SOURCE: Castle, Gregory. “Ambivalence and Ascendancy in Bram Stoker's Dracula.” In Bram Stoker, Dracula: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical, Historical, and Cultural Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by John Paul Riquelme, pp. 518-37. Boston: Bedford, 2002.

[In the following essay, Castle utilizes a historical approach to Dracula, focusing on Anglo-Irish relations in the late nineteenth century.]

ASCENDANCY IN DECLINE

Historical approaches to literature have become increasingly appealing to many readers in the past two decades, and nowhere is this more apparent than in Irish studies, where revisionist writing about history and a literary criticism informed by new thinking about postcolonial situations have altered our way of looking at Irish culture and politics. It is within this context that we have seen a reconsideration of the relationship between the Anglo-Irish ruling class (the Irish Protestant Ascendancy) and the Catholic-Irish “natives.” In Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1995), Terry Eagleton maps the failure of the Ascendancy elite to achieve political and cultural hegemony. The perspective he provides enables us to see in Dracula the effect of social dislocation and loss of power, which Stoker would have experienced as an Anglo-Irishman.

Though the Anglo-Irish considered themselves a client of the British state, their ineffectual rule of Ireland—marked by absentee landlordism that drained Ireland of its capital and many of its goods, “rack-rent” policies that often bordered on extortion, and social and political ineptitude—ultimately guaranteed that they would never achieve the kind of political and social dominance required by any ruling class. “Hegemony is not just a psychological matter,” writes Eagleton. “[I]t is also a question of economic incentives and social techniques, religious practices and electoral routines” (28). In his description of the economic and social basis of the Ascendancy, the Irish historian J. C. Beckett hits upon one reason for its failure to achieve hegemony: its social insularity. “To entertain their neighbors, and be entertained by them, at drinking and field-sports was almost the sum-total of their activities, and probably formed a fair index of their notions of social responsibility and public duty” (182). Still, like R. F. Foster and other Irish historians, Beckett concedes that the Ascendancy did contain individuals who overcame selfishness and improvidence in order to champion the efforts of their more reform-minded peers. This attitude toward the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy indicates that even those who wish to see it in the best possible light cannot avoid noting its utter failure to achieve dominance, despite its advantageous connections to the British empire. Its “half-hearted” attempts at social reform only underscored this failure and, ultimately, helped create the social and political conditions for a Catholic nationalist middle class to rise and express their own political and social power.

“Taken as a whole,” writes Eagleton, “the Ascendancy represented a backward, unmannerly sector of the British governing class; and their ability to win the loyalty of their tenants was seriously disabled by the ethnic, religious and cultural abyss which yawned between them” (59). He goes on to claim that, at its worst, the Ascendancy was a “parasitic social formation” (66).¹ Some historians, like R. F. Foster, play down the parasitical or vampiric side of the Ascendancy. Citing Michael Davitt, the nineteenth-century Irish Land Leaguer who called the Ascendancy “cormorant vampires,” Foster writes that this “picture … has long been disproved; if the post-Famine Irish landlords were vampires, they were not very good at it” (Modern Ireland 375). Anyone expecting a Manichaean dualism,² in which the Ascendancy sits squarely on the side of the British Empire against a common Catholic Irish foe, is frustrated by the ambivalent social position of the Irish Protestant, marked as both colonizer and colonized, “caught on the hop between conflicting cultural norms, whose whole existence is a barely tolerable in-betweenness” (Eagleton 160). For Eagleton, the failure of the Anglo-Irish political elite to achieve control over the political and social life of Ireland and to maintain close allegiances with the British state corresponds to a development in literature in which realism, the dominant mode of literary expression in nineteenth-century Britain, becomes unstable and ambiguous in the work of Irish writers. For a number of reasons having to do with Ireland's colonial status—especially the absence of a strong middle class and a “native” language—Irish fiction develops in a direction that “lends itself more obviously to modernism” (Eagleton 148). By this Eagleton means that Irish fiction anticipates the modernist critique of a form of realism that concealed its aesthetic operations. In this way, realism creates an impression of transparency, of a neutral, disinterested mode of depicting social life ideally suited to the development of a bourgeois class seeking to legitimize and naturalize its ideological commitments. It claims to permit us to see the otherwise unseen causes of social events and to understand the “stealthy effect” (Eagleton 201) of social conditions on character.

