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Chapter 20-21

Summary
The narrative returns to Harker's journal. Harker investigates the whereabouts of the boxes of earth that were removed from Carfax and finds that twelve have been delivered to two London houses. The other nine have been taken to a house in Piccadilly, an area of London.
Back at the asylum, Harker and the other men wonder how they are going to break into a house in a busy area like Piccadilly without being seen.
Seward's diary records his visit to Renfield, who claims he is now indifferent to eating flies, but nevertheless says, "Life is all I want." He insists that he does not want the souls of the flies and spiders that he eats, but Seward points out that if he takes a life, he will necessarily be burdened by the soul of the creature. This idea upsets and angers Renfield. Because Renfield appears to want a higher kind of life, Seward suspects that the Count has visited and influenced him.
The men form a plan to sterilize all the Count's earth in one day, between sunrise and sunset, to deny him all his refuges.
Seward notices that Renfield is unusually quiet, but suddenly hears a yell from his room. An attendant rushes in and tells Seward that Renfield has had an accident. Seward finds Renfield lying face-down on the floor, covered with blood. His face is bruised, as though it had been beaten against the floor, his skull is fractured, and his back seems to be broken. Van Helsing, Holmwood and Morris arrive. Renfield knows that he is dying. He tells the men that the Count has been visiting him. The Count sent Renfield flies to eat, wanting to be invited into his room. He promised Renfield all sorts of creatures to eat in exchange for Renfield's worship of him as his master.
Mina visits Renfield. He notices that she looks pale, and angrily concludes that the Count has been draining the lifeblood from her. The next time the Count visits him, in the form of a mist, he grabs him. The Count takes human form, picks Renfield up and throws him to the floor before slipping away under the door into the asylum.
Alarmed to hear that Mina has become the Count's victim, the men run to her bedroom door, which is locked. They break in on a shocking scene. Harker is lying on the bed in a stupor. Mina is kneeling on the bed facing the Count, who is forcing her face down onto a bleeding wound on his chest. She is drinking his blood. Van Helsing leaps forward, brandishing his communion wafers, which makes the Count retreat. As the rest of the men advance with their crucifixes, the Count escapes in the form of a vapor. Mina utters a piercing scream.
Van Helsing wakes Harker, who is horrified at the sight of the blood-covered Mina. Mina cries that she is "unclean" and has become her husband's worst enemy. Harker reassures her of his loyalty to her.
Holmwood and Morris enter. Holmwood says that the Count has burned all their manuscripts and diaries, but fortunately, they have copies in the safe. Morris, who wanted to find out where the Count had escaped to, says that he saw a bat fly from Renfield's window, but it did not head for Carfax.
Mina recounts that she awoke to find Harker asleep by her side and a white mist in the room. The mist turned into the Count, whom she recognized by the descriptions she had read in the various diaries. Terrified, she noted his red eyes and the red scar on his forehead, where Harker had struck him with the shovel in Transylvania. The Count threatened to kill her husband if she made a sound. He drank blood from her throat, saying that this was not the first time he had done so. Mina felt her strength being drained away. He told her that she was now "flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin," adding that she would be his companion and helper and would always come to his call. He also said that she would feed off the group of men that surround her. With a sharp fingernail, he opened a vein in his chest, forced her lips onto the wound, and made her drink his blood.
Mina feels that she is now "a poor soul in worse than mortal peril."
Analysis
The scene where the men burst into Mina's room to find her drinking the Count's blood is the most shocking - and certainly one of the most discussed - in the novel. Much of its power to shock arises from Stoker's inversion of traditional gender stereotypes. Harker, who should be defending Mina from the evil Count, lies in a stupor on his bed, in the usual pose of the helpless female victim. While the Count does threaten Mina and force her head onto his breast, she is actively drinking his blood. It is significant that she recalls that when the Count drinks blood from her neck, "I did not want to hinder him." We are reminded that he can only go where he is first invited. Though Mina blames "the horrible curse. when his touch is on his victim," we cannot help but think that this is an unconvincing attempt to blame an external factor for the desire his touch aroused in her - reminiscent in its disingenuousness of a rapist blaming his actions on his victim for wearing a short skirt.
The Count is usually the feeder who sucks blood from his victims, but our first sight of him, in a perversion of the traditional mother-and-infant roles, involves him giving Mina blood from his breast. While the mother gives life to her child through her milk, the Count is ensuring death for Mina's soul - a fate that her male friends will share when she feeds off their blood.
The blood-sucking theme also subverts the symbolism of the Christian sacrament of Holy Communion or the Eucharist. Communion involves drinking consecrated wine that is thought to represent or actually become the blood of Christ. This wine (along with the consecrated wafer, which represent Christ's body) is believed to be a food that nourishes a person in the direction of immortality. Drinking the Count's blood, as Mina does, confers a kind of immortality - the Un-dead cannot die in the normal way - but it is not eternal life, but a type of eternal damnation. Just as Renfield fears being plagued by the souls of the creatures he eats, so Mina is in despair at the thought that her soul is in "worse than mortal peril."
That even the strong and virtuous Mina falls victim to the Count is testament to his power. If he is capable of corrupting this paragon of womanhood, no one is safe.