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DRACULA’S APOLOGETICS OF PROGRESS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2016

Lucas Kwong
Lucas Kwong*
Affiliation:
New York City College of Technology, CUNY
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Extract

Religion in Dracula studies has often looked a little like the Un-Dead Lucy, a ghastly simulacrum of living faith. Indeed, readings of the novel frequently depend on a suspicious approach to the novel's professions of piety, one that regards them as a mask for more fundamental concerns: the heroes profess religious concern, but what they really want is to neutralize the New Woman, or racial degeneration, or sexual perversion. Under these conditions, Christianity provides, at best, a potent discourse through which the characters can manage these coded crises. When religion does enter the conversation, critics tend to read the text for clues to Stoker's personal position on the theological controversies of his day: the Catholic-Protestant divide in Ireland, the place of High Church ritualism in Anglican worship, the merit of the doctrine of transubstantiation. As a result, we are left with a Dracula that functions as an elaborate code book, encrypting what Stoker secretly (or not-so-secretly) believed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , March 2016 , pp. 111 - 129
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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