I. Authoring the Archive

Mina's cataloguing of information combats the fear and illegibility of the threat that she, her friends, and the British nation experience in the form of Dracula. From the very beginning of the novel, the Count is described as an elusive, unmappable presence. Dracula as a being is able to change forms – he can turn into a bat or wolf. His body itself is unreadable: is he living? Is he dead? At one moment, he is described as an “old man” with “astonishing vitality in a man of his years” (23-24; ch. 2), and the next as “a tall, thin man” who had “grown young” (155; ch. 13). He eludes a solid materiality. He can dissipate into thin air as dust or fog. He casts no shadow, and mirrors and photographs fail to capture his reflection. His location is under constant question and his ethnic heritage is inscrutable. Dracula is wholly undocumentable at first and, as a result, Jonathan and the others doubt his existence. Jonathan repeatedly questions what he sees in Castle Dracula, asking “what manner of man” is Dracula, or “what manner of creature is it in the semblance of man?” (39; ch. 3).

Jonathan's experience of Castle Dracula makes the vampire's unmappability most apparent. While traveling in “that far East,” Jonathan has no clear route to take, no easy mode of transportation, and no knowledge of the local customs. As he notes, the “further East you go the more unpunctual are the trains,” and though the country is beautiful and “very picturesque” (11; ch. 1), it is also “very mysterious” (12; ch. 1) and “unknown” (14; ch. 1). Most distressing of all is Jonathan's inability to locate any complete map of Transylvania. Indeed, Castle Dracula does not show up on any available map: as Jonathan writes, “I was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our own Ordinance Survey maps” (10; ch. 1). This lack of documentation forms an extreme contrast to the materials Dracula has collected about England. His study contains a wealth of information on the West, a “vast number of English books. . .bound volumes of magazines and newspapers” with all sorts of information from “history, geography, politics, political economy, botany, geology, law – all relating to England and English life and customs and manners” (25; ch. 2). Dracula has access to histories of verified documents, helping him to assimilate to London life, while Jonathan stumbles around the “East,” blind and unknowing because he lacks access to maps and histories. Acquiring knowledge becomes the method through which conquering and colonizing is possible for Dracula, and his potential for doing so inspires the fear and unease Jonathan, Mina, and their friends feel toward him. Their inability to know or understand Dracula makes him more threatening. Therefore, the hunters’ first step in defeating Dracula is to make sense of him, to render him legible. The mapping of Dracula's physicality, history, and location becomes necessary for navigating, understanding, and eventually capturing him; the novel itself becomes a form of entrapment – of making real and confirming the strange.

The ideology of conquest through knowledge and documentation is, as Thomas Richards explains in The Imperial Archive, quite common among the Victorians. After all, “people in Britain began to think differently about what it meant to hold on to an empire. The narratives of the late nineteenth century are full of fantasies about an empire united not by force but by information” (1). Domination itself became not just a matter of “military might, economic muscle, and political pull,” but of gathering information and organizing archives (2). “The British collected information about the countries they were adding to their map,” Richards observes, so “[t]hey surveyed and they mapped” (3). Furthermore, in Dracula, conquest doesn't just come via information; rather, the fantasy of empire within the novel utilizes the information collected to conquer, or at least to enable a more strategic use of force. If anything, Mina's mediation work and textual mapping is like that of the war office, supplying fighters with the information they need to make a more precise and effective attack. While Richards considers the surveying and mapping in Dracula to be the work of an “old-boy network,” it is the sympathetic and feminine Mina who becomes responsible for the gathering, surveying, and mapping of knowledge (63). Her organization and compilation of various narratives finally corner and contain Dracula, in a way that mimics the imperialist method of knowledge-gathering, within the solid and reproducible form of the novel.

