in general from Dracula’s ability to unsettle social and sexual
structures, and from fear of awakened female sexuality in particular. While a valuable analysis of Dracula,
and probably a telling look into Stoker’s own psychology, readings like Craft’s are complicated by Mina
Harker, who fights consistently and with some success against the role of idealized victim in which Stoker
casts her leaving her. This has made her a good starting point for recent versions of the Dracula myth which
portray the autonomy granted by the vampire-principle in a less negative light. Two recent interpolations of
the Mina character, Francis Ford Coppola’s in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1994) and Alan Moore’s in The
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2000), consciously set out to redeem Mina from the woman=victim
tautology to which Stoker forced her, not completely successfully, to submit. Coppola’s Mina, whom I will
examine briefly, is redeemed by her passion for Dracula, a process of romantic and sexual empowerment
initiated by the vampire, but presented as beautiful (and temporary) rather than horrific. Moore’s more
radical and important take reaches back to the archetypal independent females of 19th-century detective and
adventure fiction and produces a “Wilhelmina Murray” who is specifically and explicitly empowered by her
vampirism. In contrast to Stoker’s Mina, who is doubly fettered by her womanhood and the contagion left
by her pseudo-sexual encounter with Dracula, and Coppola’s Mina, whose autonomy is made contingent on
her sexuality, Moore others and empowers Wilhelmina by means of her vampiric powers and natural
resourcefulness, in more explicitly political fashion that does no violence to either the Mina of Dracula or
League‘s late-Victorian setting.
The Mina Harker of Dracula is in some ways a typical young bourgeois woman: insistent on propriety;
devoted to Jonathan in an undemonstrative fashion; scornful of the “New Women” and, in an ironic
prefiguration, their “appetites” . Van Helsing praises her effusively: “So true, so sweet, so noble, so little an
egoist . . . One of God’s women fashioned by His own hand to show us men and other women that there is a
Heaven where we can enter, and that its light be here on earth” . The frequency with which he returns to this
theme betrays an underlying insecurity: to Van Helsing and Stoker, Mina is the perfect virtuous woman
because she must be. It is to protect this idealized Christian femininity that the vampire hunters fight; they
need a symbol of innocence to inspire them in their fight with the Count, a symbol of corruption. Mina fills
this role capably, and serves the similar structural needs of Stoker as author by embodying ordinary English
decency in a way that the aristocratic and libidinous Lucy Westenra cannot. When Dracula vamps Mina, it is
calculated to horrify in a way that Lucy’s corruption cannot; for a moment, it seems, the invasion narrative is
complete and the invader has achieved dominance. The final hunt for Dracula draws its tension from the
hunters’ constant, obsessive anxiety regarding the progress of Mina’s vampirism. Indeed, this is practically
the only thing exciting about the novel’s last 80 or so pages, when the courage of Mina’s struggle with the
foreign corruption within is stressed (almost hysterically at times by Van Helsing) and contrasted with the
passivity of her husband. Jonathan has been enervated by the Weird Sisters and unmanned by Mina’s
transgress liaison, and does little but mope until the time comes for his revenge. Despite this, his share of the
narrative greatly increases as compared to the novel’s middle section, as we are treated to his dull struggle
to reclaim his manhood.
Mina, on the other hand, despite being the centre of all this activity, is largely reduced to a spectator
until the penultimate scene. She spends most of the final section under hypnosis, and even the information
gleaned thereby is suspect, as the hunters worry whether having been seduced by Dracula once, she is now
merely his puppet. Stoker has spent a great deal of time stressing Mina’s intelligence and helpfulness, but
now she must be neutralized so that the men can have their merry chase. The vampiric blood in her
designates her as unreliable and an invalid, bereft of the ability to protect herself.
The irony is that the men have done very little to convince the reader that they deserve to win. Readerly
sympathy with them derives first from sympathy with Mina; if they defeat Dracula she will be cured of her
vampirism. One cannot help but feel the vampire hunters’ insistence of Dracula’s fiendish cunning to be
somewhat defensive when the long record of their bumbling is considered. Van Helsing’s ridiculous cloak-
and-dagger secrecy has been in good measure responsible for Lucy’s death. Time and again, when the men
are confused and discouraged, Mina shows them the way forward, not by her example, but by practical
action. Despite Van Helsing’s lifetime of combat against creatures like Dracula, he relies almost entirely for
his intelligence on Mina’s typewritten observations and her compilation of the information the others bring.
At least twice at the end, it is only Mina’s keen mind that foils Dracula’s escape. It must be remembered that
when Mina requests that Van Helsing hypnotize her, she is fighting for her life using the only avenue of
action to which she has not been denied access by the men.