The Irish Protestant novelistic tradition lays claim to no such transparency. Realism fails to take hold, in part because the Ascendancy intelligentsia had occluded or mythologized their own involvement in the causes of social events. Moreover, the causal relationship between social conditions and the individual in realistic literature, which might be said to reflect a bourgeois social compact, does not obtain under conditions of colonial domination. As Eagleton suggests, the pressures of the “real” in colonial societies produces social consequences that are not always explicable in terms of cause and effect and drive colonized writers to create unrealistic (that is to say, fantastic) representations of unbearable social conditions. We see this throughout the nineteenth century in the tendency of Irish Protestant Gothic novelists such as Charles Maturin, Sheridan Le Fanu, and Bram Stoker to create macabre or ghostly allegories of their feelings of social displacement and disempowerment. Eagleton's brief characterization of Dracula as a ghoulish type of the absentee Ascendancy landlord (215) suggests a direction for analysis that has been largely ignored in recent historical criticism of Dracula. Much of this criticism is concerned with Stoker's ambivalent sexuality and his response to the threat of absorption by a rising Catholic middle class. In this criticism, Dracula represents the “return of the repressed,” and this return is especially threatening when it appears to reverse the power dynamic of colonialism or to foretell the absorption, both socially and politically, of the Ascendancy by the Catholic Irish. Though the fears of absorption were quite real, the fear of “reverse colonization” emerges more obviously from English anxieties than from Anglo-Irish concerns. The Ascendancy had perhaps more to fear from the English than they did from the Catholic Irish.³

Many of the social issues alluded to in Dracula—social decadence, racial degeneration, poverty, disease (especially syphilis), the fear of immigration from the colonies⁴—were very much English concerns. Critics who analyze the significance of these issues in Dracula take their cue from Mina Harker, who identifies Dracula as “a criminal and of criminal type. Nordau and Lombroso would so classify him”(p. 336 in this volume). Max Nordau's Degeneration, published in German in 1892 and in English in 1895, constituted the leading edge of criticism leveled against the excesses of “civilized” culture at the fin de siècle. In overheated rhetoric, Nordau excoriates the decay of a sick culture:

[T]he fin-de-siècle mood … is the impotent despair of a sick man, who feels himself dying by inches in the midst of an eternally living nature blooming insolently for ever. It is the envy of a rich, hoary voluptuary, who sees a pair of young lovers making for a sequestered forest nook; it is the mortification of the exhausted and impotent refugee from a Florentine plague, seeking in an enchanted garden the experiences of a Decamerone, but striving in vain to snatch one more pleasure of sense from the uncertain hour.

(3)

Nordau's rhetoric is not far from that of English social reformers in the 1890s, such as Charles and William Booth. Charles Booth's census of London's East End created new categories of the urban poor. In addition to creating the Salvation Army, his brother William published an influential book in 1890, Darkest England and the Way Out, which set forth a plan for the segregation and, ultimately, forced emigration of the most degenerate members of the urban population.⁵ Against this English background, argues Daniel Pick, Stoker's Dracula presents “a vision of the bio-medical degeneration of the race” that “at once sensationalized the horrors of degeneration and charted reassuringly the process of their confinement and containment” (75, 83). In this view, the threat is to the English race, and Stoker's narrative structure, which allocates narrative authority to exclusively English characters who produce their own version of events, reinforces this national emphasis.

But it is clear, given the destiny of the Ascendancy in the nineteenth century, that Anglo-Irish anxieties were not the same as English ones and that the threat represented by Dracula could be read as emanating not only from a foreign source, a primitive Catholic Other, but from the English themselves who, for all intents and purposes, abandoned their Anglo-Irish clients. This double threat—and double fear—marks a congenital instability in terms of political and cultural identity, an instability that places the Anglo-Irish as a class on both sides of the colonial divide. In Dracula, this double placement results in anomalous, hybrid figures: a primitive, atavistic Dracula is nonetheless civilized while the civilized, rational English are dependent on primitive superstition. If we read Dracula as “a kind of allegory, which properly interpreted lays bare the historical forces at its heart” (Eagleton 183), these forces—which blur the line between civilized and primitive, national and transnational—need to be recognized and explained. By staging this allegory in London, the heart of the empire, Stoker invites us to consider the threat of Dracula within the binary structure of imperialism (which makes an absolute distinction between the primitive or premodern colonized and the civilized or modern colonizer), a structure in which Dracula represents the return of the repressed colonial subject. But when we read Dracula with an awareness of Stoker's ambivalent Anglo-Irishness, the emphasis shifts from a binary structure in which a Protestant England is invaded by Catholic vampires to an ambivalent structure in which Anglo-Irish Protestants must negotiate between the Catholic peasantry they mistreated and the English politicians who hold their future in their hands. Though it is set in London and Transylvania and features no Irish characters, it is possible, even inevitable, to read Stoker's novel as an expression of the Protestant Ascendancy's most deeply rooted fears.