If the way to defeat Dracula is, in part, to capture or “know” him, the narrative certainly attempts to do so, and it enables Mina to take on a central role in that task. The novel establishes Mina as the mediator of knowledge and even the editor of the text itself. Mina’s reserved abstraction of how the novel comes into existence – that is to say, her vague editor's preface – frames the narrative as a whole, veiling it in deeper mystery until the unpacking of its pages reveal her as the compiler and editor of the final text. Appearing after the front piece and dedication, Mina's editorial framing is a trope of the gothic genre, reminding us of similarly “framed” stories of horror in gothic staples like Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1797), Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826), and, even more recent and relevant, Stoker's own The Lady in the Shroud (1909). Within this familiar gothic trope, a character or group of characters hint at how the pages to follow have come into existence, obscuring and delaying our understanding of what's to come even as they appear to direct the audience on how to read the text at hand. What's interesting about this framework in Dracula is that in it, Mina defers her responsibility in crafting the “papers.” Refusing to name herself as the text's compiler, she does, in the preface, insert herself as its author. “How these papers have been placed in sequence,” she writes, “will be made manifest in the reading of them” (5; preface). Mina's authorship and role as editor is thus revealed, as we witness, through her own accounts and those of Jonathan, Van Helsing, Seward, and Holmwood, who frequently reference her role in the transcription and compilation of the various documents that make up Dracula. Footnote ⁵ Van Helsing, for example, claims Mina as the mediator or conduit through which all knowledge must pass, exclaiming that Mina's textual editing and transcription work “opens the gate for me” (165; ch. 14). Through Mina's typed journal entry, which she transcribed from her own shorthand, she reveals her knowledge about Lucy's sleepwalking experiences to Van Helsing. It is by reading the transcript of Mina's journal, Van Helsing acknowledges, that he finds the evidence he needs to support his diagnosis of Lucy and discovers the means for saving her soul. As the “gatekeeper” or mediator of knowledge, Mina reproduces others’ words and then circulates them. Mina copies and organizes Jonathan's, Dr. Seward's, Lucy's, and her own journals, while systematically compiling the additional newspaper clippings, letters, and telegrams in chronological order that together make up Dracula.

Even before Mina understands the full extent of Dracula's threat, she has an intuitive sense that transcribing and copying her and Jonathan's journals will be important at a later date; as she expresses in her journal, “I shall be prepared. I shall get my typewriter this very hour and begin transcribing. Then we shall be ready for other eyes if required” (161; ch. 14). She even works as an interviewer to record “verbatim” her initial conference with Van Helsing, explaining that “memory was everything in such work. . .you must be able to put down exactly almost every word spoken, even if you had to refine some of it afterwards” (163; ch. 14). Such scenes explicitly place Mina as editor and writer, in addition to her role as “mere” transcriber. Mina compares her diary-writing, which she performs “whenever [she] feels inclined,” to her attempts to emulate her contemporary “lady journalists” by “interviewing and writing descriptions and trying to remember conversations” (56; ch. 5). Mina's attention to writing down details exactly as they happen and recording accounts and conversations precisely as they were relayed shows her attention to discovering the truth. She recognizes that in the future, these documents, as well as those of her other compatriots, need to be reliable because they will be used to influence the opinion and action of others. Whereas Jonathan could find no resources on Dracula to prepare him for his first vampiric encounter and entrapment at Castle Dracula, Mina's help in publishing and reproducing their findings in a narrative form that they see as a scientific, methodical record that is “exactly contemporary” addresses a much needed lacuna in the imperial archive (5; preface).Footnote ⁶ After Mina's labor, future Jonathans will be able to return from the British Museum armed with texts on the Count.

