Mina Harker: Dracula's Bride?

Throughout Dracula, one character remains a constant. That would be Mina Murry Harker, wife of Jonathan Harker and final near victim of Dracula’s spree of evil. In the book and most portrayals, Mina is a school teacher, and only connected to the events by friendship or her husband. Yet when Dracula forces her to drink his blood and start to change, she takes center stage, locates and guides the men to him, all the while remaining determined to help in any way she can to get vengeance for Lucy and put Dracula down for good. Most adaptations of the story stick to this basic framework, with some, such as F.W. Mearneau’s Nosferatu having her be the one to ultimately end Dracula’s reign of terror by sacrificing herself to lure the count into sunlight, and others, such as Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, have her getting into adventures after Dracula’s death, either with or without Jonathan, and generally just being cool. In my opinion, these versions of Mina are solid role models for girls, despite some of the sexist leanings some of the stories have, due to Mina’s overall noble and kind nature, yet having an iron resolve that allows her to journey into battle with a villain who, let’s be honest, raped her, and stand against forces that any human would be terrified to face, and still feel some measure of sympathy toward someone who is pure evil. So why is it that, in most modern versions of the story, Mina is made into a reincarnation of Dracula’s wife and falls in love with him, or just plain out falls in love with him? I seriously don’t get the appeal of this, especially since most times I’ve seen it, it is done extremely poorly. Seriously, the Coppola film might be one of the earliest versions where this happened, but I’ve seen it so many other times that it is ridiculous. In the NBC Dracula series, this was basically the main plot, the “sequel” Dracula the Un-dead by Bram Stoker’s great-grandnephew Dacre has Quincy Harker’s father turn out to have been Dracula along with Dracula actually turning out be a good guy hunting a vampire Elizabeth Bathory, and even the animated film The Batman vs. Dracula has the female lead turn out to be a reincarnation of Dracula’s wife. I have to question why this is so popular. Reading the text, there is only one moment that indicates an actual connection between the two that doesn’t come off as disturbing or rapey. It’s when Mina says she feels sorry for Dracula for his curse, which she follows up by saying that she feels sorry for him just because of how much being a vampire must suck. Considering we don’t know how Dracula was turned in the first place, Mina’s sympathy could be completely misplaced, and Dracula could just be evil. But even still, that one moment doesn’t explain the obsession with putting the two together. The moments that go against that scene include Dracula raping and murdering Lucy, torturing Jonathan, killing untold numbers of people over the centuries, killing babies, beating women, pretty much raping Mina, and a number of other crimes. Yet, somehow, this one scene seems to have become the source for making the two a dedicated couple, despite the only physical interaction between the two being a rape scene. Like I previously questioned, what is with the desire to make us sympathize with character’s that are pure evil? It ruins the mystique around them, and makes them into less compelling characters for me.