Dracula responds to these fears and the cultural displacement of the Ascendancy class. By projecting an ambivalent Anglo-Irish subjectivity onto two highly ambivalent fictional characters, Abraham Van Helsing and Count Dracula, it expresses the social “reality” of an elite ruling class that has lost its legitimacy and become “homeless.” Stoker's text is thus a reflection of a particular historical process in which the Ascendancy descended from its stable position as a ruling class to “a form of cultural displacement” (Eagleton 63). As many critics have noted, this shift became apparent to the Ascendancy in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, when Land League agitation in Ireland and land legislation in England resulted in the virtual disestablisment of the Anglo-Irish land-owning class.⁶ By the time Stoker published Dracula in 1897, the threat of absorption by a politically powerful Catholic middle class was palpable, despite the success of the Catholic church in its campaign in 1890 to topple Charles Stewart Parnell, an Anglo-Irish politician whose affair with a married woman, Mrs. Kitty O'Shea, cost him the leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party. The Ascendancy had cause for alarm, especially given the rhetoric of Irish-Ireland nationalists like D. P. Moran, who could write, in 1905, at the peak of the Literary Revival, “the Gael must be the element that absorbs” (37).⁷ The “clerical-national alliance” continued unabated after Parnell's fall, with some Irish political allegiances shifting to Gladstone's Liberal party, which drafted the 1886 and 1893 Home Rule Bills.⁸ By the late 1890s, increasingly virulent protestations from what Foster calls “irreconcilable elements left out of the Parnellite equation,” together with a dwindling of Anglo-Irish support for Home Rule, created a climate of paranoia and deracination (Modern Ireland 427). The prospect of absorption by a growing Catholic middle class led the Ascendancy into an “obsessive, hierarchical subculture” (Foster, Modern Ireland 427) in which self-perceptions were colored by the double threat of Catholic political power and English indifference.

For many readers of Dracula, the Irish historical context may not seem relevant to their understanding of a man who had become an important player in the English theater community and whose sensibilities, judging from characters like Jonathan Harker, John Seward, and Arthur Holmwood, are British and imperialist. But it is worth noting that before he went to work for Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre, Stoker was the quintessential Irish Protestant: the star student of Edward Dowden, professor of English at Trinity College, Dublin (the pinnacle of Protestant education in Ireland), “the brilliant son of a professional Dublin Protestant Family, Trinity Gold Medallist, Auditor of the College Philosophical Society, Double First and civil servant” (Foster, “Protestant Magic” 259).⁹ Though not a land-owning member of the Ascendancy class, he nevertheless enjoyed the privileges of that class as well as the sense of ambivalence with respect to the British government, which had, for all intents and purposes, abandoned the Anglo-Irish. Like many of his class, he developed modes of “escapism motivated by the threat of a take-over by the Catholic middle classes—a threat all the more inexorable because it is being accomplished by peaceful means and with the free legal aid of British governments” (“Protestant Magic” 251). Reading Dracula with an awareness of this ambivalence and the social crisis that follows from it, we find a displaced expression of Stoker's—and the Ascendancy's—contradictory feelings of estrangement and entitlement. But the ambivalence encrypted in Dracula involves something more than a mixed feeling with regard to the British government's policy of appeasing an increasingly restive and politically potent Catholic middle class; indeed, it seems to involve an uneasy dependency on the very Catholicism, with its sacramental magic, that the Protestant Ascendancy was reputed to fear.

Like Oscar Wilde before him and James Joyce after, Stoker borrows and refashions the sacramental icons, rituals, and prayers; but unlike them, he does not do so in order to advance an ethical or artistic program that stands in defiance of Church or State authority. Rather, Stoker is more interested in using sacramental elements in order to protect Church and State from a threat that is, paradoxically, marked as Catholic. His recourse to sacramentalism amounts to a preemptive tactic, one in which the Irish Catholic's sacramental desire and the rituals that express it are appropriated. His intention is to exert a symbolic domination over Catholic Ireland and thus to forestall the decline of an ineffectual Ascendancy class and to fend off the reverse colonization or absorption that events in fin de siècle Ireland seemed ominously to foreshadow. Stoker's reaction to political realities like land expropriation, Catholic democracy, and, inevitably, Home Rule—all of which, by 1897, would have been regarded as serious threats to Ascendancy privilege—was not merely to appropriate but also to Gothicize sacramental desire. Reading Dracula in the context of Irish Protestant occultism, what Foster calls “Protestant magic,” can help us understand why, in this Gothic drama of the return of the repressed, Dracula wears an Englishman's clothes and Van Helsing, the protector of English women and English values, brandishes a Roman Catholic cross.