Van Helsing glibly praises Mina’s man’s brain--a brain that a man should have were he much gifted--and a
woman’s heart” . And yet it is Mina’s perceived “woman’s heart that makes the men reluctant to put her
“man’s brain” to work, to allow her the dignity of defending herself; this almost causes her downfall. Despite
having proved her deductive faculties, she is closed out of the boys’ club of hunters. “Tings are quite bad
enough for us, all men of the world, and who have been in many tight places in our time; but it is no place
for a woman” is Dr. Seward’s absurd take on the situation the day before Dracula slips past their defences
and forces himself on Mina while her husband sleeps beside them. Stoker seems to feel secure in the manifest
rightness of this position, even when it approaches the ludicrously tragic. The day after Dracula vamps Mina,
in a scene that is almost farcical, Van Helsing succeeds first in drawing Mina’s attention back to the fact that
the Count “banqueted heavily” the previous night, and then in the space of a single page, placing the Host
on her forehead, he manages to burn her excruciatingly, brand her, and call her mind back yet again to her
unholy state. Van Helsing appears painfully inept, and Mina’s reaction to his “banquet” remark is composed,
cool, and displays a new hardness that is far from angelic:
[“]These stupid old lips of mine and this stupid old head do not
deserve it so; but you will forget it, will you not?” [Van Helsing]
bent low beside her as he spoke; she took his hands, and looking
at him through her tears, said hoarsely:--
“No, I shall not forget, for it is well that I remember; and with
it I have so much in memory of you that is sweet, that I take it all
together. Now you must be going soon. Breakfast is ready, and we
must all eat that we may be strong.”
In contrast to Van Helsing’s sentimentality, Mina, with predator’s blood coursing through her, is focused
on the hunt. Indeed, the modern reader is tempted to conclude that it is really Mina who masterminds
Dracula’s downfall, saving her own soul and avenging Lucy’s. She uses Van Helsing’s specialized
knowledge, Godalming’s money, and Seward and Quincey’s special skills and physical prowess to overcome
the special impediments--her womanhood and the contaminated victim status that she has acquired by
trusting the men to protect her--that limit her ability to take direct action and press her into passivity.
But how would Stoker’s reading public have received a less passive heroine? His other writings,
particularly later works such as the startlingly demented The Lair of the White Worm (1911), fluctuate
between prurience and prudery; he was “prude and pornographer at once, each of these impulses apparently
exacerbating the fury of the other” . Dracula is a gothic romance with themes of twisted sexuality; the
strong female character will inevitably be misused if introduced into such a narrative. There existed,
however, well-established alternative models in popular fiction which presented female independence and
unconventionality in an acceptable way.
Especially after 1860, courtesans or demi-mondaines became more and more accepted as part of polite
society. These women were drawn from all backgrounds, but catered to an almost exclusively aristocratic
clientele; known as “Great Strumpets” or “Grandes Horizontales” , they were widely admired by young girls
of the upper and middle classes, and their fashions and mannerisms were slavishly imitated. In contrast to
widespread concerns about immorality among lower-class streetwalkers, the Great Strumpets were seen as
attractive and daring to have so audaciously escaped social norms. They had wealth, influence, and freedom
from social bounds. Empowered by their sexuality and othered by their work, they were free to engage in
traditionally masculine activities such as shooting, gambling and training horses. They were living
embodiments of a female escape fantasy.
Francis Ford Coppola sets his “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” in a lush fin de siecle of decadence and barely
repressed eroticism, and portrays female characters (Mina, Lucy, the Weird Sisters) in a way that is indebted
to the Great Strumpet concept. Coppola’s Dracula (Gary Oldman) is presented specifically as an agent of
sexual unsettlement and liberation, who became a vampire when he cursed God for letting his beloved die in
the 15th Century. Although “Count Vlad” is the indirect agent of the “awakening” of Mina (Winona Ryder)
the process is mediated by the fact that she chooses to be vamped by him. The film’s tagline, “Love Never
Dies,” is the key to Coppola’s central theme: Mina is trapped in a passive female gender role, betrothed to
the passionless Jonathan Harker (played by the wooden Keanu Reeves in an inspired bit of casting), but her
attraction to Dracula (who is figured consistently in terms of animalism, not undeath) gives her the courage
to make love to him illicitly and assert her sexual autonomy. Like the Strumpets, her freedom derives from
her desirability; however, perhaps reflecting the sensibilities of a late-20th-century audience, the only freedom
that concerns her is the freedom to love whom she chooses. This sets her apart from Lucy (Sadie Frost),
whose expression of lust without concern for “true love” aligns her even more closely with the Strumpet
figure. Mina‘s downfall, in contrast to Lucy’s libidinous excess, is romantic and heroic: her freedom only
exists in the realm of love, and therefore dies with the death of her lover. Mina and Dracula are presented
sympathetically as lovers and the “Crew of Light” ambivalently as well-meaning but repressive and repressed
agents of a sexless status quo; but the narrative structure remains very similar to the novel, with the only
important difference being that Mina is allowed to taste freedom before Dracula’s expulsion and the vigilant
re-assertion of her passive role.
