SOURCE: Herbert, Christopher. “Vampire Religion.” Representations 79 (summer 2002): 100-21.

[In the following essay, Herbert offers a religious interpretation of Dracula.]

Here chiefly, Lord, we feed on Thee, And drink Thy precious Blood.

—Charles Wesley¹

RELIGION/SUPERSTITION

Once consigned to the limbo of the subliterary, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) has attained canonical status by gaining recognition as a pioneering exploration of forbidden zones of sex.² The strong religious thrust of this novel has correspondingly been ignored, not to say suppressed, in recent criticism: acknowledging the primacy of a broad vein of late-Victorian religious sentiment in Stoker's sensationalistic Gothic tale has evidently seemed to its interpreters hard to square with claiming it as a significant literary object—or even, indeed, as “the first great modern novel in British literature.”³ Restoring its religious motivation to view is bound to complicate its standing as an icon of radical fin de siècle modernity but may help us trace the logic of certain late-Victorian cultural disorders that it seems to allegorize. It is a move that irresistibly leads back to Gothicism and to sex, after all.

At first glance, Dracula seems so afflicted with split identity that nothing could make it whole. At least as open as the original Gothic fiction of the 1790s was to William Wordsworth's scorn of the genre as a pandering to modern readers' “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation,”⁴ it presents itself nonetheless as a solemn parable of what John Henry Newman called “the warfare between the city of God and the powers of darkness”⁵ and as an endlessly ventriloquized religious testimonial. Its characters pray constantly for the intercession of “Almighty God” (D [Dracula], 261) in their struggles with the demonic; they cross themselves, brandish crucifixes, and invoke the protective powers of communion wafers. Scriptural quotation is worked deeply into the stylistic texture of the novel, both in the frequent echoing of biblical verses and in dramaturgical effects such as the pietà that ends the story, the dying hero Quincey Morris bleeding from his Christological wound in the side as his friends kneel around him in prayer and fervently intone “Amen” (D, 418). Most significant of all, a series of passages instructs readers to interpret the tale not just in accordance with a broadly ecumenical religious spirit but in particular theological terms. A vampire, declares the pious Van Helsing, nominally an advanced medical scientist but more a lay priest (and necromancer) and the book's main religious authority, is “an arrow in the side of Him who died for man” (D, 276): the battle against the plague of vampirism is a battle specifically on behalf of Jesus Christ. “Thus are we ministers of God's own wish,” he elsewhere says to his band of vampire hunters: “that the world, and men for whom His Son die, will not be given over to monsters, whose very existence would defame Him. He have allowed us to redeem one soul already [Lucy Westenra's, redeemed by her being put to death with a stake driven through her body], and we go out as the old knights of the Cross to redeem more”; they struggle, he declares, “for the good of mankind, and for the honour and glory of God” (D, 360, 361).

This strain of militant homiletic rhetoric, which sharply distinguishes Stoker's book from precursor texts such as John William Polidori's The Vampyre (1819)⁶ and Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872),⁷ risks inducing in sensation-fiction readers (not to mention non-Christian ones) something like the “horrible feeling of nausea” (D, 48) that the Count's malodorous lairs or his foul breath induce in those who encounter them within the novel. Admittedly, this pietistic ambience serves to some extent as a kind of magnifying medium designed as much to heighten the shock value of Stoker's sensationalism as to impart religious edification; even so, critical study of Dracula needs to begin by recognizing it as very likely the most religiously saturated popular novel of its time. Whether Stoker's Christian vocation is one with which pious readers ought to feel comfortable is another question, however.

It might initially seem that the novel is meant to stand as a manifesto of religious conviction amid a secularized rationalistic-scientific late-century world of which the distinctive presences are networks of the festishized information technology that Stoker prophetically highlights: telephones and telegraphs, dictaphones, Kodak cameras.⁸ At times, Van Helsing describes his mission as vampire exorcist in just such terms. “I want you to believe” and to have “faith,” he says to the skeptical psychiatrist Dr. Seward, who here represents the mentality of the modern scientific outlook (D, 230).⁹ But the religious didacticism of the novel in fact is directed not against the unbelief of secular scientism but—surprisingly in the context of the 1890s—against its very opposite, the alarming upsurge of superstition and black magic that is symbolized by the vampire invasion of England. The evil Count is above all an emanation of the world of superstition and an image of a terrible menace posed by the superstitious mentality to decent Christian existence. “Every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians,” Jonathan Harker informs us, reporting later that the gypsies there are “without religion, save superstition” (D, 32, 73). In effect, Dracula, the dreaded master of this territory, is superstition itself, come fantastically to life. Stoker defines superstition anthropologically, as the thought-system of primitive society; Harker's journey to Transylvania at the beginning of the story is accordingly not so much an eastward movement in space as it is a time-journey into a stratum of the European mind prior to the supposed conquering of pagan magical thinking by Christianity. The world with which he is acquainted, he writes in his diary, precisely articulating Stoker's theme, “is nineteenth-century up-to-date with a vengeance. And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill” (D, 67). Initially complacent in his idea of Transylvanian superstition as harmless folklore, he quickly learns in his stay at Castle Dracula to regard superstitious conceptions like vampirism as still-vital malignant powers able in effect to rise from the grave of the past (hence the special aptness of the vampire myth for Stoker's purposes) to pose a lethal menace to English society on the threshold of the twentieth century. The menace is that England could become in its turn, if the vampire invasion succeeds, a land “without religion, save superstition.”

Christian religion, then, is equated in this novel with modernity in its struggle against atavistic prereligious influences. (In a more typical text of the day such as Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure [1895], Christianity and modernity are of course taken to be adversarial.) Which atavistic social forces might in the 1890s have seemed to Stoker sufficiently menacing to arouse the “panic of superstitious fear” (D, 117) that is the keynote of the novel and that catalyzes its appeal to the saving influence of religion? There may be no definite answer to this question, crucial though it undoubtedly is to giving Dracula an anchorage in late-century contemporaneity; nor, above all, need we assume that this book, hybrid as it is of Gothic horror-mongering and religious earnestness, will prove to be fully coherent in its thinking. One would rather expect such a book to resist an author's will to impose unity on it and to exhibit potentially irresolvable contradictions. We may begin resituating Dracula in its decade, however, by noting that this was not the only text of the day devoted to policing what was felt to be the hazardous boundary between the verities of religion and the deformities of superstition—or, rather, to insisting that this supposed boundary is real to begin with, that “superstition” is dangerous because of its insidious resemblance to that higher thing, “religion,” and that piety therefore has no more urgent task than, turning inward, that of purifying itself of superstitious credulity and, turning outward, that of waging prophylactic war on superstition wherever it appears. The emergence of this cardinal theme in the late nineteenth century bears witness to the predicament of religion in this period, when its difficult fate, as Newman and other ecclesiastical conservatives saw with much distress, was to be forced to shore up its waning cultural legitimacy by a display of antagonism toward, and of anxious vigilance against, infiltration by irrational or antimodern elements. The category of “superstition” becomes recognizable to this extent as a strategic manufacture of the modernist moment: not a given or a self-evident thing, but a function of particular cultural needs.