SACRAMENTAL MAGIC

Reading the Anglo-Irish plot of Dracula involves recognizing the tensions, ambiguities, and contradictions that marked the Ascendancy's ambivalent, compromised position. In Stoker's use of sacramental elements, we find a contradiction: the fight against the atavistic horror of vampirism, the cutting-edge technology deployed by Van Helsing and his Crew of Light,¹⁰ is useless without recourse to occult and sacramental practices. Critics typically interpret the contradictory interdependence of superstition and modernity in Dracula as a reflection of the ambivalence generated by competing ideologies of gender, race, class, and nationalism within modernity.¹¹ Geoffrey Wall puts the matter plainly when he writes that in Dracula we find a “contradiction between the archaic stuff of its narrative and the contemporary techniques which allow that narrative to emerge” (15).¹² However, Stoker's use of sacramental ritual and icons to ward off a demonized Catholic threat is less paradoxical and enigmatic if taken in the context of the Irish 1890s. During that decade, the threat of the Catholic middle class provoked Protestant intellectuals to embrace occult knowledge, to Gothicize their alienation, to engage in a ritualistic self-fashioning that, paradoxically, appropriates the sacramental in order to make up for a paucity of national and spiritual vision. What we discover is a text deeply ambivalent about the Catholicism it impugns: in order to compensate for the increasing political power of the Catholic Irish, Stoker symbolically transforms them into Transylvanian peasants and into the Count, both occupying a primitive landscape where their sacramental desire is recoded as superstition, ignorance, monstrosity, and atavism. But this displacement and disavowal of the Catholic Other does not prevent scientists like the Dutchman Van Helsing from taking up sacramental rituals in order to supply what the rationalism and materialism of modernity had repudiated: a way of seeing beyond the limits of a “normal” scientific paradigm and the “sentimental” social truths that legitimate and sustain it (Greenway 218ff).

Stoker's and his characters' ambivalent attitude toward Catholicism and sacramentalism reflects to some degree a colonialist desire to disavow the Irish Catholic; but it also reflects the desire of a marginalized elite to appropriate religious ritual in order to invigorate itself. From the Gothic romanticism of Charles Maturin and Sheridan Le Fanu to the occult esotericism of the Literary Revivalists, Irish Protestant intellectuals turned to mysticism and the occult in order to solemnize and ritualize their otherwise impoverished social condition. Foster's description of W. B. Yeats's Protestant subculture fits Stoker's: “an insecure middle-class, with a race-memory of elitism and a predisposition towards seeking refuge in the occult” (“Protestant Magic” 265-6). Stoker probably shared Yeats's “exasperation with Catholic demos, and a refusal to allow that element the monopoly of being ‘Irish’” (246). This strain of “Protestant magic” is, as Foster indicates, part of a long Ascendancy tradition of “occult preoccupations.” The interest in secretive or esoteric societies counteracted both scientific positivism and Roman Catholicism. The popularity of Freemasonry and occult orders reflects a desire for access to spiritual and irrational experiences that provided a compensatory escape from social and cultural displacement and a balm for anxieties concerning the threat of a powerful Catholic middle class. For many Ascendancy intellectuals, this kind of access offered a powerful alternative both to Catholicism and to conventional modes of historical and social analysis emanating from Britain.¹³

Sacramental elements manifest themselves on a number of levels in Stoker's text. On one level, we find references to an array of sacramental practices including marriage, baptism, confession, the Eucharist, extreme unction, and even, if we regard vampiric induction in this light, the taking of (un)holy orders.¹⁴ Stoker's descriptions of these practices are anthropological in so far as they correspond to the actual conditions of religious life in Transylvania. But on another level, the sacraments become an element of a Gothic fantasy in which they become vulnerable to Van Helsing's (and Dracula's) occult resignification. We can trace the change from an anthropological to a Gothic representation in Stoker's shifting treatment of sacramental elements. In the opening chapters, which detail Jonathan Harker's journey to and sojourn in Dracula's castle, the accoutrements of Catholicism are regarded with an ethnographic distance and disdain.¹⁵ Upon his arrival in Transylvania, Harker notes the frequency with which the local peasants cross themselves reverently and describes them in the style of the imperial travelogue:

Here and there we passed Cszeks and Slovaks, all in picturesque attire, but I noticed that goitre was painfully prevalent. By the roadside were many crosses, and as we swept by, my companions all crossed themselves. Here and there was a peasant man or woman kneeling before a shrine who did not even turn round as we approached, but seemed in the self-surrender of devotion to have neither eyes nor ears for the outer world.

(p. 33)

Stoker's depiction of the Transylvanian peasants draws on a source, Major E. C. Johnson's On the Track of the Crescent (1885), which compares them to Irish and Scottish peasants.¹⁶ We see reflected quite clearly in Jonathan Harker's depictions of the Transylvanian peasants the attitude of the Ascendancy toward the Irish Catholic. It is one he would have found seconded in his source material, where the “grossly superstitious” Roman Catholic Székely peasants are described as exhibiting “a curious combination of the canny Scot and the imprudent Irishman” (p. 384). Johnson's description of the Greek Orthodox Wallachians typifies the imperial travelogues of the period. The Wallachians, he notes, have

many points of resemblance to our friend Paddy. He is grossly superstitious, as the number of crosses by the roadside and on every eminence testify; and, like his prototype, he lives in abject terror of his priest, of whose powers he has the most exalted ideas. He believes that ‘his rivirence’ could turn him into a cow, or, as in Lover's famous anecdote, ‘make him meander up and down in the form of an ould gander’ for eternity, should he show any sign of having a will of his own.

