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Note: the following article on religion in Dracula is a modified excerpt (pp. 115-117) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see the relevant page on the main site.

You can also find an article about religion in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Religion in Dracula is a matter of oppositions. Bram Stoker’s Dracula presents the narrative as a whole and the Count in particular as an opposition to Christianity. Jacques Coulardeau argues that “Dracula [is] the heir of an older tradition than Christianity, that is to say paganism … Older religions are centered on a cult to nature: the night and the day, as well as the earth, the sun, and the moon” (2007, 130).

At the same time, Norma Rowen adds that the inverted Christian imagery in Dracula essentially renders the Count an antichrist, with Renfield’s phrase “the blood is the life” a parody of the Eucharist (1997, 241).

Furthermore, by calling Mina his “bountiful wine-press” (D 306), Dracula introduces a metaphor often argued to carry religious connotations. The reason is due to the fact that wine is part of the Eucharist (Kreitzer 1999, 125), but also because of the allusion to Genesis, with Mina’s vampiric baptism becoming a parody of the creation of Eve (Loughlin 2004, 204).

“Czarina Catherine” and “Demeter”

In the third part of the novel, Mina, in a hypnotic trance, reveals enough details for the men to pursue Dracula back to Transylvania. They discover that the ship carrying Dracula back is called “Czarina Catherine” (D 337).

Perhaps it would be tempting to read this solely as an allusion to the historical person after which the ship was named and thus as a hint at promiscuity, a threat evidently connected with Mina. Considering however that the novel refers to yet another ship, namely “Demeter”, the ship with which Dracula arrives in England, I argue that the two should be read as a pair. Rarignac makes such a comparison between the ancient Greek goddess Demeter and the Russian empress underlying the parallel:

Mythical torch-bearing “Demeter” brings light to the world through her role in the Eleusinian Mysteries; Catherine the Great, native Pomeranian who was christened Sophie by her Lutheran parents, became known as the Enlightener or Illuminator, and brought Russian dominance and the spark of the Orthodox faith to the Black Sea region through her victories over the Ottoman Turks … Voltaire celebrated the empress as “the Star of the North,” the immutable, thereby aligning her with Mina and contrasting her with the Count as Lucifer and the morning star – visible only at dawn and dusk. “The Czarina Catherine” is fittingly named for a vessel intended to transport a gnostic quest towards its ultimate ends: Wisdom and Purity. (Rarignac 2012, 167)

There is merit in such a reading. However, I argue that yet another comparison can be made, one focusing on Count Dracula, if the ships are examined in connection with the original bearers of their respective names, the ancient Greek goddess Demeter and Saint Catherine of Alexandria.

Death and Salvation

Exploring religion in Dracula through the prism of oppositions, interesting conclusions can be drawn. In particular, one should note that Demeter is connected with time and the cycle of the seasons in particular, but also with paganism, as she can be seen as “the pagan Mother Earth” (Andriano 1993, 111).

Saint Catherine of Alexandria, on the other hand, was raised a pagan but converted to Christianity before meeting her martyr’s death in the form of beheading (Alchin 2015). As a result, Count Dracula arrives in England aboard a ship named after a pagan goddess and is forced to retreat aboard one named after a converted pagan who became a martyr, and thus implicitly reached God after she was beheaded, much as the beheading of Lucy led to her absolution.

The pagan-Christian dichotomy is repeated often throughout the novel, also in regard to temporality and the split between cyclical and linear time. This individual occasion is quite significant, however, not only because it alludes to linearity (and Christianity) apparently vanquishing cyclicality (and paganism), but also because the ship names foreshadow the future and Dracula’s ostensible demise. Of course, such an outcome also implies that Dracula will find peace.

Religion in Dracula: Count Dracula’s Jewish Origins

Besides this tension (also temporal) between Christianity and paganism, Dracula also displays another similar split that again possesses temporal undertones. Namely, there are several references the text makes to Dracula’s possible Semitic origin. Religion in Dracula, being about oppositions, makes the differentiation explicit.

As Jonathan describes the Count, the very first thing he observes is that his face was “aquiline” (D 24), a description that alludes to Semitic origin (Davison 2004, 135). Furthermore, he has a “pointed beard” (D 148), traditionally associated with the Devil as much as the Jews (Davison 2004, 135). An additional detail is the Count’s characteristic odor (D 25), “similar to the foetor judaicus long attributed to the Jews” (Davison 2004, 135).

The Gothic has had a tradition of depicting Jewishness in particular, akin to mythological ways, long before Dracula.

The figure of the Wandering Jew – itself including significant connections to distorted temporality – precedes Dracula by many centuries, not only in folklore but also in literature, as Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale”, from The Canterbury Tales, could allude to the Wandering Jew. C.R. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), perhaps the most characteristic Gothic treatment of the figure, was written almost eight decades before Dracula.

Religion in Dracula as a Reflection of Wider Cultural Stereotypes

According to Davison (2004, 122), anti-Semitic stereotypes and cultural concerns, particularly in connection with the Jews’ assimilation into British society, remained a pertinent theme throughout the nineteenth century.

Particularly after the 1870s, Jews were seen with increased skepticism, as their allegiance to the Empire was questioned, and their image had become synonymous with the Gothic monster. Gothic tropes were consistently implemented to refer to Jews, as “in popular parlance generally, unscrupulous company promoters and (often Jewish) stock-jobbers were ‘vampires’, ‘bloodsuckers’, ‘wolves’, and ‘vultures’” (Malchow 1996, 160), underlining the Jews’ position as Others.

At this point it is important to recall that Dracula was written in the apogee of the British age of empire, and hence heavily influenced by the relevant anxieties of the fin de siècle.

Fears related to degeneration, temporal reversal, foreign invasion and corruption of the British core, play a very important part in Stoker’s novel. Although Dracula is perhaps not as a typical example of Imperial Gothic as, for instance, Haggard’s She, it is still paradigmatic of how these fears are projected on an Other. The age of empires effectively facilitates the creation of the age of vampires.

Read more: Angelis, Christos. “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic. Doctoral Dissertation. Tampere, Finland: Tampere University Press, 2017. Available from the repository of the Tampere University Press.

Works Cited

Alchin, L.K. “Saint Catherine”. Catholic Saints. 2015. Web. Accessed on 29 May 2015. < http://www.catholic-saints.info/patron-saints/saint-catherine.htm >.
Andriano, Joseph. Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 1993.
Coulardeau, Jacques. “The Vision of Religion in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula”. Post/modern Dracula: from Victorian Themes to Postmodern Praxis. Edited by John S. Bak. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2007.
Davison, Carol Margaret. Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature. Gordonsville: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Kreitzer, Larry Joseph. Pauline Images in Fiction and Film: on Reversing the Hermeneutical Flow. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press Ltd., 1999.
Loughlin, Gerard. Alien Sex: the Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004.
Malchow, Howard L. Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
Rarignac, Noël Montague-Étienne. The Theology of Dracula: Reading the Book of Stoker as Sacred Text. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2012.
Rowen, Norma. “Teaching the Vampire: Dracula in the Classroom”. Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Sucking through the Century, 1897–1997. Edited by Carol Margaret Davison. Toronto: Dundurn Group Ltd., 1997.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. London: Penguin, 2003. (Cited as D).