On one practical level, this conflicted nexus of thinking expressed itself in the great national mission of suppressing idolatrous superstitions among indigenous populations in the territories of the British Empire.¹⁰ It expressed itself closer to home in the emergence of a rationalistic and naturalistic broad-church Anglicanism committed to purging the church of superstitions like belief in the literal infallibility of Scripture. And it expressed itself notably in the critique of superstition carried out in evolutionary anthropology (that quintessential late-Victorian intellectual enterprise) at just the extended period (1890-97) during which Stoker was drafting his novel.¹¹ One particularly revealing cognate text for Dracula, for instance, would be William Robertson Smith's The Religion of the Semites, published in 1889, the year before Stoker began work on his vampire story.¹² In totemic aboriginal society, Robertson Smith says, “[the savage's] superstitious hopes and fears and observances” focus on the worship of sacred animals epitomizing “the usual savage idea about things that are taboo”: that “they are charged … with a certain supernatural energy” rendering them mortally dangerous to touch or eat (RS, 126, 160). The holiness, the deadly energy, that they contain “is conceived as infectious, propagating itself by physical contact”; it “is contagious, just as uncleanness is,” and inspires reactions of disgusted aversion (RS, 161, 450). Thus “in the primitive taboo, … sanctity and uncleanness meet and are indistinguishable,” says Robertson Smith (RS, 370): this to him represents the essential formula of superstition.

Only at the much later stage of Hebrew thought do superstitions based on taboo give way to a genuinely religious conception of a deity who possesses ethical consciousness and whom religion exists to propitiate with adoration. But the process is a gradual and incomplete one: hence the “remains of … primitive superstition” (RS, 446) that Robertson Smith traces in various Old Testament texts that give evidence of the worship and the ritual eating of mice, swine, and “the abomination,” or small quadruped vermin. (He does not mention bats, though they are specifically cited in Leviticus [11:13, 19] as belonging to the class of species that a religious person “shall have in abomination.”) “All such creatures were unclean in an intense degree, and had the power to communicate uncleanness to whatever they touched,” yet in such a text as Ezekiel 8:10, they figure, he says, illustrating his theme of the original identity of the unclean and the sacred, “as objects of superstitious adoration” (RS, 293). He concludes that these Old Testament materials, grotesquely incongruous as they are with higher Hebrew religion, bear witness to “the re-emergence into the light of day of a cult of the most primitive totem type, which had been banished for centuries from public religion, but must have been kept alive in obscure circles of private or local superstition” (RS, 357).

The following year, Stoker, as though transposing directly into fiction the speculations and the implicit cultural anxieties of The Religion of the Semites, begins to elaborate his tale of the terrifying reemergence of primitive vampire worship from its remote stronghold in the Carpathians into the light of day of modern Christian England.¹³ Like Robertson Smith, he conceives his book as an extended meditation on the relations of modern ethical religion to superstitious notions of uncleanness. In Dracula, however, for all its putative devotion to the cause of true religion, the two supposedly antithetical categories of religion and superstition reveal an uncontrollable tendency to collapse into one another.

On the one hand, Dracula embraces wholeheartedly the idea that immorality, particularly in the all-important sexual realm, signifies uncleanness. This idea is anathema to any modern analysis of moral phenomena—any analysis, that is, that stresses choices, motives, consequences, relativities of circumstance. The code of uncleanness, by contrast, expresses the archaic principle of taboo, the principle of quasi-physical, indwelling contamination. The latter doctrine is supreme in Dracula, where emotively laden metaphors of sanitation everywhere function as moral and religious statement. Hence, for example, all the stress given by Stoker to the repugnant filthiness associated with the Count: to “sanctify” his lair to render it uninhabitable by him is to “sterilize” it (D, 396, 331). Lucy Westenra's “voluptuous wantonness” under the influence of vampirism is similarly designated “unclean”; she is said to become a “foul thing” (D, 249, 252). In causing this language to pervade the novel, Stoker gives a note of peculiar urgency to what amounts to the axiomatic structure of Victorian moral ideology: this is the conventional language, if raised to a nearly hysterical new pitch, of the popular fiction of the day.¹⁴ But Stoker goes further, bringing plainly into view (as Robertson Smith does by other means, and possibly with another intent) the supposedly defunct superstitious substructure that continues in fact to bear the weight of this ideology: this he does by taking as the donnée and main plot device of his novel the premise that moral perversion, being as it is a form of “uncleanness,” can be caught by physical contact. Dracula imagines moral “uncleanness” not to be a figure of speech, in other words, but to be in some occult sense a literal reality. This outlandish idea—this idea that ought to be outlandish—crops up shockingly here in Victorian popular literature like a “survival” of the totemic protoreligion hypothesized by Robertson Smith. Stoker calculates that it will not seem all that alien or implausible to his readers, after all. The most significant primitive cult that reemerges into the light of day in this text, that is to say, is not the one that comes over from Transylvania, but the one that has inhabited Victorian thinking all along.

Dracula belongs to the imaginary regime of superstition rather than to that of religion and ethical consciousness, to repeat, because the transmission of the moral pollution of vampirism in Stoker's fable is purely a mechanical process, as the transmission of what Robertson Smith memorably calls “the sacred infection” (RS, 450) is in the system of taboo. A vampire becomes “hard, and cruel, and sensual” (D, 209) in the same way that one contracts rabies or AIDS: as the result of nothing but an exchange of infectiously contaminated bodily fluids by which the victim is “tainted” (D, 406), and in turn is rendered mortally dangerous as a carrier of perversion to all other people. “He have infect you,” Van Helsing explains to Mina after her violation by Dracula (D, 360). Considered as a politics insidiously transmitted by its own occult (literary) mode of infectious contact, this nineteenth-century version of taboo thinking, in which moral depravity is figured as diseaselike transmissible contamination, might well make a reader uneasy, for what it signifies in a latter-day context is one or another panicky ideology based on shunning the unclean, on policies of segregation or of social cleansing, and on the worship of purity of blood. To frame the issue in these terms is to suggest that the theme of “the reemergence into the light of day” of long-banished pre-ethical superstitions may not at all be a dead letter for modern history, and that popular fables of science (here personified in Van Helsing) embracing superstition in the guise of religion may not be wholly innocuous. If only for this reason of its possible importance as a signifier and infectious agent of modern ideologies of pollution, Dracula would be worthy of close critical attention.

Suggestions of the noninnocuous character of renascent superstition run close to the surface of another pertinent text of the day, James Frazer's Golden Bough, the two-volume first edition of which was published—with a dedication to Robertson Smith—in 1890, a year after The Religion of the Semites and the same year in which Stoker began his prolonged gestation of Dracula.¹⁵ “[The] radical conflict of principle between magic and religion sufficiently explains the relentless hostility with which in history the priest has often pursued the magician,” Frazer declares (GB, 60)—a proposition that Dracula seems to transcribe in the fable of Van Helsing's obsessive campaign to liquidate the Count, whom he sees not just as a dangerous criminal but as an ideological (and at some level an evolutionary) rival as well. But Frazer's argument concerning “the distinction between religion and superstition” (GB1, 1:32) is crucially more ambivalent than the one set forth by Robertson Smith. The evolutionary transcending of superstition by religion, however absolute “the radical conflict of principle” between the two may be in theory, seems ever more illusory to Frazer. His grand theme, in fact, turns out to be the “confusion of magic and religion” (GB, 60), the permeation of religious ideas and practices by archaic, supposedly obsolete magical elements handed down from the earliest stages of human culture. For Robertson Smith, the emergence of religion out of the materialistic world of superstition signifies an unqualified cultural achievement; for Frazer, religion serves as a medium through which undying primitive cruelty and superstition are transmitted in potentially virulent forms to the modern world.

