Stoker builds Dracula around a pair of characters who understand the vampire long before anyone else does, and neither is believed for most of the novel because of how they understand it. Renfield, locked in an asylum, has already fallen partly under Dracula’s psychic influence and eats flies and spiders to ‘absorb their life’ — a madman whose ravings are, infuriatingly, more accurate than the sane characters’ explanations.
Van Helsing is his opposite: a Dutch physician fluent in folklore that his rigorously modern English colleagues find embarrassing, who has to spend chapters simply convincing Dr. Seward that garlic and communion wafers belong in a scientific investigation at all. Stoker uses both men to dramatize the novel’s real anxiety — a scientific age suddenly forced to admit that its instruments can’t detect everything that’s real.
It’s a theme the vampire fiction that came before Stoker gestured at more crudely; Dracula is the version that made the gap between knowledge and belief the actual engine of the horror.
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