Mina’s Return to Purity through Religion

In Dracula, religion becomes something extremely important to the characters because it brings safety and cleanliness in a world tainted by Dracula. When Lucy was turning into a vampire, she never recognized god and never asked for religious help. After Lucy appeared to pass away she did not go to heaven and instead become the embodiment of evil and sucked the life out of children. This ultimately led to her rejection of the host, or any other religious symbol, and her gruesome murder by Arthur. On the contrary, Mina recognizes god and his judgement of her when she states “I am not worthy in His sight. Alas! I am unclean to His eyes, and shall be until He may design to let me stand forth in His sight as one of those who have not incurred His wrath” (Stoker pg 385). The capitalization of H represents god because it is not a regular man Mina is talking about, it is the all-powerful religious figure she praises. The continued repetition of His also means that only god can save and allow Mina to become a pure woman again. The words “eyes” and “sight” are important because as Mina is becoming a vampire it entails that she will also become voluptuous and sexual like the three sisters we see in the novel. Women are supposed to express themselves conservatively and with a calm demeanor but becoming a vampire would make Mina appear the complete opposite. If god saw Mina in an oversexualized appearance, it would be much harder for him to forgive her and see her as pure again. When Mina is forgiven and rid of Dracula’s evil when he dies it shows that her ability to acknowledge and rely on god allowed her to be saved. This ultimately shows that the Victorian society feared the repercussions of leading a life without the guidance and approval of god, or religious leaders. For a society that was so loyal to their religious practices, there was an immense amount of fear of what life would be if they steered away from it. Steering away from religion was in fact what was occurring in Victorian culture as science started becoming more influential in how we saw the natural world. Thus Bram Stoker’s Dracula reinforces the importance of being pious by installing fears into society of what they would become if they were not devout. Some fears include being overly sexual, immoral, blurring gender roles, evil, madness, and death which were all clearly seen as negative characteristics in the novel.