There’s one thing about Dracula adaptations that always bugs me: the reincarnated wife plot. Dracula is haunted by tragic death of the love of his life, usually from before he became a vampire. (In Francis Ford Copolla’s fever dream Vlad the Impaler is so sad about his dead wife that he yells at God and stabs a cross and that turns you into a vampire, apparently). Then, he lays eyes on Mina. He immediately knows that she is his dead wife reborn through oceans of time or whatever. Their love is destined and he must have her.
I’m particularly thinking about Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (which is a ludicrously inappropriate title; I’ve decided to go with BS Dracula instead). The NBC Dracula series also jumps on the dead wife bandwagon. Dracula Untold too, though as far as I can tell that movie has less than one percent to do with the novel. (I get the feeling these adaptations are playing follow the commercially successful leader). For an interesting change of pace, there’s also the 1973 Dracula starring Jack Palance where Lucy is the reincarnated wife.
I hate this cliché with every fiber of my being. I don’t want it anywhere near my favorite novel. Honestly, I don’t think I’d want this story anywhere. But, it’s particularly awful in the context of the original novel. Let me just sort of spew my rageful thoughts out here, particularly with BS Dracula in mind.
Firstly, this plot completely takes away Mina’s agency. Dracula is the only one who remembers their connection. He has to tell her that they’re supposed to be soulmates. And, he starts pursuing her before she knows any of this. There’s some hefty entitlement going on here. She was with him before, so she’s going to be with him now, even if she has no memory of it. He lost his lady, he was sad, he spent hundreds of years moping and murdering innocent people, and then he gets a replacement. She takes away his sadness and brings out his better nature (not that he attempts to make any restitution to his victims; apologizing for eating babies just wouldn’t be romantic, I guess).
Mina isn’t presented as having any real choice in the matter. She has to be same woman as she was in her previous life. She has to love him back. Her previous life up to this point doesn’t matter. It’s like that bit from Daria: without knowing it, she’s just been waiting her entire life for him to show up and now her life can really begin. She exists to be in love with him.
Yet, this relationship is supposed to be positive for both of them. Being with Dracula fulfills some need she wasn’t even consciously aware of before. Because, you see, Victorian society is repressing her sexuality and individuality. So, she needs a man to come along and liberate her. Of course, she can’t be really fulfilled with Jonathan. I mean, come on, he’s a kind, naïve, well-mannered, generally nice guy. How boring is that? He needs to be a complicated, ambiguous, dangerous, mysterious, dark and brooding loner who murders people, but he feels bad about it so it’s okay.
That brings me to the second thing that enrages me about the dead wife cliché: how it stands in comparison to the canonical relationship between Jonathan and Mina.
Dracula and Mina’s love is supposed to be based on destiny. They’re in love because they’re soulmates. They’re in love because they’re in love. It’s a grand romance that was always meant to be. But, it doesn’t feel like it’s based on anything about them as people and how they relate to each other on a practical level.
Jonathan and Mina’s love is shown in their actions as well as their thoughts towards each other: simple things, not always grand gestures. Jonathan takes recipes home for Mina. She memorizes the train schedule to help him out. They learn shorthand together. They have common interests (“Trains are so cool.” “I know, right?”). They supported each other in their careers. They set up a household together. They deal with day to day issues. I can’t imagine Mina and Dracula working on a budget, doing taxes, discussing schedules with the serving staff, giggling at each others dumb jokes, complaining about the latest changes in the train schedule or just getting ready for bed and chatting over the boring minutiae of the day, like I can with the Harkers.
And even in more extreme situations, their relationship is far more meaningful. Jonathan faces off against vampires and bloodthirsty wolves to see his fiancée again. Mina travels to a strange country on her own and marries Jonathan while he’s in his sick bed. She supports him through is grief and trauma. As I’ve said before, she puts together the group, and is ultimately the one who is responsible for stopping Dracula, because she wants to get to the bottom of what’s wrong with her husband.
Even through the grief of losing his second father and the lingering trauma from his ordeal at Dracula’s hands, Jonathan wants to take care of Mina. To the point that he inadvertently harms her by agreeing to keep her out of the investigation. And he regrets his actions. When Mina says that she’s “unclean,” Jonathan embraces her, reassures her that there’s nothing wrong with her. He tries his best to comfort her as her condition worsens. He will stand by her in life, death, or undeath.
What does Dracula concretely do for her? He feels bad about the countless people he’s murdered. He offers her generic “love.” He fills some need she didn’t know she had, that in the movie comes off primarily as just sexual. She has to be with him. In trope terms, she exists to be his morality pet and replacement goldfish.
I’m not saying I don’t enjoy love at first sight, love that persists across time, reincarnated soulmates. I’m a romantic. But, there needs to be something behind that. I need to know that these people work as friends, as partners. The reincarnated wife plot in BS Dracula and its imitators isn’t romantic. It’s soaring strings, staring into each other’s lives, sex, and vague destiny trying its hardest to tell me that its romantic.
Why would I want to see that when I have Mina and Jonathan’s love story? When I have a personal, real, human love story?
Hell, consider Jack and Lucy’s relationship: a lonely, complicated man with a dark side (and, yeah, a strain of self pity) who is turned down by the woman he loves who is in love with a more traditionally romantic hero. And? He respects her, accepts her choices, supports her even if he’s still hurt by the loss. He doesn’t force the issue, he doesn’t think that she needs his love to make her life complete. He’s a good person. He’s likable despite, maybe because of his faults. We want to see him overcome his demons and live a better life. I don’t want to see Dracula redeemed. I don’t see him as a dark, gothic rebel saving Mina from those stupid, Victorian preps. I don’t want Mina to be reduced to an object for his redemption arc.
He’s a terrifying villain because he’s an abuser, a manipulator, a sadist, who violates people physically, mentally, and emotional to take away their power. Dracula is something fundamentally evil in an unsettlingly real way. There’s nothing sympathetic about Dracula. Rewriting the story to make him an antihero only reflects that the author thinks that Dracula, dark, tortured, dangerous, powerful, is a figure we should identify with, above someone like Jonathan. And popular culture seems to by and large agree that this is the story we want to see. And that doesn’t reflect well on the popular psyche.
The reincarnated wife plot isn’t more interesting than the love story in the book. Jonathan and Mina Harker aren’t boring. They’re a romance we can really aspire to.
Fun fact: I’m too lazy to do my legwork on researching dates, so I don’t know whether any of these predate it, but in 1983 there was an AD&D roleplaying module published by the name of Ravenloft. One of the early efforts of authors Tracy and Laura Hickman, it went on to become one of the most popular RPG adventure modules ever published, inspiring its own game setting and a line of novels, earning a place in the literary history of vampires. In the adventure, your group of adventurers explores the mystery of the castle Ravenloft, the domain of a Dracula-knockoff vampire named Strahd von Zarovich who spends his eternity in obsessive pursuit of a woman. Every time he manages to catch up to her, she dies (usually thanks to him somehow), and then she’s reincarnated and he hunts her down and tries to marry her or whatever all over again.
The thing is, this young woman has never wanted anything to do with him. In her first life, she was in love with Strahd’s younger brother, and she thought of Strahd affectionately as a lovable in-law, till he got creepy all over her and destroyed his entire family over it.
Even better, in each life an author has taken a pen to, she does in fact have goals, interests and capabilities of her own that have nothing to do with him.
And I think that’s the first case of the ‘reincarnating Dracula wife’ trope, except it’s exactly as stalkery and awful as it should be. At any rate, at least one time the authors recognized a creeper scenario when they saw one.
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