(105)

In a less overt manner, Stoker performs a similar displacement by which the Eastern European Other takes on the characteristics of a latently Irish primitive. An early scene between Jonathan and a peasant woman sets an imperial English tone: “She then rose and dried her eyes, and taking a crucifix from her neck offered it to me. I did not know what to do, for as an English Churchman, I have been taught to regard such things as in some measure idolatrous, and yet it seemed so ungracious to refuse an old lady meaning so well and in such a state of mind” (p. 31). Harker's attitude here is typical of the imperious Englishman; more surprising is the way in which this attitude, a kinder and gentler version of Johnson's, is transformed as the narrative moves beyond Harker's travelogue, with its generic commitments to a colonialist attitude, and begins to record the disturbing events back home in the metropolis.

The gradual approach of Dracula, with his ambiguous identity—noble and base, civilized and monstrous—appears to weaken the resistance of Englishmen and Englishwomen and to make them susceptible to the vampiric desire that is one of the secrets contained in Harker's notebook. In a section preceded by a “[s]trange and sudden change in Renfield” (p. 119), the madman who is “mixed up with the Count in an indexy kind of way” (p. 252), Mina artlessly and perhaps unconsciously borrows the sacramental language to express her devotion to and trust in her husband. She ties his notebook with ribbon and seals it with her wedding ring. She then kisses it and shows it to Jonathan: “[I] told him that I would keep it so, and then it would be an outward and visible sign for us all our lives that we trusted each other; that I would never open it unless it were for his own dear sake or for the sake of some stern duty” (p. 123). Mina's paraphrase of Catholic theology—in which the sacraments are “visible signs chosen by Christ to bring mankind the grace of His paschal mystery”¹⁷—sets the stage for a later development: the intervention of Van Helsing, who performs the work of synthesis, unthinkable to Jonathan and only imagined by Mina, of reason and superstition, of the Churchman and the idolatrous Catholic peasant. As a scientist, lawyer, and European, Van Helsing shares common ground with the English characters. But his Catholicism and his belief in occult knowledge and practices link him with the peasant Other, particularly as it was represented by Irish Protestant Revivalists, including Yeats, J. M. Synge, Lady Augusta Gregory, and Standish O'Grady, who were profoundly ambivalent toward Catholicism. Van Helsing introduces the sacramental as occult practice among his rationalist English friends, even claiming, implausibly, that he has an Indulgence. His use of the sacraments is, professedly, a sacred one, done in the name of God for the good of humanity, but his professions should not blind us to the impact his intervention has on his English friends.

Van Helsing, nevertheless, has a distinctly Anglo-Irish coloration, because he embodies the easy familiarity with the mystical and the occult of Irish Protestants who sought secret wisdom in order to overcome social deracination. But so too does Count Dracula. When we consider the relation between him and the culture of which he is seemingly an integral part, we find another displaced Anglo-Irishman, this one a monstrous parody of the rack-rent absentee landlord, parasitical and haughty. Dracula wears the “monstrous” face that the Ascendancy wore at some periods of Irish history, particularly during the famine. His decrepit castle, the lack of servants, the mingling of fear and respect accorded him by Catholic peasants who seem to stand to him in a relation of subservience—all of this suggests the social milieu of the Ascendancy Big House. He resembles the irredeemable gentry, helpless, isolated, and fallen into decay, found in the stories of Sheridan Le Fanu, one of Stoker's models as a writer.¹⁸

Van Helsing and Dracula each embodies an aspect of Stoker's split and compromised Anglo-Irish identity in a double projection that allegorizes social anxieties and offers symbolic consolation for feelings of political illegitimacy and spiritual and cultural homelessness. On the one hand, Dracula represents the monstrous “parasitic social formation,” as Eagleton describes the Ascendancy, which is brought down by rational and scientific Englishmen. The Ascendancy's political inadequacy is thus played out in Dracula's vampirism and the Crew of Light's heroic protection of English values and English women. On the other hand, we have something like the Protestant magician in Van Helsing, whose mystified science disrupts the binary opposition between the heartless, eminently rational English and the victimized, powerless Catholic Irish. Van Helsing “infects” English values and rational science when he supplements both with sacramental magic, which he authoritatively declares necessary in combating a threat that he depicts as demonically Catholic. “‘And now, my friends,’” Van Helsing says solemnly, “‘we have a duty here to do. We must sterilise this earth, so sacred of holy memories, that he has brought from a far distant land for such fell use. He has chosen this earth because it has been holy. Thus we defeat him with his own weapon, for we make it more holy still’” (p. 297). But the symbolic triumph embodied in Van Helsing's exorcism of Dracula is offset by Jonathan Harker's note that concludes the novel. The ambiguity of the note, which Steven Arata calls “troubled and qualified,” suggests that Dracula's attempt to penetrate English society may have succeeded after all.¹⁹ The Harkers' son, Quincey, named after the man who died while bringing Dracula down, “links all our little band of men together” (p. 368). Jonathan refers to spiritual links, of course. But there are blood connections as well, for Mina's unholy sacramental union with Dracula suggests that her son may carry Dracula's blood in his veins. Reading the Anglo-Irish plot of Dracula reveals that even symbolic triumphs are ambivalent, since it is unclear whether Quincey represents the corruption or the revitalization of the English race.