Mina's mass-production of these same documents so that everyone can have easy access to them mimics Dracula's threat of reproducing himself in London – “where, for centuries to come he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless” – by suggesting that, yes, indeed, Dracula will be produced infinitely throughout London, but not in the way he thinks (53-54; ch. 4). Dracula's reproduction will not occur through the destruction of English bodies, but rather through the technological circulation of Mina's documents. The novel Dracula itself is what gets reproduced, rather than vampirism, in the period when “commercial book publishing became a mass market business” (Weedon 1). In Dracula, as Leah Richards argues, the “potential spread of vampirism creates a need for these particular texts, and the same technological advances and methodologies in printing and publishing that satisfied the needs of a vast reading public make the exchange of information in Dracula possible” (440-41). In this sense, then, Mina's documents, which make up the novel itself, can be read, as Leah Price might suggest, as a “physical thing” with a particular use value (4). As Price notes, “nineteenth-century understandings of, and feelings toward, the uses of printed matter” are directly tied to the relation between “reading (doing something with the words), handling (doing something with the object), and circulating (doing something to, or with, other persons by means of the book – whether cementing or severing relationships, whether by giving and receiving books or by withholding and rejecting them)” (5-6). Dracula in particular is concerned with circulation; the text, as Mina is quick to point out, must be mass-produced and shared in order to defeat Dracula, primarily because the documents are given a truth-value that combats the anxiety and fear created by Dracula's invasion. That anxiety can only be mastered by containing it within the pages of Mina's constructed novel. The more the truth gets out, is read and reiterated, the more authority it has and the more protection it can offer.

Mina alone seems to understand the importance of this shared literacy and broad circulation. She lectures Dr. Seward on the topic when he is reluctant to share his journals with her, explaining that she needs access to his writing “[b]ecause it is a part of the terrible story, a part of poor dear Lucy's death and all that led to it; because in the struggle which we have before us to rid the earth of this terrible monster we must have all the knowledge and all the help which we can get” (197; ch. 17). Mina elaborates, “We need have no secrets amongst us; working together and with absolute trust, we can surely be stronger than if some of us were in the dark.” For Mina, the putative privacy of the personal journal is sacrificed to its public function. Van Helsing appreciates and commends such foresight in Mina. Without her transcribed journals, he would never have been able to piece together the clues behind Lucy's illness. He praises Mina, exclaiming, “how can I say what I owe to you? This paper is as sunshine. . .I am daze, I am dazzle, with so much light” (165; ch. 14). Van Helsing admires Mina for her diligent note-taking, while acknowledging her power to reveal secrets and mediate private knowledge. Within the novel, it is not enough that “the material be collected by firsthand observers and written down; it needs to be shared” (L. Richards 440). Only by knowing everything that can be known can the group defeat Dracula. The reproduced and identical copies that Mina circulates amongst the group members mimic “the shift from a culture that disseminates information only to a privileged few to one that distributes information on a large scale, transcending boundaries of class, location, and gender” (440). The mass production of Mina's documents informs a wide audience and is itself, much like the hands that compiled and edited it, a “relayed – mediated or channeled – communication” (Galvan 18).

II. Meaningful Production

The fin de siècle saw a rise in New Woman and women novelists, which, as Sally Ledger explains “link[ed] feminist fictional output with mass culture” (178). The “notion,” as Andreas Huyssen remarks, “gained ground during the nineteenth century that mass culture is somehow associated with women while real, authentic culture remains the prerogative of men” (qtd. in Ledger 178). Mina's mass production of writing not only aligns her with the secretarial positions popular amongst New Woman professionals of the time, but also places her in the middle of a cultural battle regarding anxiety over women writers and their authenticity – in terms of their reliability and accuracy in portraying the truth. Stoker's depiction of Mina as competent, sympathetic, and yet intellectual combats such assertions that women's writing was inauthentic. In fact, Mina's alliance with the typewriter does much to dispel such notions. Knowledge, and in particular the spreading of knowledge through writing technologies like the typewriter, was culturally perceived to be about authority, authenticity, and the production of truth. As Leah Richards notes, “the discourse of power related to the typewriter and the typewritten page from its earliest stages of development” (499) began with what Darren Wershler-Henry explains was “the desire for a simple writing machine that could. . .efficiently and legibly produce truth” (qtd. in L. Richards 449). Indeed, the cultural value placed on typewriting is what makes Mina's work so significant within the novel. Mina, the mediator between the personal accounts and the typewritten documents, has the power of authenticity, as her power to produce truth plays out continually through her textual spread of knowledge. Mina gets recognized for her ability to both reproduce and circulate, as well as produce and process knowledge into valuable and useable information.

