GEORGE STADE
215
Dracula. She has the brain of a man. "Ah, that wonderful Madame
Mina!" says Van Helsing. "She has a man's brain-a brain that a
man should have were he much gifted - and a woman's heart," the
perfect combination. It is through application of "her great brain
which is trained like a man's brain" that she is able to organize a
mass of documents so as to reveal to the men exactly what Dracula
is, what his plans are, and how to track him down. Thus her better
half helps to defeat her worser.
So there we have it: through Mina, we see what men want of
women . Through Lucy we see what men both want and don't want.
Men want women to be at once sexy and virginal, for example, and
motherly to boot. They like their women to be womanly, but will kill
them for it, at least in their imaginations. They also like their women
to be manly. But it would take a far less easily fatigued pen than
mine to itemize all that men want of women, for men are weak. I
will skip the addition and guess at the sum: men say that women are
this or that, rather than that or this, because they need women to be
this or that - which has the sound of a tautology (like other
statements about anything of importance). But between the first
term and its return we pass through one explanation of misogyny. I
would say that the size of a man's misogyny is equal to the distance
between the compliant creatures of his daydreams and the women he
actually meets, who are different, to put it mildly.
One final. word, for the last thing I want to be confused with is a
feminist sympathizer. Although I know nothing about women, I be–
lieve that if you were to look at how women writers depict men, in,
say,
Frankenstein
and
Jane Eyre,
you would find yourself in a separate
but equal madhouse of fascination and dread, of displaced horror,
misdirected violence, and abysmal longings.
