Episode 35: The Women of Dracula, Part 2

Episode
Written By Stephanie Summar

Patriarchy Bites

A female vampire dressed in white with dark hair leans over a sleeping man on the bed and smiles.

At Paranormal Pajama Party, we've been pulling back the velvet curtains on Bram Stoker's Dracula, and what we've found is far more unsettling than just fangs and fog.

In "The Women of Dracula, Part 2: Patriarchy Bites", we wade into the novel's chilling undercurrents, exploring how it grapples with female power, intellectual authority, and the shaky ground of Victorian masculinity. Join us as we explore the themes that prove the patriarchy can be scarier than any vampire.

 

  • Steph: Before we begin, a quick content warning: Paranormal Pajama Party is a podcast about scary stories and legends, but there’s nothing scarier than the patriarchy.

    When discussing tales in which women are often the villains, we’ll have to unpack some stories in which women are victims.

    This episode contains the usual amount of cursing, as well as discussions of sexual assault – including a scene in which a vampire attack is described in language and imagery that mirrors sexual violence. We’ll also be talking about death, gendered power dynamics, and Victorian nonsense. Please listen with care.

    If you’re enjoying this unholy blend of horror analysis, gender theory, and tooth jokes, don’t forget to subscribe to Lights Out!, my companion newsletter where I go even deeper into the stories behind the stories.

    You can find it at paranormalpajamaparty.substack.com. That’s paranormalpajamaparty.substack.com. Fangs very much.

    An excerpt from Dracula, by Bram Stoker. For context, Jonathan Harker is trapped in Castle Dracula, the Count has warned him against wandering around, and the situation is getting worse.

    15 May– Once more have I seen the Count go out in his lizard fashion. He moved downwards in a sidelong way, some hundred feet down, and a good deal to the left. He vanished into some hole or window. When his head had disappeared, I leaned out to try and see more, but without avail–the distance was too great to allow a proper angle of sight.

    I knew he had left the castle now, and thought to use the opportunity to explore more than I had dared to do as yet. I went on to make a thorough examination of the various stairs and passages, and to try the doors that opened from them. At last I found one door at the top of the stairway which, though it seemed to be locked, gave under pressure.

    This was evidently the portion of the castle occupied by the ladies in bygone days, for the furniture had more air of comfort than any I had seen. The windows were curtainless, and the yellow moonlight, flooding in through the diamond panes, enabled one to see even colours, whilst it softened the wealth of dust which lay over all and disguised in some measure the ravages of time and the moth.

    My lamp seemed to be of little effect in the brilliant moonlight, but I was glad to have it with me, for there was a dread loneliness in the place which chilled my heart and made my nerves tremble. Still, it was better than living alone in the rooms which I had come to hate from the presence of the Count, and after trying a little to school my nerves, I found a soft quietude come over me.

    Here I am, sitting at a little oak table where in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen, with much thought and many blushes, her ill-spelt love-letter, and writing in my diary in shorthand all that has happened since I closed it last. 

    Later: the Morning of 16 May.– God preserve my sanity, for to this I am reduced. Safety and the assurance of safety are things of the past. Whilst I live on here there is but one thing to hope for, that I may not go mad, if, indeed, I be not mad already. If I be sane, then surely it is maddening to think that of all the foul things that lurk in this hateful place the Count is the least dreadful to me; that to him alone I can look for safety, even though this be only whilst I can serve his purpose.

    The Count’s mysterious warning frightened me at the time; it frightens me more now when I think of it, for in future he has a fearful hold upon me. I shall fear to doubt what he may say!

    When I had written in my diary and had fortunately replaced the book and pen in my pocket I felt sleepy. The Count’s warning came into my mind, but I took a pleasure in disobeying it.

    I determined not to return to-night to the gloom-haunted rooms, but to sleep here, where, of old, ladies had sat and sung and lived sweet lives whilst their gentle breasts were sad for their menfolk away in the midst of remorseless wars. I drew a great couch out of its place near the corner, and unthinking of and uncaring for the dust, composed myself for sleep.

