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Dracula Q2: Christianity and colonialism
Christianity is embedded deeply in the fabric of the book. Dracula is held back by crucifixes, his soil destroyed by holy water. Mina is marked by the communion wafer. Dracula lives in Transylvania, a region described as "backwards" and superstitous, heavily pagan. Similarly, the heros of the book are upright Christian men, coming to spread the power of God and Empire to these heathen abberations.
Did the Christian overtones in the book bother you? Did you notice them? How should, or could, Dracula be retold in a more secular age?
Comments
Not just Christian, but specifically Catholic, I think. The heroes are mostly from Protestant nations and have to, in some cases reluctantly, adopt Catholic trappings and spirituality in order to tackle the enemy. This is (I think) part of a wider spirituality, not just confined to Christianity, which sees much or Protestantism, especially the nonconformist branches, as being too cerebral and insufficiently in contact with the non-material world.
So a nonconformist Christian tackling evil spiritual forces (like maybe Frank Peretti as a fairly extreme example) would not hold to crucifixes or sanctified communion elements, but would reckon that the name of Christ and the act of faith were entirely sufficient, and everything else is just superstition. Dracula is a long way in a different direction from this, holding that to combat spiritual entities you need objects that participate explicitly in both the material and spiritual worlds.
At one stage years ago I'd have put myself in the nonconformist camp, but nowadays not, so the inclusion of tangible spiritual weapons was a) not a surprise and b) quite welcome.
I suppose to some extent you could argue that this parallels the distinction in fantasy between magic (which typically needs "stuff" to make it work, as well as the training and innate skill of the magician, as opposed to psionic forces, which just need mental power without props.
These things didn't bother me in the slightest. I don't think Dracula should be re-told to suit a more secular age - let it remain a hallmark of it's own age. But I suppose Peter Watts tackled how vampires might be dealt with in the space age in his novel Blindsight.
But that does raise an interesting question - how would non Catholic people deal with a vampire? One presumes that like witchcraft and demons, there are (and always have been) ways of dealing with vampires, and crucifixes are just the '19th C. modern' version of this. Surely things like stakes through the heart, decapitation, and filling the mouth with salt harken back to older times. People in the ancient near east might have used curse texts, incantations, natron, and other things. But since the novel takes place in Europe at the end of the 19th C., these are the things we see.
(In Stoker's later novel, Lair of the White Worm, electricity and dynamite make an appearance, for example.)
I am agreeing with both Richard and Apocryphal here. The religious trappings work here because religion is magic, and so is Dracula. Apocryphal's mention of Peter Watt's Blindsight as a modern vampire story is spot on - that book was terrifying, and if you want a scary vampire story, read that. The religious objects work because this is what Catholicism was meant to combat. The crucifix and the rosary and the body of Christ are weapons in the war against darkness.
They didn't bother me. I saw the use of the religion of a locale as a weapon part of a typical move by an Empire to appropriate a local knowledge system against a people by showing that they did not have the power to use it. They are vulnerable and immature, and thus need to be governed by a "modern people" who know how to use the Catholic religious system to accomplish their goals. This is an incredibly common strategy of Orientalist and Colonial projects in general, although the tools are "horrific" and there is always the danger of falling "under their spell."