Dracula’s plot is framed as a Crusade against a Saracen-like enemy

Evidence

Dracula is an anti-Catholic text. Superstitious Transylvanians and roadside shrines are dismissed by Jonathon Harker as relics of a former time, code for “weird, Catholic stuff.” Stoker, a member of the Church of Ireland, clearly harbored some ill feelings toward Catholics and their religious accoutrements, but these elements also reflect the Romantic-Gothic preoccupation with medievalism, a period that the Gothic style inextricably identified with Catholicism. In fact, the entire campaign to kill Dracula is framed as a Crusade, much like medieval battles against the Saracen: This crusade is conducted by the lawyer Harker and other Westerners of good standing, a nobleman and a doctor from England, Van Helsing as a representative of Teutonic blood, and Morris, a courageous big-game hunter. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 521

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects Dracula’s anti-Catholic and Crusade framing to Arjana’s earlier chapters on the medieval Saracen as the template of the Muslim monster; also ties to BMF candidate in Frankenstein — the monster as all non-white Others.
• BMF: The detail that Dracula’s enemies are a multi-national coalition fighting a supernatural Saracen-like count reproduces a pattern in Things Fall Apart — where a coalition of European institutions/representatives ‘civilize’ and dismantle an African ‘other’ community, with each participant carrying a distinct civilizational mission.