Fear of Religion

In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the character of Dracula is often seen depicting the devil or in some cases God, but Dracula more accurately represents Stoker’s fear for organized religion with the showing of the dangers in spreading yourself around and using women to put children under Dracula’s spell in blind faith.

                In Dracula Bram Stoker uses the character of Dracula to represent a new religion just beginning with showing the relationship between using crates of soil to help Dracula travel with mission trips where students will travel around the world trying to convert people to their certain religion. In Dracula Bram Stoker shows that Dracula can only travel and sleep in soil from his homeland of Transylvania making it so he must pack of crates of soil and disperse them across England because that is the territory that he wishes to move to for the fact that he would be able to make more vampires in the area. This brings a big parallel with mission trips made both a while ago when Christian missionaries were exploring new parts of the world and even today with churches of all denominations sending school aged students on missions across the world. Mission trips are used by every large secular religion to spread their religion to all parts of the world but since Stoker was born into an Irish Protestant family church we can believe he is mostly talking about Christian missionaries for the story of Dracula. Christian missionaries are known for travelling to many parts of the world to spread the Christian faith but one criticism that seems to arise from the mission trips is that Christians are westernizing these cultures that did not have Christianity instead of simply teaching the faith. This fear seems to be what Stoker is advising with Dracula showing that if you go around spreading your own culture and beliefs you are taking away the culture of those you are trying to help.

                Stoker shows a fear of organized religion and blind faith by showing that Dracula uses Lucy to bite children and turn them into vampires after she is turned into one herself. When Lucy gets turned into a vampire in the novel and leaves he grave at night she is trying to bite others around her but she isn’t going after older adults that can fight her off she is going after weak and innocent children that she knows she can infect. When children are young they start to develop a personality for themselves but it never starts out as something they really explore more of just adhering to what their parents believe. This is known as a time in development called “Identity Foreclosure” which is defined by “the status of adolescents who prematurely commit to an identity without adequately exploring alternatives” (Feldman 388). This can also be seen as blind faith where children will latch onto the religion of parents and guardians simply because they are in an environment where that’s all they know. Using Lucy to attack children can be seen as making them blindly believe in this vampire way of life with no real idea of what they are doing or trying to accomplish. Using sucking the blood out of children shows the fear that Stoker sees in organized religion being a danger to society.

                Stoker’s fear of organized religion is manifested in the things Dracula does to keep his legacy alive, with sucking the blood out of children and using foreign soil to draw parallels with blind faith and missionaries. One thing I was trying to look at was maybe more of Dracula representing a perversion of religion with Mina drinking his blood against Christians drinking wine at communion, as well as more research into Stoker’s religious background and missionaries in the past.  

Works Cited

Feldman, Robert. Development Across the Life Span. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2011. 1-724. Print

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. London, England: Puffin Books, 1887. Print