The 1890 edition of The Golden Bough does not make explicit the ultimate motives of Frazer's great inquiry into the logical structures of superstition. In later editions, he premises his work on the startling claim that Christian Europe at the threshold of the new century is menaced by a possibly volcanic upsurge of a latent superstitious mentality that has never, despite all efforts, been successfully extirpated from the modern world. “A solid layer of savagery” remains, he says, “beneath the surface of society” and poses “a standing menace to civilisation.” “We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below.” As evidence for this prophecy, so evocative imagistically of the story told in Dracula, he cites from newspapers of the day instances of gruesome crimes associated with various forms of black magic; an account of a woman “slowly roasted to death as a witch in Ireland,” for example (GB, 64-65). It seems to Frazer as though “the re-emergence into the light of day of a cult of the most primitive totem type” is a realistic possibility and even a pressing danger in civilized fin de siècle Europe. I have suggested elsewhere that Frazer's dread of a catastrophic modern outbreak of superstition may have referred to the huge wave of anti-Jewish persecution that spread from one European country to another like a contagious mania in the 1880s and 1890s.¹⁶ Read against this contemporary backdrop, the fable in Dracula of the infiltration of England by a repulsively filthy bloodsucking parasite from the East, one of whose prominent physical features, much belabored in the text, is “a 'ook nose” (D, 174; see also 48, 209), who is like an arrow in the side of Christ and must be chased out of the country and finally “utterly stamp[ed] … out” (D, 342) with all his kind by a warrior band of Christians, seems to resonate all too powerfully with the anti-Semitic propaganda that echoed across Europe (though it never was publicly acceptable in England as it was on the Continent) in the decade during which Stoker worked on his novel. Is vampirism in this novel at some level a metaphor for the blood libel (the lunatic claim that Jews murder Christians to draw their blood)? Of what modernity, exactly, is this “the first great … novel”?¹⁷

Dracula, in any case, amounts to a fictionalized treatise on—or an object lesson of—that “confusion of magic and religion” that filled Frazer with alarm for the future of European civilization. Having proclaimed itself an allegory of the confounding of superstition by the forces of Christian piety, the novel adopts in fact an acutely ambivalent stance toward the superstitious. Its fundamental doctrine, after all, is that the “witch[es] and demon[s]” (D, 313) of superstition are not, as Frazer the scholarly Cassandra thought it essential to insist, hallucinatory symptoms of modern cultural pathologies, but real. “There are such beings as vampires,” Van Helsing, the arbiter of wisdom in this novel, earnestly admonishes his late-Victorian readership (D, 276). In its concerted assault on the Frazerian doctrine that belief in witches, demons, and vampires is not just intellectually atavistic but unfailingly in league with ideologies of scapegoating and sadistic persecution, this novel sets itself squarely against the Enlightenment spirit on behalf of which Frazer proselytizes.

It enacts at the same time a nearly total engulfing of the religious spirit by superstition that a religiously devout modern reader could scarcely fail (one supposes) to find shocking and even sacrilegious. Renfield, the “zoophagous” inmate of Dr. Seward's insane asylum, is given his major role in Dracula (he is by far its most fascinating personality) precisely to theorize the collapse of religion into the spiritual vacancy of superstition—and to introduce in so doing a potentially severe complication into the theological argument of the novel. Afflicted as he is with “homicidal and religious mania” (D, 135), he worships Dracula, to whom he prays as a divinity and whose advent in England he senses telepathically, proclaiming it with the fervor of a demented John the Baptist. “The Master is at hand,” he announces (D, 135). He later likens himself to Enoch (Genesis 5:21-24), who “walked with God”: “he believes he is in a Real Presence,” observes his scornful keeper, Seward, who regards him merely as deranged (D, 308, 137). Readers are not allowed to dismiss Renfield or by extension his vampire worship quite so complacently. Stoker presents him as a sympathetic and intelligent figure whose veneration of Dracula poses a striking riddle: according to what system of thinking could the loathsome vampire actually become an object of religious devotion? The question is central to Stoker's cautionary political allegory of the advent of a charismatic and nihilistic dictator—one who boasts of his descent from Attila the Hun (D, 60)—whose power resides in his gift for communicating a lust for blood in the form of “homicidal and religious mania” to his followers. Of all the intuitions of twentieth-century modernity in this novel, this is the most clairvoyant, and the point at which it comes closest to Frazer's bad dreams of a volcanic tide of superstition and savagery getting ready to burst upon modern Europe. But it is an intuition marked profoundly by ambivalence, as the sympathetic portrayal of the Count's disciple Renfield immediately tells us, and as Stoker's sotto voce expression of a dark and cruel strain of anti-Semitic paranoia tells us in another way.

Dracula's claim of sanctity is just the one theorized by Robertson Smith, in which gods are not the source of ethical values but are imagined, rather, as beings “unclean in an intense degree” and possessing above all a virulent contagiousness, “the power to communicate uncleanness to whatever they [touch].” Rejecting evolutionist theory in favor of a revivalist one, Renfield proclaims not so much a false religion, that is, as the restoration of the religious mentality in what Victorian anthropology claimed to be its authentic primordial form. He is perfectly aware that his “superstitious adoration” of Dracula is void of spiritual content save one thing, the instinct to worship blindly an all-powerful, irresistibly charismatic god: apart from this, his religious sensibility expresses itself solely in a mad vampirish craving for blood. A religion devoid of spirituality and devoted to the worship of uncleanness can only seem a monstrous delusion from a modern point of view. The forces of Christian piety in the novel hasten therefore to brand Renfield a maniac and to lock him up as the best way of silencing his sacrilegious evangelism—but not before he has injected into the book the dangerous idea that the holy and the infectiously dirty may finally, as the anthropologists argued, be one and the same. Is the totem figure Dracula the true god, and the spiritualized Christian deity so often invoked by Stoker's morally virtuous characters in some sense an impostor?

As far as its explicit rhetoric goes, Stoker's text constitutes an impassioned defense of religious orthodoxy against any such idea—and yet its most provocative effect is that it allows Renfield to preach the abominable idea so distinctly to begin with and that so much narrative and polemical machinery is needed to suppress it, as though it possessed more plausibility than could be openly admitted. Why this would be is suggested in Stoker's explicit embrace of the aboriginal metaphysics of “uncleanness” that the Victorian middle classes, as we have said, were all too prone to regard as the basis of morals, particularly in conjunction with sexual innuendoes of the kinds that are almost identical to vampirism in this novel. “Unclean! Unclean! Even the Almighty shuns my polluted flesh!” Mina cries out in despair once the virus of vampirism has entered her bloodstream (D, 336). We know that she is polluted not in any spiritual or moral sense, but only, again, in the sense in which a spiritually immaculate AIDS sufferer might be if she had been attacked in the subway by a maniac with an infection-laden needle. Yet this novel commands its readers to regard her even so as a contaminated and perverted being. Stoker's Christian God apparently subscribes to the code of indelible uncleanness and to the whole ancient system of taboo thinking, driven as it is by superstitious ideas of contamination, exclusion, and phobic dread. Van Helsing confirms the pitiless divine judgment on Mina, “knowing that so far as symbols went, she with all her goodness and purity and faith, was outcast from God” (D, 349). The very meaninglessness of “so far as symbols went,” tacked on to Van Helsing's decree as a vague palliative, underlines the vindictive superstition that passes muster as Christian faith in Dracula and that Stoker expects his readership to find not only comprehensible but acceptable. In this startling sentence, he expressly enacts the displacement of ethical and humanistic religion by a fantastic theory of contagious uncleanness. The text shows no sign of theological alarm or resistance as the spiritualized Christian deity, who cares only about the motives in people's hearts, is overruled here by a wrathful superstitious one—the perverted one known to Renfield as Dracula. The logic by which the worship of a god of uncleanness and the horrified revulsion from unclean objects turn out to be identical is spelled out fully only by the anthropologists, but the “confusion of magic and religion” that motivates this sector of Stoker's novel is unmistakable.

