Essay Numbah Two

Ah, it's that time again, everybody's favorite: essay writing time. I tend to be a bit of a procrastinator (though judging by the fact that just about everybody else gets their blogs done just before they're due each week, you all are too), and so at this point I'm just finished with planning out my essay. "Planning out" being a vague term here meaning writing a whole bunch of ideas on paper with some arrows, doodles, and incomprehensible squiggly things, plus a rough attempt at organizing them into a potential paper.

Now at this stage I would normally start actually writing my paper (and hey, I already got a (crappy) thesis statement done), but instead I thought I would put that off and instead put some of my ideas here. It's a win-win-win: I get to develop my concepts a bit further before transferring them into my essay, I get to fill up my blog post for the week, and you all get to read my lovely ideas and hopefully maybe please comment and help make them better. So here goes.

First thing I did was decide to write my paper about Dracula. Woooo, step one complete! After about 45 minutes (mostly consisting of staring at a blank page, flipping through class notes that look like they were taken by a schizophrenic, and trying to resist the ever-present pull of my computer), I decided that I wanted to write about the conflict between the New Woman and the Old Woman (should I be capitalizing that? I should probably figure out before I write an entire paper about it) in Mina.

I've decided that Mina isn't a New Woman or and Old Woman. She doesn't represent the transition from Old Woman to New Woman. She has qualities of both and gets along just fine that way (besides, you know, the whole getting-turned-into-a-vampire thingy  but I don't really think we can blame that on HER). She is the Newish Woman. [Terminology is a work in progress]

The Newish Woman is, like the New Woman, strong, skilled, and even potentially independent. But she doesn't leave behind things like family, love, and some of women's traditional roles in society. Mina is skilled and independent -- she has organizational skills, can work her way around a typewriter, and was easily able to hop a train to Transylvania to help her husband Johnathan in his time of need. But she also lets herself be told what to do by men, is a bit ditsy when it comes to her husband ("oooh I just looooove him sooooo muuuuuuuuch <3<3"), and plays up to a womanly image.

One thing that I think exemplifies the Newish Woman duality is Mina's hypnotic communication with Dracula. On the one hand, it is her idea to spy on him through herself, making herself essential to the group, and she is quite brave about it as well. On the other hand, though, she is incapable of doing it herself: she has to rely on Van Helsing to hypnotize her and hear what she says -- she can't remember any of it. So while she is being helpful and intelligent in finding Dracula, she is still not quite independent and has to rely on men to be fully useful.

Mina is somewhere between the two extremes of Lucy, the Old Woman who is a girly-girl with all the boys chasing after her, and the New Woman version of Wilhelmina from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, who is cold-hearted, a leader, and, well, kind of a bitch.

Well, that's it for now. I've still got a lot to go, but I wrote plenty enough here. If I was more devious, I would probably cut this blog post in half and post one now, the other on Friday. Ah well. Good luck to you all in your essay-writing endeavors.