My capstone course for my English Literature major centered on the history, ideology, and cultural impact of the English Country House. We read novels including Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm. For my final paper, I chose to examine the main women in these novels as representations of radical feminine virtual within the context of the English Country House, which attempts to confine women’s power and agency. This was an enlightening paper to write as it challenged my skills in critical analysis in literature as well as being surprisingly fun to write because of how invested I found myself in revealing the unique lens Stoker and Gibbons portray women through.
Women and the English Country House: Breaking Connections to an Unreal Past and Rigid Ideals in Cold Comfort Farm and Dracula
The English country house is the perfect symbol for a picturesque exterior masking much darker realities. One of the driving goals of the country house is to constrain its inhabitants, relying on a facade of domestic bliss to hide the way it clings to a version of the past that never really existed in the first place and fails to acknowledge women’s labor. Women are often a key part of what’s excluded in the picture of the country home as it is steeped in patriarchal systems. In this light, virtuous women are dutiful, maternal, and incorruptible from outside influence. The country house’s repression of women reinforces a limiting portrayal of female characters in novels centered on the protection and preservation of the country house and its principles of proper English identity. However, Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm and Bram Stoker’s Dracula offer possibilities for reading revolutionary women who create a new interpretation of feminine virtue in relation to the English country house. Flora Poste shows the futility of holding onto the past and the ensuing necessity of embracing modernity amidst a time when the English country house’s downfall provoked a growing urge to idealize the past as a way of prolonging its inevitable decline. Mina Harker, though subject to socially conditioned ideals of propriety, discovers her own power and agency under the direst of circumstances that would aim to portray her as weak and incapable while in fact achieving the opposite.
Tidying Up: Flora Poste’s Ghostbusting Guide to Rejecting the Past
Cold Comfort Farm is more of a cold place than one filled with comfort when Flora Poste arrives, but Flora is the epitome of tidiness and comfort. “Unless everything is tidy and pleasant and comfortable all about one,” she says, “people cannot even begin to enjoy life” (Gibbons 19). Comically contrasting this vision of domestic tidiness and therefore bliss, Gibbons introduces the reader to Cold Comfort Farm as such: “Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of a wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns. The wind was the furious voice of this sluggish animal light that was baring the dormers and mullions and scullions of Cold Comfort Farm” (32). Gibbons’ satire of the rural English novel begins with the animalistic characterization of the landscape and country home–one that is perpetually stuck in the past: “there was not much of the original building left, save the tradition that it had always been there. It crouched, like a beast about to spring, under the bulk of Mockuncle Hill. Like ghosts embedded in brick and stone, the architectural variations of each period through which it had passed were mute history” (33). In the same way, the inhabitants of Cold Comfort Farm are compared to animals–most notably Adam, who shares a “deep, primitive” bond with all living beasts (Gibbons 35)–and are unable to escape the burden of the past until the modernizing force of Flora Poste arrives with a mission to “tidy up” this inhospitable home, shed its ghosts, and bring the Starkadders into the modern era as civilized people. Flora’s mission is the central component of Gibbons’ satire, around which comedy revolves. Conflict arises as Flora quickly realizes her task will not be as easy as she initially supposed, and the resistance she faces is most potently encapsulated by Aunt Ada Doom. As Mara Reisman argues in “Civilizing Projects, Feminism, and Comedy in Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm,” Flora must compete with Aunt Ada Doom for power over the family. “For Flora, civilizing the Starkadders means unsettling the traditional power represented by Aunt Ada and imposing on the Starkadders her more modern view of the world. For Aunt Ada, civilization means domesticating her family (like animals on a farm) which she controls with money and madness. Both believe their imposition of order is in the family’s best interest” (Reisman 37). Where Flora intends to liberate, Aunt Ada aims to imprison the family in the home, preventing their progress, for the sake of continuing tradition because “there have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort.”
Another facet of Gibbons’ satire is Flora’s reliance on novels to interpret the people around her, parodying the instincts of the rural novel that constructs its own literary conventions and tropes. She even views her time at Cold Comfort as an opportunity to “collect materials” for a future novel. Gibbons’ undermining of the tradition of country house novels by the likes of D.H. Lawrence reveals, as Reisman summarizes, “Flora’s larger goal in tidying up the Starkadders, therefore, is to break down narrative conventions because she does not subscribe to the rural novels’ version of life,” which she accomplishes by breaking up the stagnant traditions of the Starkadders’ way of life (41). Extending this goal to the novel as a whole, Gibbons alludes to the ideology of the country house as a constraining force, by nature rooted in a mythologized and romanticized past that ignores the realities of labor and subjugation, particularly of women. The polished exterior hides the dirty connection to the working class people who enable the house to function.