It is expressed vividly, also, in the decisive role that Dracula gives to sacred devices like the crucifixes and communion wafers that Van Helsing relies on in the struggle against vampirism. Stoker exhorts his readers to regard these things as precious adjuncts of Christian piety. In fact, piety has little to do with the sanctity that chiefly manifests itself in Dracula, just as in the primitive thought-worlds analyzed by Robertson Smith and Frazer, in a potent physical force, “a certain supernatural energy,” that inhabits sacred objects. Frazer's dominant metaphor for this force is that of electric current. Divinity in primitive thought is “as it were, electrically charged with a powerful magical or spiritual force which may discharge itself with fatal effect on whatever comes in contact with it” (GB, 235; see also 549, 688-89). This is just the force that discharges itself in the confrontation with the Count in his safe house in Piccadilly, when Seward holds up a crucifix and “[feels] a mighty power fly along [his] arm” (D, 347). Stoker does not fail to recognize how alien the electrical interpretation of the power of the crucifix may seem to be to any modern, nonsuperstitious form of Christian devotion, and lest we disregard this motif of his novel as merely a Gothic effect, he devotes several passages of earnest theological discussion to it. “It is odd,” observes the good Protestant Harker, “that a thing which I have been taught to regard with disfavour and as idolatrous should in a time of loneliness and trouble be of help. Is it that there is something in the essence of the thing itself, or that it is a medium … in conveying memories of sympathy and comfort?” (D, 59). Van Helsing unequivocally settles the question in favor of the essentialist, which is to say the magical, superstitious, materialistic doctrine of crucifixes. “Whilst this is close to you no foul thing can approach,” he says to Mina, lending her his little golden crucifix (D, 324). It evidently radiates an uncanny force field that vampires—undeterred or even magnetized as they are by an intended victim's religious purity—find intolerable.

Still more extravagantly superstitious is Stoker's idolization of “the Sacred Wafer.” Even when unceremoniously ground up and mixed with putty, its blessed substance acts as an impervious barrier to vampire evil. Again, Stoker strongly asserts its religious virtue. “The most sceptical of us” were deeply impressed by Van Helsing's faith in the protective agency of holy wafers, says Seward. “We felt individually that in the presence of such earnest purpose as the Professor's, a purpose which could thus use the to him most sacred of things, it was impossible to distrust” (D, 248). But this tolerant and morally affirmative formula is subjected to drastic revision in the scene where Van Helsing, bringing the novel's discourse on communion wafers to its shocking but rigorously consistent climax, seeks in the wake of Mina's violation by the Count to preserve her against a repeat attack by what he regards as the surest means. With his usual solemnity, Van Helsing invokes the aid of a merciful divinity: “On your forehead I touch this piece of Sacred Wafer in the name of the Father, the Son, and—” But his intervention goes horribly awry. Mina screams in agony. “As he had placed the Wafer on Mina's forehead, it had seared it—had burned into the flesh as though it had been a piece of white-hot metal” (D, 336). Holy instruments like wafers and crucifixes, we learn at this moment, are charged with precisely that dangerous sacred electricity that Victorian anthropology identifies as the essence of the system of taboo and that has nothing whatever in common with “the powers that come from, and are symbolic of, good” (D, 360). “There is something magnetic or electric in some of these combinations of occult forces,” explains Van Helsing, as though quoting Frazer (D, 360). Sanctity in Dracula is conceived not as a medium of moral inspiration, in other words, but as a scary uncontrollable force that, if it is dangerous to vampires, is equally so even to a “sweet, sweet, good, good, woman” (D, 349) such as Mina in her hour of peril.

Nor is it just the superstition of electrified taboo objects that is revived and seemingly endorsed as a Christian value in the scene of Mina's scourging. What is revived at the same time, and shown to be its natural correlative, is the cruel primitive code that a sexually violated woman becomes indelibly “unclean” and is to be regarded as a pariah or even viciously persecuted by the respectable. (This is the code that Hardy, who saw its modern currency as a prime index of the moral derangement of his society, disavowed two years earlier in Tess of the d'Urbervilles.) Van Helsing and his friends are appalled by the harshness of the divine punishment inflicted on Mina, and the reader is of course urged to be full of love and forgiveness toward her. But Mina herself, as we saw, reads off the correct lesson: “the Almighty shuns my polluted flesh!” she cries (D, 336). “Alas! I am unclean to His eyes” (D, 403). “God is merciful and just,” says Van Helsing to Harker shortly after the incident (D, 344), but these words are belied by the fact that the Almighty, acting through His sacred instrument the wafer, has inflicted ferocious, disfiguring punishment on the blameless Mina. Either that or the Almighty Himself is handcuffed just as vampires are by the laws of superstition and helpless to provide protection against the magical high-voltage electricity, cruel and impersonal, that courses through taboo objects.

The rhetoric of the novel surrounding these issues—which are its central ones, raised not inadvertently but with concerted emphasis—is thus irresolvably contradictory. Dracula ardently professes to champion the cause of morality and Christian “reverence,” but all the while indoctrinating its readership in a system of nihilistic superstition rife with sinister ideological overtones. None of this escapes Stoker's attention, though it may defeat his understanding of his own self-divided religious thinking. “There is nothing base in the book,” he wrote defensively to William Gladstone in offering him a presentation copy, “and though superstition is fought in it with the weakness of superstition I hope it is not irreverent.”¹⁸ At one very notable late point in the novel, Van Helsing attempts more forcefully to redeem his campaign of religious activism from the possible charge that it collapses the supposedly all-important cordon sanitaire between religious piety and superstition. Laying a wild rose on the box where the Count is hiding will prevent him from emerging. “So at least says the superstition,” Van Helsing observes. “And to superstition must we trust at the first; it was man's faith in the early, and it have its root in faith still” (D, 368). Superstition, the breeding ground of vampire cults and other evils such as burning women to death as witches, is vindicated at last by its archaic, never uprooted kinship with its nominal adversary, Christian faith! This frank glorification of “the weakness of superstition” (or rather, this declaration that religion and superstition are not to be regarded as antagonistic after all) would have seemed to Frazer, if his researches had left him time to read works like Dracula, a profoundly regressive lesson and a confirmation of all his fears about the persistence of dangerous atavistic intellectual forces in the late-Victorian world.