    I suppose I must have fallen asleep; I hope so, but I fear, for all that followed was startlingly real–so real that now sitting here in the broad, full sunlight of the morning, I cannot in the least believe that it was all sleep.

    I was not alone. In the moonlight opposite me were three young women, ladies by their dress and manner. I thought at the time that I must be dreaming when I saw them, for, though the moonlight was behind them, they threw no shadow on the floor.

    They came close to me, and looked at me for some time, and then whispered together. Two were dark, and had high aquiline noses, like the Count, and great dark, piercing eyes that seemed to be almost red. The other was fair, as fair as can be, with great wavy masses of golden hair and eyes like pale sapphires.

    All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down, lest some day it should meet Mina’s eyes and cause her pain; but it is the truth.

    They whispered together, and then they all three laughed–such a silvery, musical laugh, but as hard as though the sound never could have come through the softness of human lips. It was like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of water-glasses when played on by a cunning hand. The fair girl shook her head coquettishly, and the other two urged her on.

    One said, “Go on! You are first, and we shall follow; yours is the right to begin.”

    The other added, “He is young and strong; there are kisses for us all.”

    I lay quiet, looking out under my eyelashes in an agony of delightful anticipation. The fair girl advanced and bent over me till I could feel the movement of her breath upon me. Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood.

    The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth.

    Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and could feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle as one’s flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer–nearer. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super-sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited–waited with beating heart.

    But at that instant, another sensation swept through me as quick as lightning. I was conscious of the presence of the Count, and of his being as if lapped in a storm of fury. As my eyes opened involuntarily I saw his strong hand grasp the slender neck of the fair woman and with giant’s power draw it back.

    But the Count! Never did I imagine such wrath and fury, even to the demons of the pit. His eyes were positively blazing. The red light in them was lurid, as if the flames of hell-fire blazed behind them.

    In a voice which, though low and almost in a whisper seemed to cut through the air and then ring round the room he said: “How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me! Beware how you meddle with him, or you’ll have to deal with me.”

    The fair girl, with a laugh of ribald coquetry, turned to answer him: “You yourself never loved; you never love!” On this the other women joined, and such a mirthless, hard, soulless laughter rang through the room that it almost made me faint to hear; it seemed like the pleasure of fiends.

    Then the Count turned, after looking at my face attentively, and said in a soft whisper, “Yes, I too can love; you yourselves can tell it from the past. Is it not so? Well, now I promise you that when I am done with him you shall kiss him at your will. Now go! go! I must awaken him, for there is work to be done.”

    “Are we to have nothing to-night?” said one of them, with a low laugh, as she pointed to the bag which he had thrown upon the floor, and which moved as though there were some living thing within it.

    For answer he nodded his head. One of the women jumped forward and opened it. If my ears did not deceive me there was a gasp and a low wail, as of a half-smothered child. The women closed round, whilst I was aghast with horror; but as I looked they disappeared, and with them the dreadful bag.

    There was no door near them, and they could not have passed me without my noticing. They simply seemed to fade into the rays of the moonlight and pass out through the window, for I could see outside the dim, shadowy forms for a moment before they entirely faded away.

    Then the horror overcame me, and I sank down unconscious.

    [MUSIC]

    Steph: Hi! I’m Steph, and this is Paranormal Pajama Party, the podcast that brings you classic ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales. Together, we’ll brush the cobwebs off these terrifying tales to shed some light on their origins and learn what they can tell us about the deep-rooted fears society projects onto women.

    Last time on Paranormal Pajama Party, we cracked open Dracula’s coffin and found that the real horrors of the 1897 novel weren’t just the fangs and the fog, but Victorian freakouts over female sexuality. Despite bearing the Count’s name, the book is absolutely crawling with women – most of whom end up undead, unholy, and unacceptably horny.

