Women and victimhood in Dracula

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 stage ends by explaining what it contributes to the next. The evidence points are labelled by the job they do in the argument.

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

Question focus: “Little more than victims” asks how far harm and coercion dominate the women’s roles. It does not itself concede meaningful agency. Test what the characters know, say and change, as well as what happens to them.

Considered and set aside

Because the evidence divides the women into those who write and those who are written about, Step 3 needs contexts and critics that explain that division, not general background.

But both critics are about what men do to women. Therefore Step 4 must decide whether that, or the Count’s violence, settles the question.

Therefore Step 5 orders the paragraphs from the women the statement fits to the woman it does not, and places the objection where it is strongest: in the men’s protection of Mina.

The argument spine

Overall argument: The principal women are subjected to coercion, although the castle women’s original transformation is not narrated. Only those whose stories men finish remain “little more than victims”, so the decisive question is who controls the record.

Paragraph plan

What to leave out, and why

‘Stoker presents the female characters in the novel as little more than victims.’ How far, and in what ways, do you agree with this comment on Stoker’s presentation of the female characters in the novel Dracula?

“Little more than victims” asks how far suffering and coercion define Stoker’s female characters. It does not settle whether they have meaningful agency, and victimhood does not necessarily remove the power to speak or act. The answer also depends on a further question: victims of whom? Lucy, Mina and the castle women experience different forms of harm, dependency and male control. I shall argue that the statement has considerable force where men complete and interpret a woman’s story, but becomes inadequate for Mina, whose writing and judgement help direct the pursuit. Their suffering matters; so does the authority through which readers encounter it.

To be a victim is to undergo harm or coercion. It does not follow that a character has no voice, desire or power to act. The “more” must therefore be measured in knowledge, speech and choices that change what happens. Because Dracula is assembled from diaries and letters, those powers are also narrative ones. A woman who writes her own account, and whose account is used, has a power that a woman described only by others lacks.

Lucy is the strongest case for the statement, but not because she is silent. In her letter to Mina she asks, “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?” (Chapter 5). The joke belongs to a private letter, and its exaggeration matters: it briefly imagines a desire larger than the marriage plot allows. Yet she withdraws it at once as “heresy”. Earlier in the same letter she has already written the script by which she will be treated: “we women are such cowards that we think a man will save us from fears, and we marry him.” The Lucy who has opinions expects to be rescued. Lucy continues to record her experience during the attacks, including her final memorandum in Chapter 11. After her death, however, men narrate her return and destruction. Seward’s diary narrates her end, and its language decides which Lucy is real. The vampire’s “voluptuous wantonness” belongs to the “foul Thing”; the body after the staking is Lucy “with her face of unequalled sweetness and purity” (Chapter 16). Even the killing is handed out among the men, “as a privilege to the one best entitled to it”. Christopher Craft reads the scene as the men reasserting together their control over a woman whose desire has become aggressive, and the wording supports him. Lucy’s appeal as a vampire, “My arms are hungry for you”, is what the ceremony exists to silence. Many readers argue that Lucy is no longer a victim by the end, since as a vampire she preys on children. But her power is the Count’s, and her ending is Seward’s. She is both a victim of the Count and the subject of a ceremony narrated by men who love her, yet the accounts of her vampiric return and destruction give her no opportunity to interpret those events herself. For Lucy, the statement holds.

The castle women seem to challenge a simple account of female victimhood. They speak, desire and reproach the Count: “You yourself never loved; you never love!” (Chapter 3). Their origins are not narrated, so the claim that they were victims who became predators remains an interpretation. Their present dependency, however, is visible. They give way to the Count’s commands and ask, “Are we to have nothing to-night?” Harker records his own attraction and terror; in Chapter 27 Van Helsing records their approach to Mina and their destruction. Their power to threaten others does not give them control over their representation. The statement therefore retains force, although the argument rests on the dependency and narrative limits the novel actually shows, without requiring an account of their origins that the novel withholds.

Mina is different, and the difference lies precisely in the record. In Chapter 17, as the men gather, she takes the cover off her typewriter and tells Seward that “dates are everything”. The phrase turns chronology into method: separate experiences become a sequence the hunters can act on. Mina does not merely preserve the men’s discoveries. She makes them intelligible to one another, and when the Count burns the manuscript in Seward’s study (Chapter 21), her copies survive. Late in the novel her own memorandum (Chapter 26) reasons out the Count’s route home, and the men act on it. A woman whose knowledge directs the pursuit is not “little more than” a victim.

The strongest objection comes not from the Count but from the men. Van Helsing decides that the hunt “is no part for a woman” (Chapter 18), and the irony lies in the sequence. Mina has just made the shared record possible, yet its circulation is now restricted against her. “It is strange to me to be kept in the dark,” she writes (Chapter 19). It is while she is shut out, and the men are busy elsewhere, that the Count reaches her. Here the statement has real force: Stoker shows protection itself making a woman a victim. Carol Senf’s view that Stoker is ambivalent about the New Woman explains the pattern: he can imagine female competence but hesitates to let it stand alone, so the men admit Mina’s intelligence only inside their protection. Yet Mina answers her exclusion with an imperative: “I want you to hypnotise me!” (Chapter 23). She proposes the procedure through which her enforced connection with the Count can yield information. The link that places her at risk becomes, through her initiative, the hunters’ best means of pursuing him. Mina remains a victim of the Count’s coercion and enforced blood exchange. But she turns that condition into a method.

That “more” is real, but the novel remembers it on the men’s terms. The final note gives the last word to Van Helsing, who says that Mina’s son “will some day know what a brave and gallant woman his mother is”. Her public, intellectual achievement is praised by a man, within an affectionate family scene, and as a mother’s. The ending values her agency while placing it inside a domestic settlement. This qualifies the case against the statement but does not overturn it. The praise exists because the record she made exists.

The statement captures the importance of harm and coercion, but underestimates the agency the novel gives some of its women. It has considerable force for Lucy and the castle women, whose later stories are completed by male narrators. Mina’s contribution makes the description “little more than” inadequate: she suffers the Count’s assault, yet also writes, compiles, reasons and proposes methods on which the hunt depends. Victimhood and agency are not mutually exclusive. The decisive contrast concerns the scope the narrative gives each woman to explain and change what happens. Mina’s power does not cancel her suffering; it prevents that suffering from being the whole account of her role.

The essay ends here. For board-published candidate responses, assessment commentary and points to test, open the separate teaching notes.

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