THE VAMPIRE IN THE CHURCH

The foregoing analysis reads Stoker's book against the grain in some respects, but it does take the religiosity of Dracula at face value in starting from the proposition that the main theme of the novel is the conflict, however problematic and ambivalent it proves to be, and however shrouded in a kind of false consciousness or willful self-delusion, between religion and vampiric superstition. Noteworthy nineteenth-century literary evidence can be adduced to point the reading of Stoker's novel in another and a more subversive direction. This evidence tells us that the image of the vampire is not that of the depraved or primitive other of religion after all, but of religion itself, and that all the organized labor of eradication dramatized in Dracula may best be construed as an effort to mystify the essential bond between vampirism and Christian faith.

Stoker honeycombs his text, in fact, with hints of perversely reflexive relations between vampirism and Christianity. Renfield imagines his evil deity the Count preaching a message of salvation and of what amounts to eternal life: “All these lives I will give you, ay, and many more and greater, through countless ages, if you will fall down and worship me!”—almost too explicit an echoing of Christ's proclamation, “I came that [Christians] might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). A similar hint of an overlapping of Christianity and vampirism underlies Mina's recurring vision of the Count at Whitby, in which his glaring red eyes seem to stare out at her uncannily from the reflection of the setting sun on the stained-glass windows of St. Mary's Church (D, 129; see also 298, 327). In Mina's mind's eye, Dracula is inseparably associated with the church: contemplating Christian imagery from just the right angle of light, she glimpses there a phantasmagoric apparition of vampire evil. The same refractive effect takes a more violently sacrilegious form at the moment of the Count's sadistic assault on her, when he forces her to drink the blood that spurts from the wound—not in his side, as a strict Christology would call for, but in his breast (D, 328). Lest a reader miss the theological aspect of this brutal scene, Van Helsing characterizes the experience undergone by Mina as “the Vampire's baptism of blood,” a phrase that is pointedly repeated twice more in the remainder of the novel (D, 362, 384, 406). Christians undergo the same baptismal experience, of course: they are washed in the blood of the Lamb and they drink His miraculous blood, the elixir of immortality, in the sacrament of the Eucharist.

The crux of the theological argument of Dracula lies in this persistent suggestion that vampirism is not so much an alien invasion after all as it is a dark mutation of Christian forms. At this point the discourse of the novel becomes harder to decipher with confidence. An interpretation determined to salvage Dracula for the cause of respectable religion would construe the Count's Messianic aura as the clearest sign of the parasitism and spiritual perversion of one who has chosen to play the role of the diabolical negative of Christ. But it is hard to avoid the more scandalous idea that would follow from Freud's definition of the uncanny: that vampirism in Dracula acts out the phantasmatic return of the frightening repressed aspect of Christian faith itself, the aspect of itself that faith denies. The novel voices no such explicit argument, of course; rather, it invests vast sums of rhetorical capital in repudiating its own hints that vampirism and Christianity may coincide—in scripting itself, that is, as a parable of godliness in conflict with an alien “monster.” At a couple of striking moments, however, the latent counterfable of Dracula is allowed to express itself fairly plainly. There is the matter of the vampire's needing consecrated earth from his castle crypt in which to take refuge while abroad. The graves of “great men and good women … make sacred the earth where alone this foulness can dwell,” explains Van Helsing. “For it is not the least of its terrors that this evil thing is rooted deep in all good; in soil barren of holy memories it cannot rest” (D, 280). In some fashion, the ghastly vampire is “rooted” in holiness just as superstition, as we saw, “[has] its root in faith”—formulas that significantly revise the anthropological narrative, defining superstition not as the evolutionary predecessor of religion, but, rather, as an outgrowth of it. Van Helsing's cryptic statement receives no direct elucidation, however. We do not learn from the text exactly why the sacred should be the native soil of this terrifying force of evil or how such a notion could possibly be incorporated within the avowed moral system of the novel. Seward, alarmed at the symptoms of vampirism beginning to show themselves in Mina, later makes the head-spinning comment, “there may be a poison that distils itself out of good things” (D, 363). His phrase suggests that the perverted craving for blood that stands for moral evil in this novel is somehow a distillate of piety itself, piety in its pure form.

Stoker has no intention of throwing his novel into theological turmoil by openly pursuing this line of thought, but he does at such moments seem to link his text to a constellation of others where the subliminal logic of Dracula is fully expounded. Stoker's immediate contemporary Frazer again serves as a key point of reference, particularly in his stress on the overwhelming role played by the mystique of blood in the history of religions. In the 1890 edition (the year, I will mention again, when Stoker began cogitating his vampire book), Frazer's very first ethnographic excursus on “the notion of … a god incarnate in human form” (GB1, 1:32) is devoted to the theme of priestly figures who gain inspiration “by sucking the fresh blood of a sacrificed victim,” whether an animal or, as Frazer assumes to have been the original form of such rituals, a human being (GB1, 1:34). The devil-dancer of southern India thus “drinks the blood of the sacrifice, putting the throat of the decapitated goat to his mouth” (a scene grotesquely evocative of Mina's assault by the Count) and then becomes utterly possessed by the demon, in which condition he is “worshipped as a … deity” (GB1, 1:34). Another of Frazer's central chapters, developed in later editions of The Golden Bough, recounts at length the rites of the death and resurrection of the Phrygian vegetation god, Attis. The principal event of these gruesome mysteries was what Frazer calls, in the same phrase that echoes repeatedly in Dracula, “a baptism of blood.” The devotee of Attis descended into a pit beneath a grating on which a bull (or originally, Frazer conjectures, a human being) was sacrificed. “Its hot reeking blood poured in torrents through the apertures, and was received with devout eagerness by the worshipper … till he emerged from the pit, drenched, dripping, and scarlet from head to foot, to receive the … adoration of his fellows as one who had been born again to eternal life and had washed away his sins in the blood of the bull” (GB, 408). The obvious parallelism between Christian ideas and practices and primitive models such as these sanguinary rites “struck the Christian doctors themselves,” Frazer says, “and was explained by them as a work of the devil, who sought to seduce the souls of men from the true faith by a false and insidious imitation of it” (GB, 415). Turning this formula inside out, Frazerian anthropology claims to reveal the deeply embedded traces of heathen blood rites, and by implication the ancestral blood lust, lying at the core of respectable modern religion. The “true character” of religion, Frazer declares, is “often disguised under a decent veil of allegorical or philosophical interpretation”: to twitch aside this veil is to disclose underlying motifs “which otherwise must have filled [worshipers] with horror and disgust”—to disclose in effect a devil-dancer figure eerily latent in the image of Jesus Christ, peering out from Christian devotions as Dracula does from the church window at Whitby (GB, 414).

