In Dracula, For Instance, We See This Same Leitmotif Of Ambiguity; Dracula

In Dracula, for instance, we see this same leitmotif of ambiguity; Dracula himself is a scientist and provides the Oedipal bad father to Van Helsing's good (Roth, 2004: 468). The interest in medicine and science as a way of prolonging life, through the use of surgery and drugs, opened up questions of ethics that had hitherto been redundant. The ambiguity in Gothic novels such as Dracula and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde reflect the growing anxiety over science's ability to regulate itself, an anxiety that still pervades today in the form of debates concerning cloning, DNA and stem cell research (Rose, 1996: 8).
We have seen how science and medicine is treated and portrayed in both texts; how they both reflect the changing face of scientific discourse and the ambiguity of the Victorian sensibility regarding the potential of experimentation. However there is further facet of science that is explored in the novels and that is its relation to religion and mysticism. Geoffrey Rowell, in Hell and Victorians (1974) details the extent that spirituality and, in particular, hell and damnation affected the late nineteenth century consciousness:
Heaven, hell, death, and judgment are the traditional Four Last Things of Christian theology, but it would be true to say that twentieth-century theologians have, for the most part, been embarrassed at saying much about any of them. In this they stand in sharp contrast to the majority of nineteenth-century divines, who not only wrote at length on Christian eschatology, but regarded it as a central part of Christian teaching. (Rowell, 1974: 1)
We can see this reflected very clearly in the narratives of both Dracula and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In the former, for instance, there are numerous references to crucifixes, sacraments, holy water and other sacred items that, literally, challenge the primacy of science to provide successful answers to the problems of pervasive evil; a clear metonym for the larger evils of society. In Stevenson's novel, science fails the desperate physician in the book's conclusion:
Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? Or will he find the courage to release himself at the last moment? God knows; I am careless; this is my true hour of death, and what is to follow concerns another than myself. (Stevenson, 1993: 62)
Jekyll's symbolic suicide here is not so much a reflection of his weakness as his loss of faith in science to provide a cure for his condition and the same can be said for the conclusion of Dracula. Van Helsing, a man of science, what we would recognize today as a psychiatrist, abandons his rational, scientific self and resorts to spirituality and mysticism to defeat the evil Other; itself a clear symbol for the Victorian faith in God as described by Rowell.