To set the scene, at the end of his essay “’Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” Christopher Crest makes the claim that Little Quincey, Jonathan and Mina’s baby born on exactly the one-year anniversary of big Quincey’s death could represent “the restoration of ‘natural’ order” but a sub-reading could be that his is the “son of an illicit and nearly invisible homosexual union” (Crest 458-459). He cites the line: “His [Little Quincey’s] bundle of names links all out little band of men together” (Stoker 402) to form his idea that “Little Quincey was luridly conceived in the veins of Lucy…and then deftly relocated to the purer body of Mina…” (Crest 459). Crest also spends much of his essay building on the idea that “Van Helsing stands as the protector of the patriarchal institutions” (449).
I can see why Craft makes this claim; as we’ve discussed in class, Dracula threatens patriarchal heterosexual society, and Van Helsing is the one who leads the hunt and has the knowledge to take Dracula down. And yes, Van Helsing does call Mina “one of God’s women” (201), which Crest sees as Van Helsing putting women into boxes (Mina’s a good, pure woman, which “determines and delimits the range of activity permitted to [her]” [Crest 450]). But I didn’t really find Van Helsing any more patriarchal or defensive of heterosexual society than any of the other characters. He and Dr. Seward both find ways to exclude Mina from the action, and Jonathan was very enthusiastic about protecting England from a vampire takeover. For me, none of the arguments Crest made about Van Helsing being a “protector of the patriarchy” didn’t seem to be unique to his character; all of the men in the novel had the same end goal and they all played a part in depriving Mina of any power. Van Helsing was just the oldest and most knowledgeable about vampires.
I think that these ideas can shed an interesting light on the final paragraph of Dracula. In the scene Jonathan describes, Van Helsing is holding baby Quincey and says (about their whole vampire-killing adventure): “’We want no proofs; we ask none to believe us! This boy will someday know what a brave and gallant woman his mother is” (402). On the one hand, this seems like a reversal of the role Crest puts Van Helsing in—one could easily say Jonathan had been brave, escaping from the castle, wanting to protect his wife, stabbing Dracula, but Van Helsing singles out Mina instead, using words associated with knightliness, which was the expectation of an extremely patriarchal and male-oriented society. Either Van Helsing’s character changed within a page and seven years, or he wasn’t nearly as patriarchy-loving as Crest claimed, which makes more sense to me. Crest’s claim about Van Helsing’s role would make more sense at the end, I think, if one were to read Little Quincey as a restoration of “rightness”, but Crest puts down that idea in favor of the baby being the child of all the men in the novel. If this were the case, wouldn’t the final scene probably not be Van Helsing bouncing the illicit baby on his knee?
I think this final scene does cast Van Helsing as a protective character, but not of the patriarchy, of Jonathan and Mina and their baby. He was one of the only people of the generation before Dr. Sewards who did not die. In an odd way, I think his connection to superstitions and what the Victorians would consider the past makes him less of a proponent of patriarchy than some of the other characters. Lucy’s mom was probably around the same age as Van Helsing, and she left nothing to her daughter in her will. It all went to Lord Godalming (178). I feel like if Van Helsing were of the same patriarchal state of mind, he would have dismissed the silly superstitions of the non-British and diagnosed Lucy as crazy or having a wandering uterus or something instead of taking her symptoms seriously.
Van Helsing’s treatment of women is something I hadn’t paid close attention to before, but this post made me realize just how much he seems to adore them. While reading, I found it a little weird how much Van Helsing praised “Madam Mina” and always seemed to be prattling about her “man brain.” I especially liked your point about Van Helsing taking Lucy’s case seriously and devoting himself to saving her. This made me think about how dedicated he was to “saving” her after she became a vampire — I wonder if you could make an argument that Van Helsing was not a “protector of the patriarchy,” as Craft claimed, but a protector of (the right kind of) womanhood.