For all his preoccupation with religious pathologies of blood, Frazer seems never to mention possible affinities of vampirism itself and Christianity; other writers do, however, prefigure this cardinal if only obscurely indicated theme of Stoker's novel. For example, C. R. Maturin's Gothic masterpiece Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) presents an array of foreshadowings of Dracula that seem to make visible its subliminal argument.¹⁹ Like the Count, Melmoth traverses Europe “seeking whom he might devour”; he uncannily materializes in madhouses and prisons, his eyes blazing with a “preternatural glare” that clearly signals his family relation to Stoker's Count, to tempt despairing inmates to share his own “insane and morbid existence” (MW, 381, 176, 229). The central irony of Maturin's novel is that the vampirelike monster's unappeasable cruelty and greediness for souls is only a reflex of the “religious malignity” of the church establishment he defies: the Christian moral ideal, the novel declares, is at bottom a sadomasochistic syndrome based on “the theology of utter hostility to all beings whose sufferings may mitigate mine” (MW, 167, 174). In Dracula, whatever suggestion there may be of the vampirish quality of Christian piety—the suggestion that the perverted Count is not the antithesis of the religious spirit but an uncanny manifestation of it—is only indirectly expressed and is contradicted by the religious apologetics that run throughout the text. Melmoth helps us to see the loquacious religiosity of its descendant Dracula as to some degree a compensatory rhetoric designed to preserve the good name and assuage the bad conscience of a text that (apart from being guilty of a markedly unchristian propensity for pornographic indecencies) seems to contain its own underlying structure of “religious malignity.”

Another work in the illicit lineage of Dracula would be Ludwig Feuerbach's 1841 Essence of Christianity, translated into English by George Eliot in 1854 and thereafter a key ancestor text for relativistic British freethought.²⁰ Having “always the image of the Crucified one in his mind,” says Feuerbach, tracing the same pattern of religious psychology that Maturin does, the Christian believer inevitably contracts a morbid desire “to crucify either himself or another” (EC, 62). “In faith there lies a malignant principle,” he says (EC, 252), italicizing his essential doctrine. In the grip of this principle and obsessed with the necessity of enforcing religious orthodoxy, Christianity can only imagine a god who is “a selfish, egoistical being, who in all things seeks only himself, his own honour, his own ends” (EC, 27). In order to mask the malignant Draculalike nature of this divine being that it glorifies and worships, theology teaches that “God is love,” but this very formula, in its refusal to exalt love into an essential spiritual substance, inevitably does homage, says Feuerbach, to “the God—the evil being—of religious fanaticism” (EC, 53). In Christian faith and theology, therefore, “there lurks in the background of love … an unloving monster, a diabolical being, whose personality, separable and actually separated from love, delights in the blood of heretics and unbelievers,—the phantom of religious fanaticism” (EC, 52-53).

To think of Bram Stoker's phantasmal monster in Maturinesque or Feuerbachian terms as the uncanny return of the ferocious essence of faith—as precisely that aspect of Christian love that “delights in the blood of heretics and unbelievers”—gives the official binaries of Dracula what may seem like a vertiginous spin. Yet the vindictive ferocity of faith is plainly on display wherever one turns in this novel. The brutal auto-da-fé inflicted by Van Helsing's team upon Lucy Westenra for her crime of becoming infected with the “voluptuous wantonness” of vampirism—a scene of Christian purification imagined as a sadopornographic spectacle of gang rape and murder (D, 254)—offers an almost hallucinatory instance of the malignant crucifying principle that Feuerbach diagnoses as the core of Christian devotion. The scene of the branding of Mina's forehead by the Sacred Wafer offers another similarly shocking set of images of female mutilation in the name of religious piety, as we saw. No less than in the fictionalized Inquisition of Melmoth the Wanderer or in The Essence of Christianity, Christianity in Dracula is imagined above all as an agency for the pitiless eradication of deviancy. Stoker's contribution to the Maturin-Feuerbach strain of vampire literature is the overpowering erotic and misogynistic impulse that he uncovers in the psychology of religious vindictiveness. His book stands in the archive of English fiction as a supreme illustrative text of the principle that the vocation of purifying the world of perversion is itself inescapably perverted.

That Stoker was personally prone to moral panic and to religious vindictiveness like Van Helsing's is strongly suggested by his 1908 essay “The Censorship of Fiction,” a diatribe against a supposed infestation of England by a rash of pornography in modern novels that obviously functions at some level as an objective correlative of the allegory of vampire invasion in Dracula.²¹ Male pornographers, Stoker says here, are very bad—they have in fact “crucified Christ afresh”—but he singles out women as “the worst offenders in this breach of moral law” and asks rhetorically with regard to them, as though referring retrospectively to the staking of the criminally lewd Lucy Westenra, “what punishment could be too great?” (“Censorship,” 485). Extraliterary evidence like this notwithstanding, Dracula is notable for the provocative ambiguity that reigns over it. Can it be said to perform a knowing critique of religious vampirism, or is it itself a vampire text that “delights in the blood of heretics and unbelievers”? Are we meant to find spiritually uplifting, as the authoritative-seeming Van Helsing insists we should, the Talibanesque law that dictates the cleansing of the body politic by driving wooden stakes into the bodies of impure women and decapitating them afterward? Stoker's cryptic novel refuses to let us decipher this, its essential secret—though a text that to any degree eludes legibility on such matters can only be regarded with profound suspicion.

We can conclude in any event by deciphering at least partially the element of vampire lore on which the novel hinges: the unslakeable craving for blood that it treats as the vampire's defining pathological symptom. One might assume this theme to be a given of the genre, but it has nothing like the same prominence in previous English-language vampire literature that it takes on in Dracula. True, when the vampire countess is exhumed in the conclusion of Carmilla (315), she is found to be immersed in a preservative bath of blood; but Le Fanu's story up to this point has scarcely mentioned the blood motif, and has portrayed Carmilla's hungry fixation on the heroine, Laura, as purely a matter of unhallowed sexual desire (one that this compelling text dangerously presents as almost natural). For all the aura of deviant sexual compulsion that surrounds vampirism in Dracula, however, Stoker gives a new twist to the vampire genre by wholly identifying the condition of the Nosferatu with the ravenous drinking of blood. To some extent, this emphasis reflects the novel's broad displacement of the spiritual and moral vocabulary of normal Victorian fiction in the direction of mechanics (hence all the stress in Dracula on the physics of vampirism: on the vampire's inability to cross running water, the insulating properties of wafer-impregnated putty, the complex laws of telepathic communication between vampire transmitters, and so forth). The strong emphasis given to the theme of blood in Dracula carries at the same time a reference—a particularly scandalous one—to a distinctive element of nineteenth-century religious psychology.

If the central determinant of the Victorian mentality was that strain of puritanical Protestantism that Matthew Arnold, identifying it as “the ruling force” of his time, called Victorian “Hebraism”²² and that G. M. Young called “the imponderable pressure of the Evangelical discipline,”²³ the fountainhead of Victorian Evan gelical culture was in turn the Methodist revival, “the great rekindling of the religious consciousness of the people”²⁴ presided over in the late eighteenth century by John and Charles Wesley and the Calvinistic George Whitefield. No phase of religious feeling in England for at least the next century could escape their influence, which “radiated through the older denominations,” as Young says, “and was not without effect on the Church itself” (65).²⁵ Heirs as they inescapably were to this transformative movement, nineteenth-century Britons needed not be Methodists or even Christian believers to be impregnated with Wesleyan sensibility. It may come as a surprise to discover through the lens of Dracula that a fundamental element of this sensibility was the Wesleyans' near-obsessive fixation on the Eucharist, on the sacramental eating of sacred flesh and, in particular, the sacramental drinking of sacred blood. The distinguished Methodist scholar J. Ernest Rattenbury, citing contemporary records of the tremendous passion for the communion ritual that was aroused by “the flaming message of the love of God” proclaimed by the Methodist preachers, amazingly concludes that “there can be no doubt that Holy Communion was the central devotion of the Evangelical Revival.”²⁶ A cultural historian is bound to wonder how the prevalence of this complex of religious symbolism might have affected the British national psyche in the course of the age of Evangelical dominance. Dracula gives us some clues.

