The reading
The bead. To be made clean after a monstrous defilement from outside — the contaminant confronted and destroyed at real cost, and the stainless self restored.
Engines
- purity/contamination · content · spine · ✓ — the defiled-victim shape: an innocent is contaminated from without (Mina, branded by the Host, crying "Unclean! Unclean!"; Lucy turned to "the foul Thing") and a costly, bloody cleansing returns the clean state ("the snow is not more stainless than her forehead! The curse has passed away!"), paid for to the value of a life (Quincey's).
Dual-use read. Purity's counterfeit is the purity spiral / scapegoating — you are clean by blood, and you stay clean by purging a contaminant whose defilement is declared irreversible. The documented ancestor is Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race (#68185), forerunner of "great replacement" / "poisoning the blood" rhetoric. The difference is the wish-valence guard: Stoker's purity is bought with a real cleansing of a real contaminant at real cost (the engine enables — the defilement is confronted and removed), where the counterfeit grants the clean identity by birth and "maintains" it only by exclusion, skipping any cleansing (substitutes) — and, with the contaminant framed as one-drop and irreversible, points the purge outward at an out-group. Value-flow call is subjective, per the README — Dracula sits on the enabling side (the cleansing is dramatized and costly), but it is the purest fictional statement of the wish the purity spiral hijacks. (Caveat the entry flags: Stoker drapes the defilement in religious-guilt vocabulary — "mark of shame... until the Judgment Day" — a sin-overlay that the sibling specimens The Metamorphosis and Naaman strip away.)
Consumption. Denounce the impure to feel clean — the contaminant named as a tribal badge, the actual cleansing skipped.
Verdict. Purity/contamination's primary specimen and the first prevention-pole engine's native home: a horror novel runs the engine because the engine is a dread (of contamination) and its relief (the cleansing), not an approach to a wished identity. Dracula is multivalent — the vampiric appetite reads as transgression, the Crew of Light as a band — but cupel's bead-claim is purity, and the seductive appetite is precisely the contaminant the engine exists to purge (dreaded, then destroyed — not a welcomed license), which is why the novel is at once titillating and cleansing.
Evidence. Slot-proven — Dracula (all three slots verbatim against Gutenberg #345). The sibling specimens are The Metamorphosis (#5200, the purifier's-POV shape, controlling the sin-overlay) and Naaman the Syrian (2 Kings 5) (2 Kings 5, KJV #10, the clean isolator in the ritual register); the counterfeit is in counterfeit-catalog (Madison Grant, #68185).
The evidence
The clean specimen of the engine's defiled-victim shape: an innocent is contaminated from outside, and a costly cleansing restores her to purity.
Slot 1 — Defilement
The contamination is imposed, involuntary, and felt as uncleanness. Mina, branded by the Host after Dracula forces his blood on her:
"Unclean! Unclean! Even the Almighty shuns my polluted flesh! I must bear this mark of shame upon my forehead until the Judgment Day." (l. 12107)
Lucy, vampirised, becomes "the foul Thing" — the defilement made flesh, the contaminant to be cleansed.
Slot 2 — The cleansing, at cost
Purity is bought with a real, bloody, dangerous labour — Lucy's release by the stake, the work given to the one who loved her:
"the work of her destruction was yielded as a privilege to the one best entitled to it" (l. 8862)
The cost runs to a life: Quincey Morris dies in the final cleansing of Dracula himself.
Slot 3 — Purity restored
The defilement lifts and the clean state returns. Lucy, after the staking:
"her face of unequalled sweetness and purity... the holy calm that lay like sunshine over the wasted face" (ll. 8864–8867)
And Mina, at Dracula's death, the brand gone:
"the snow is not more stainless than her forehead! The curse has passed away!" (l. 15392)
Guard / distinctness — purity, not redemption
The defiled are victims of imposed contamination, not sinners atoning: Lucy and Mina did no wrong; they were infected and assaulted. The stuck-state is defilement (external, involuntary), the release is cleansing (removing a contaminant), not atonement for guilt. Purity earned through real cleansing — the wish-valence guard holds. (Leak noted for the next specimen: Stoker drapes the defilement in religious-guilt vocabulary — "mark of shame... until the Judgment Day" — so a sin-overlay is present here, controlled by The Metamorphosis and Naaman.)
Result
All three slots fill against imposed, non-self-caused contamination. Tagged purity/contamination — the defiled-victim shape.