The independence that Mina’s talents and admirability deserve, then, needs to be made uncontingent and
intrinsic to the character. Or such is the project of Alan Moore in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Moore ignores the sex-based empowerment of the Strumpets and reaches back to a parallel tradition in
Victorian fiction with clearer affinities to Mina: popular detective and adventure fiction. William Burton's
"The Secret Cell," published in New York in 1837, featured a professional female detective known as
"L____;" this story predated by four years Edgar Allan Poe's famous Chevalier Dupin of "Murders in the
Rue Morgue." Moreover, where Dupin was an aristocratic dabbler, L____ was a professional private
investigator when the idea of a woman having a profession at all was still more than a little shocking. In
Britain, the first recorded female detective story was William S. Hayward's "Revelations of a Lady
Detective" (1861). These female detectives were generally of a type; cool, collected, upright, honest and
clever. Certainly the most famous was Frederick Wright Hume's Hagar Stanley, who closely prefigures
Moore's Miss Murray in her toughness and abrasiveness. Hagar of the Pawnshop, the Gypsy Detective
(1898) introduced Hagar as a half-English, half-Romany (Transylvanian?) girl, contaminated by the foreign
like Mina and a firm and upright defender of English values. Hagar's foreignness and Gypsy blood likely
helped the audience accept her aggressive behaviour in defense of her honour, as when, faced with the
persistent unwanted attentions of a Romany man, she boxes his ears without a moment's hesitation.
Closely related to the female detective was the "adventuress," the female equivalent of the heroic protagonist
of the "adventure fiction" typified by H. Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain. A good example of the
adventuress is Irene Adler, the antagonist of the Sherlock Holmes novel A Scandal in Bohemia (1892).
Conan Doyle used the term "adventuress" to describe her knowing that to his audience, it was a loaded term
signifying brilliance, unconventionality, a taste for excitement, and outsider status; Adler, for instance is
foreign and a demi-mondaine.
This is the tradition upon which Moore drew for his Wilhelmina Murray character. League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen is a fanciful tribute to the literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries and a
landmark work in the emergent genre for which several names have been proposed, but which seems to be
entering general parlance as "steampunk" (see also William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference
Engine and Moore's retelling of the Jack the Ripper story, From Hell). Steampunk as a genre is
characterized by a fictionalized, often high-tech and science-fictive 19th-century setting against which
nostalgias are indulged and modern anxieties played out; Moore's approach is to imagine a fin de siecle
fantasy London in which the work of fiction writers of the period is conflated. Thus, in 1898, a mysterious
young woman named Wilhelmina Murray stands at the English Terminus of the uncompleted Dover-Calais
Bridge to meet with Campion Bond, Special Agent of the Crown on Her Majesty's Secret Service. Bond
enlists Miss Murray (she is called by her maiden name throughout) to assemble a covert military unit
consisting of Allan Quatermain, Captain Nemo, Henry Jekyll and his alter ego, the Invisible Man, and
herself. As Bond notes, "[t]he British Empire has always had difficulty distinguishing between her heroes and
her monsters.”
Miss Murray's history is not immediately revealed to the other characters, but her identity with Mina
Harker is clearly intended to be apparent to the reader. There is the name; and Bond on page 3 makes
reference to her having been "ravished by a foreigner." This is in the context of a discussion about her
unnamed "former husband" and Wilhelmina having "reverted to her maiden name.” Within three more
pages, we have been transported via Nautilus to Cairo, where Wilhelmina has left a knife in the back of a
would-be rapist and rescued the opium-addled Allan Quatermain, hurling abuse at him all the while as he
struggles to pull himself together. Clearly this is a very different Mina from Stoker's. The reader can
speculate as to whether this is an alternate version of Mina, as Stoker left the Harkers happily married a
mere year before the events of League; certainly the few times Jonathan is alluded to, Miss Murray is
scornfully dismissive. She has apparently been scandalized and excluded from society as a result of her
encounter with Dracula; she muses to Nemo that "[W]e are both made strangers in our homelands. Exiles . .