Hundreds of hymns composed by the Wesleys document the overwhelming emphasis placed on the mystique of blood, and particularly on the avid drinking of the blood of Christ, in the Methodist imagination. In its fixation of religious rapture upon cannibalistic impulses that ordinarily would fall under one of the most stringent taboos and would arouse nothing but “horror and disgust,” Methodist revivalism forms an exceptionally vivid instance of the principle, formulated by the late-Victorian anthropologists (and undoubtedly first discovered by them in their own culture), of the ultimate identity of the obscene and the divine.

Now, Lord, on us Thy flesh bestow
                    And let us drink Thy blood,
Till all our souls are filled below
                    With all the life of God.

(Hymns, no. 30)

From Thy blest wounds our life we draw;
                    Thy all-atoning blood
Daily we drink with trembling awe
                    Thy flesh our daily food.

(no. 85)

Often in these hymns the mere drinking of blood, enacted ritually in the decorous form of Eucharistic wine-sipping, hardly seems sufficient to slake the sanguinary longings of Wesleyan piety. It is the essential dynamic of this mode of spirituality that the craving for union with God always outstrips the possibility of satisfaction and drives piety to ever more extravagant forms. Sometimes this craving transposes itself into an unmistakably sexualized register marked by the strongest possible insistence on the fantasy of gulping warm blood directly from Christ's wound—or of actually entering that wound.

We thirst to drink Thy precious blood,
                    We languish in Thy wounds to rest,
And hunger for immortal food
          And long on all Thy love to feast.

(no. 112)

“Even now we mournfully enjoy / Communion with our Lord,” as though we “felt His gushing blood,” says the weirdly amorous hymn no. 4, in which, among other striking synesthetic effects, vaginal and ejaculatory imagery fuses dizzily together. The intensely eroticized blood-drinking of Dracula may seem pathological, and is of course treated as such in the novel, but we can see that it only replicates—in comparatively rather mild terms—key thematics of Victorian religious imagination. Other Methodist hymns record visions not just of drinking blood but of bathing and wallowing in it that recall Frazer's account of the rites of Attis (or rather, that his account was itself designed to recall). “The altar streams with sacred blood, / And all the temple flames with God!” declares one ecstatic hymn (no. 89).

Still the wounds are open wide,
                    The blood doth freely flow
As when first His sacred side
                    Received the deadly blow:
Still, O God, the blood is warm,
                    Cover'd with the blood we are.

(no. 122)

For one standing outside this orbit of religious experience, such texts can hardly fail to be repellent: their very repellency is the catalyst of the religious intoxication they strive to produce. It is no wonder, on the one hand, that the sensation of disgust (painful and delicious at the same time) should hold the paramount place that it does in Victorian moral psychology or, on the other, that a writer like E. P. Thompson should recoil from Methodist piety as psychotic.²⁷ Even Rattenbury finds the pure stream of the Wesleys' religious inspiration to be tainted with something aberrant. “This dwelling on the blood of Christ, plunging in it, and so forth, are not expressions which seem to have any justification in the New Testament,” he cautiously observes. Indeed, he says more plainly, “there are repulsive elements not genuinely Christian in some of Wesley's metaphorical uses of blood symbolism” (Hymns, 89, 90). Frazer sought to develop a mode of analysis for getting to the bottom of precisely this deranged and, as he believed, deeply sinister symbolic and psychic structure, though of course without invoking any such dubious category as the “genuinely Christian” and without limiting his field of contemporary reference to Methodism in particular. What Feuerbach conceived psychologistically as the “phantom” and ever present Doppelgänger of decent Christianity, “the evil being … of religious fanaticism” that inhabits faith and “delights in the blood of heretics and unbelievers,” Frazer interprets in evolutionary terms as the indelible trace of the cannibalistic origins of religion (GB1, 2:88-89). Dracula takes its place in this lineage as another concentrated investigation, cast this time in the Gothic mode, of the same matrix of fundamental cultural themes.

The immediate referent of Stoker's novel, then, can only have been the streak of ghoulish appetite that so powerfully energized Victorian religious feeling, even though this implication is “disguised under a decent veil” in Dracula by the portrayal of vampirism as an infestation from a remote, superstitious foreign land. All of Stoker's necromantic imagery of tombs and cemeteries and of undead corpses rising from the grave is resonant with echoings of the Wesleyan hymnbook. “We too with Him are dead, / And shall with Him arise,” declares one hymn (no. 4).

The yawning graves give up their dead;
The bodies of the saints arise,
Reviving as their Saviour dies.

(no. 26)

Mainly, though, Stoker translates into the grotesque terms of vampirism the gluttony for blood that forms the central devotional motif of Wesleyan Christianity. This point is too clear by now to require further illustration, but I will cite one more striking hymn, in which the faithful are urged, as Van Helsing urges his own Christian paramilitaries, to be “fill'd with holy violence” in defense of the faith. The theme, for once, is not the anomic boundlessness of the craving for divine blood but the attainment of religious satiety.

Communion closer far I feel
          And deeper drink th' atoning blood;
The joy is more unspeakable,
                    And yields us larger draughts of God,
Till nature faints beneath the power,
And faith fill'd up can hold no more.

(no. 54)

In Stoker's Gothic refraction of this imagery, Jonathan Harker discovers the magically rejuvenated Count, fresh from what the Wesleyan hymnal would call a “mystic banquet” (no. 99) of blood, asleep in his box of earth in the chapel of Castle Dracula.

There lay the Count, but looking as if his youth had been half renewed, for the white hair and moustache were changed to dark iron-grey; the cheeks were fuller, and the white skin seemed ruby-red underneath; the mouth was redder than ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the corners of the mouth and ran down over the chin and neck. Even the deep, burning eyes seemed set amongst swollen flesh, for the lids and pouches underneath were bloated. It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood; he lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion.

(D, 83)

The effect is that of a suddenly naturalistic, and of course savagely ironic, vision of the sated Wesleyan communicant, so “fill'd up” with divine blood that he “can hold no more.” At such a moment, vampirism seems to come into focus in Stoker's text as a metaphor for the way in which the religious past of the nation, shot through as it is with “repulsive elements” and with “religious malignity,” seems to prey pervertingly on its modern-day soul.

It may be objected that this reading of Dracula hinges on an essential confusion or irrationality, since in the Eucharist, as in the primitive cults analyzed by Frazer, worshipers drink the blood of the deity to gain supernatural powers or everlasting life, whereas in vampirism, it is the other way around: it is the deity who, in celebrating “the Vampire's baptism of blood,” drinks from the veins of initiates to impose on them what Van Helsing calls “the curse of immortality” (D, 252) and to preserve his own everlasting life. But in complexes of supremely charged cultural imagery like the one surrounding the cult of blood-drinking in Western spirituality, logical consistency has not much of a role to play, and to insist on it would disable inquiry into these phantasmatic subjects from the start. Emotional valences and symbolic functions are bound in such systems of thinking to be reversible, as sadism and masochism are in psychoanalysis and as filth and purity, the obscene and the divine, are in the regime of taboo or in the Wesleys' hymns, where to become “stain'd” (no. 17) and to be rendered immaculate are equivalent forms of expression. Stoker enacts precisely this kind of logical reversibility in the scene of the Count's attack on Mina, where he first drinks her blood and she then, as if to dramatize the relation of interchangeability that obtains between the vampire myth and Eucharistic worship, drinks his.

