On Fanlore, users with accounts can edit pages including user pages, can create pages, and more. Any information you publish on a page or an edit summary will be accessible by the public and to Fanlore personnel. Because Fanlore is a wiki, information published on Fanlore will be publicly available forever, even if edited later. Be mindful when sharing personal information, including your religious or political views, health, racial background, country of origin, sexual identity and/or personal relationships. To learn more, check out our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Select "dismiss" to agree to these terms.
Mina Harker
| Character | |
|---|---|
| Name: | Mina Harker Wilhelmina "Mina" Harker (Full Name) Mina Murray |
| Occupation: | school teacher, housewife |
| Relationships: | Jonathan Harker - husband, Lucy Westenra - friend |
| Fandom: | Dracula |
| Other: | |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
This article is a stub. Please help us out by adding more content. |
Mina Harker, aka Wilhelmina Harker née Murray, is a character from Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula. She appeared in most of the adaptations of the novel and many other Dracula-related works.
Canon
In the book, Mina is one of the three main narrators, the only female character surviving at the end and the person who compiles all the documents that the novel consists of in-universe. She is a friend of Lucy Westenra and fiancee, and then wife, of Jonathan Harker; her connection to Lucy is what later on unites her and Jonathan with the rest of the hunters. Mina plays an active role in the hunt for Dracula, but eventually the men decide to exclude her, which leads to her being attacked by Dracula. Forced to drink his blood, she starts slowly turning into a vampire and forms a mental link with him, but her use of this very link ends up helping the group to find and kill Dracula before her trasformation is complete.
Fandom
Mina is a beloved character in Dracula fandom. She's often praised as an example of a female character that is unusually strong and competent for Victorian literature, as well as a sensitive representation of a trauma survivor. She's often headcanonned as autistic, POC, and/or with an interest in macabre. Treatment of Mina is used as one of the major reasons for harsh criticism of Dracula adaptations.
Memes
- Hot girl summer
- Goth Mina
- Train fiend
- Mina's gun
Interpretations and Discussions
- Mina and the New Woman - how much Mina is meant to be a New Woman character, Mina's uneasiness towards the feminist movement of her time
- Mina and class - Jonathan and Mina as the poorest characters in the novel and how being the lower middle class orphans shaped them
- Mina wrote Dracula - the importance of Mina as the one collating the documents that the novel consists of
- Mina's portrayal as a SA survivor - how much Mina's feelings towards the blood baptism mirror these of rape survivors, how revolutionary of Stoker not to victim blame her or kill her off
- Treatment of Mina in adaptations - removing her intelligence and active participation in the hunt, adding romance with Dracula
Shipping
- Mina Harker/Jonathan Harker
- Mina Harker/Lucy Westenra
- Mina Harker/Dracula
- Crew of Light
- Dracula/Jonathan/Mina
Fanworks
Fanfic
- The New Woman, Archived version by astrangergivingthestrangewelcome - AU where Mina gets a more active role in the hunt (2023-2024)
- If I were in your place, Archived version by animate_mush, 2024 -- a Mina-Lucy bodyswap fic
Some Mina-centric stories explore the process of her vampire transformation and her mental link with the Count:
- Sensations, Archived version by Assimbya - Mina's transformation and trauma (2006)
- Mina's Story, Archived version by NYMeggi (2009)
- Mina's Lost Entries by evenstar8705 (2009)
- One Flesh, Archived version by PsychoPomposity (2013) - an exploration of the psychic link between Mina and Dracula
Fanart
The book Mina is usually depicted as dark-haired, often a POC, wearing sensible clothes in cool tones like green and blue. In the Dracula Daily fandom, there is a tendency to portray the later book Mina in black, wearing mourning after the death of Peter Hawkins or just to showcase her Gothiness. Besides solitary portraits, there is a lot of art of Mina with Jonathan, Lucy (who is given contrasting frilly and blonde designs) or the whole Crew of Light.
Gallery
Mina Murray by Carmilla-Mircalla (2009)
Mina Harker by ceciliagf (2010)
- The fog is not your friend, Mina run!! by keawi (2022)
- Goth girls love trains, Archived version by can-of-w0rmz (2024)
- Mina by cry-ptidd (2025)
Meta
- This is going to be a long post about unreliability in Dracula... by draculasstrawhat (2024)
Other
Resources & External Links
- Wikipedia: Mina Harker
- Mina Harker on AO3
- #Mina Harker on Tumblr
- Mina Harker on Dracula Fandom.com wiki
- Mina Harker on TVTropes
References