Dracula - Chapter 19 (Bite 3)

In this chapter of Dracula, Mina Harker is left in the dark. After the men return from their visit to Count Dracula’s house, Jonathan avoids telling her what happened, and the others agree it is best she not know. Mina is left alone with her anxiety, her dreams, and a creeping fog that seems to have a will of its own.

Mina’s journal entry for October 1 opens with her frustration at being excluded. She has had Jonathan’s “full confidence for so many years,” and now she sees him “manifestly avoid certain matters, and those the most vital of all.” She knows the men are trying to protect her, but the secrecy wounds her. She cries twice in one morning, something she says she never does on her own account, and resolves to hide it from Jonathan so he will not fret. “I suppose it is one of the lessons that we poor women have to learn,” she writes.

Her thoughts spiral into guilt. She replays the chain of events that led to Lucy’s death: if she had not gone to Whitby, Lucy might not have visited the churchyard in the daytime with her, and then she would not have walked there in her sleep, and the monster could not have destroyed her. “Everything that one does seems, no matter how right it may be, to bring on the very thing which is most to be deplored,” she writes. The logic is painful and circular, and it shows how the horror has turned inward.