By the same token, to portray Dracula as a reactionary trafficking in necromancy under the name of religion, as I did in the first section of this essay, and to portray it alternatively as a Feuerbachian-Frazerian allegory of the macabre and perverse dimension of Victorian Christianity, as I have in the second section, is perhaps only to do the same reading in different voices, or to hold up the same object of study to slightly different angles of interpretive light. Criticism is conditioned to seek definite statements of textual motivation, but in a case like the present one, such statements may need to be left in abeyance, or rather, contradictory-seeming ones may need to be entertained together if we wish to avoid performing a vampirish act of interpretive violence on the text itself. We must suspend certain judgments of literary value for similar reasons. Is Dracula to be judged, to quote Rattenbury on the Reformers' view of the medieval Mass, as “a most unscrupulous commercialization of the superstitions of the people” (Hymns, 66), or can it justifiably be treated as a serious work of literature, even conceivably “the first great modern novel”? These alternatives may not necessarily be incompatible within an uncompromisingly modern-style critical frame. All that one can say for certain is that a reading that dogmatically excludes either term of this binary will leave us with only a truncated version of Stoker's book. It is likely to be impossible for scholarship to prove that the Count's Christological aspect, an effect that seems to turn all the ostensible piety of this novel inside out, is a deliberate “intention” of the author. Significant modern texts tend to be uncontrollably volatile and indeterminate, and to make it impossible to know just how full a knowledge they possess of their own designs. To say that Dracula eludes full analysis in this way may be only to say that it is authentically “modern” after all, its antiquated Gothicism notwithstanding, and to make the strongest case for its value that can be made.

Notes

1. Hymn no. 42 in J. Ernest Rattenbury, The Eucharistic Hymns of John and Charles Wesley (Akron, Oh., 1996). Throughout this essay, the Wesleys' hymns are cited according to their numbering in Rattenbury's edition.

2. Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Glennis Byron (1897; reprint, Peterborough, Ontario, 1998). Hereafter cited parenthetically as D.

3. Jennifer Wicke, “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media,” ELH 59 (1992): 467. A couple of noteworthy recognitions of religious themes in Dracula are the pages devoted to the novel in Victor Sage's Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (New York, 1988) and especially the brief but excellent article by Jules Zanger, “A Sympathetic Vibration: Dracula and the Jews,” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 34 (1991): 33-44.

4. William Wordsworth, “Preface to the Second Edition of … ‘Lyrical Ballads,’” in The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Hutchinson and Ernest de Selincourt (London, 1950), 735.

5. John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ed. A. Dwight Culler (1864; reprint, Boston, 1956), 7.

6. John William Polidori, The Vampyre: A Tale (1819; reprint, Tring, U. K., 1974).

7. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla, in In a Glass Darkly, ed. Robert Tracy (1872; reprint, Oxford, 1993), 243-319.

8. On these themes, see Jennifer Wicke's fascinating essay “Vampiric Typewriting.”

9. Victor Sage argues along exactly these lines that Dracula makes “an elaborate attack on facile scepticism, purblind belief in ‘progress’ and scientific materialism.” The characters of the novel “have to learn that empirical science … can't explain everything and it is necessary finally to fall back on true faith,” true faith defined as “that final, true irrational yielding of scepticism before the immaterial truths of existence”; Victor Sage, Horror Fiction, 54. This account seems strangely ready to extend credence and respect to a text that would identify “true faith” and “the immaterial truths of existence” with superstitious mumbo jumbo about vampires. If this is indeed the message of Stoker's book, it would seem to disqualify itself for serious consideration by sophisticated readers.

10. The long campaign waged in British India to eradicate Thuggee, the secret society of stranglers devoted to the worship of Kali, for example, furnishes an instance that resonates especially strongly with the story told in Dracula.

11. Advanced late-Victorian natural science often described itself in similar terms, as a purifying campaign against intellectual “superstitions” such as absolute space and time.

12. W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites: The Fundamental Institutions (1889; reprint, New York, 1972). Hereafter cited parenthetically as RS.

13. In The Moonstone (1868; reprint ed. J. I. M. Stewart, Baltimore, 1966), Wilkie Collins tells a variant of this fable in his tale of the three sinister Indians, emissaries of a wild province “fanatically devoted to the old Hindoo religion” (524), who invade England to recover the sacred diamond of their sect.

14. David Copperfield, for example, is rich in instances of such language. Annie Strong's supposed sexual immorality is “like a stain” upon her surroundings; Steerforth is guilty of the “pollution of an honest home” by seducing little Emily; the prostitute Martha Endell is “defiled and miserable”; David says to his wife Dora “there is contagion in us”; and so forth. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1849-50; reprint, Boston, 1958), 220, 350, 520, 529.

15. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: The Roots of Religion and Folklore, 2 vols. (1890; reprint, New York, 1981), hereafter cited parenthetically as GB1. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to later editions of this work in the form of the one-volume abridged edition of 1922: The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, abridged edition (1922; reprint, New York, 1963), hereafter cited parenthetically as GB.

16. Christopher Herbert, Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery (Chicago, 2001), 206-8.

17. For an excellent treatment of Dracula as a Svengalilike image of sinister Jewishness, see Zanger, “A Sympathetic Vibration.” “Stoker very quickly establishes the conflict between ordinary humans and the Un-Dead as one between Christians and Un-Christians,” Zanger shrewdly observes (38).

18. Quoted in William Hughes, Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker's Fiction and Its Cultural Context (New York, 2000), 15.

19. Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820; reprint, Lincoln, Nebr., 1961). Hereafter cited parenthetically as MW.

20. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (1841, 1854; reprint, New York, 1957). Hereafter cited parenthetically as EC.

21. Bram Stoker, “The Censorship of Fiction,” The Nineteenth Century 64 (1908): 479-87.

22. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson (1869; reprint, Cambridge, 1966), 149.

23. G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age, 2d ed. (London, 1960), l. See also G. Kitson Clark, The Making of Victorian England (New York, 1976), 20-21.

24. Mark Pattison, “Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750,” in Essays and Reviews: The 1860 Text and Its Reading, ed. Victor Shea and William Whitla (Charlottesville, 2000), 388.

25. “Underlying the sectarian differences between Arnold, Newman, and the Evangelicals, there is a fundamental community of aim which springs from their common indebtedness to John Wesley and the religious movement he initiated in the eighteenth century”; Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (New Haven, 1957), 228.

26. Rattenbury, Hymns, 3, 4. As Rattenbury notes (70), this element of Methodism attracted considerable attention in the nineteenth century, notably by Anglo-Catholics stressing what they felt to be John Wesley's unrecognized affinity with them. See, for example, W. E. Dutton, ed., The Eucharistic Manuals of John and Charles Wesley (London, 1871).

27. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1966), 371-72.