Abstract
A recurring theme in Dracula criticism is the assumption that, because Stoker’s protagonists rely on Catholic sacraments and symbols, they represent Catholicism, High Church Protestantism, or a perverse variation thereof. The protagonists’ adoption of Catholic sacramentality, however, lacks any accompanying moral or epistemological shift—Stoker’s protagonists never adopt Christian morality, nor do they transition from skepticism to faith. Rather, the protagonists instrumentalize Catholic sacramental objects, making them tools with which to exterminate vampires and to justify the hatred that underpins that task. The protagonists’ relationship to the Communion wafer encapsulates their disregard for theology and their willingness to manipulate sacrament.
In chapter 23 of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, long after the novel’s protagonists have begun to rely on Abraham Van Helsing’s scientific and supernatural expertise, Jonathan Harker seethes, “I care for nothing now […] except to wipe out [Dracula] from the face of creation. I would sell my soul to do it!” (Stoker 302). Later in the same chapter, Jonathan expresses his desire not merely to “destroy that earthly life” of the Count but also to “send [Dracula’s] soul for ever and ever into burning hell” (306). These are not the sentiments of a man who has just undergone a moral, religious, or spiritual conversion—Jonathan’s willingness to sell his soul and his all-consuming desire to condemn Dracula’s indicate that vengeance, not piety, motivates his murderous actions. Yet, despite the evidence to the contrary, a variety of critics have read Dracula’s protagonists as either converting or conforming to some form of Christianity.
The English and American protagonists begin the novel skeptical of the supernatural, but, because of the influence of the charismatic quasi-Catholic Van Helsing, gradually learn to rely on superstition and Catholic symbols to conquer Dracula. Critics have interpreted this change as the result of a spiritual or religious experience, and investigate the results and morality of that conversion. For example, Noelle Bowles reads Dracula as a narrative about the protagonists’ pious adoption of High Church Anglicanism. 1 Patrick R. O’Malley sees Dracula as a description of the protagonists’ indoctrination into Catholicism, a religion that he argues relies on the superstition that Dracula represents. 2 Christopher Herbert investigates how Dracula’s protagonists could be converting to either a perversely occult parody of Christianity or to a radical Christianity barely distinguishable from vampirism. 3 Even critics who do not discuss these apparent conversions assume that Dracula’s protagonists align themselves with Christianity. Charles S. Blinderman and Christopher Gist Raible, for example, both consider Dracula as a dramatization of the struggle between virtuous Christians and immorality, while Carol A. Senf suggests that Dracula deconstructs the divisions between Christianity and superstition. 4
However, the protagonists’ skepticism and instrumentalism prevent a genuine adherence to any religious tradition. In dialogue with nineteenth-century theology and philosophy, Dracula distinguishes between its protagonists’ use of Christian symbols and the intellectual transition that would mark a true conversion. The protagonists’ skeptical mindset stifles the possibility of developing faith and accepting its accompanying moral convictions. Dracula’s protagonists recognize neither intrinsic values nor metaphysical properties, instead judging even Catholic sacrament for its instrumental usefulness to them. To these vampire hunters, nothing exists outside of the evidence of their senses. Rather than accepting either Christianity or occultism, Dracula’s protagonists integrate the ostensibly holy into a framework that determines morality by use-value instead of inherent goodness.
The protagonists’ behavior and their relationship to Christian sacrament do develop as the novel progresses. That development, however, is not based on growing faith. Rather, it stems from the accrual of more knowledge, knowledge integrated into their unchanging mindset. This thesis does not mean that Dracula indicts rationality or religious skepticism as such; instead, it argues that Dracula depicts the manipulation of a religion as a means to accomplish a morally questionable goal and to obscure immoral motives. Stoker’s protagonists rely on sacraments and theology in the enactment of graphic violence and they cite their piety to avoid rigorous inquiry into the moral rightness of that violence. As Senf puts it, these protagonists “[conceal] their lust for power under the rubric of religion” (“Mirror” 99). The novel’s characterization of its allegedly Christian protagonists distinguishes between this manipulative use of a religious, moral, or ideological system and a genuine acceptance of that system. When they exploit a religious tradition for immoral purposes, the protagonists cede their claim to the identity of adherents to that tradition.
Dracula misleadingly suggests that its protagonists become devout Christians. The protagonists appear to convert when they accept the leadership of Van Helsing, whose anti-rationalist rhetoric demands a cultish devotion based on irrational faith. John Seward provides the text’s first portrait of Van Helsing, describing him as “a philosopher and a metaphysician, and one of the most advanced scientists of his day” and as having “an absolutely open mind” (Stoker 129). With this mix of scientific and metaphysical authority, Van Helsing demands irrational faith from Seward and the other protagonists, asking them “[t]o believe in things that [they] cannot,” and even concludes the novel by renouncing rationality altogether, announcing that “[w]e want no proofs; we ask none to believe us!” (202, 369). Van Helsing’s proclamations align him both with anti-rationalism and, more specifically, with a particular vision of the Roman Catholic Church, an organization Victorian Protestants suspected of fostering irrational faith while disregarding reason.
