Moore's Misogyny and Miss Harker

One of the clearest places where The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen collapses is Mina Harker. And it’s not a minor misstep or a difference of interpretation – it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes the character, and Dracula itself, work at all.

Mina Harker is not interesting because she is dark, abrasive, or “strong” in a modern, performative sense. She is interesting because she combines intelligence, tenderness, moral courage, and self-sacrifice without ever becoming passive. In Stoker’s novel, she is the emotional and ethical center of the book. She gathers information, synthesizes knowledge, steadies the group, and – crucially – chooses to risk her own soul so that Dracula can be destroyed. Halfway through the novel, she is effectively the leader. The men follow her because she is worth following.

Moore throws this away completely. His Mina Murray is embittered, domineering, sexually hardened, and emotionally punitive – a stock figure lifted from a much thinner tradition of “tough women in charge.” The result isn’t subversive; it’s reductive. She reads less like a reimagining of Mina Harker and more like a projection of Moore’s recurring problem with female authority: power is expressed through cruelty, sexuality is stripped of warmth, and vulnerability is treated as weakness rather than strength.

This ties directly into Moore’s long-standing trouble with sex in general. His erotic writing consistently confuses transgression with depth and explicitness with honesty. Lost Girls is the most obvious example, but the same tonal problems surface here. Sexuality becomes abrasive, joyless, and faintly punitive. Women, especially, are flattened into vectors for experience rather than agents of meaning. Moore seems unable – or unwilling – to imagine erotic life that doesn’t carry a residue of contempt.

What makes this especially frustrating is Moore’s hypocrisy. He has repeatedly criticized other writers for reusing, remixing, or “misunderstanding” established characters. He has framed such practices as artistically lazy or ethically suspect. And yet League is nothing but reuse – often careless reuse – of characters whose entire significance depends on historical, social, and moral contexts Moore either ignores or actively rejects.

Nowhere is that failure more damaging than with Mina. Dracula is structured around a moral premise that Moore appears not to grasp: that saving one woman from corruption matters enough to justify collective risk and sacrifice. Mina is not “rescued” because she is weak. She is defended because she is good, capable, and beloved. That idea may be unfashionable, but without it the novel collapses – and so does Mina herself.

Moore replaces this with a version of Mina who seems to resent everyone around her, who governs through scorn, and whose authority feels borrowed rather than earned. The warmth, courage, and quiet ferocity that made Mina unforgettable are gone. What remains is a character who could be swapped with almost any generic genre leader without loss.

The pattern repeats across Moore’s work, but Mina is particularly egregious. When Moore mishandles male characters, the result is often eccentric or indulgent. When he mishandles female characters, the damage cuts deeper. Sexuality curdles. Authority turns sour. Compassion evaporates.

The tragedy is that Moore is capable of far better. He understands power, fear, and myth as well as anyone in the medium. But when it comes to women – and especially women whose strength is inseparable from moral gravity – he too often substitutes abrasion for insight.

Mina Harker deserved more than that. So did the book that borrowed her name.