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Is Dracula an allegorical tale?
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This article one author's take on Stoker's hidden meanings...DRACULA SYMBOLISM, IMAGERY, ALLEGORY https://www.shmoop.com/dracula/symbol...
BLOOD:
This one is practically a no-brainer—of course blood is important in a vampire book. Whether they're vegetarian Twilight vampires chugging down elk's blood or gleefully stating "Mwahaha! I vant to drink your blood," we know that vampires are to the red stuff as Santa Claus is to milk and cookies.
But what, exactly, do all the references to blood mean? Renfield is the only character to really explain it, and he does so in fairly reasonable tones to Mina:
"I tried to kill him for the purpose of strengthening my vital powers by the assimilation with my own body of his life through the medium of his blood—relying, of course, upon the Scriptural phrase, "For the blood is the life." (18.16)
So, according to Renfield, anyway, to consume someone else's blood is to consume some vital part of his or her life. If you consume enough of their blood, you gain their "vital powers" (and, obviously, they die).
Of course, we have to take Renfield's explanation with a grain of salt (or a drop of blood) since after all, he's locked up in an insane asylum for a reason. But his explanation does make a certain amount of sense when you compare it to what Dracula is up to—he appears to have gotten younger after moving to England and feeding on Lucy. She becomes weaker as he becomes stronger.
Perhaps Renfield is right—maybe in the world of Dracula, consuming someone else's blood really does allow you to "assimilate" some of their "vital powers."
Thirsty?
COMMUNION AND THE SACRED WAFER:
Here's the clincher: It's not just the vampires who are drinking blood. It's also (gulp) the good guys.
As long as we're talking about drinking blood, we should pause to think about the Christian ritual of Holy Communion (a.k.a. the Lord's Supper or Holy Eucharist). Religious infodump: Holy Communion is a kind of reenactment of Jesus's last meal with his disciples the night before he was crucified. He ate some bread and had some wine, shared it with his friends, and told them that the bread represented his body and that the wine represented his blood (he knew he was about to die).
He also instructed them to remember him whenever they had wine and bread. Christians of almost every sect perform some version of Communion, eating bread or wafers and drinking wine. However, one of the main differences between Catholic Communion and most Protestant Communion is the Roman Catholic belief that, during the rite of Communion, the bread and wine consumed actually change to become the body and blood of Jesus. (This is called "transubstantiation," for the "changing" ["trans"] of substance.)
So when Van Helsing shows up with "Sacred Wafers," what he has are Communion wafers (bread) that have already been blessed by a priest. And since Van Helsing is Roman Catholic, he believes in transubstantiation—that the wafers only look like wafers, but are actually the body of Jesus. That's about as holy as you can get in the Christian tradition.
Why is this important in Dracula, you ask? Well, at its most basic level you could view the Christian rite of Communion as being about gaining strength from consuming someone else's blood. Is vampirism a twisted version of the most sacred of Christian rituals? That makes vampirism pretty darn unholy.
And maybe that's why the Sacred Wafer that Van Helsing brings is so effective as a vampire repellant. The Sacred Wafer and vampires are like opposite ends of a magnet—they simply can't touch, according to a fundamental physical (or spiritual) law. Remember what the wafer does to poor vampire Mina's head?
As he had placed the Wafer on Mina's forehead, it had seared it—had burned into the flesh as though it had been a piece of white-hot metal. (22.43)
Ouch!
Read more in the full article on DRACULA SYMBOLISM, IMAGERY, ALLEGORY https://www.shmoop.com/dracula/symbol...
Bayesian Analysis Of Blood Transfusion In Dracula http://imj.ie/bayesian-analysis-of-bl...Digging our teeth into different blood types in Dracula https://www.imt.ie/blogs/digging-our-...
Do vampires go for certain blood types? It’s a possibility, according to a fascinating piece of conjecture in the Irish Medical Journal.
Underground Knowledge — A discussion group
Books mentioned in this topic
Vlad the Impaler: In Search of the Real Dracula (other topics)Vlad Dracula: The Dragon Prince (other topics)
Dracula (other topics)
Dracula (other topics)
For example, could there be a subtle commentary on the ultimate nature of blood? Things science is perhaps yet to discover about blood and possibly DNA as well?
Note that Bram Stoker was a member of the secret society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. http://www.thejourneyhomegenealogy.co...
Clinical vampirism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clini...
"Clinical vampirism, more commonly known as Renfield's syndrome or Renfield syndrome, is an obsession with drinking blood. The earliest formal presentation of clinical vampirism to appear in the psychiatric literature, with the psychoanalytic interpretation of two cases, was contributed by Richard L. Vanden Bergh and John F. Kelley in 1964.[1] As the authors point out, brief and sporadic reports of blood-drinking behaviors associated with sexual pleasure have appeared in the psychiatric literature at least since 1892 with the work of Austrian forensic psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Many medical publications concerning clinical vampirism can be found in the literature of forensic psychiatry, with the unusual behavior reported as one of many aspects of extraordinary violent crimes."