Anglican theologian George Salmon exemplifies Victorian anti-Catholic anxieties, which stemmed from a belief that Catholics had irrational, unquestioning faith in their leaders—the same faith Van Helsing apparently demands. Salmon uses the metaphor of a doctor or a barrister to differentiate between Anglican and Catholic leaders, noting that people trust doctors and barristers “[n]ot because of their official position, but because of their superior acquaintance with” medicine or law (Salmon 50). Further, he argues “that the true analogy to the relation between a Christian teacher and his pupils is not that between a physician and his patients, but rather that between a physician and the class of students,” since “[a] physician does not exhort his patients to study their own case out of medical books” but “will frankly tell [students] the reasons for the course of treatment which he advises; he will not ask them to receive anything merely on his authority” (115, 116). To Salmon, Catholic authorities treat believers as patients while their Anglican counterparts treat believers as students. Consequently, Catholic leaders illegitimately ask for trust based on their rank, rather than on demonstrations and explications of their own theological expertise.
Salmon’s criticisms apply to Van Helsing, especially given the professor’s brag that he is “a lawyer as well as a doctor” and Seward’s wish to be Van Helsing’s “pet student again” when the professor leaves too much unexplained (Stoker 175, 202). This echo of Salmon’s analogy posits Van Helsing as a Catholic authority—a legal and medical expert who deigns not to treat others as students, not to justify his claims with explanations. Regardless of whether this parallel was an intentional reference or a meaningful coincidence, it demonstrates that Van Helsing presents himself as belonging to two classes of people both noted in the Victorian era for their ability to—problematically—demand trust without self-justification. 5 From the heading of his first letter, which identifies him as “Abraham Van Helsing, M.D., D.Ph., D. Lit, etc., etc.,” the text emphasizes Van Helsing’s intellectual authority—his accolades are too numerous to list (130). And even this list of doctorates, by trailing off into the vagueness of “etc., etc.,” demands faith without clear explanation (130). Just as Van Helsing derives unquestioned authority from his titles, those titles themselves require unquestioning faith through their lack of specificity. Although he has no position of authority within the Catholic Church, Van Helsing’s secular titles afford him the exact type of authority Salmon attributes to the Catholic priest, authority Van Helsing apparently uses as an anti-rationalist Catholic.
Yet, even though Van Helsing scolds “this enlightened age, when men believe not even what they see,” the professor actually requires remarkably little faith from his followers and admits that even he needed “fact [to] thunder on [his] ear[:] ‘See! See! I prove; I prove’” to believe in vampirism (317, 241). Immediately after demanding that Seward have faith and “believe things which we know to be untrue,” Van Helsing states that “even yet [he does] not expect [Seward] to believe” and makes plans to “prove” that Lucy Westenra has become a vampire (202, 203). Van Helsing and Seward examine Lucy’s empty tomb, finding only circumstantial evidence of her transformation (209–10). They then return the next night, during which, as evidence accumulates, “it [begins] to dawn upon [Seward] that [he is] accepting Van Helsing’s theories” (208–11).
With the vampiric Lucy lying in her coffin, Van Helsing could “simply follow [his] inclining” and kill her (210). However, he decides to wait, prolonging the vampire’s existence to provide evidence to Arthur Holmwood (210). Van Helsing then leads yet another expedition to the tomb, this time bringing Arthur and Quincey Morris as well as Seward (212–15). Even so, it is not until the night after this that the vampire hunters finally kill Lucy, allowing, as Van Helsing puts it, “the soul of the poor lady whom [they] love [to] again be free” (222). This extended process, which prolongs both Lucy’s un-death as a vampire and the threat of the so-called “bloofer lady,” serves only to provide the skeptical Victorians with evidence of vampirism (187). Although Van Helsing convinces Seward, Arthur, and Quincey to believe something improbable to their rational Victorian minds, he does so by appealing to their willingness to gather evidence, not to irrational faith.
