Dracula, and Modernity's Innocence

Across many loose adaptations and questionable Salon articles, Bram Stoker's magnum opus has left its mark on the public consciousness. Yet its commentary on modernity goes tragically unnoticed...

If you have ever taken a literature class on Bram Stoker's famous 1897 novel Dracula, then you must have been taught its usual, inescapable subtextual interpretation: it's either a reaction against repressive Victorian norms surrounding sexuality, a disguised expression of the author's own closeted homosexuality, or a racist pamphlet  playing up the fear of the Other coming in from afar to pervert our women, drink the blood of Christian children and poison our water supply.

Thus if you wish to glean meaning from this novel, as is typical of literary analysis, you will have at your disposal a wide array of exactly three lenses to choose from: it’s about being gay, being jewish, or subverting conservative social values.

But enough about American right-wing influencers.

Instead, as the novel’s story begins on May 3rd, it is as good a time as any to approach the text from another angle, one that has already been discussed in academic circles, but remains largely unseen in the public consciousness: something I would call "modernity's innocence".

Modernity and the Ancient World

Now don't you worry, we are not concerned here with a critique of scientific progress, or the danger of science "going too far". Such themes were naturally prevalent in the literature of the time: one's mind goes to Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), if not further back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). And although these classic tales have lost little of their power and cultural aura across decades of remakes, reboots and re-imaginings, they are concerned with issues that have lost some of their original bite.

In a time of unprecedented technological bounds and societal transformations, it was easy to be swayed by Auguste Comte's positivism and to assume that one day, even something as ethereal and transcendent as a man's soul would inevitably find itself encased within a mathematical equation or swirling around in a test-tube. Man's fear then was that of the boundless power of science, before which not even the greatest eternal mysteries - least of all God - would prevail in the end. It was fear of the disenchantment of the world, of being left alone in a dark, cold universe with no morals, no guidelines, no wonder left to imagine and no stories left to tell.

Stoker's tale shows a different, almost opposite fear: here, the rationalist New World firmly enters the early spring of the scientific age, only to be caught back by the cold, crooked hands of the Old World, clawing its way back out of the early grave Progress had too eagerly - and too greedily - dug for it.

Here, science finds itself outmatched by an aberration, a walking contradiction, a division by zero, a "living-dead"; something that modernity, having dismissed tradition and faith as crude and useless, can no longer understand or fight against. Take too much antibiotics, and you'll be surprised how easily your immune system will fold against something as crude as a common cold.

Modernity vs the Old World: innocence and ignorance

Now this reading of Stoker's text is neither elusive nor unsubstantiated. In fact, it has been discussed at length in a particularly pertinent video by Morgoth.

Dracula And The Enchanted Past

The first chapters of Dracula are enough to show the severe dichotomy between the Old and New World, that have grown so distant as to be entirely alien to one another: Jonathan Harker's Londonian, self-assuredly rational mindset is soon challenged by the superstitious atmosphere that still reigns over the deepest recesses of wild Eastern Europe. But the dichotomy does not stop there.

Harker is a young man of modest origins, working hard to earn a living and rise above his condition; Dracula is the last scion of a dying aristocratic line, whose former glories are, in his own words, "as a tale that is told" (ch. 3). One is freshly engaged to a young woman; the other's former brides are long dead. One is an adventurer, and a confirmed man of action who traveled the world with his friends Godalming and Quincey Morris; the other has never left his country, and can not sleep even one night away from his native soil. One focuses first on "facts - bare, meager facts verified by books and figures and of which there can be no doubt" (ch. 3); the other bathes in the half-light of myth, where the "children of the night" howl at the coming dawn and blue flames glow eerily in the night of St-George's eve.

As we read through Harker's diary, we see his reason staggers against what his senses tell him, when he is faced with manifestations of blood-soaked folklore growing into palpable, deadly shapes. As he straddles the line between cold reality and a living nightmare, he never loses his sense completely, but relies more and more on supernatural aid, specifically a crucifix, which an old Transylvanian woman offered him before he left for Dracula's castle:

Taking a crucifix from her neck, [she] 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. She saw, I suppose, the doubt in my face, for she put the rosary round my neck, and said, “For your mother’s sake,” and went out of the room.