A PRIESTLY SCIENCE

Like many of the productions of the Irish Literary Revival, in which Irish Protestant intellectuals invented an occult peasantry, Stoker's Dracula effects an uneasy, because partly unconscious, link between Protestant and sacramental magic. We see this most vividly in Van Helsing's sacramental occultism, which brings to bear a “foreign” synthesis of science and the rituals and supernatural powers of the Catholic sacraments against a demonized Catholic foe. Van Helsing's arrival in England comes shortly after Mina's sacramental ritual of sealing Jonathan's notebook. Seward describes him to Holmwood as a man on the cutting edge of science: “He is a seemingly arbitrary man, but this is because he knows what he is talking about better than any one else. He is a philosopher and a metaphysician, and one of the most advanced scientists of his day; and he has, I believe, an absolutely open mind” (p. 129). The master/disciple relation between Seward and Van Helsing underscores the distinction between the self-assured conventionality of the former and the enigmatic authority of the latter. Van Helsing is presented from the first as enigmatic, a rationalist who presents his knowledge in parables or withholds it in portentous silences. In defending his strategy to keep Lucy Westenra's condition from Holmwood, he tells Seward: “I have sown my corn, and Nature has her work to do in making it sprout” (p. 135). He is arbitrary and imperious, consistently holding back what he knows and controlling who finally comes to know it. His skepticism with respect to conventional science comports easily with a deep knowledge of and respect for the occult. His authority comes not from Seward's conventional science, but from an occulted, priestly version of it: “There is grim purpose in all I do; and I warn you that you do not thwart me” (p. 146). Part of his power is directly attributable to his unorthodox assumption of sacramental authority (he is, after all, not a priest). The sacramental paraphernalia, particularly “a little golden crucifix” (p. 176) brought in to save Lucy after science has failed, provokes no discernible response from those gathered around her bed who have come to trust implicitly in Van Helsing's methods. The mystery that he imparts to the crucifix and the Host—which he can barely name, calling them the “other things which [the Un-Dead] shun” (p. 216)—is a hybrid one, compounded of the awesome power of the priest and the pagan superstitiousness of the peasant.²⁰ His heterodoxy is commented on, ironically enough, by the conventional scientist, Seward, who quotes Van Helsing's justification for using the supreme sacrament: “‘The Host. I brought it from Amsterdam. I have an Indulgence.’ It was an answer that appalled the most sceptical of us, and 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” (p. 217).

Seward, of course, can only grasp Van Helsing's recourse to the unscientific in strictly religious terms, citing his “earnest purpose” as sufficient justification for an illegitimate use of the sacraments. What Seward fails to see is the extent to which Van Helsing mystifies conventional science, for example, when he says: “‘You do not let your eyes see nor your ears hear, and that which is outside your daily life is not of account to you. … But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs, which think themselves new; and which are yet but the old, which pretend to be young—like the fine ladies at the opera. … There are always mysteries in life’” (pp. 201-02). When asked if he could believe in such paranormal concepts as “corporeal transference” or “astral bodies,” Seward demurs. Only “hypnotism” is “accountable.” Van Helsing, in seeking to wean Seward from his limitations, prepares him for a much more disturbing message: “that science does not always validate social truth” (Greenway 227). Van Helsing's paradoxical conjoining of the rational and the supernatural, governed by a prophylactic use of the sacraments, brings together two conflicting imperatives. One is the rational desire for an ordered account, exemplified by Seward's clinical approach to Renfield and Mina Harker's archival foresight: “[T]he whole story is put together in such a way that every point tells.” (pp. 251-52). The other is the necessity for occult knowledge and practices that will enable the technologies of writing to represent what is unaccountable. In his role as a progressive scientist, Van Helsing champions paranormal approaches to experience; but his acceptance of superstition and folklore places him well outside the bounds of empirical science. Through his influence, the Crew of Light, conventionally pious and valiant, at bottom rational, nevertheless become caught up in the ambiguous conjunction of science and occult knowledge and fall in with his plan to “restore Lucy to [them] as a holy, and not an unholy, memory” (p. 222). To that end they say the prayer for the dead over her somnambulant body and heartily destroy her. By the time Seward confronts Dracula in his London house, he is “[i]nstinctively” brandishing a crucifix and the Host (p. 304).

