Envisioning an Indulgence: Dracula (1897) & Van Helsing (2004) (Critical Essay‪)‬

This paper argues that a sub-theme of pro-Catholicism exists in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula. The only people who destroy the Count are a Catholic, protected by Catholic sacraments and an Indulgence from a Church authority, and apparently partly converted Protestants. The possibility is addressed that Stoker, despite being considered a confirmed Protestant, wrote Dracula as an understated work of propaganda promoting the proselytisation of Protestants to Catholicism, and that the motion picture Van Helsing (2004), being a rare example of a screen adaptation so informed, suggests a foregrounding of this pro-Catholic sub-theme is possible. Despite the possibility that Dracula's antagonist is the most enduring and widely adapted of any modern literary creation, and that Irishman Bram Stoker's 1897 novel is arguably replete with Catholic allegory, no stage or screen adaptation faithfully foregrounds a pro-Catholic theme. The novel's religious analogy is obvious: in his most basic perversion of Catholic lore, Count Dracula is the figurative Antichrist who promises eternal life through the ingestion not of sacramental wine representing the blood of Christ, but of actual human blood. In analysing Stoker's characterisation of his eponymous star, both Ken Gelder and Judith Halberstam argue the Count is anti-semitically modeled on stereotypical images of blood-sucking, baby-stealing Jews, (1) while Clive Leatherdale plumbs the depths of its Catholic allegory and rationalises it as a response to the weakening hold of creationism in the face of Charles Darwin's evolutionism. (2)