Embedded in the country house is a culturally fabricated production of the ideal English identity. Country house literature fashions the physical architecture of the home into an ideological monument to the past, claiming what it means to be English and defining the role of women within the image of the country house. In order to do this, it must necessarily cling to visions of an idealized past, in the same way Aunt Ada Doom does to exert control over her family, arresting their natural movement forward in time. During the historical moment of Gibbons’ writing, however, the country house had begun its collapse. World War I in particular signaled the beginning of the end for the landed estate, and the transition to viewing the country house as an object of nostalgia, a move that Gibbons problematizes through Flora’s rejection of the past and her role in bringing Cold Comfort Farm into modernity by altering and relocating its people (although, not necessarily the farm itself; members of the family begin to simply abandon the farm, while Reuben takes over the management of the farm as he wished to all along). The country house is a monument to the past, a safe haven amidst unpredictable change, but as it begins to dissolve, living in the past becomes futile. Aunt Ada Doom highlights this reality in saying, “This room was your citadel. Outside, the world you had built up so fiercely for twenty years was crumbling into fantastic ruin” (Gibbons 194). Gibbons’ novel shows that the past is in fact what holds everyone back, centered on that fateful woodshed which induces trauma in Aunt Ada. Her insistence that nothing can happen at Cold Comfort and her manipulation of the family to supposedly shelter them from “the great dirty world where there were cowsheds in which nasty things could happen and be seen by little girls” reflects the English country house’s preservation of a past that never really existed in the way literature portrays it (Gibbons 114). However, at the expense of detaining her family, Cold Comfort Farm is left to disarray, incapable of change: “[Sometimes Urk] told [Aunt Ada] that the farm was rotting away. No matter. There have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort. Well, let it rot … You couldn’t have a farm without sheds (cow, wood, tool, bicycle and potting), and where there were sheds things were bound to rot” (Gibbons 115). In the same breath Aunt Ada uses to condemn the outside world for its ability to corrupt using the image of a shed, she also states that farms, too, have those same sheds, ironically affirming that the call is coming from inside the house. However, when Flora enters the picture with her modern worldliness and a mission to tidy up life for the Starkadders, an escape from a home that constrains its inhabitants by Aunt Ada’s obstinate will is made possible. In the same way Gibbons’ novel offers an alternative to the limits of the symbol of the English country house.
The Vampire Within: Mina Harker’s Redefinition of Feminine Virtue
While Flora is undoubtedly a revolutionary female character in the way she enacts change for others, Dracula’s Mina Harker can be more challenging to read. Nevertheless, Stoker’s portrayal of Mina offers a subversion of feminine virtue as defined by the English country house and through the lens of Victorian ideals. Beyond the threat of foreign vampires, Stoker’s novel, on the surface, offers Mina as a challenge to the “proper” English woman wrapped up in the hegemony of the country house. Many scholars read Mina as a representation of the 19th century’s New Woman: a woman that, as Ashley Craig Lancaster in “Demonizing the Emerging Woman: Misrepresented Morality in Dracula and God’s Little Acre” defines, desired an active role in society’s workforce; no longer focused solely on motherhood; and developed a growing sexual freedom. Dracula’s interest in the New Woman as a cause of the “moral decay of society” revolves around the contrast between Lucy and Mina (Lancaster). While Mina does align with certain traits of the New Woman, contrasting Lucy’s bolder defiance of feminine virtue with her sexual freedom, an alternative reading of Mina’s character shows her as a revolutionary woman of courage rather than one who must be rescued from the danger of Dracula and returned to normative femininity as the surface reading of Dracula would suggest. Mina’s power is evident in the fabric of the novel, even though at times she herself doubts her own agency or restricts herself within the box of submissive femininity. Mina discovers a new side of herself after she is exposed to vampiric infection from the Count, however it is not her growing lust for blood that makes her dangerous; it is the strength she discovers within herself under distressing circumstances that reveals her true power. This is the aspect of her character that most challenges Victorian femininity, likening her to the symbol of a vampire as one who deviates from normative behavior. By the end of the book, it is clear Mina does not fulfill the powerless victim role Stoker assigns her, but this realization first requires her to journey into herself and discover the vampire within.