When we read the sacramental elements in Dracula as reflecting anxiety over the loss of Ascendancy power, Van Helsing's priestly scientism emerges as a critique that aims not to denigrate Catholicism but rather to implicate conventional science and English rationality in an indictment of its own origins and limitations. He invigorates rational scientific inquiry with a Gothicized sacramentalism, in an act that suggests the impotence of both science and the established Church of England. His odd marriage of rationality and sacramental ritual resembles the decadent Catholicism that flourished in Dublin at the fin de siècle, which involved the potent mixture of sexuality and occult knowledge that we find in Yeats's mystical stories and Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.²¹ When he places a “little golden crucifix” on Lucy's dead lips to protect her from the ghastly transformation into a wanton vampire that he knows will take place (p. 176), he supplements medical science with an occult protection against Lucy's vampiric sexuality. We see a similar use of sacramental elements in his resignification of the Host. When Van Helsing inspects Carfax the first time, intoning “In manus tuas, Domine” and crossing himself before entering, he warns his Crew that they “must not desecrate needless” the Sacred Wafer he has passed out to them for protection (p. 253); yet he is willing to appropriate the sanctifying powers of the Host into an ad hoc ritual on the authority of a bogus Indulgence. When they return to Carfax to “cleanse” Dracula's crates of earth, Van Helsing remarks that Dracula “has chosen this earth because it has been holy. Thus we defeat him with his own weapon, for we make it more holy still” (p. 297). Orthodox or not, the brandishing of crucifixes and sacred wafers does little more than temporarily daunt Dracula, who turns into a “great black cloud” and sails away after being caught vamping Mina Harker (p. 283). Moreover, when the Host sears its image onto Mina's forehead, she seems to bear a reminder not just of her “uncleanliness” but also of the inefficacy of the Host, which has proven powerless to protect Mina's soul even as it proves successful in warding off Dracula's diabolical advances. The “‘Vampire's baptism of blood’” (p. 318) occurs in spite of Van Helsing's trappings of sacramental authority, which plays no major role in the final, victorious struggle to destroy Dracula. The crucifix can make Dracula cringe and the Host can contaminate his earth boxes, but what defeats him in the end is hypnotism, telepathy and other “new science” procedures that Van Helsing advocates and that enable the Crew of Light to trap and execute him. There is nothing ambiguous or occult about the “great kukri knife” that Jonathan Harker uses to dispatch Dracula or his “impetuosity, and the manifest singleness of his purpose” (p. 367).

Understood as an allegory of Ascendancy deracination, Stoker's narrative evokes a déclassé ruling elite filled with resentment over a sense of lost privilege that turns to occultism and sacramentalism in order to spiritualize its social and political displacement. Dracula performs a grotesque parody of “Protestant magic” within that allegory, his vampirism mocking both the sacramental desire of the Irish Catholic and the hybridizing impulse of the Irish Protestant occultist. In Stoker's working papers, we find notes indicating that the Count “has an ambivalent attitude towards the icons of religion: he can be moved only by relics older than his own real date or century (that is, when he actually lived)—more recent relics leave him unmoved” (qtd. in Frayling 343). Frayling goes on to note, however, that “the idea that vampires could be moved only by relics older than their own real date sounds ancient and folkloric, but appears to have been invented by Stoker” (344-5). In a process of creative cultural translation, Stoker augments his research into Transylvania folklore concerning the vampire myth by inventing sacramental elements for it, much as the Anglo-Irish Revivalists translated Irish folklore, giving to it an occult significance that reflects their own desire for a magical conception of the world. Dracula becomes the embodiment of the deracinated native intellectual, caught between two national identities—the Catholic Irish and the English—neither of which appears to offer any hope for the future of the Ascendancy.

Mediating these national extremes is the Catholic “foreigner” Van Helsing, the scientist whose sacerdotal knowledge challenges the assumptions of an imperial class without himself having to abdicate from that class. Like the “Protestant magician,” who sought spiritual authority to make up for the failure of political power, Van Helsing seeks to make up for the failures of science by adopting sacramental rituals. Some critics have noted that Van Helsing's medical procedures resemble Dracula's vampirism. Arata puts it well when he writes that “Van Helsing and his tradition have polished teeth into hypodermic needles, a cultural refinement that masks violation as healing” (87). But Dracula has likewise refined his predatory vampirism into a subtle strategy of revenge and seduction, in which Englishwomen like Mina Harker are countermined, transformed into his “kin” and, incestuously, his “bountiful wine-press[es]” (p. 288). Dracula presents Anglo-Irish anxiety displaced onto opposed characters: on the one hand, Van Helsing represents the alienated Anglo-Irish intellectual dabbling in the occult; on the other hand, Dracula represents the deracinated landlord class that resents the empire for abandoning it and that holds the Catholic peasants in thrall. This double projection of a compromised identity upsets any attempt to read Dracula in a Manichaean or binary way, for though the Crew of Light emerge victorious, the worldview that made the victory possible may have been fatally undermined in the process. Like Yeats in the 1890s, Stoker envisioned a world in which binary opposites—good and evil, male and female, spirit and matter—struggle for supremacy. But Stoker anticipates Yeats's vision of a “rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem” when he depicts a struggle that is confused or multiplied by a force that threatens to undermine the very foundations of binary thinking. This peculiar binary struggle captures the position of the Anglo-Irish caught between the poles of English colonizer and Catholic colonized, never quite secure in their role as a native ruling class ambiguously supported from outside. At the end of the novel, Van Helsing is secure in the bosom of his adopted and adoptive English family and Dracula is never quite contained or defeated, for his blood courses still in the veins of Jonathan Harker's child. This conclusion drives home the point that ambivalence marks the compromised history and social position of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy.