Van Helsing only requires a temporary suspension of disbelief that allows him to offer definitive proof for his claims, meaning that he asks for the only type of faith the most skeptical Victorian thinkers could endorse. The leading skeptics of the Victorian era were “the scientific agnostics,” and, according to James C. Livingston in Religious Thought in the Victorian Age, their “primary legacy […] was their championing, with W. K. Clifford (1843–1879), [of] a powerful morality of knowledge and belief that came to be known as the ethics of belief controversy” (Livingston 27). In his essay titled “The Ethics of Belief,” Clifford professes the skeptical dogma that “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence” (Clifford 77). Yet, although Clifford is as skeptical as Van Helsing is credulous, even Clifford admits that someone is justified in suspending disbelief temporarily to perform an experiment. To Clifford, “it is our duty to act upon probabilities, although the evidence is not such as to justify present belief; because it is precisely by such action, and by observation of its fruits, that evidence is got which may justify future belief” (79). Clifford condemns permanent belief in an idea that lacks evidence, but he recognizes that scientific knowledge can only advance if researchers temporarily suspend their disbelief to perform experiments.
Clifford postulates that a belief affects “the actions of him who holds it” (73). Thus, if Seward did not temporarily have faith in Van Helsing’s hypothesis, he would not participate in the professor’s reconnaissance at the tomb. Even though Van Helsing implores Seward, Arthur, and Quincey to have faith—an unsubstantiated belief—that faith is only a temporary presupposition which allows Van Helsing to provide evidence of the existence of vampires. Rosemary Jann observes that, even though “Stoker’s characters may profess faith in a higher religious truth, […] their actions reaffirm the truths of a normative reality,” meaning that Dracula is actually a “celebration of the methods of rationalistic analysis” (Jann 284, 278). Jann’s claim is partially true. Rather than celebrating the skeptical rationality of the Victorian era, Dracula reveals how that skepticism, when taken to an extreme, can empty everything, including religion, morality, and human life, of any intrinsic value outside of its usefulness in fulfilling a particular goal. Not every action of a protagonist signifies this amorality, but many of the ways protagonists interact with Christian sacraments, symbols, and ideas evidence a mindset that often devalues religion and, at times, rationalizes morally problematic motives and actions.
Dracula, then, stands at the intersection of two Victorian debates: the conflict between Clifford’s agnostic empiricism and religious faith, and the Anglican critiques of Roman Catholicism. At this intersection, the novel may imply a critique of Catholicism that treats it not as too irrational but as too tangible—a suggestion that Catholicism relies on superstitious evidence rather than devout faith. Yet, while this suspicion of superstition forms part of the Anglican rhetoric—Salmon caricatures legends of deceased priests returning to Earth to describe Purgatory—the charge that Catholicism relies too heavily on tangible miracles differs sharply with the prevailing Victorian image of Catholicism (Salmon 208–11). To suggest that supernatural events would proffer unseemly evidence to Catholics would be to implicitly admit that those events have occurred, an acquiescence that Victorian Anglican discourse would be unlikely to accept.
While certain forms of anti-Catholic rhetoric could comfortably embrace this tactic, mystifying Catholicism as witchcraft, Victorian Anglicanism strove to define itself against Catholicism primarily by emphasizing its own rationality and modernity—the terms with which Clifford would likely align himself in a different debate. O’Malley observes an inextricable link between Catholicism and outdated irrationalism in the Victorian imagination, noting that “[w]ith its systems of saints, rituals, and seemingly supernatural sacramental theology, Roman (and ultimately ritualist) Catholicism appeared to many English critics to be an eruption of the medieval into the present, an anachronism […] dangerous to liberty and prosperity in contemporary England” (O’Malley 20). Victorian anti-Catholic sentiment identified Catholicism with anachronistic irrationalism, not genuine occultism.
Anglican rhetoric shaped itself as it did in response to the perceived threats of Catholic authority figures manipulating their unquestioning followers to undermine the English government. In Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England, E. R. Norman tellingly recounts how Victorians received publications from the First Vatican Council as assaults on “[m]odern learning, science, individual freedom, and the liberal state”—basically “every aspect of the nineteenth century which British Protestantism had come to espouse as of the essence of enlightenment in the new age” (Norman 80). The Council sought to demarcate the papal authority, which Anglicans took as evidence of an encroachment on the secular realm—an encroachment framed by already existing conflicts between the Vatican and the Victorians over such secular issues (52–6, 87). In More Roman Than Rome, James Derek Holmes documents conservative Cardinal Henry Manning’s rhetoric, which fell eerily in line with Anglican fears, as well as an increasing tendency for Victorian Catholic priests to flaunt their affiliation to Rome and the Pope—both of which could only exacerbate Anglican fears of papal control (Holmes 117–18). Despite the efforts of liberal Catholics like John Henry Newman, Victorian Catholicism suggested a threat of irrational devotion to a leader who claimed infallibility and apparently sought secular power.
