{"id":1037,"date":"2023-09-27T16:54:31","date_gmt":"2023-09-27T20:54:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/?p=1037"},"modified":"2023-09-27T16:54:35","modified_gmt":"2023-09-27T20:54:35","slug":"van-helsing-and-the-baby","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/2023\/09\/27\/van-helsing-and-the-baby\/","title":{"rendered":"Van Helsing and the Baby"},"content":{"rendered":"

To set the scene, at the end of his essay \u201c\u2019Kiss Me with Those Red Lips\u2019: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker\u2019s <\/span>Dracula<\/span><\/i>\u201d Christopher Crest makes the claim that <\/span>Little <\/span>Quincey, Jonathan and Mina\u2019s baby born on exactly the one-year anniversary of big Quincey\u2019s death could represent \u201cthe restoration of \u2018natural\u2019 order\u201d but a sub-reading could be that his is the \u201cson of an illicit and nearly invisible homosexual union\u201d (Crest 458-459). He cites the line: \u201cHis [Little Quincey\u2019s] bundle\u00a0of names links all out little band of men together\u201d (Stoker 402) to form his idea that \u201cLittle Quincey was luridly conceived in the veins of Lucy…and then deftly relocated to the purer body of Mina…\u201d (Crest 459). Crest also spends much of his essay building on the idea that \u201cVan Helsing stands as the protector of the patriarchal institutions\u201d (449). <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I can see why Craft makes this claim; as we\u2019ve 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 \u201cone of God\u2019s women\u201d (201), which Crest sees as Van Helsing putting women into boxes (Mina\u2019s a good, pure woman, which \u201cdetermines and delimits the range of activity permitted to [her]\u201d [Crest 450]). But I didn\u2019t 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 \u201cprotector of the patriarchy\u201d didn\u2019t 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.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I think that these ideas can shed an interesting light on the final paragraph of <\/span>Dracula. <\/span><\/i>In the scene Jonathan describes, Van Helsing is holding baby Quincey and says (about their whole vampire-killing adventure): \u201c\u2019We want no proofs; we ask none to believe us! This boy will someday know what a brave and gallant woman his mother is\u201d (402). On the one hand, this seems like a reversal of the role Crest puts Van Helsing in\u2014one 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\u2019s character changed within a page and seven years, or he wasn\u2019t nearly as patriarchy-loving as Crest claimed, which makes more sense to me. Crest\u2019s claim about Van Helsing\u2019s role would make more sense at the end, I think, if one were to read Little Quincey as a restoration of \u201crightness\u201d, 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\u2019t the final scene probably not be Van Helsing bouncing the illicit baby on his knee?<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To set the scene, at the end of his essay \u201c\u2019Kiss Me with Those Red Lips\u2019: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker\u2019s Dracula\u201d Christopher Crest makes the claim that Little Quincey, Jonathan and Mina\u2019s baby born on exactly the one-year anniversary of big Quincey\u2019s death could represent \u201cthe restoration of \u2018natural\u2019 order\u201d but a sub-reading … Continue reading Van Helsing and the Baby<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5325,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125361],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2023-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5325"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1037\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}