The question of truth becomes both extremely important in the novel and is directly associated with Mina's compilations of accounts. The documents (or the novel itself) become necessary not just as a way of convincing people that the threat of Dracula is real, or as a way for everyone to have access to the necessary information in order to track and exterminate Dracula, but as a way of anchoring or grounding the group in a world where “possible impossibilities” loom (Stoker 172; ch. 14). This becomes most clear at moments when the characters doubt what they have seen or experienced. Returning to their journals, to documents, and to words reassures them. For example, when Jonathan's brain fever returns, re-reading his journal and Van Helsing's letter, which confirm those experiences, cures him. Given the journal by Mina, Van Helsing conclusively endorses the veracity held within it. Reading this letter of verification, Jonathan also recognizes the truth of his experiences, explaining that Mina “showed me in the doctor's letter that all I wrote down was true. It seems to have made a new man of me. It was the doubt as to the reality of the whole thing that knocked me over. . .but, now that I know, I am not afraid, even of the Count” (168; ch. 14).

The wisdom and truth of words is stressed throughout the novel, starting from its very beginnings. In the preface, though writing in the passive voice, Mina suggests the veracity of the documents by calling them a “history” and “simple fact” (5; preface). Newspaper accounts and scientific observations, as well as personal journals, are all granted an implicit authenticity, both within the preface and within the novel at large. This reassurance points to the importance of reading in revealing the truth. Van Helsing himself posits the inherent truth of personal documentation. When looking at Lucy's letters, he says that they are “words into her soul” (154; ch. 13). This insistence on the truth of the written word, while reassuring to readers, also reveals the characters’ anxiety regarding the truth. While Mina's journalistic tactics, reliable secretarial skills, and innate honesty and goodness do not leave us questioning Dracula's existence, the extreme focus on the text's ability to reveal truth can be read as a reaction to the inability to read or understand Count Dracula.

Documentation and the authority it holds becomes extremely important as the characters undertake their quest to rid the world of the Count. Mina, as the most astute member of her group, makes the most of this process, not only through the documents she organizes, but also through her use of her trance-like connection with Dracula. In order to physically “locate” him within the world, Mina relies on the psychic connection Dracula cultivates when he exchanges blood with her. When the group loses Dracula's trail in Varna, Mina resolves to “go over all carefully, and perhaps. . .arrive at some conclusion” (304; ch. 26). Mere lines later, she makes her discovery, revealing that the Count was returning to his castle by the river Pruth. Citing her own typescript as the source contributing to her conclusion, she explains to the others that she “read in the typescript that in my trance I heard cows low and water swirling level with my ears and the creaking of wood. The Count in his box then, was on a river in an open boat” (306; ch. 26). A quick look at her map and Mina is able to discover the river the missing vampire is taking to his destination.

In fact, Mina values the mass production and sharing of knowledge that grants her these particular insights in the face of male allies who continuously seek to exclude her from the group's collective fund of knowledge and full participation in knowledge production. They justify this exclusion by couching it in terms of protecting her, as a woman, from harm. Van Helsing first attempts to ban Mina from the battle against Dracula, arguing that it is “no part for a woman. . .hereafter she may suffer – both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams” (207; ch. 18). Dr. Seward suggests as much, stating “Mrs. Harker is better out of it. . .it is no place for a woman, and if she had remained in touch with the affair, it would in time infallibly have wrecked her” (225; ch. 19). Similarly, Jonathan seems to think that once Mina compiles the text, her “job” is finished, and she can be left out of the “future work” (223; ch. 19) and return to her “own home” where she would be “happier. . .with her daily tasks to interest her” (230; ch. 20). “I am so glad she consented to hold back and let us men do the work,” he writes; “now that her work is done, and that is due to her energy and brains and foresight that the whole story is put together in such a way that every point tells, she may well feel that her part is finished” (218; ch. 19). While giving her the credit she deserves, Jonathan excludes her from any of the “serious” business, reinstating traditional gender roles and order by reducing Mina to a stereotypical conception of the mere secretary, who passes the reproduced documents to her male boss without having any stake in their content or outcome. Such statements stem directly from Victorian notions of women's weaker nerve force and consequent “inability to withstand mental and emotional strain” (Galvan 77).