Notes

1. Elsewhere, Foster talks of the “‘vampirizing’ tendency of the Irish Parliamentary Party” (Modern Ireland 468), a largely Irish Protestant group. For a generally more charitable view of the Ascendancy, see 167-94.

2. Manichaeanism refers to a binary situation, in this case one in which the colonizer and colonized are locked in a pitched battle for domination. Manichaeanism originally referred to a religious dualistic philosophy in Persia in the third century C.E.

3. On the threat of “reverse colonization,” that is the process by which natives of the colonies make their way to the metropolitan center, see Arata; on the threat of absorption, see Schmitt.

4. See Boone, Craft, Croley, Glover, Halberstam, McWhir, Pick, Spencer, and Warwick.

5. On the Booths and the “rhetoric of reform,” see Croley.

6. R. F. Foster argues that “[p]olitical upheavals and land agitation from the 1870s would destroy Ascendancy power completely” and that “the isolation, or marginalization, of the Southern Irish Protestant had been mercilessly highlighted since the 1830s” (“Protestant Magic” 246; see also 249). Foster treats this at length in Modern Ireland 373-428.

7. Douglas Hyde made similar claims ten years earlier in his influential essay, “The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland” (1894).

8. See Foster, Modern Ireland, 424ff. On the “clerical-national alliance,” see Emmet Larkin (xvii-xxi, 32-3, and passim) and Eagleton (78).

9. Foster goes on to note of Stoker's first book, Duties of Clerks of the Petty Sessions, that “[o]nly an Irish Protestant could have graduated so easily from that to Dracula” (“Protestant Magic” 259).

10. The phrase “Crew of Light” (referring to Van Helsing, Seward, Holmwood, Morris, and the Harkers) is Craft's invention, though he takes his cue from Stoker: “Lucy, lux, light” (208, n. 7).

11. See Wicke, who notes that “it is not merely the atavism of Dracula that makes his appearance in England so frightful; it is his relative modernity” (p. 598). Others—notably McWhir (31), Glover (249) and Spencer (200)—note the blurring of line between modern and premodern.

12. See Craft (101), Gagnier (147, 153), Greenway, Jann, and Wicke.

13. On “occult preoccupations” see Foster, “Protestant Magic” (251, 261-3), and Jann (274).

14. On the seven principle sacraments, see “Theology of Sacraments” in The New Catholic Encyclopedia (12: 806-15, esp. 811).

15. On the imperial travelogue, see Arata; on ethnography see Gagnier, who notes “Stoker's ethnographic obsessions, such as dialect” (150), and Foster, who writes that Stoker's working notes for Dracula reflect “seven years of Yeats-style research into folklore, myth, armchair anthropology, medieval history, and magic” (“Protestant Magic” 259).

16. As far as I can tell, only Foster notes this aspect of Stoker's source; unfortunately, he does not pursue the point: “The Irishness of Dracula must be left aside here” (259).

17. The New Catholic Encyclopedia (12: 806). “Sacraments are signs of faith in a twofold sense. On the one hand, they are objective expressions of the faith as it is professed and lived in the Church. … On the other hand, they express the personal faith of the recipient. ‘All sacraments are certain protestations of faith’ (Aquinas ST 3a, 72.5 ad 2)” (12: 813-14).

18. “[T]hough ostensibly set in Derbyshire, [Le Fanu's “authentic masterpiece” Uncle Silas] was long ago spotted by Elizabeth Bowen as an Irish story in disguise, dealing with exploitation, imprisonment, fractured identity, and hauntings” (Foster, “Protestant Magic” 251).

19. Arata goes on to note that “Harker unwittingly calls attention to the fact that the positions of vampire and victim have been reversed. Now it is Dracula whose blood is appropriated and transformed to nourish a faltering race” (643). Halberstam makes the opposite point: “In Dracula, vampires are precisely a race and a family that weakens the stock of Englishness by passing on degeneracy and the disease of blood lust” (340).

20. See Anne McWhir: “Between the familiarity and reasonableness of prayer-book religion [i.e., Anglicanism] and the superstitious rituals and beliefs of foreign Catholicism there is Van Helsing's use of ritual magic derived from Catholicism to preserve an Anglican world” (McWhir 33).

21. On decadent Catholicism, see Hanson, especially the chapter on Wilde, “The Temptation of St. Oscar,” (229-96).

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