Deviating from Flora as a female protagonist who is unapologetically in control of her own life and not shy about meddling in others’, Mina, at the outset of Dracula, continually aims to subject herself to the constraints of an identity governed by the country house and its ideals. She believes she must be a diligent wife, and that she must resist and repress her connection to Dracula, falling in line with the goal of the novel to condemn foreign threats (personified through the Count) to English identity (symbolized by the country house). Mina’s life is defined by duty: to be a dutiful schoolmistress, friend, wife, and woman; everyone around her recognizes this as her nature. Even the writing of her diary is perceived by her as a duty, and she practices writing shorthand “to be useful to Jonathan” (Stoker 123, 86). Mina embodies the proper English woman, and thus in the men’s effort to destroy the Count, the protection of her purity is paramount. Van Helsing tells Mina their willingness to fight is “for your sake in the first, and then for the sake of humanity” (Stoker 359). However, the fight is not only the men’s. Mina is a crucial player in the hunt for Dracula, and without her, the group would not have succeeded. She compiles all their diaries and organizes the information in chronological order (Stoker 262). She figures out the Count’s misdirection after they almost fail on their hunt and lays it all out for the men like the school teacher she is (Stoker 391-4), accomplishing this work even while suffering the gradual changes of vampiric transformation, demonstrating her desire to continue to be of service and her unwavering commitment to their task. Mina is also the only one of them to have been bitten by Dracula and survived to fight back.
Nevertheless, the men repeatedly try to shield her from harm and leave her out of their plans. After Van Helsing explains vampires’ weaknesses and formulates what they must do to eradicate Dracula, he turns to Mina and says, “You are too precious to us to have such risk … We are men, and are able to bear’ but you must be our star and our hope, and we shall act all the more free that you are not in the danger, such as we are” (Stoker 281). Ironically, it is when the men believe they are protecting Mina in leaving her behind, telling her to sleep and rest, that she is in fact most endangered. Dracula seizes this opportunity of Mina’s isolation to attack and feed on her. Though horrified by the vampiric infection she subsequently experiences, she faces this greater threat with dignity, acknowledging her difference and understanding the bigger picture. “I am not as you are,” she says, “There is a poison in my blood, in my soul, which may destroy me; which must destroy me, unless some relief comes to us. Oh, my friends, you know as well as I do, that my soul is at stake” (Stoker 371). She is even willing to take her own life if necessary to extinguish all impurities of vampires in the world, including herself:
“Were death, or the fear of death, the only thing that stood in the way I would not shrink to die here, now, amidst the friends who love me. But death is not all. I cannot believe that to die in such a case, when there is hope before us and a bitter task to be done, is God’s will. Therefore, I on my part, give up here the certainty of eternal rest, and go out into the dark where may be the blackest things that the world or the nether world holds!” (Stoker 371)
Mina’s life means less to her than the devotion she feels towards doing what is right. She is not afraid of death, only of allowing vampires to continue to wreak havoc in the world.
Critically, amidst her readiness to fulfill the duty of exterminating Dracula, Mina is repulsed by the vampiric taint to her blood and body. Upon seeing the wound on her neck inflicted by Dracula, Mina cries, “Unclean, unclean! I must touch [Jonathan] or kiss him no more. Oh, that it should be that it is I who am now his worst enemy, and whom he may have most cause to fear” (Stoker 324). The connection to pure feminine virtue has been severed; in its place is a new attachment to Dracula, and Mina is horrified. As the assembly recounts the events of the night, Mina clings to her husband, feeling weak and fearful. Watching the scene, Seward observes, “The poor, dear lady shivered, and I could see the tension of her nerves as she clasped her husband closer to her and bent her head lower and lower still on his breast. [However] Then she raised her head proudly” (Stoker 326). This small but powerful gesture is the first instance after Dracula’s attack on her earlier that very night where Mina finds strength in herself. Then, she tells the men what happened to her. When she reaches the moment describing how Dracula placed his lips on her throat, “Her husband groaned again. She clasped his hand harder, and looked at him pityingly, as if he were the injured one,” proving her selflessness in caring for Jonathan amid her own pain (Stoker 327). Although women are portrayed as supposedly more susceptible to Dracula’s influence than men and thereby weaker in their vulnerability, Mina is the one providing strength for her husband. She has paid the price for Dracula’s threat, yet she uses this to motivate action for the good of others, becoming an asset to the team and allowing them to achieve their collective goal. She demonstrates true courage, choosing to act even while afraid and in the face of peril. Furthermore, Mina uses her vampiric infection for the advantage of the group and their goals, once again wielding knowledge against Dracula–as she did before when compiling the diaries–through hypnotism. Prescott and Giorgio in “Vampiric Affinities: Mina Harker and the Paradox of Femininity in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” explain, “Mina’s desperate attempts to disavow her own vampiric affinities reveal not only the coercive power of Victorian femininity but also the possibility of a cultural space in which to perform a radically different female agency that neither patriarch – Van Helsing nor Dracula – can ultimately control” (488). She is repulsed by her connection to the Count and her newfound vampiric abilities but at the same time locates power within them, ultimately discovering his plans to escape and leading the men to him. Using the knowledge she produces through her willingness to do whatever it takes, Mina shows that strength and courage can be found where the men only want to see vulnerability.
