They Call The Wind “Mimi”

One of the odd things about working from someone else’s material is when you wonder if you’ve stumbled upon something that the original author thought of but then dropped, for whatever reason. Case in point: Mimi.

I sometimes suspect Lilla was the original love interest for Adam, and there’s a lot of confusion in the manuscript as to which girl he’s talking about. Lilla comes across as the “Mina” character (if I remember my Dracula correctly) while Mimi seems wilder. Not as wild as “Lucy”, perhaps, but more suited to being Caswall’s first victim—which would make sense if we were re-writing Dracula and had no antediluvian serpent on our hands. (Those who would over-simplify Stoker’s attitude about the races would do well to note that the heroine of the book has a Burmese mother.)

The bulk of Act 3 in the original is an attempt to save Mimi’s life from the attacks of the giant snake, whom our heroes have ascertained is the primary target of WW. This results in an awkward marriage arrangement which seems a bit out of date for 1911. And then a long, fruitless chase scene that ends with Adam and Mimi returning to Doom Tower.

None of this is adequately explained. They abandon Lilla, it’s hard to avoid noticing. And it’s Lilla who is the threat to Arabella’s plans. (Watford just vanishes from the story.) But WW leaves her comfortable lair to chase Adam and Mimi out in the open.

From a story perspective, this gives you a nice chase scene, and a way for our characters to (finally!) interact with the WW. So even though it’s “pointless,” it at least makes dramatic sense.

Except for the whole why of it. Mimi’s sole power is that she has it within her to counter Caswall. She has some Burmese snake charming power hinted at,, but it’s never developed. So, by mere virtue of leaving she ceases to be a threat to anyone.

In order to get the snake to chase her, Mimi has to be some sort of threat, which means (to me) that she has to have some kind of important impact on the end of the story. I’ve been wrestling with that one.

But it occurs to me, it’s even harder to figure out why WW would chase a threat that was leaving. If Mimi had something the WW needed, maybe.

Or….or if it were a deliberate provocation. That feels better because it gives our characters something to do that’s not totally reactive.

Interesting.