- Chapter 1

Notice the emphasis on Harker's Protestant faith as the motive behind his initial dismissal of the crucifix;

Bless that good, good woman who hung the crucifix round my neck! for it is a comfort and a strength to me whenever I touch it. It is odd that a thing which I have been taught to regard with disfavour and as idolatrous should in a time of loneliness and trouble be of help. Is it that there is something in the essence of the thing itself, or that it is a medium, atangible help, in conveying memories of sympathy and comfort

- Chapter 3

 Of course, you wouldn't blame Harker for disbelieving old wives' tales, and neither would I. But is it not rather faith that blinds him to the danger he faces? Isn't it his implied faith in the absolute explanatory power of scientific rationalism that leaves him unarmed and unready against his supernatural foe?

This innocence manifests itself also as rationalizing: as soon as he finds his way back to modern civilization, after months of illness, his first instinct is to doubt his senses and find some rational explanation for his bone-chilling memories:

"I have had a great shock, and when I try to think of what it is I feel my head spin round, and I do not know if it was real of the dreaming of a madman. You know I had brain fever, and that is to be mad."

- Chapter 9

Once he slinks back into the mold of his normal, nonthreatening, urban existence, he naturally starts repressing his memories, and assumes - or rather hopes - that it was nothing more than the effects of some momentary illness of the brain. It is only when he sees the Count again in London that he finally accepts the grim reality.

Once again, it is by belief rather than reason that Harker holds on to his rationalist view. Though you will note in the text that he never dismisses his experience entirely; instead he simply casts a veil of ignorance over it, and tries to live a normal life with Mina - now Mina Harker. The seed of acceptance of the supernatural has been sowed in his heart, and it bears fruit in the end: but his stronger belief in rationality, desperate to find a scientific explanation, dismisses the most logical conclusion: that what he lived through was just as real as it was supernatural.

Reason vs Rationalism: the failures of modern faith

Thus the protagonists are powerless to stop or even hinder the threat of Dracula. Which begs the question: isn't Dracula more rational than his supposedly enlightened adversaries? Isn't it they who, clogged as they are by presumption and scientism, dismiss the only weapons that could truly hinder him? Dracula says it best himself:

"Ah, sir, you dwellers in the city cannot enter into the feelings of the hunter!"

- chapter 3

In yet another point of contrast, the Count is fully prepared to face the modern world: he plans his expedition with explicit care: his library is filled with tome after tome on all manners of information on life in London. He already speaks excellent English when meeting Harker, and  eagerly learns more from long nightly discussions with him. From the boxes of earth to his other contacts in London to his command over the Roma by the end of the novel, everything in Dracula's undertaking speaks loudly of one who "commanded nations and intrigued for them".

Dracula is more than a bloodthirsty monster: he is a prepared, methodical invader. He has carefully studied his preys, and knows exactly how to exploit their weaknesses. Against him, his adversaries' strengths are rendered useless.

His shape-shifting abilities make him an impossible target for Quincey Morris' gun; the supernatural hold he exerts over Renfield's mind confounds Dr Seward; he toys with Arthur Holmwood's nerves as he slowly turns his beloved Lucy into another vampire before his very eyes; and he even attacked the group's beating heart, by desecrating - without ever breaking entirely - Mina Harker's body in a dark mockery of Holy Communion.

This begs the question: isn’t Dracula more rational than his supposedly enlightened adversaries? Are they not encumbered by the limitations of their rationalist attitudes, which leads them to dismiss the only weapons that could truly endanger the Count? Whereas the dreaded vampire, knowing both worlds, can easily navigate through London and accomplish his sinister purpose.

Yet this also exemplifies one of Dracula's own weaknesses: the rigidity, and thus predictability of his purpose. As in uncounted centuries past, he remains a conqueror, through and through; and his undertaking, no matter how thoroughly planned, is still animated by the same thirst for blood and the same will to dominate. Call it "mental rigor mortis". It proves to be a major weakness for the Count against the only opponent who truly understands his foe: Abraham Van Helsing.

Abraham Van Helsing: the bridge between the worlds

As the Brothers Krynn have already discussed, professor Abraham Van Helsing is far from the common image of a scientist facing a supernatural entity. Isn't it only too common today that the supernatural element is made lesser, more quaint, through the rationalizing might of The Science Man?

