Love and the Harkers

         There are many people who would be quick to call love “hopeless” and cast it aside. Their minds are filled with horror stories of love falling apart, leaving despair in its wake. But if there is any couple in literature that could be described as a goal to strive towards, or a hope that perhaps love can overcome any circumstances, it is Jonathan and Mina Harker of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This husband and wife are a timeless epitome of true marriage.
         As with any marriage, Jonathan and Mina each have their own roles to fulfill, but these roles are not mutually exclusive. They help each other. Jonathan, typical husband, is the breadwinner for the two of them—he is a solicitor, a type of lawyer1. It is he who must travel far from home for the sake of business, and who must earn the money to pay the bills. Mina, as the wife, is an assistant school-mistress, and also the nurturing figure of the household, the one who cooks, cleans and takes care of everyone. Yet while Jonathan is on his way to Transylvania, he takes careful note of the food there, learning the names and ingredients, so that he might share them with Mina upon his return. He does not belittle her work, nor does he ignore it, but he takes it upon himself to be a part of it, no matter how small. He understands that “in creating the human race ‘male and female,’ God gives man and woman an equal personal dignity,”2 that Mina’s own job as a wife is no more or less important than his own job as a husband. And Mina, instead of leaving her husband alone with the task of running a business and making money, chooses to assist him in whatever ways she can. While he is away she tells Lucy, “I have been working very hard lately because I want to keep up with Jonathan’s studies, and I have been practising shorthand very assiduously,”3. She too understands that she is her husband’s equal, and that equality must be accepted by both parties; she cannot simply allow herself to be subservient to her husband, when she might instead make an effort to help him. Just as Christ confirmed the “special esteem”4 of women, so too do Jonathan and Mina, in that they recognize that a married couple is much stronger as a team working together, instead of a man and woman dividing the household with a line of tape.
         Jonathan and Mina also understand that a healthy relationship involves more than just love alone. It requires thought, and consideration of the other person. One cannot claim to be in love, and yet forget about his or her significant other as soon as the other is out of sight. There are many who “consider it too difficult, or indeed impossible, to be bound to one person for the whole of life,”5 and who would be quick to “[mock] the commitment of spouses to fidelity,”6. Jonathan, though he is miles away from Mina in Transylvania, and not yet married to her, could get away with forgetting or purposely ignoring her. But he keeps the woman he loves at the forefront of his mind. He mentions her often in his journal, notes things he must tell her, tries to get a letter to her when he realizes the Count is holding him prisoner, and in his last journal entry, his final lament is that he will not see Mina, the final word in the entry is her name, “Mina!”7. When he recounts his experience with the three women in Dracula’s castle, and the way they tempted him in trying to drink his blood, he writes, “it is not good to note this down, lest some day it should meet Mina’s eyes and cause her pain,”8. And Mina, relaxing in Whitby while he is gone, does not simply enjoy herself without a thought about Jonathan, but writes, “I wonder where Jonathan is and if he is thinking of me! I wish he were here,”9. Most of her journal entries begin with a sad and worried thought about how she has yet to hear from him. The bond between them does not thin and vanish as the physical distance between them grows greater.
         Though Jonathan and Mina face many struggles that can only be found in a work of fiction, their love is made very real through their understanding of and commitment to each other. Even before their actual marriage, they take their relationship seriously, making the marriage all the more successful once they are eventually wed. By following their example, perhaps we can learn a bit more about what it means to be married, and just how much strain two people can withstand if they are only willing to face danger together. The Harkers help us to see “the indissolubility of marriage as a fruit, a sign and a requirement of the absolutely faithful love that God has for man and that the Lord Jesus has for the Church,”10.
1. Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York, NY: Barnes & Noble Books, 2003), 22.
2. John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio, 1981, 22.
3. Stoker, Dracula, 67.
4. John Paul II, FC, 22.
5. John Paul II, FC, 20.
6. John Paul II, FC, 20.
7. Stoker, Dracula, 66.          
8. Stoker, Dracula, 48.
9. Stoker, Dracula, 84.
10. John Paul II, FC, 20.