    We explored how vampirism in the novel operates as a metaphor for sex – complete with all the seductive sucking, body-fluid swapping, and conspicuously penetrative stakes you could possibly ask for.

    But this isn’t just a tale of bloodsucking: it’s a cautionary story about what happens when women express sexual desire, autonomy, or – heaven forbid! – wear fewer than six layers of clothing.

    Lucy Westenra, the blonde belle of Dracula, starts out as a perfect and pure Victorian angel, but her fatal error is daring to want more. More suitors. More choice. Maybe even more… sex? As punishment, she’s transformed into a child-hunting vamp and violently “purified” by the men who once adored her when they shove a long, hard stake into her body. (I know how it sounds. I did it on purpose.)

    But Lucy’s second death isn’t just about getting rid of a threat to the local kiddos. It’s about restoring order. Once she’s staked and decapitated, the men are re-energised, their masculinity back intact, and their bromantic quest for justice can continue. Men will literally kill their undead ex before going to therapy.

    We also traced how the novel is steeped in Victorian cultural panic – about the first-wave feminism of the New Woman, about social degeneration, and about women demanding things like bodily autonomy and, weirdly, bicycles. Through that lens, Dracula becomes a story not about monsters, but about maintaining the patriarchy at all costs.

    And if that sounds like bad news for the remaining women of Dracula… oh boy. You don’t even know what’s coming for Mina Harker.

    But first: What’s up with those three sexy ladies from the excerpt I just read?

    That scene occurs early in the novel, and you now know as much about the three vampire women who haunt Dracula’s castle as we ever find out, really. They’re all red lips, sharp teeth, and empty stomachs. No backstories. No personalities beyond seduction. No names.

    Pop culture knows them as the Brides of Dracula, but we don’t even know if they’re actually his brides – that’s a post-publication nickname that’s stuck. There’s even a textual suggestion that two of them might be his daughters, which adds a fun incest-horror wrinkle to the already weird domestic setup.

    After Dracula himself, they’re the first vampires we encounter – and they immediately establish what happens to women in this novel who want things, especially if what they want is pleasure. They don’t get redemptive arcs. They don’t get second chances. They get obliterated.

    Jonathan Harker’s encounter with the vampire women begins with a warning that he almost immediately ignores. Dracula explicitly tells him not to leave his room at night, without explaining why. As you’ll see in a moment, this is a classic Van Helsing move, honestly. Maybe they hate each other because they have so much in common.

    Jonathan goes a-wanderin’, falls asleep at a writing table, and wakes to find the women materialising in the moonlight – without casting shadows, which instantly marks them as both supernatural and symbolically unreal. What follows is an extremely erotically charged scene, for Victorian literature. And more importantly, it flips Victorian sexual dynamics entirely on their heads.

    Remember, Jonathan is currently trapped in the castle, and no amount of slamming his shoulders into big doors is getting him out. He’s gone from man of action to damsel in distress, and he’s uncomfortable with it.

    And in this scene, Jonathan isn’t the aggressor. He’s submissive. He lies back, heart beating, waiting in what he calls a “languorous ecstasy” for the blonde vampire to kiss him with her red lips. He describes it as wicked, terrifying, and 100% something he wants.

    This scene is often read as erotic horror, but it’s also something else: an emasculation. Jonathan’s leaning into that submissive role, and worse – he wants it. He wants to be touched. Consumed. Penetrated.

    And it only gets worse when his new boyfriend bursts in, not to protect Jonathan, but to reclaim him. “How dare you touch him… This man belongs to me.” Is it jealousy? Is it possessiveness? Whatever it is, it’s pretty homoerotic. Dracula thinks he’s cute.

    By the time Jonathan makes it back to England – sick, shaken, and very much in need of smelling salts – he's not a hero. He’s a man who’s been feminised, infantilised, and humiliated. He was a damsel in distress, wanted to be seduced, got saved by his rival, and will soon be rescued again… by his wife.