In this political, religious, and cultural climate, anti-Catholic rhetoric focused on superstition only insofar as it corroborated the more pressing charge of unreflective obedience. Norman quotes Victorian Prime Minister John Russell who, acutely encapsulating anti-Catholic concerns, warns against Anglican interest in Catholic ritual because such practices threaten “to confine the intellect and enslave the soul” (Russell, qtd. Norman 58). Borrowing from a misogynist lexicon Van Helsing himself exemplifies in his surprise at Mina’s possession of a rational “man’s brain,” Victorian anti-Catholic discourse frequently characterized Catholicism as feminine to signify its irrationality (Stoker 240). 6 If Roman Catholicism was seductive at all, according to Victorian rhetoric, it was so because of its irrational, aesthetic medievalism, not because it provided illicit yet tangible access to the supernatural. Thus, Dracula provides either a radical reimagining of the Catholic Other—one that departs from both the conventions of anti-Catholic rhetoric and the underlying anxieties that fueled it—or, more likely, a set of characters that bear both striking similarities to and noteworthy differences from the irrationally obedient Catholic. Stoker’s protagonists are convinced, not seduced, by the material evidence Van Helsing proffers, differentiating them from the stereotyped individuals lulled to obedience by the allures of suspect Romanist ritualism.
Instrumentalism, not piety, guides the protagonists’ use of Van Helsing’s communion wafers and crucifixes. Even though the most compelling evidence of the protagonists’ conversion may be their reliance on Catholic objects, the protagonists’ treatment of these items actually disproves such a conversion. Van Helsing’s anti-rational rhetoric implies that, in using the wafers and crucifixes he provides for them, the protagonists are acting on newfound irrational faith. Yet, the vampire hunters do not begin using these religious objects until after Van Helsing has demonstrated that “his little golden crucifix” causes the vampiric Lucy to “[recoil …] and, with a suddenly distorted face, full of rage, [dash] past him as if to enter the tomb” and that the communion wafer causes her to “[stop] as if arrested by some irresistible force” (Stoker 219). In proving Lucy’s vampirism to Seward, Arthur, and Quincey, Van Helsing demonstrates the usefulness of crucifixes and communion wafers against the undead.
Consequently, when the vampire hunters rely on the “little silver crucifix[es]” and “portion[s] of sacred wafer” with which Van Helsing “equip[s]” them, they rely not on faith in these items’ holiness but on the belief that what Van Helsing has already demonstrated about the items will hold true (253). Their reliance on Van Helsing’s Catholic paraphernalia requires no other metaphysical conviction than belief in their ability to learn from past experiences, which even the perennially skeptical Clifford endorses as necessary and justifiable. Clifford explains that “we may add to our experience on the assumption of a uniformity in nature,” not because “we have [any] right to believe anything of this kind,” but because it is the only way to learn about the world (Clifford 93, 95). Without assuming such uniformity, a “burnt child” could not learn “that the fire will burn it to-day just as it did yesterday” (92). When using Van Helsing’s Catholic items, the vampire hunters place their faith not in God but in their ability to trust and learn from past experience.
This use of Van Helsing’s wafers and crucifixes does not require any conviction in the objects’ holiness. The Protestant protagonists would need a substantial amount of faith to believe in the transubstantiation described in Catholic Eucharistic theology and, even if they did, they would need faith in Van Helsing to believe that the wafers he carries have indeed been consecrated and more faith still to believe Van Helsing’s dubious claim that he “[has] an Indulgence” (Stoker 217). 7 To use a communion wafer or a crucifix to repel a vampire only requires the belief that some characteristic of the wafer or crucifix makes vampires recoil. That characteristic may or may not be holiness. The vampire hunters cannot prove anything besides the vampire’s dislike of Catholic items, and consequently they believe nothing else about them. 8
Although O’Malley and Bowles read Seward’s first identification of Van Helsing’s Host as “a mass of what looked like thin, wafer-like biscuit” as indicative of his ignorance of Christian sacrament, that description could actually be another example of what Van Heling earlier calls Seward’s “good logic” (217, 206). 9 When Van Helsing shows Seward Lucy’s empty tomb, rather than making the logical leap that her absence means she has become a vampire, Seward asserts that the absence “only proves one thing”: “[t]hat [Lucy’s body] is not there” (206). Seward is too strictly logical to conclude that the absent body must be a vampire, and he is too skeptically rational to conclude that the wafer must be the transubstantiated Eucharist. In each case, Seward disputes the presence of an apparently absent body—whether that be the transubstantiated body of Christ or the vampiric body of Lucy, risen from her tomb in a parodic repetition of Christ’s Easter Resurrection.
