High Church, Low Church, and Purity

Throughout Dracula, religion and faith has proved to be greatly comforting to the “good” characters. The novel has been set up in such a way that the band of good Christians fighting Dracula employ civilized religion for their side, against the spooky mysticism of Dracula and Transylvania. In this way, “good versus evil” has also been ascribed to this binary, the idea that mysticism or superstition is something that needs to be defeated. By looking at the “Longman Anthology” text in comparison to Stoker’s Dracula, we can further analyze the role of religion in the text.

With any text, we can further understand the tensions between the pages of a story by studying the historical events going on at that time, and gain further insight into the author’s psychology. The “Longman Anthology” presents a sort of divide in the English Church in the Victorian age between “High Church” and “Low Church”. High Church consisted of the more mystical, not strictly Bible-based religious practices such as candle burning or incense burning. Low Church was an emerging oppositional faction within the Church of England that was “Anti-Catholic, Bible-oriented, concerned with humanitarian issues, and focused on the salvation of individual souls within a rigid framework of Christian conduct” (1056). This new faction was known as Evangelicalism; they disagreed with what they saw as frivolous Church practices in favor of frugality. “Gothic revival architecture, the burning of altar candles and incense, the resplendent vestments of the clergy— all these were aspects of a religious apprehension of sensuous beauty and mysticism that had not been seen in England since before the Reformation. This “High Church” aestheticism came into direct and ongoing conflict with “Low Church” sobriety” (1056). We can see Realism battle Mysticism when it comes to religion in Dracula.

Religion and faith are embodied in the forms of our Dracula-fighters, and we can imagine the picture of the “ideal Christian woman” being Mina Harker. She is constantly talking to and thanking God, dedicating her work to Him, and after she is turned, and the scar from the wafer seared into her forehead, it devastates her. “As he had placed the Wafer on Mina’s forehead, it had seared it— had burned into the flesh as though it has been a piece of white-hot metal. My poor darling’s brain told her the significance of the fact as quickly as her nerves received the pain of it” (Stoker, 316). It is the symbol of her rejection from God, who has always been the ultimate comfort for her. A tangible mark of being no longer pure, no longer even completely human, is the worst thing for Mina, worse even than the fact of being a vampire itself, and is supposed to be the biggest fear for any God-fearing good Christian woman. “Unclean! Unclean! Even the Almighty shuns my polluted flesh! I must bear this mark of shame upon my forehead until the Judgement Day” (Stoker, 316). Since Dracula’s attack of her was so reminiscent of a rape scene, this echoes of a woman’s rape causing her to lose her virginity, and in her eyes, her purity. No matter how good and pure the woman is, she could not help or prevent being attacked. “…so far as symbols went, she with all her goodness and purity and faith, was outcast from God” (328). However, at the end of this book, Dracula is killed and Mina’s purity is restored, something that cannot be done for rape survivors.