    Let’s be honest: Jonathan’s going to need one hell of a redemption arc to win back his Victorian Man Card.

    But back to that room in the castle. Angry as he is, Drac doesn’t kill the women. He just reasserts control. They back off. They wait for their infant DoorDash delivery, and then they disappear into the shadows again.

    Why? Because the Brides aren’t real characters. They’re the monstrous-feminine in its purest form: all appetite, no restraint. Stoker pays a lot of attention to their mouths – red lips, sharp teeth, tongues that lap like animals. Women’s mouths are often symbolic stand-ins for genitalia in literature – especially mouths that devour. And these mouths are dangerous: capable of seduction, penetration, and transformation. They’re erotic and animalistic – and maternal.

    Because again, these women eat babies.

    Just like Lucy’s child-hunting twisted the Victorian ideal of the nurturing mother, the Brides double down on that violation. It’s not a subtle metaphor – Female sexuality outside motherhood becomes monstrous. Female pleasure without male control becomes a threat to civilisation.

    They’re not like Lucy, who slips gradually from innocence to threat. They’re not like Mina, whose intelligence and purity make her worthy of salvation. The Brides are dangerous from moment one. And because they never waver, they’re never redeemed.

    When Van Helsing kills them later in the book, it’s shockingly anticlimactic. One of them – the blonde – gets a moment of description. He’s briefly entranced by her beauty, struck by what he calls “the instinct of man to love and protect.” It takes Mina’s cry to snap him out of it. Then: stake, decapitation, garlic in the mouth. The other two? Off-page. No drama. No mourning. No ritual.

    They were beautiful, dangerous, and they were ultimately disposable. Because unlike Lucy or Mina, the Brides aren’t useful to men. Lucy and Mina generate emotion – grief, guilt, admiration, devotion. Their stories are about their impact on male characters. They pass the Bechdel test, sure, but they’re still defined by their relationships to men.

    The Brides? They’re just... there. Useful for one early scene. Hot, dangerous, and symbolic. They can go now. So they do.

    But just because a woman is indispensable doesn’t mean she’s safe, either.

    The Brides are erased because they have no narrative value beyond desire. Mina, on the other hand, becomes the beating heart of the narrative – the caretaker of information, the emotional centre of the group, and the only woman the men unanimously agree is worth saving.

    And yet, that doesn’t mean she’s spared. It just means her punishment is more complex.

    While Lucy pays the ultimate price for her sexual desires, Mina Murray – soon to become Mina Harker – presents a more complicated negotiation with Victorian gender expectations. She's not only an “acceptable” version of the New Woman, she's literally the architect of the entire narrative we're reading.

    From our first introduction to her, Mina is defined by her professional skills, which were terribly tech-savvy for the time. She's practising shorthand and typewriting, tools of the emerging female workforce. This is allowed, though, because she’s just learning them so she can be useful to her future husband, Jonathan, when he gets back from Romania to his career as a promising young law clerk.

    But Mina quickly realises these skills aren’t just about support – they’re about power. They enable her to gather information, spot connections that the men around her overlook, and transition from passive secretary to active curator of knowledge. The young men – Jonathan, Dr John Seward, Arthur Holmwood and Quincey Morris – have no idea this is happening. But we do.

    Mina’s been journaling everything that’s happened since the start of the novel’s events, and not in the emo way I was journaling when I was 19. Right from the start, she’s doing it like a true New Woman. She writes, “I shall try to do what I see lady journalists do: interviewing and writing descriptions and trying to remember conversations. I am told that, with a little practice, one can remember all that goes on or that one hears said during a day.”

    For all her pooh-poohing of independent women, Mina has a knack for lady journalism. When Jonathan has a Dracula-related breakdown back in England, she opens his diary and finds another source. When Dr Seward mentions recording his notes via phonograph, Mina volunteers to transcribe them – and just like that, she gains access to information he hadn’t intended to share. Oops. There goes another secret, accidentally decrypted by a woman with a typewriter and a brain.