This is Mina’s true inner vampiric nature: the strength and independence she develops not through her infection by the Count but by her steadfast effort to destroy Dracula. This is the threat to the restrained Victorian woman and the English country house that would hide her behind the curtain despite how integral she is to its success. The power and perseverance she locates within herself comes to head in the climactic scene of the novel. Stoker writes through Mina’s perspective as she witnesses from afar the men attacking and subsequently killing Dracula. Yet for a moment, Mina thinks, “I should have felt terrible fear at seeing Jonathan in such danger, but that the ardour of battle must have been upon me as well as the rest of them; I felt no fear, but only a wild, surging desire to do something” (Stoker 416). Mina in this moment and the reading of her character as another concealed vampire offers a glimmer of feminine virtue redefined to embrace the use of action and knowledge against enemies, the reappropriation of a weakness as a power, and the employment of bravery even when one is facing the worst fate imaginable. The contrast between this possibility and Stoker’s ostensible portrayal of Mina as one who is saved by men rather than saving the day herself and ultimately returns to a position of normative femininity, thus vanishing more vampires than one, is heightened in the final words of the novel. Speaking of Mina’s son, Van Helsing says, “later on he will understand how some men so loved her, that they did dare much for her sake” (Stoker 419). These words frame the fundamental struggle of the novel in terms of the preservation of the purity of women and by extension the sanctity of the country house; this is the reward for the sacrifices they have made to defeat Dracula. Yet, it is also true that veiled within Stoker’s portrayal of Mina is a woman that upends the definition of a “pure” woman and reconstructs what feminine virtue should mean–it is not her duty to her husband or her propriety as a woman but in the strength, perseverance, and compassion she locates within herself that makes her exceptional and also vampiric.
Conclusion: Paving the Way for Powerful Women
Where in Cold Comfort Farm, Aunt Ada Doom constrained the Starkadder family––a metaphor for the constraint of English country house ideology as a whole–in Dracula, it is Mina’s own social conditioning coupled with the reinforcement of submissive feminine behaviors ordered by the men that restrict Mina from fully embracing her inner vampire. Regrettably for Mina, there is no Flora Poste who comes to modernize the scene and allow the inhabitants of the country house to live their lives beyond the ideological limits of the home. Nevertheless, whether it’s Flora Poste exorcising ghosts of the past or Mina Harker offering a potential way for women to embrace their inner vampire, Gibbons and Stoker offer readings of revolutionary female characters that undermine the dominant hegemonic ideal of feminine virtue connected to the English country house. At the end of Cold Comfort Farm, Flora succeeds in disrupting Aunt Ada’s power over the Starkadders, literally and metaphorically opening the door for them to leave the country house and the associated constraints the ideology of the country home represents. At the end of Dracula, Mina returns to the comfort of domesticity and duty with a restored purity recentered on the narrow path of Victorian feminine virtue, but not before she has guided the fight to Dracula with radical bravery and embraced power within her that was supposed to be a disadvantage. Thus, where women can be ghostbusters and vampires, they can also break the boundaries of the ideology of the English country house.
Works Cited
Gibbons, Stella. Cold Comfort Farm. Penguin, 2007.
Lancaster, Ashley Craig. “Demonizing the Emerging Woman: Misrepresented Morality in Dracula and God’s Little Acre.” Journal of Dracula Studies, vol. 6, article 5. 2004.
Prescott, Charles E., and Grace A. Giorgio. “Vampiric Affinities: Mina Harker and the Paradox of Femininity in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 33, issue 2. 2005, pp. 487–515.
Reisman, Mara. “Civilizing Projects, Feminism, and Comedy in Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm.” Modern Language Studies, vol. 43, no. 1, 2013, pp. 30–49. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24616718.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Edited by Glennis Byron, Broadview Press, 2000.