Mina: traditional and modern

The five stages below lead to the finished essay. After planning, use steps 6 and 7 of the writing guide to draft and revise your own response.

Each bullet states a paragraph’s main point and explains how it contributes to the essay’s overall argument.

• Traditional: marriage, duty, care, faith and male protection. These commitments do not necessarily mean passivity.
• Modern: paid work, technical skills and independent judgement, read alongside the 1890s New Woman debate.
• Both: the statement proposes coexistence, not an equal balance. Ask how these qualities work together and where they conflict.
• How far: establish which evidence supports the combination and what qualifies it. Do not refute a claim of equality that the question does not make.
• Initial reading to test: Mina simply combines the best of old and new. Test that reading against the group’s dependence on her work and its decision to exclude her.

The evidence should test coexistence, authority and the consequences of exclusion before the essay reaches a judgement.

Considered and set aside

• Case for the statement: shorthand and typing are modern means that Mina initially offers as service to Jonathan (Chapter 5). Her skills and traditional commitments coexist in the same actions.
• Complication: the men praise her intelligence and then exclude her (Chapter 18). This does not disprove that she is both traditional and modern; it exposes a tension over who controls her work.
• Deciding evidence: the exclusion leaves her uninformed, while her later hypnosis and memorandum help direct the pursuit (Chapters 23 and 26). The plot depends on her active intelligence.
• Provisional judgement: Mina combines traditional commitments and modern competence. The novel makes that competence indispensable while repeatedly recognising and restricting it through traditional forms of authority.

• Structure: point by point. Examine coexistence and its limits within each issue rather than dividing Mina into two separate personalities.
• Opening: begin with her mockery of New Woman writers beside her own modern skills. Define the terms and state the qualified answer.
• Work: “useful to Jonathan” (Chapter 5) and “dates are everything” (Chapter 17). Explain how declared service develops into authority that benefits the group.
• Praise and exclusion: “man’s brain” and “it is no part for a woman” (Chapter 18), followed by being “kept in the dark” (Chapter 19). Analyse the restriction without treating it as proof that coexistence is impossible.
• Consequences and recovery: hypnosis (Chapter 23) and the memorandum (Chapter 26). Show why the plot needs the participant the men tried to protect by excluding.
• Ending: Jonathan’s final note and Van Helsing’s praise place Mina’s achievement in a family frame. Conclude that traditional and modern qualities coexist under continuing pressure.

Keep the context attached to these passages. Charlotte’s work offers a useful comparison, not proof that she was Mina’s model. The final turn should grow from the group’s dependence on Mina, not from an invented claim that “both” must mean equality.

“Mina Harker is both traditional and modern.” How far do you agree?

Mina mocks the New Woman while practising skills associated with her. Her jokes in Chapter 8 sit beside the paid work, shorthand and typing through which she becomes indispensable to the hunt. “Traditional” here means commitments to marriage, duty, care and faith; “modern” describes her technical competence and independent judgement. The statement that she is both does not require these qualities to be equally balanced. I shall argue that they coexist in the same actions, but under pressure: the men depend on her intelligence while claiming authority to limit its use. The question is not which half of Mina wins, but what that combination enables her to do and what it costs her.

Mina’s working skills are modern in their means and traditional in their declared purpose, which is where “both” is literally true. An assistant schoolmistress who earns her own living before the hunt begins, she practises shorthand and typing because “When we are married I shall be able to be useful to Jonathan” (Chapter 5). The phrase places her accomplishments within service to a husband, but the abilities it describes later serve a much wider enterprise. “Useful” should not be read as a retreat from modernity: it was the period’s own language for women’s work. Bram’s mother, Charlotte Stoker, argued that women in workhouses should be trained and helped to emigrate to countries where “a self-supporting woman is alike respected and respectable”. That does not make Charlotte a model for Mina, but it shows how the case for women’s work was made at the time – in the vocabulary of usefulness and respectability, which is the vocabulary Mina speaks. Her joke that the New Woman “will do the proposing herself” (Chapter 8) distances her from a caricature, not from the education and work the movement argued for. And when she insists that “dates are everything” (Chapter 17), chronology becomes a method of reasoning: she does more than copy the men’s records; she makes separate accounts intelligible together. Service supplies the acceptable vocabulary for work whose intellectual consequences exceed it.

The coexistence becomes most difficult in the men’s response to her. Van Helsing praises Mina’s “man’s brain” and “woman’s heart” (Chapter 18), recognising her ability through a gendered division of reason and feeling. The same speech then declares that the hunt “is no part for a woman”. Seward endorses the decision: “I agreed heartily with him.” Their admiration does not give Mina equal authority over the work she has made possible. Historical understanding matters here. The compliment is intended as praise, but intention does not settle its effect. A modern reader can recognise the praise while examining how it leads into protective exclusion. This qualifies the terms on which Mina is allowed to be modern, rather than disproving that modern and traditional qualities coexist.

What decides the question is the plot’s verdict on that exclusion. Left uninformed in the asylum while the men search, Mina is attacked by the Count; afterwards she insists, “There must be no concealment … we have had too much already” (Chapter 22). Her return is driven by her own initiative. “I want you to hypnotise me!” she tells Van Helsing (Chapter 23), turning the Count’s bond with her into a source of intelligence about him. Even her compassion, the most conventionally feminine of her qualities, becomes moral direction: she asks the men to see the Count as “That poor soul who has wrought all this misery”, and tells them that their work “is not a work of hate” (Chapter 23). In Chapter 26, “Mina Harker’s Memorandum” reasons from the evidence to the Count’s route home, and the man who excluded her reverses his own judgement: “Our dear Madam Mina is once more our teacher. Her eyes have been where we were blinded.” This sequence is Jordan Kistler’s best evidence that Mina is the novel’s New Woman, and it is decisive here. The traditional frame of male protection has failed, and only Mina’s modern competence repairs it. The hunters cannot defeat Dracula without the intelligence they tried to set aside.

Yet the ending gives the last word back to tradition. The final note, written seven years later, is Jonathan’s, and it closes on Van Helsing speaking “with our boy on his knee”: “This boy will some day know what a brave and gallant woman his mother is. Already he knows her sweetness and loving care; later on he will understand how some men so loved her, that they did dare much for her sake.” The praise is real – “brave and gallant” are a soldier’s adjectives – but it is spoken by men, framed by motherhood, and its final clause turns her story into theirs: what the boy will learn is how much the men dared for her. Mina, whose typing produced the record, has no voice in the final note. Prescott and Giorgio argue that the novel’s closure cannot fully contain the disruption Mina represents, and that is the right emphasis. The domestic ending cannot erase what readers have watched her do, because the documents she assembled are the novel we have just read. But it does decide who speaks for them.

Mina is both traditional and modern because those qualities repeatedly coexist in what she does. Her skills begin as service to Jonathan and become a resource for the whole alliance; her loyalty sustains an independence of judgement that the men cannot safely exclude. The ending celebrates her within marriage and motherhood, without cancelling the intellectual work that makes that ending possible. Stoker gives no frictionless reconciliation of old and new. Mina’s greatest challenge to male authority may be that the men cannot defeat Dracula without her.

The essay ends here. Open the separate teaching notes for discussion questions and guidance on using this example.

All nine examples · 60 Estate practice questions · Quotations and evidence.

The original question and assessment source notes remain available in the UK and Irish guide. That assessment context is separate from AP scoring. The literary argument here has been retained; the preparation is presented for US classroom use.