    Even better, she gains Seward’s trust by editing out his embarrassing emotions. His romantic disappointment, his grief, that weird thing where Lucy rose from the grave to eat children and had to be staked – all smoothed out and typewritten and manly once again, thanks to Mommy Mina, emotional custodian of Victorian masculinity.

    And she doesn’t stop there. Mina takes a central role in constructing the very text we're reading in the novel. She’s transcribing, collecting newspaper clippings, and organising everyone's diaries and letters. The book exists because she made it. That’s real narrative power.

    She knows it, too. When Dr Abraham Van Helsing arrives – too late, too dramatic, and full of vague foreign expertise – he’s instantly cagey about what he shares and when. He asks for access to Jonathan’s diary. Mina obliges… but not before reminding him who’s really holding the reins. She hands him the shorthand version first, knowing full well he can’t read it. When he sheepishly admits as much, she reveals the typewritten version she’d already prepared – a gentle flex.

    Of course, she immediately feels guilty about that. “I could not resist the temptation of mystifying him a bit,” she writes, “I suppose it is some of the taste of the original apple that remains still in our mouths.” It’s a fascinating moment. Mina compares her tiny, harmless act of gatekeeping to Eve’s original sin in the Garden of Eden – as if a woman with knowledge is always evil.

    Van Helsing and Mina are both keepers of knowledge – but their methods, motives, and the consequences of their choices couldn’t be more different.

    Van Helsing hoards. He waits. He plays the long game of dramatic reveals. “Ah yes! She is the Un-Dead!” he announces, once Lucy has become a full-blown vamp with a child in her arms. He’s like someone watching a horror movie who figured out the twist and won’t tell you, but definitely wants you to know he knows. …Except in this version, two women – Lucy and her mother – are dead because he wouldn’t explain the garlic.

    And the novel never holds him accountable. His knowledge is treated as innate – a vague Continental wisdom we’re not meant to question. The book never really explains where his vampire expertise comes from, just that he’s wise and worldly and probably smells faintly of pipe tobacco and, I don’t know, tongue depressors.

    Mina, by contrast, earns her knowledge. She interviews, compiles, cross-references. She builds a collaborative vampire-fighting database before Airtable was even a gleam in Silicon Valley’s eye. Where Van Helsing gatekeeps, Mina shares.

    And her transparency becomes the group’s greatest weapon. Her psychic connection to Dracula is horrifying, yes, but it’s also the thing that lets them track him. Her communication and openness are what win the day. And yet, Van Helsing – ever the protective patriarch – keeps trying to cut her out “for her own good.”

    He famously says she has a “man’s brain and a woman’s heart.” On the surface, it’s meant as a compliment – a clumsy, paternalistic, deeply gendered compliment, but a compliment nonetheless. But it reveals the limits of his admiration. He can’t make sense of Mina’s intellect unless he codes it as male.

    The irony, of course, is that Mina isn’t acting like a man at all. Van Helsing performs the traditionally masculine academic role – authoritative, withholding, theatrical. Mina reframes knowledge as something relational, collaborative… dare I say feminised. She’s not hoarding power – she’s distributing it.

    If we’re generous, Van Helsing’s comment is an attempt to reconcile this contradiction: a woman who’s both brilliant and nurturing. But let’s not be generous. Because the more I reread this novel, the more I think Van Helsing kind of sucks – harder than Dracula, who at least sucks professionally.

    That line – “man’s brain, woman’s heart” – isn’t praise. It’s containment. Mina threatens his authority not in spite of her femininity, but because of it. She’s competent and caring, intellectual and emotionally intelligent. He can’t dismiss her, but he also can’t acknowledge her as an equal without ceding power. So he reframes her intellect as an anomaly. A quirk of biology. Brains from Column A, body from Column B.

    It’s not admiration. It’s justification for why Mina – so clever, so indispensable – still needs to be sidelined from any actual vampire-hunting plans.

