I read Dracula as quite a conservative text that, as you say, has a lot of fears of ‘the Orient’ and what it might do to a ‘civilized’ Victorian society (corrupt our women, enfeeble our men, etc). I don’t think the fact Mins has training or education undermines that effect - nor does the portrayal of the male characters.
The discourses we have about values in our society are imperfect and fragile: ideas about gender, for example. We can all reel off the tropes of what men and women should be like. And we all know that in practice, no individual meets that standard of behaviour/character/presentation. But we have a rigid set of idealised tropes that are, by definition, impossible for us to ever fully actualise. This is like Derrida’s practice of deconstruction & double reading - any discourse always already contains the seeds of it’s undoing within itself.
So, while Mina might be educated (which fits with progressive middle class aspirations of white, Victorian womanhood at the time) and the men can and do emote (Jonathan in particular is at risk of falling under Dracula’s ‘spell’, too, in the early novel) at the end of the day, it’s the good old heterosexual, middle class, monogamous family that is ‘saved’ from these threatening, vampiric others.
Yeah! I think there’s something really there in what you say about Jonathan as you say - he goes on this quite interesting journey towards being a bit more of a masculine hero. He starts the book in this kind of feminised role (he’s weakened by Dracula, he’s clueless, he’s kind of fascinated by him and seduced by vampirism) & it’s the desire to protect Mina that transforms him later in the novel to this swashbuckling hero who’s decapitating people on wagons. Lots of gothic romanticism in Mina’s sort of ‘pure’ femininity and how that inspired all the men to Fight the Other. There’s so much about gender going on this book! 🫠