The Men investigate Carfax

Chapter 7

Includes the October 1st entries of Jonathan Harker’s journal, Dr. Seward’s diary, and Mina Harker’s journal; as well as the October 2nd entry of Mina Harker’s journal.
Armed with crucifixes, garlic, holy communion wafers, electric lamps, knives, and revolvers, the men go to investigate Carfax. The break into the house, and, after they find some keys, Jonathan, having seen the plans to the place, is able to lead them to the chapel. The chapel is full of a nauseating smell, and the men investigate to find that twenty-one of the boxes are missing. A few of the men think that they see Dracula’s face outside the window, but dismiss it after a moment as a trick of the light. The room then becomes overrun by thousands of rats. Arthur takes the keys and throws open a chapel door to the outside. He blows a whistle and his dogs, which he has brought to Seward’s house, come to the rescue. Although initially timid at the chapel’s threshold, once encouraged the dogs send the rats running. The men return, having accounted for only twenty-nine boxes but having survived a crucial first step. Jonathan remarks before going to bed that Mina looks paler than usual. The next morning, Van Helsing asks Seward for permission to see Renfield. The interview is short Renfield insults Van Helsing and tells him to leave, which he does.
Mina reports bad dreams. The night the men go to Carfax, a mist creeps over the lawn outside her window. She can hear Renfield screaming, but he is silenced by the asylum attendants. In a state of half-sleep, she has a dream that mist is pouring into her room. In the mist, she can see two red eyes, and later, she sees a white face bending towards her. The next night, she sleeps but does not dream. She wakes feeling unrefreshed. Renfield asks to see her, and when she does he kisses her hand and asks God to bless her. Later, she asks Seward for a drug to help her sleep, which he provides, but she goes to bed feeling a sudden fear that she might want the power to wake.
Includes the October 1st and October 2nd entries of Jonathan Harker’s journal; the October 1st entry of Seward’s diary; a letter from Mitchell, Sons and Candy to Lord Godalming, dated October 1st; and the October 2nd entry of Seward’s diary.
Jonathan tracks down the destinations of the missing boxes, which have been deposited in houses in different places in and around London. Twelve boxes have been put into two houses in different parts of London, and the last nine boxes are in a house in Picadilly, a London suburb. The men wonder how they will break into houses in populated areas.
Seward speaks with Renfield some more. Renfield seems more articulate, but his ideas are still bizarre. He seems torn by the need to consume life, but he is fearful of consuming souls. Reports of Renfield’s behaviour show a man in deep conflict; he is at times articulate and at time seems as if he is consumed by a deep remorse.
The men try to plan an assault that will destroy all fifty boxes in one day, between sunrise and sunset. Van Helsing researches magical defenses and cures to use against the vampire. Seward characteristically wonders if they have all gone mad, and will wake up in straitjackets. The chapter ends with a report from an attendant that Renfield has had a terrible accident. Dr. Seward goes to investigate. . .
The October 3rd entry of Dr. Seward’s diary.
Renfield’s face is bashed and bleeding and his back is broken. The attendant wonders how the straitjacketed Renfield could have injured himself this way: if his back was broken, he wouldn’t have been able to beat his own face against the floor, and if he mangled his face before throwing himself off the bed, blood would have been left where he landed. Seward sends an attendant to fetch Van Helsing. Van Helsing performs an emergency operation to relieve the pressure brought on by the skull injuries, so that Renfield can tell them what happened. The dying Renfield tells them that on the night the men went to investigate Carfax, Dracula appeared and offered him countless lives to feast on if Renfield would fall down and worship him. The madman gave the vampire the invitation he needed to enter the asylum; after that, the vampire did not give Renfield any of the promised lives. Two days later, Renfield saw Mina and realized that she had been drained. So tonight, when Dracula entered, Renfield tried to fight with him. The vampire’s eyes burned him and deprived him of his strength, and Dracula flung him across the room.

The men rush upstairs to the Harkers’ room. They find it locked and are forced to break down the door. When they enter, they see Jonathan Harker unconscious and Mina Harker being forced to drink blood from a cut on Dracula’s chest. The vampire throws Mina aside and prepares to attack, but Van Helsing brandishes a holy wafer, and the men advance with their crucifixes. Dracula draws back, and the room is enveloped in darkness as a cloud obscures the moon. He becomes mist and escapes. Mina screams with horror and despair. They wake Jonathan, who is terribly confused, and Mina keeps crying that she has been made unclean. Arthur and Quincey, who left to pursue Dracula, return to report that the vampire destroyed the study including the papers compiled by Mina and Jonathan. Fortunately, another copy is hidden in the safe. The two men went to Renfield’s room and found him dead. Quincey reports that he saw a bat flying from Renfield’s window, though not back in the direction of Carfax.
Mina tells the men that she woke to see Dracula standing there, her unconscious husband beside him; he threatened to kill her husband if she screamed for help. Assuring her that it was not the first time he had drained her, he then drank from her throat. Dracula then promised that she would be “flesh of my flesh” and “blood of my blood,” telling her that she would soon become his companion and helper. When he calls, she will have no choice but to come. He then forced her to drink the blood from a wound he made in his chest.
Analysis
Mina stands ready as the count’s next victim. When she writes that “sleep begins to flirt with me,” we know that it is Dracula—not sleep—that is seducing her during the night. These suspicions are confirmed when, in one of the strangest and most debated scenes of the novel, Van Helsing’s crew barges in upon Dracula’s feeding frenzy. The scene, which likely shocks us as much as it does the men, challenges gender conventions in several ways. First, neither of the men appears to be the aggressor. Rather than jumping to his wife’s defense, Harker sprawls on the bed, while Dracula, rather than feeding, is fed upon. Although the count forces her into the position yet Mina is in effect the instigator as she actively sucks from the wound on Dracula’s chest. Here, the vampire presents a perverse mockery of the nursing mother: rather than giving life by offering milk, the count tries to ensure Mina’s death by feeding her his blood. Symbols commonly viewed as male become female, and vice versa: aggression becomes stupor, and milk is transformed into blood. The entire scene defies gender categories, which would be especially troubling to Victorian audiences who relied upon rigid categories to structure their lives. In a world governed by reason and order, Dracula can pose no greater threat than by disordering gender roles.
The feeding ritual in Harker’s room perverts not only the image of a mother nursing her child, but also the image of the Eucharist. The Christian ritual of Communion celebrates Christ’s sacrifice through the ingestion of the wafer and wine, which, depending on one’s beliefs, either represent Christ’s flesh and blood or literally become them through transubstantiation. Participating in the Eucharist, some believe, confers immortal life after death. Dracula, by contrast, consumes real—not symbolic—blood. Though the blood grants the count immortality, his soul is barred from achieving anything that resembles Christian grace. Renfield, who lives according to Dracula’s philosophy, goes so far as to discredit the notion of a soul. Indeed, according to Dr. Seward’s diary, the patient “dreads the consequence—the burden of a soul.” Much of Van Helsing’s arsenal against the count comes from Catholic symbolism, including the crucifix and holy Communion wafers. Given the rising religious skepticism in Victorian society—as Darwin’s theory of evolution complicated universal acceptance of religious dogma—Stoker’s novel advocates a return to the more superficial, symbolic comforts and protection of the church. Stoker suggests that a nation that ignores religion and devotes itself solely to scientific inquiry dooms itself to unimaginable spiritual dangers.

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