    And then it gets worse. Because even if she thinks like a man, Van Helsing still insists she feels like a woman. And that’s reason enough to cut her out of the strategy. But Mina isn’t just excluded – she’s sanctified.

    Van Helsing elevates her to a symbolic ideal: the perfect woman. Pure, maternal, modest. Mina’s empathy, gentleness, and her ability to help the men process their grief and confusion — qualities that should elevate her to co-leader — instead turn her into the team mascot.  She becomes the men’s emotional anchor, their guiding light. Their Angel of the House.

    But being the Angel of the House means you don’t get to be the General of the Army. The more Mina embodies ideal femininity, the more the men justify keeping her out of the war room. She’s not weak, she’s too good! Too sacred to risk. They put her on a pedestal. And then they leave her there.

    And here’s the final trap: Mina herself helps build that pedestal. She defers. She nurtures. She edits out male vulnerability, reinforces male authority, and works behind the scenes instead of demanding the spotlight.

    While Van Helsing withholds knowledge to maintain authority, Mina shares hers to maintain trust. And in doing so, she becomes not a partner, but a symbol. They’re not fighting with Mina. They’re fighting for her.

    And while Van Helsing is realising how much Mina and her man’s brain threaten his authority, his nemesis, Count Dracula, is realising that her knowledge-gathering is a threat to his eternal life. So when the men leave her behind, ironically for her protection, he strikes, and he strikes hard.

    The only vampire attack we’ve “seen” so far in the book is mostly off-screen – from a distance, Mina sees a dark shadow looming over Lucy’s half-reclining figure on a cliffside bench. It sort of looks like a couple, canoodling. It appears to be a seduction. Dracula’s attack on Mina is not seductive or slow in any way – it’s essentially rape.

    The first two nights of his blood-sucking adventure, the men don’t even notice anything amiss, except that Mina’s sleeping a bit more than usual and looks pale and tired. Probably something to do with her lady parts.

    It literally takes Renfield, a lunatic obsessed with Dracula, to spell it out for them before they realise three days later that the Count has entered their sleeping quarters in the form of mist and is targeting Mina.

    By the time the Dude Crew has raced into the Harkers’ bedroom, Dracula is halfway through forcing Mina to drink his blood.

    “With his left hand he held both Mrs. Harker's hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom... The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink.”

    Once he’s fled their crucifixes and the heroes have begun picking up the pieces of their shattered safety, Mina reveals that Drac himself told her this was punishment for her intellect.

    “And so you, like the others, would play your brains against mine,” he told her. “You would help these men to hunt me and frustrate me in my designs!... But as yet you are to be punished for what you have done. You have aided in thwarting me; now you shall come to my call. When my brain says ‘Come!’ to you, you shall cross land or sea to do my bidding.”

    The men may swing the stakes, but Mina sets the direction. So when Dracula targets her, he’s not just feeding. He’s neutralising.

    And it works. Her infection fractures the group, panics the men, and robs Mina of agency – not just physically, but narratively. She goes from author to object, from archivist to archive. Suddenly she’s not the one compiling everyone else’s voices – she is the source of information, and everyone else decides how and when to access her.

    But even then, Mina doesn’t stay sidelined for long. Even in half-vamp mode, she’s still contributing more than Van Helsing, who’s once again trying to keep her in the dark while he makes Big Man Decisions, this time ostensibly because anything she knows, Dracula may be able to learn.

    The irony, of course, is that the very thing he thinks disqualifies her – her connection to Drac – becomes their greatest tactical advantage.

    The infection that was meant to silence her instead gives her access. The Count might control the link, but Mina learns to listen through it. She’s the one who lets the group track his movements, interprets his patterns, and transforms her psychic and physical trauma into usable intel.

    She’s being haunted in real-time by the man who violated her, and who continues to violate her with the infection slowly transforming her into a monster, but she turns it into a strategy.