Yet, somewhat ironically, Mina's mental fortitude makes her the most resolute and distinguished member of the group. Mina is the one that remains emotionally grounded, while the men around her experience a crisis in masculinity: Seward suffers not only from heartache and rejection, but from a chronic melancholia; Van Helsing's wacky, yet obsessive antics belie a deep-seated grief over the loss of his wife and child years earlier; Arthur is asked to stake his own bride; Quincy functions for the majority of the novel as a rather flat character, perhaps even as a caricature of the American West, whose only purpose is to be sacrificed in the final battle; and Jonathan is perhaps the most fragile of all.Footnote ⁷ Rather than experience mental distress herself, it is Jonathan, Mina's husband, who suffers from periodic “violent brain fever” (95; ch. 8) and a premature whitening of the hair from nerves and stress. On the surface, the men's exclusion of Mina seems to serve this Victorian containment narrative of circumscribing women within a safe, domestic role, but in actuality their exclusion of Mina seems to function more as a paltry reparation of their own unraveling masculinities.

Unsurprisingly, then, the men are severely misguided, since it is at the very moment when Mina is “kept in the dark” that Dracula attacks her and she is “infallibly. . .wrecked” (225; ch. 19). It is not her participation that ruins her; rather, it is the dangers of concealing information and perpetuating feminine ignorance that are to blame. Perhaps were the men aware of their own fragility, they would realize that they are unable to protect Mina. Their focus on Mina's weakness, rather than on a retrospective realization of their own, is exactly what provides Dracula with the perfect opportunity to target Mina. One could argue that Dracula, as a superior reader of British knowledge (we know from Jonathan's journal that he has mastered the language and read many texts on British culture), recognizes Mina's strategic role in transcribing and producing knowledge for the band of men. It is both this recognition of Mina's capabilities and his uncanny understanding of the men's vulnerability that provide Dracula with the means and motive for establishing his blood link with Mina, and by extension with the rest of the knowledge that the group has hitherto gathered. When the highly guarded and regulated Mina is left alone and isolated she is vulnerable to attack. Similarly, it is when Lucy is left in the dark, and unable to take the proper precautions for self-preservation, that she succumbs to Dracula's (sexual) invasion. As a result of her ignorance, Lucy eventually participates in Dracula's project of reverse colonization as he seeks to expand his property holdings. But this is also an expansion of his monstrous male reproduction, as Lucy is reborn as one of Dracula's “ever-widening circle of semi-demons” (54; ch. 5). The lesson here quickly becomes that women (and Mina in particular) have an important role to play in the “future work” of the English nation. Dracula has access to female-dominated domestic spaces, as well as the public streets of London. Therefore, all people of England, both men and women, must become responsible warriors in the fight against such threats. Directly after her encounter with Dracula, the men decide that once more Mina should be taken into their “full confidence; that nothing of any sort – no matter how painful – should be kept from her” (253; ch. 22). The men are forced to recognize that Mina contributes to the protection of the nation not by her ability to reproduce sexually, but by her acts of knowledge-gathering, archiving, and textual (re)production.

