Just as Stoker's other Gothic disruptions flirt with and transgress boundaries of personal identity, his portrayal of Mina Harker as “a stereotypically ‘good’ little Victorian Miss” (Sally Ledger's term, “The New Woman” 30) troubles any simple definition of normative femininity. By exploring these borders and their effects, Stoker attempts to shore up the seemingly besieged categories of Englishness, manliness, and national identity. As David Glover has argued, Stoker's text reveals “a fixation with unfixing the boundaries, with the attractions of liminality, in order that the lines of demarcation might be all the more strictly controlled” (48).
Mina Harker exists on the cusp of culturally overdetermined boundaries that were undergoing extensive revision during the Victorian fin de siècle. Although nothing seems more natural to Mina than her desire to help her husband in the public sphere while maintaining an intimate friendship with Lucy Westenra in the private, these familiar roles become estranged by the new taxonomies of deviancy popularized during the late nineteenth century. Poovey and Armstrong both have argued persuasively and influentially that the image of the “proper lady” that was circulated in conduct books and domestic fiction shaped the way women viewed themselves during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 24), epitomizes shifting cultural anxieties at the moment when a long-standing ideological conception of proper femininity comes under suspicious attack. Van Helsing's paranoid observation, “Madam Mina, our poor, dear Madam Mina, is changing” (319 ch. Many critics concentrate on Dracula himself and the men who do battle with him interestingly, the novel also develops Mina's complex subjectivity through her unspoken but deep affinity with the vampire.
These conflicting statements capture the peculiar double bind with which Mina struggles throughout Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). As she recounts this perverse seduction in her own words, however, she contradicts her earlier disavowal: “strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him” (284). A FTER MINA HARKER awakens from Count Dracula's vampiric embrace, she asks the men around her, but more pointedly herself, “What have I done to deserve such a fate, I who have tried to walk in meekness and righteousness all my days?” (285, ch.
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