    While Van Helsing is clutching his secrets like crucifixes, Mina is the one communicating, organising, and yes – publishing. Again.

    It’s her transparency – even at great personal cost – that lets the group stay one step ahead of Dracula and ultimately destroy him.

    And who should be the one to deal the fatal blow and save his wife but poor, feminised Jonathan Harker, damsel in distress no more! This is how Mina writes about the climactic battle in Romania:

    “Jonathan’s impetuosity, and the manifest singleness of his purpose, seemed to overawe those in front of him; instinctively they cowered aside and let him pass. In an instant he had jumped upon the cart, and, with a strength which seemed incredible, raised the great box, and flung it over the wheel to the ground…

    “The sun was almost down on the mountain tops, and the shadows of the whole group fell long upon the snow. I saw the Count lying within the box upon the earth, some of which the rude falling from the cart had scattered over him. He was deathly pale, just like a waxen image, and the red eyes glared with the horrible vindictive look which I knew too well.

    “As I looked, the eyes saw the sinking sun, and the look of hate in them turned to triumph.

    “But, on the instant, came the sweep and flash of Jonathan’s great knife. I shrieked as I saw it shear through the throat; whilst at the same moment Mr Morris’s bowie knife plunged into the heart.

    “It was like a miracle; but before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight.”

    By the time we reach the end of the novel, there’s a lot at stake for Jonathan – no pun intended. He has to drive the final blow. He has to kill Dracula. He has to save Mina. And the epilogue tells us that yes, he did it: he’s got a wife, a baby boy, and the respect of all his bros, even the dead one. Jonathan Harker has become a man again.

    But that arc only works if the female threat to his masculinity has been dealt with once and for all. Mina can’t be the dominant force in the narrative anymore. Not if we’re going to call this a “happy” ending, where Victorian England is returned to normal, gender norms and all.

    Before this final “fuck you, ladies” moment, if might’ve been tempting read Dracula as a proto-feminist novel. After all, it’s full of men making stupid mistakes in the name of Being Men. Van Helsing’s intellect is more bluster than brilliance. Arthur and Quincey are pretty much decorative, as much as we get to know about them, and Dr Seward’s not much better. You could say this is a novel that shows how destructive male secrecy and exclusion are, and how Mina quietly holds everything together with a pen, a typewriter, and sheer maternal determination.

    And maybe Mina was ironically dismissing the New Woman, since she herself is a pretty good example of one. She has remarkable agency for a woman in 1897 fiction. She’s clever, competent, curious, and more emotionally intelligent than the entire Dude Crew combined. She builds the narrative archive that enables them to destroy Dracula. She becomes the group’s true strategist. And when she’s sidelined, it’s not because she’s weak – it’s because she’s too important. That’s… something.

    Maybe the madness and mayhem that occurs after the female characters discover sexuality… er, vampirism… was satirical – a point taken to its logical extreme to show how silly it is to be afraid of it. Bram Stoker’s mother had feminist leanings (or as many as she was allowed in her day) so it’s not that out there to imagine that perhaps her son’s book might be a little wink and a nod towards capable women.

    But when you look back at it as a whole, the narrative punishes every woman who steps out of line.

    Lucy expresses sexual agency? She dies screaming with a stake in her chest and garlic in her mouth, “purified”. Don’t worry, she looked pretty again after they stabbed her, so they know she went to heaven.

    The Brides? They get nothing. Not even names.

    And then that fucking epilogue happens, written by Jonathan, probably with his penis. When “order” is restored, it’s male order. Dracula is symbolically castrated, the Dude Crew goes home. Mina's removal from the frontlines is complete – she returns to proper Victorian womanhood as wife and mother, and her son (of course he’s a boy!) has been named after the men who “saved” her. You think they squeezed a “Mina” in there? Maybe a polite little “Murray”? Yeah, me neither.

    Her intelligence, which drove the entire narrative, is safely contained within the domestic sphere. Women's minds are acceptable tools when deployed by men in service of preserving patriarchal order, but they must ultimately be reabsorbed into traditional roles.