III. Mina's Body of Knowledge

Only through making use of Mina's secretarial, mental, and even telepathic powers of mediation does the group make progress in its quest. Just as Mina operates as a medium through her use of technology, she also acquires telepathic powers after Dracula's attack, wherein her body becomes an intermediary between Dracula and Van Helsing. Galvan's work readily negotiates this movement from technological medium to spiritual medium, arguing that “women's operating, typing, and séance channeling” are not “separate functions, but different expressions of the same one” (11); the development of women as spiritual mediums “parallels their increasing involvement over the course of the period in technological modes of communication mediation” (4). Victorian perceptions of “the proper woman” as passive and sensitive were read as characteristics ideal for mediation (4n5). Mina certainly possesses these excellent feminine qualities. In particular, Mina has the power of sympathy necessary to reach out and connect with others, making her not only a vulnerable subject of Dracula's enforced mind-connection, but also a natural spiritual mediator. Mina provides comfort and “sweet sympathy” to Arthur Holmwood as he cries over the loss of Lucy. She explains that it is her “woman's nature” that allows her to comfort him, even going so far as to attribute it to her innate “mother-spirit” (203; ch. 17). Thus, in addition to her business-like, logical “man's brain,” Mina holds the “woman's heart” that makes her a naturally sympathetic mediator of the spiritual and technological (207; ch. 18).

Both spiritual and technological mediation figure the female medium as automatic and even mechanized. Women were perceived to be excellent mediums because they “combined the right kind of presence with the right kind of absence” (Galvan 12). In other words, the woman as presence meant that she had the power to reach out sympathetically and “facilitate networks of communication,” but as an absence, she was “automatic” and could ensure the privacy of the messages transferred—the invisibility of the medium depended in part on the removal of her intellect from the conversation (12). While associated with machinery in some respects, as she becomes a document to be read and evaluated by Van Helsing and Dracula, Mina ultimately resists this reading because of the power that she gains as producer, reproducer, and generator of knowledge. Despite her body being used as a telepathic channel of communication, Mina's own mind never ceases to work intellectually. Indeed, while it is tempting to read women mediums as a “supplement or substitute for machines,” Galvan is quick to point out that this is merely a metaphor: “overtly or covertly, these women all acted purposefully and in their own self-interest” (14). So, too, does Mina's mind. Even while under the Count's telepathic control, her mind remains her own. Van Helsing acknowledges that even though “Mrs. Harker's tongue is tied[,] I know that she has formed conclusions of her own, and from all that has been I can guess how brilliant and true they must be, but she will not, or cannot give them utterance” (280; ch. 24). It is Mina herself who recognizes that just as the Count can get into her mind, she can access his through hypnotism. Whereas Dracula's invasion of Mina's body is likened to an illness or disease, making her “unclean” and undermining her virtuousness, Van Helsing's use of hypnotism, though functioning in similar ways – he argues that it is impossible to “accept the hypnotism and reject the thought reading” (171; ch. 14) – is figured as a “cure” or preventative measure to counterbalance the Count's assault on her mind. Mina's body literally becomes the battlefield upon which the fate of England is decided. As Dracula's invasion shifts from the city of London to Mina's own body and mind, the fight moves from being about evacuating Dracula from London to evacuating him from Mina. Here, Mina's body literally becomes representative of the English nation and, as such, reinforces her centrality to the novel. Mina as the mother of the Empire needs to be protected and secured, even as she seeks retaliation through the collection and control of knowledge.Footnote ⁸

Dracula's initial attack on Mina establishes the lines of battle across Mina's mind, body, and soul. He recognizes the power Mina wields. In his invasion of her body, in which he forges the blood-link between them, granting him access to her knowledge, he also tries to destroy and cut off the transfer of knowledge from the group in an attempt to cripple its progress. In his rapid exit from Seward's house, Dracula makes “rare hay of the place,” destroying all the original documents the group relied upon for information: “all the manuscript had burned, and the blue flames were flickering amongst the white ashes. The cylinders of [Seward's] phonograph too were thrown on the fire, and the wax had helped the flames” (249; ch. 21). Much like the physical documents and technological devices thrown on the fire, Mina, the carrier and classifier of knowledge, becomes a body of knowledge for Dracula to destroy. Unfortunately for Dracula, he fails in both endeavors. Mina has responsibly made copies of her files; his usurpation of Mina's textual mind, which he attempts to read like a document, is inevitably foreclosed when he realizes that Mina, as a technological communication device, operates as a window into his own movements. While he intends to read Mina for information, it is, ironically, he who becomes a document that Mina and Van Helsing decipher.

