Teaching notes: Mina: traditional and modern

Board-published responses

• VCAA (Victoria, Australia), VCE Literature 2023, Section A – high-scoring Dracula responses (Question 1 on the significance of a passage, and Question 2 on how the text treats “power”). Both are built around the threat of the New Woman. What lifts them is that one governing idea is carried from the set passage across the whole novel, tied to narrative voice (Harker’s travel-writer’s prose giving way to personal narration) and to verbal echoes, such as the “hell-fire” eyes shared by the Count and the undead Lucy. Note their limit for this question: they treat Lucy and Mina as a “symbolic battleground”, and do not ask whether Mina is herself a New Woman – the question this essay answers. VCAA says its samples are not models to copy; they are rewarded for what they achieve and contain small slips. VCAA, 2023 VCE Literature external assessment report (the board’s own material).
• Pearson Edexcel 2022, full-mark (40/40) Dracula and Dorian Gray answer on “imbalances of power”. It reads the praise of Mina’s “man’s brain” as irony – repeating the stereotype while exposing it – and separates characters’ views from the novel’s. Our ¶3 makes a related but more precise move: it reads the compliment in its period and places the novel’s critique in the conclusion Van Helsing draws from it. Pearson 9ET0/02 report, June 2022, pp. 144–150 (the board’s own material).

What the examiners said

• Look past the marriage. On AQA’s question about Mina and Jonathan, some students wrote only about a stereotyped husband and wife, rather than “the different roles she embodies and the inversion of gender roles”. AQA 7707/1 report, June 2023, p. 11
• AQA’s examiners saw useful contexts in answers on Mina: the New Woman, religious belief and gender roles. The mark scheme suggests Chs. 12, 13 and 23 as other moments to use. Same report, p. 11; AQA mark scheme, June 2023, pp. 23–24
• On CCEA’s 2024 question about Mina’s power, the common argument was that she is powerless during the Count’s attack but pivotal to his defeat. Some answers contradicted themselves, arguing for her power in one paragraph and against it in the next. Decide your degree of agreement and hold it. CCEA Chief Examiner’s report, Summer 2024, AS 2, p. 12
• How the examiners view context: CCEA’s examiners criticised answers that branded Van Helsing’s “man’s brain” praise as misogyny, saying they showed “a lack of understanding of nineteenth-century views of women” – and of the writer’s intentions. The lesson is not that the remark is beyond criticism. It is that context comes first: work out what the words meant in the 1890s, then judge what the novel does with them. CCEA also asks for brief, relevant context rather than context “off-loaded” without reference to the question’s key terms. Same report, pp. 9–10 and 12
• Pearson’s examiners noticed that many students linked Lucy to the New Woman, but very few explored whether Mina is also a New Woman figure, through her shorthand and her “man’s” brain. Pearson 9ET0/02 report, June 2022, p. 142
• VCAA’s examiners stress that “significance” and “context” in a question need unpacking before you write; students who had worked out what those words meant wrote relevant, detailed answers, while others merely summarised. VCAA, 2023 VCE Literature report, Section A