    So yes, Dracula gives us a woman with intellectual and emotional authority. But then it gently places her on a pedestal from where she can never come down.

    That’s not feminism. That’s Victorian moral panic crisis management.

    [MUSIC]

    Steph: It’s time for lights out at the Paranormal Pajama Party. You don’t have to fall asleep, but for the love of god, don’t wander into any unfamiliar rooms in this spooky gothic castle. …No reason.

    To learn more about Dracula, Mina Murray’s narrative power, and the historical figures who almost definitely weren’t the inspo for the world’s most famous vampire – looking at you, Vlad the Impaler and Elizabeth Bathory – check out my sources in the show notes.

    After the podcast ends, the sleepover continues over at Lights Out! – my newsletter companion to Paranormal Pajama Party, featuring more gothic gossip, weird women, and historical sidequests I couldn’t fit into the episode.

    The most recent one connects Dracula to the invention of the sports bra. Because of course it does. You can find it at paranormalpajamaparty.substack.com. Or substake, which is what I almost just called it because I have vamps on the brain.

    I’ll be back soon with more spine-tingling tales and critical discussion. In the meantime, don’t forget: Ghosts have stories. Women have voices. Dare to listen.

The Brides of Dracula: appetite personified

Stoker’s introduction to the three nameless vampire women in Dracula's castle—often called the Brides—sets a terrifying standard for women who dare to desire. These are figures of pure, unbridled appetite, stripped of individual personality beyond their predatory allure.

Their insatiable hunger and violent, almost maternal, acts disrupt Victorian ideals of womanhood, highlighting society’s profound fear of female pleasure and agency outside of male control. Their ultimate erasure from the narrative speaks volumes about the fate of women who defy patriarchal norms.

Minds at play: Mina Murray vs. Van Helsing

The battle of wits in Dracula extends beyond the pursuit of the Count. It's also a compelling, quiet rivalry between Mina Murray's meticulous intellect and Van Helsing's sometimes self-serving expertise. Mina, with her shorthand and typewriter, diligently constructs the novel's central archive, connecting disparate pieces of information that the male characters often miss.

Van Helsing, despite his revered status, frequently withholds crucial knowledge, contributing to avoidable tragedies. Mina's transparent approach to information sharing, even when confronting her own terrifying psychic link to Dracula, becomes the group's most potent weapon. Yet, Van Helsing’s infamous "man's brain and a woman's heart" compliment subtly diminishes her, revealing the patriarchal impulse to contain powerful female intellect within traditional gender roles, even as it proves indispensable.

Jonathan Harker: From damsel to dominant?

Jonathan Harker's harrowing experience in Dracula's castle presents a compelling study of Victorian masculinity under duress. His transformation from a capable solicitor into a vulnerable, almost "damsel-in-distress" figure is stark. The erotically charged encounter with the Brides, where he finds himself in a submissive role, challenges traditional notions of male dominance. Dracula’s possessive intervention further complicates Jonathan's sense of self.

While Jonathan ultimately delivers the fatal blow to Dracula, ostensibly restoring his “manhood,” this act of re-masculinisation often comes at Mina's expense. The narrative concludes with Mina's powerful agency reabsorbed into the domestic sphere, ensuring the re-establishment of a "happy" patriarchal order.

Is Dracula a secretly progressive text, or a masterful example of “Victorian moral panic crisis management” that ultimately reinforces the era’s rigid gender norms?  Tune into “The Women of Dracula, Part 2: Patriarchy Bites” on Paranormal Pajama Party to hear the full analysis and decide for yourself.

For more gothic insights, weird women, and historical sidequests that couldn't fit into the episode, subscribe to the podcast’s companion newsletter, Lights Out! at paranormalpajamaparty.substack.com.

Sources

Stephanie Summar
Next

Episode 34: The Women of Dracula, Part 1