In addition to Mina's body being the “map” or the “device” of communication between Van Helsing and Dracula, Stoker also seems to be writing the anxieties of the time that centered on women and textual production onto Mina's body. As Fleissner notes, women's writing in the nineteenth century “threatens accepted ideas about femininity – and must be silenced at all costs” (418). But in the historical context in which Dracula was written, women's writing as secretarial work was “invaluable to the masculine business world” even while woman's mass production of literature potentially threatened the ideals of these same men (419). Stoker, I would argue, wants to situate Mina's writing as a productive force, seeking to retaliate or work against male fears of female literacy. Positioning Mina and her skills as a service to the English nation, rather than a threat to the patriarchal hierarchy, seeks to alleviate these fears. Stoker even presents the novel as Mina's compilation, giving the reader the feeling that the text was written (if not completely, or realistically) by a strong, yet feminine woman. Indeed, Mina's writing is less a threat within the novel than what brings the novel into being. As the reproducer of the documents, Mina becomes the producer of the actual novel itself – writing her own esteemed qualities onto the future world she has helped to make possible through her actions.

As the mediator of various texts and thoughts, Mina alone provides access to knowledge, which contributes directly to the safety of the nation. Her secretarial and even journalistic skills, as well as her “natural femininity,” make her the only character within the novel who can generate the documents needed to destroy Dracula, giving birth to a restored England. While Mina is quick to catch on to the fact that catching Dracula means sharing knowledge, her manly allies “only fully learn the lesson through painful trial and error” (Galvan 79). Finally, though, the male characters become accustomed to Mina as the possessor of both wifely, “feminine” qualities – namely, her sympathy – and more independent, “masculine” ones – as writer and intellectual. Van Helsing happily thanks “[t]he good God” that “fashioned” Mina “for a purpose. . .when he made that so good combination” (207; ch. 18). That these qualities bring light to the darkness caused by Dracula is made further evident when Mina's book helps her to locate Dracula for Van Helsing's warriors. Van Helsing acknowledges that “[h]er eyes have seen where we were blinded. Now we are on the track once again” (306; ch. 26). Such acceptance and idealization of Mina's unique labor makes it possible for Stoker to position Mina as integral to improving the English nation, and putting it back “on track,” while alleviating male anxieties about female literacy. Contrary to veins of current feminist theory that are critical of women's complicity in nationalist and imperial projects, enormous numbers of women of the 1890s, including many we would now call “feminist,” articulated a desire to contribute to building a more expansive British nation. While contemporary feminists might be troubled by Mina's involvement in the imperial project, Stoker's conception of Mina as a knowledge-producer for the nation seems to underscore exactly the boundary-pushing feminine empowerment characteristic of protofeminists of the late-Victorian period.Footnote ⁹ To be sure, women's agency in the novel, and the discourses surrounding that agency, through which Mina's mediumship operates, does the work of repairing the culture of masculinity that Dracula threatens. Nevertheless, Mina's agency is no less agential because it reinforces patriarchal and imperialist projects. Her role in preserving and repairing the masculinity damaged by Dracula's conquest is certainly designed to uphold the patriarchal and imperial structures of nineteenth-century Britain. However, Mina's mediation and agency make it clear that women do have a role to play in the forging of the future English nation.

Mina proves that she has the ability to extract and pull together the most meaningful parts of the text, and is responsible for not only transcribing and disseminating knowledge, but also processing it. Extracting meaning from all of the parts, she quickly becomes and remains, with the exception of Dracula, the most valuable character of the novel, who spreads knowledge and unites a nation through giving her countrymen and women access to her mass-produced text. Mina is a female character capable of being a wife and mother, as well as an independent professional and valued writer. From his particular ideological position, one difficult to classify as conservative or progressive, Stoker seems to suggest that women with Mina's qualities are most apt for guiding the nation into a brighter future, and that their access to knowledge and writing abilities is the channel through which this can be accomplished.