Remember Ghostbusters, where gods and demons are reduced to extra-dimensional Pokemon you can capture with the right equipment? Or Blade, where you can rationally explain away all the odd wants, needs and weaknesses of the Undead?

But what makes Van Helsing stand out, is that he has one foot planted firmly into each of the seen and unseen realms. He never reduces the supernatural to a simple formula, nor does he proclaim belief is superior to the scientific method. Instead he works on both levels.

Dracula: Abraham Van Helsing: The Wisest Old Man in all of Horror Fiction

We have seen how deep is the chasm that separates the Old World and the New: Van Helsing is the only character who can truly cross it. He is a man of science and a man of faith, a practicing Catholic and a practitioner of newly developed techniques - such as hypnotism, which neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot had brought back into the limelight in the early 1880s.

He is as well-versed in psychology, as Seward's old mentor, as he is attuned to religion and the realm of the occult. And once he arms his teammates with wreaths of garlic, sacred wafers and crucifixes, they finally start to turn things to their advantage. The hunter becomes the hunted, and must flee back to Eastern Europe, where his fate will finally be settled for good.

This is hardly clearer than in chapter 24, where Van Helsing hypothesizes that Dracula's power comes not only from his supernatural state, but from his very country, "full of strangeness of the geologic and chemical world"; his impression that there should be "something magnetic or electric in some of these combinations of occult forces which work for physical life in strange way" reveals the scientist's interest in the fresh mysteries of electricity, the curative applications of which had been the subject of many unfortunate experiments. From Golding Bird's "electric bath" to Isaac Pulvermacher's “hydro-electric belt" (tested out, it is said, by Dickens himself), this area of research was as flourishing then as it may seem ridiculous today.

Yet in the same paragraph, the professor reminds his friends of their duty to stamp out Dracula, as "ministers of God's own wish. That the world, and men for whom His Son die, will not be given over to monsters, whose very existence would defame Him" (ch. 24). They are as "knights of the Cross", bound by oath to destroy the evil and redeem their unfortunate companion Mina.

Through inspiration, companionship and faith in the same purpose, Van Helsing effectively resuscitates the dying embers of the Old that reanimate his younger friends with a fire that burned ever brighter.

But there is yet another key element in this rebirth of the old through the new…

"An oath thou hast sworn…"

Several times across the novel, characters depend on promises made to each other, and to their trust in one another: in chapter 9, Mina relates to Lucy how Jonathan entrusts her with his diary, even though he knows not yet whether what he wrote in it is truth or insanity.

'Are you willing, Wilhelmina, to share my ignorance? Here is the book. Take it and keep it, read it if you will, but never let me know unless, indeed, some solemn duty should come upon me to go back to the bitter hours, asleep or awake, sane or mad, recorded here.'

In chapter 16, Van Helsing asks a great leap of faith from his friends, and particularly Arthur Holmwood, as he leads them to his fiancee Lucy's tomb so that they may destroy the undead "Bloofer-Lady" the Count had turned her into. And as they return from their grisly task, shaken but with reaffirmed faith in the Professor, he asks them to take another oath:

"Now, my friends, one step of our work is done, one the most harrowing to ourselves. But there remains a greater task: to find out the author of all this our sorrow and to stamp him out. I have clues which we can follow, but it is a long task, and a difficult one, and there is danger in it, and pain. Shall you not all help me? We have learned to believe, all of us, is it not so? And since so, do we not see our duty? Yes! And do we not promise to go on to the bitter end?" Each in turn, we took his hand, and the promise was made.”

- Chapter 6

And in chapter 25, it is a bed-ridden, vampirised Mina Harker who solemnly asks her dearest friends to swear one final oath:

"When you shall be convinced that I am so changed that it is better that I die that I may live. When I am thus dead in the flesh, then you will, without a moment's delay, drive a stake through me and cut off my head, or do whatever else may be wanting to give me rest!"

- Chapter 25

It may all seem quite trivial: the idea of promising to do something for your loved ones is hardly outlandish in the modern world. But oaths, in ancient times, guaranteed social order: one's honor, and that of their family and friends, was at stake when one swore to speak the truth, to serve a lord or to love a wife. In such an honor-based system, where reputation and trust were the best of guarantees, oath-breakers were treated all the more harshly, and blood was often the wage of an offense.

