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to Arthur in his bereavement. "We women have something of the
mother in us that makes us rise above smaller matters when the
mother spirit is evoked," she says; "I felt this big sorrowing man's
head resting on me, as if it were that of the baby that some day may
lie on my bosom, and I stroked his hair as though he were my
child" - thus showing that, unlike Lucy, she knows what a bosom is
for.
Again unlike Lucy, she is fully conscious of her taint, which she
properly abhors. By way of introduction to a plea that the men do
away with her should she become a full-fledged vampire, she says
this:
I know that all that the brave earnest men can do for a poor,
weak woman, whose soul perhaps is lost-no, no, not yet, but is
at any rate at stake-you will do. But you must remember that I
am not as you are. There is a poison in my blood, in my soul,
which may destroy me; which must destroy me, unless some re–
lief comes to us.
Better yet, and still unlike Lucy, she knows how dangerous her taint
is to men, how vigilantly she must suppress her passion to infect
Jonathan. "Unclean, unclean!" she exclaims. "I must touch him or
kiss him no more. Oh, that it should be that it is I who am now his
worst enemy, and whom he may have most cause to fear."
It is not surprising, then, that prose poems in praise of Mina,
that "pearl among women," flow from Van Helsing's lips: she is
proof "that there are good women still left to make life happy." In
fact:
... she is one of God's women, fashioned by his own hand to
show us men and other women that there is a heaven where we
can enter, and that its light can be here on earth. So true, so
sweet, so noble, so little an egoist-and that, let me tell you, is
much in this age, so sceptical and selfish.
Mina is a haven in a heartless world. That's much, but not every–
thing. What above all enables her to resist Dracula, to conquer her
own female nature, is that she is not entirely a woman . Morally
speaking, the most important component in her makeup is
masculine. She does not have the primitive and criminal brain of