Not even Van Helsing himself commits to the belief that his Host is the body of Christ. The word “Eucharist” does not appear in Dracula. Rather, Stoker’s protagonists—Van Helsing included—use the words “Host” or “wafer.” O’Malley, Bowles, and Senf elide these terms, using the term “Eucharist” when Stoker does not, or, in Senf’s case, defining “Host” in a way more appropriate for “Eucharist.” 10 Leatherdale and Raible distinguish between the terms, but in each case only as a quick parenthetical. 11 Neither explores the importance of these distinctions or of Stoker’s avoidance of the word “Eucharist.”
The Catholic Educator: A Library of Catholic Instruction and Devotion, a religious dictionary and reference book from the 1880s, defines “Eucharist” as “the true body and blood of Christ under the appearance of bread and wine,” while it defines “Host” as “Christ present under the form of bread” or “both of bread and wine” or, conversely, as “the bread before its consecration” (“Eucharist” 186; “Host” 232). To use the term “Eucharist” is to assert that the communion wafer is the body and blood of Christ; the term “Host” can ambiguously refer to the communion wafer either before or after its transubstantiation. Moreover, The Catholic Educator states that the last definition of “Host”—that it is the unconsecrated wafer—is the one “employed in the ordinary language of Catholics at the present day” (232). Tellingly, the definition of “Eucharist” explains the theology of the sacrament, while the definition of “Host” focuses mainly on what a priest does with the wafer during Mass (“Eucharist” 183–203; “Host” 232–3). The term “wafer” is, of course, even more general and less sacramental, referring exclusively to the tangible, material bread. “Host” foregrounds the wafer’s materiality more prominently than the sacramental term “Eucharist,” while “wafer” lacks any theological implications at all. When Stoker’s protagonists say “Host” or “wafer” but not “Eucharist,” they avoid claiming that the wafer is Christ, meaning that they avoid committing to Catholic theology.
The differences between Van Helsing’s Host and the Catholic Eucharist illuminate the differences between the vampire hunters and actual religious believers. The early nineteenth-century Catholic theologian Georg Hermes distinguishes between supernatural and divine occurrences, warning that “certitude concerning the supernatural origin of a revelation is totally useless for our purposes if we are not also completely certain of its divine origin,” even though if “there is an evident duty to assume a divine origin,” then “a supernatural origin follows as a matter of course” (Hermes 127). In other words, all divine events are supernatural, but not all supernatural events are divine.
The vampire hunters have evidence that Van Helsing’s Hosts have supernatural power over vampires but, because they are interested in the utility of the wafer rather than Eucharistic theology, do not question whether or not that supernatural power is divine. If theology were at issue for Stoker’s protagonists, they might have considered, as Hermes writes, that “miracles […] may not be unworthy of God in any respect” and that the miracle-worker must “not comport himself in this presentation of doctrine in a manner unworthy of God” (130, 131, italics original). Van Helsing’s blasphemous treatment of the Host violates both of these theological tenets, making him unsuitable as a religious leader. Yet, even though Van Helsing is unlikely to be holy, he does have supernatural power, which is all that the vampire hunters need for their mission.
Van Helsing repeatedly demonstrates that his relationship to the Host and the crucifix is no different from his relationship to any secular, non-sacred object. When equipping the vampire hunters, Van Helsing explains that they “need arms of many kinds,” and instructs them not to “desecrate [the wafer] needless” (Stoker 253, italics added). The Host and the crucifix are just another kind of weapon that vampire hunters use, and Van Helsing’s interdiction against desecrating the Host commands them not to waste a finite resource, rather than to treat the Host as inherently sacred. Seward internalizes this mindset, describing how the vampire hunters carry their crucifixes and hunting knives: “we each [hold] ready to use our various armaments—the spiritual in the left hand, the mortal in the right” (302). Similarly, in his introduction of the Host, Van Helsing takes the wafer “from his bag,” presumably the same bag from which he earlier had “tak[en] out a match-box and a piece of candle,” as well as “a turnscrew” and “a tiny fret-saw” (217, 205, 206). 12 Van Helsing stores the wafer in the same bag as his tools, taking no other precaution than “carefully roll[ing it] up in a white napkin” (217). Van Helsing repeatedly treats the wafer as no holier than a screwdriver or a hunting knife. 13
This instrumentalist denigration of Christianity into a tool, resource, or weapon informs not only Van Helsing’s use of Catholic items, but his use of Christian theology as a whole. Even when Van Helsing most clearly appropriates the role of a prophet—Seward describes him as speaking “so gravely that I could not help feeling that he was in some way inspired, and was stating things outside himself”—he transforms Christianity’s ultimate image of humility and self-sacrifice into a weapon (296). Van Helsing presumptuously equates the vampire hunters with Christ, proclaiming that “we bear our Cross, as [God’s] Son did in obedience to His will” (296). Although Van Helsing could be using the image of bearing a cross figuratively to indicate the bearing of burdens, his analogy simultaneously evokes the silver crucifixes with which the protagonists stalk their vampiric prey. This latter meaning erases the implications of a burden; the crucifixes are tiny weapons carried for self-defense, not heavy wooden execution devices carried as a punishment. Thus, Van Helsing’s analogy casts the Passion of Christ as Jesus’ preparation for his final conquest over sin.