. " (FN). At the same time, this scandal has apparently qualified the seemingly unremarkable Miss Murray to
lead the League. Interrogated by Nemo as to her qualifications to be leader of a group of such dangerous
men as himself and Quatermain, she turns his queries gently aside: "Dangerous men? Why Captain, you have
no idea,“ she says, stroking the blood-red scarf which later proves to hide the garish scars of her
assault by Dracula. Possibly this is a world in which the Crew of Light failed to slay the Count; in any case,
Miss Murray's scorn for her ex-husband clearly extends to men in general. "In Heaven's name be a man, sir!"
she cries, bespeaking past pain. "You play your little games with your elephant guns and your submersible
boats, but one raised voice and you hide like children!“ Substitute "crosses and garlic" for “guns and
boats” and she might as well be addressing Van Helsing and his crew. She is hard, humourless, "maddening"
and "waspish" to Quatermain and Bond.
Miss Murray is in fact considerably more than that. Although provided with a more competent crew than
Van Helsing and the vampire hunters, is it still Miss Murray who consistently shows them the way forward.
As they investigate the happenings Bond is concerned with, a new invasion narrative develops; the source
of the threat to Britain is hidden in the Chinese opium dens of Limehouse. Miss Murray deduces the secret
hideout of the foe, modelled on Saxe Rohmer's Fu Manchu but called "The Doctor" for copyright reasons)
showing the same kind of deductive skill and attention to seemingly insignificant details as the trainspotting
Mina in Dracula. Reinforcing Miss Murray's connection to the detective tradition, the real enemy turns out
to be Sherlock Holmes' nemesis Moriarty, and it is Miss Murray who plays the decisive role in foiling him.
Moore is initially coy about revealing the extent to which Miss Murray has been physically altered by her
encounter with Dracula, but she certainly possesses vampiric strength, and, in her love scene with
Quatermain, it is strongly suggested that she might possess vampiric bloodlust as well . The execrable
film version of League is far less subtle on this score, representing Miss Murray as a fully-fledged vampire,
complete with flight, the ability to shift shape, and aversion to sunlight.
Miss Murray's position as leader of the league is thus justified by her intelligence and the vampiric blood
which Stoker used to disarm her and make her a helpless invalid. And yet, despite having been othered by
Dracula and let down by English manhood, Miss Murray remains very much a middle-class English girl at
heart, concerned (ludicrously, given her companions) with keeping up an appearance of respectable
normality and taking Nemo, the colonial rebel, to task for his lack of loyalty to the crown: "I think you'll find
it's our Empire.“ Apolitical Mina Harker has been transformed into a strident imperialist, but she is not so
much concerned with British political power as with the preservation of British values from invasions of the
foreign similar to the one that destroyed her own former life. She rebukes Hyde in particular for his
bloodlust and lack of self control, setting up a contrast with her own stiff upper lip in the face of her
implicit hunger, and exhibits a hold over Hyde similar to Dracula’s control over Renfield and the
Transylvanian wolves.
Maud Ellman has noted that Dracula has mythic qualities: "there is no development of character, no
complexity of thought , , , to distract us from the elementary components of the myth . . . . That Stoker's
characters are flat and largely interchangeable is all the better, because their mythic function is never
befuddled by the nuances of personality.“ Film and comic books, of course, excel at the production of
myth. Coppola's and especially Moore's Minas take Stoker's character, stalled halfway to personhood with
no more than a slight attempt at real character development and psychological tension, and reduce her
wholly to a cipher. Coppola's myth of tragic love de-emphasizes Mina's unique and admirable qualities and
makes her into a generic tragic lover. Her connection with the vampire principle, Dracula, allows her
temporary freedom of action, but when the vampire, the principle of freedom and unsettlement is removed,
she is once again trapped in her bourgeois life. Moore locates the vampire freedom-principle in Mina,
empowering her in an intrinsic and irrevocable way and liberating the essence of Stoker's character.
Wilhelmina Murray is not the hapless victim of Dracula, denied the means of self-defense; she is an ordinary
Englishwoman, infected by the monstrous, but in the tradition of another comic-book
vampire/protector/outsider, Blade, enabled by this infection to defend England and Englishness from further
incursions of the monstrous (the second volume of League concerns the invasion of London by HG Wells'
Martians). Vampirism is thus used as a symbol of female empowerment in the face of victimization, and
Wilhelmina Murray the middle-class (super)hero is a fitting redemption and expansion of Stoker's Mina
Harker onto a truly iconic and mythic scale.
Works Cited
Coppola, Francis Ford, dir. “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Columbia Pictures, 1992.
Craft, Christopher. “’Kiss Me with Those Red Lips‘: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Byron and Glennis, eds., Dracula: Contemporary Critical Essays (Houndmills: MacMillan, 1999), 93-118.
Harrison, William H. A Fanfare of Strumpets. London: WH Allen, 1971.
Moore, Alan, and Kevin O’Neill. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen vols. 1 and 2. La Jolla, California: America’s Best Comics, 2000 and 2003.
Nevins, Jess. “Fantastic Victoriana.” www.geocities.com/jessnevins.vics.html. December 11, 2002.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.