By invoking this dated concept, Stoker summons visions and feelings of another age, and lets them materialize between the walls of a late Victorian apartment in London, in the souls of English adventurers who for an instant, become as knight-servants, kneeling before a princess to offer her their fealty and their lives. This excerpt, narrated by Dr Seward in his phonographic diary, explicitly draws attention towards the solemn religiosity and knightly devotion that transpire through the scene.

"How can I, how could anyone, tell of that strange scene, its solemnity, its gloom, its sadness, its horror, and withal, its sweetness. Even a sceptic, who can see nothing but a travesty of bitter truth in anything holy or emotional, would have been melted to the heart had he seen that little group of loving and devoted friends kneeling round that stricken and sorrowing lady; or heard the tender passion of her husband's voice, as in tones so broken and emotional that often he had to pause, he read the simple and beautiful service from the Burial of the Dead. I cannot go on… words… and v-voices… f-fail m-me"

- Chapter 25

The chivalrous imagery and pious vocabulary are far from coincidences: these are the tools through which our heroes eventually triumph. Yet they never dismiss scientific discoveries, discard modern weapons or refuse to plan ahead. For they do not simply believe in the supernatural; but in the Eternal Fact, the Source of all truth and of all reason.

By holding on to the Old and New Worlds, Stoker's heroes accomplish the impossible against all odds. Modernity made them as innocent as doves; the ancient world forced them to become as shrewd as snakes. Holding to both these truths in our own personal lives, we may yet conquer.

**********************************************************************

If modernity's innocence against the Old World is presented clearly in the text, it is also easily spotted in our own time, though in different ways. Over the last two years in France, the news have been saturated with a consistent flow of theft, burglary, rape and homicide. Out of all the horrifying stories you may have heard about stabbed priests or beheaded school-teachers, the one that sticks out the most to me is the case of 12-year-old Lola Daviet, whose body was found on October 14, 2022. I will spare you the grisly details here, but know that the depths of depraved, blood-soaked barbarism involved in this are enough to make a civilized mind stagger.

More staggering yet are the main suspect's motivations, which defy even the all-encompassing explanatory power of The Science. She had allegedly kidnapped, tortured and killed Lola for nothing more than a perceived slight from her victim's mother a few days before.

But the worst part of it is that, scientifically speaking, she was sane: doctors could not report "any psychiatric illnesses such as autism, schizophrenia, paranoia or others". No evidence of radicalization could be found. All we can say for certain is that she displayed sociopathic tendencies, a complete lack of compassion, and that she had been heard talking to herself at night, and may have dabbled in dark magic (which might explain why she originally claimed the crime had been committed in a dream, or by a ghost).

To say "it's demons" would be too easy: but when all natural explanations are spent, where are we to turn?

Needless to say, a humanist, human-rights believing, enlightened society has no tools to understand such abject, gratuitous monstrosity. When faced with such blatant horror, how could our contemporaries react? Well, as always, no one was willing to draw any conclusion: silent marches were held, candles were lit up, and our national public television graced us with a tax-funded documentary about how evil the far-right was for talking about the affair. And we have trudged on, until the next horror story came along…

In our modern age, we have been so blessed with unprecedented access to food, water, energy and general comfort, that we have grown incapable of facing barbarism with anything more than panicked incomprehension and guilt-ridden apathy. Our representatives speak boldly of principles, moral debts and human rights, and in the same sentence, deny cultures, nations and personal identities as anything more than infinitely malleable social constructs.

Modernity leaves us with a materialist, reductionist outlook on existence, an ocean of relativity where we will drown to our death unless we cling firmly on to some truth. And out of the debris of the Old World, we may not have a choice as to which piece of wreckage our desperate fingers will find.

I cannot help but be reminded of Lola's father, Johan, who after suffering severe mental health issues due to his daughter's death, died on February 24 2024.

So let’s keep our feet planted firmly into Reality, and raise our heads up to Truth. While we can, let’s drink from the deepest wells of our civilization - and from others - to quench our silent thirst for wisdom, inspiration, courage and purpose.

As our days of dishonorable peace may be coming to a bitter end, it is high time we start believing in monsters again.