Although this militarized interpretation is not wholly alien to Christianity, it allows Van Helsing to rhetorically reinforce the vampire hunters’ conviction in the holiness and glory of their crusade. Van Helsing promises an apotheosis, a reversal of the incarnation by which God became man, when he promises that the vampire hunters will “ascend to [God’s] bidding as that other through […] all that makes the difference between God and man” (296). Van Helsing vows that he will lead the vampire hunters, not just to imitate Christ, but to become God. Van Helsing’s version of Christ uses the crucifix as the vampire hunters do—as a weapon against evil, rather than as a means of self-sacrifice. This carefully-manipulated Christology validates the vampire hunters but misrepresents theology by suggesting that the cross is a weapon that offers its user Godlike power. Again, this would be problematic if the vampire hunters were theologians; as skeptical instrumentalists, however, they comfortably use or abuse theological symbols or doctrines in whatever way is most expedient in their quest. Christianity itself becomes a means, rather than a guide, for the protagonists.
The concept of sacrament—through the Eucharist—encapsulates the division between the vampire hunters and religious believers. If sacrament, and by extension all religiosity, is simply a series of actions, then the vampire hunters may indeed be or become Christians. However, if sacrament has an underlying theological meaning, a series of convictions that underpin its actions, then Stoker’s protagonists are not Christian. Their disinterest in Eucharistic theology suggests a disinterest in the possible presence of Christ in their “tools.” In the same way that their wafers—at least potentially—lack the Real Presence, their actions lack real theological belief. This hollow sacramentality, which acknowledges only actions and consequences, does not bind the vampire hunters to any ideological or moral system. Van Helsing’s rhetoric, and the violence it permits, demonstrates the dangerous manipulability of such a mindset.
Like the wafers and crucifixes with which Van Helsing arms his fellow vampire hunters, the rosary Jonathan clings to in Castle Dracula has only a use-value for him. William Hughes pinpoints the moment that the “change in [Jonathan’s] cultural and epistemological identity” begins as when an elderly Transylvanian woman places a “rosary round [his] neck” despite the fact that his education “as an English Churchman” has “taught [him] to regard such things as in some measure idolatrous” (Hughes 109; Stoker 31). The conversion seems clear when Jonathan proclaims that the rosary “is a comfort and a strength to [him] whenever [he] touch[es] it” (52). This affinity for the rosary seems especially indicative of a devoted, unquestioning faith since even some Catholics in the nineteenth century deemed the rosary overly naïve. As Mary Heimann notes in Catholic Devotion in Victorian England, the practice of the rosary “was initially resisted by some [Catholics] as childish” and that “[i]t may also have been thought effeminate by some” (Heimann 69, 69 fn. 101). These anxieties likely stemmed from the fact that the rosary’s “inherent repetitions, simplicity, and accessibility to the illiterate,” as well as its connections to non-canonical Catholic myths, made it “humbling” for more educated Catholics (64, 69). 14 Like Van Helsing’s rhetoric and use of authority, Jonathan’s devotion to the rosary suggests a dedication to the most stereotypically non-rational Catholicism.
Again, however, the apparent evidence of religious devotion actually reveals a purely instrumental relationship between the protagonist and the Catholic symbol. Prior to Jonathan’s profession of his reliance on the rosary, he remarks that even though he “did not take any” of the plum brandy that the Count left in the coach for his ride to the castle, “it was a comfort to know it was there all the same” (Stoker 36). Even seeing “the Law List” in Dracula’s library “somehow gladden[s] [Jonathan’s] heart” (44). The rosary offers Jonathan comfort and reassurance during his time in Transylvania, but so do entirely mundane objects. The fact that Jonathan keeps the rosary “round [his] neck” or “over the head of [his] bed” does distinguish it from the book and the brandy, but that distinction may be more indicative of the rosary’s portability than of Jonathan’s religious devotion to it (52, 57). Just as Jonathan never drinks the plum brandy, he never actually prays the rosary. The rosary’s religious connotations may comfort Jonathan, but they do not convert him. Rather, the rosary serves as another of the objects that Jonathan uses to maintain a sense of security during his journey through Transylvania.
Alone, Jonathan’s irreligious affinity for the rosary and sacrilegious lust for revenge do not necessarily indicate that all of the vampire hunters are abusing Christian metaphysics and morals. However, Seward, Quincey, and Arthur all subtly indicate their distance from religious belief. They all adopt and dismiss Christian symbols based on their usefulness in the current situation. While Seward and Quincey evidence their utilitarian relationship to Christianity in relatively benign ways, Arthur demonstrates his instrumental use of the religion in his rape-like execution of the vampiric Lucy—the novel’s most grotesquely violent and ethically disturbing scene.
Jann, Leatherdale, and Gregory Castle have noted the surprising fact that the morally questionable and perennially scientific Dr. Seward suggests his acceptance of the power of Van Helsing’s crucifixes and wafers (Jann 277; Leatherdale 185; Castle 532). Seward “[i]nstinctively” fends off Dracula with “the crucifix and wafer” and even “[feels] a mighty power fly along [his] arm” while doing so (Stoker 304). However, the former detail indicates his reliance on the empirical knowledge gained through Van Helsing’s demonstration at Lucy’s tomb while the latter suggests a continued focus on sensory perception rather than faith. Moreover, he goes on to describes how he, Van Helsing, Arthur, and Quincey “[steal] out of the room, leaving the two loving hearts [Jonathan and Mina] alone with their God” (307, italics added). Even after intuitively relying on religious symbols and having a physiological reaction to their power, Seward still implies that either he has no God at all or that, despite being part of the same anti-vampire crusade as the Harkers, his God differs from theirs. This phrase echoes the statement he made when Van Helsing first reveals the Host. As O’Malley notes, Seward evidences his disbelief in the Host by describing the wafer as being “to [Van Helsing]” “the […] most sacred of things” (218; O’Malley 148–9). Despite relying on the Host and the crucifix to guard against vampires, Seward repeatedly distances himself from his allies’ religion and demonstrates a belief that God’s existence is subjective and relative, rather than an objective theological truth.
Quincey’s religiosity is difficult to gauge, given that he keeps no journal and speaks only rarely in the journals and diaries of the others. However, even quiet Quincey—who is thrice described as speaking “laconically”—evidences some mistrust of Van Helsing’s occult Christianity (212, 242, 323). Jonathan and Quincey share in Dracula’s execution, with the former’s “great knife” “shear[ing] through the throat” and the latter’s “bowie knife plung[ing] into the heart” (367). Not only does the pair eschew Van Helsing’s formal, ritualistic procedure for killing vampires, but, as Phyllis A. Roth and Christopher Craft both note, Jonathan and Quincey also spurn his Catholic “weaponry” in favor of their own hunting knives (Roth 67 fn. 27; Craft 185). In the most crucial moment in their quest, and the final moment of Quincey’s life, he and Jonathan demonstrate greater faith in secular weaponry than in religious or occult ritual. By choosing the secular weapons over the sacred ones, Quincey suggests either that the two are interchangeable to him or that he deems the bowie knife as the more useful of the two—the better tool.
Arthur makes clear his distance from a Christian or quasi-Christian cosmology when he fulfills his “high duty” of staking the heart of his vampiric former bride-to-be, Lucy Westenra (Stoker 223). Although Van Helsing couches the event in Christian parlance, explaining that Arthur’s “blessed hand” will allow Lucy to “take her place with the other Angels,” and even though, as Bowles observes, Arthur’s title of “Lord Godalming” suggests “Lord God Almighty,” Seward recognizes Arthur not as a Christ figure but as “a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm [rises] and [falls]” (222, 223; Bowles 249). Following Van Helsing’s guidance, Arthur transforms into a Norse god rather than the Christian God. In this pagan context, the fact that during the staking “Van Helsing open[s] his missal and [begins] to read, and Quincey and [Seward] [follow] as well [they can]” takes on idolatrous overtones that undercut the Christian rhetoric surrounding the scene (Stoker 223).
The moment that apparently marks the Christian heroes’ first major triumph over vampirism is, in actuality, fraught with metaphysical and moral problems—the least of which is its patent pagan idolatry. Arthur—like a vampire—is a violent inversion of Christ. 15 The “shin[ing]” face of Godalming, a god who saves by piercing the heart of another rather than allowing his own hands and feet to be pierced in a crucifixion, “[gives] [Seward, Quincey, and Van Helsing] courage, so that [their] voices [seem] to ring through the little vault” (223). If the vampire hunters’ Christianity colludes with paganism, it positively embraces violence. Not only does Arthur replace Christ, but he replaces willing self-sacrifice with graphic violence inflicted on another. Even more troublingly, Senf, Herbert, Christopher Craft, and Alison Case all rightly observe implications of sexual violence in the phallic, murderous staking (“Mirror” 100; Herbert 114; Craft 182; Case 241 fn. 14). In the case of a sincere conversion, Christianity and paganism would presumably be mutually exclusive and misogynistic violence would be condemned rather than celebrated. In this case, however, the cosmologies become tools in the same way that wafers and crucifixes do: the instrumentalist vampire hunters use the Christian cosmology to justify the staking and use the pagan cosmology to enact it.
This misuse and manipulation of Christianity is not simply an indication of the protagonists’ doctrinal unorthodoxy. In positing themselves as holy crusaders, the protagonists use Christianity to validate whatever they do, just as Van Helsing misuses his alleged Indulgence, as Leatherdale puts it, as a “Vatican carte blanche to desecrate graves and mutilate corpses” even though Indulgences grant reprieves for past, not future, sins (Leatherdale 181). As Senf observes, the novel’s protagonists “avoid an inquest of Lucy’s death, break into her tomb and desecrate her body, break into Dracula’s houses, frequently resort to bribery and coercion to avoid legal involvement, and openly admit that they are responsible for the deaths of five alleged vampires,” all of which draws attention to “the contrast between the narrators’ rigorous moral arguments and their all-too-pragmatic methods” (“Mirror” 96).
Assuming the identity of pious Christians on a God-given mission obscures the fact that, ultimately, hatred motivates at least some of them. Van Helsing’s rhetoric of freeing vampires’ souls directly contradicts Jonathan’s wish to punish both Dracula’s body and his soul, and the idea of killing the vampires as an act of kindness—Seward even describes Arthur’s implement for destroying Lucy as a “mercy-bearing stake”—contrasts with Seward’s observation that his own “hate and loathing” of the vampiric Lucy would allow him to kill her “with savage delight” (Stoker 223, 219). 16 The vampire hunters not only instrumentalize their Christian rhetoric and paraphernalia—an act that may reflect a lapse or incompleteness of faith rather than an outright lack of it—but do so to sanction acts and intentions directly antithetical to the moral tenets of the creed they profess. This is not to elide Christianity with morality: while it would be absurd to claim that only a Christian can act morally, or even that any ethical failure marks someone as unchristian, it is reasonable to delineate between adherence to Christianity and the use of Christian rhetoric as means to perpetrate and rationalize hateful, violent acts expressly forbidden by Christian morals.
The defense that the ends justify the means resoundingly fails in redeeming the religiosity of the vampire hunters. Most notably, this utilitarian thinking stands in contrast with standard accounts of Christian morality that judges actions based on their adherence to God’s law and to Christ’s benevolent example. Further, though, the text muddies the protagonists’ abilities to rely on even this justification: Dracula provides no account of the moral value of executing vampires not mediated through one of its protagonists, and it complicates the moral value of a vampire’s life by suggesting the existence of vampiric souls. 17 Finally, as if to signal the incompleteness of the protagonists’ moral foundation, the novel depicts only an incomplete and ambiguous destruction of Dracula: as Roth notes, Dracula’s ostensible death, performed without the ritual quasi-Christian staking, differs radically from Lucy’s more definitive execution (Roth 67 fn. 27). Dracula “crumble[s] into dust,” possibly in a scripturally resonant death, but possibly in a vampiric escape—the female vampires in Castle Dracula demonstrate their ability to transform into dust (Stoker 367, 67–8; Roth 67 fn. 27). As contended above, Jonathan and Quincey’s divergence from ritual signals that for them Van Helsing’s quasi-Catholicism is just one weapon among many. Just as the undefined Host betrays a disinterest in theology, the incomplete ritual results only in a possible death. Unmoored from genuine Christianity, the vampire hunters can neither kill Dracula nor sufficiently justify their morally compromised efforts.
Both the vampires and their hunters pursue one goal exclusively and amorally—vampires prolong their lives by any means necessary, and vampire hunters end vampires’ lives at all costs. Both instrumentalize Christianity to accomplish their goals, with vampires inverting transubstantiation by drinking blood to preserve their earthly lives and the vampire hunters divesting the Host and crucifix of their theological significance, leaving them, as Leatherdale observes, “objects of magic rather than religion” (Leatherdale 181). 18 In a sense, then, both are vampires, draining away the inherent value of lives, religion, and morality, leaving only instrumentalist husks. This article has noted the critical tendency to read vampirism as a mirror or inversion of Christianity—O’Malley, Herbert, Blinderman, Raible, and Leatherdale all do so. That the vampire hunters can neither definitively destroy vampirism nor entirely distinguish themselves from it may not signify the novel’s efforts to deconstruct the vampire-Christian dyad it establishes, but, rather, the vampire hunters’ inability to truly fulfill the role of Christian as constructed by the novel. Rather than indicting or valorizing a type of Christianity, Dracula distinguishes between a commitment to a religion and the manipulation of that religion to facilitate and justify immorality.