Dracula

Monstrous Technologies

(Kept in shorthand.)

should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late

The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.

(Mem., get recipe for Mina.)

I had to hurry breakfast, for the train started a little before eight, or rather it ought to have done so, for after rushing to the station at 7:30 I had to sit in the carriage for more than an hour before we began to move. It seems to me that the further east you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?

Count Dracula had directed me to go to the Golden Krone Hotel, which I found, to my great delight, to be thoroughly old-fashioned, for of course I wanted to see all I could of the ways of the country. I was evidently expected, for when I got near the door I faced a cheery-looking elderly woman in the usual peasant dress—white undergarment with long double apron, front, and back, of coloured stuff fitting almost too tight for modesty.

who uses technology best?

For Van Helsing Lucy's exposure to Dracula demanded a response that dealt with the microbial origin of vampirism. It is for this reason that he introduces the garlic into her bedroom. The particular arrangement of the garlic and its subsequent destruction by Lucy's mother stages a domestic conflict between germ theory and miasmatism. Seward describes Van Helsing's actions:

We went into the room, taking the [garlic] flowers

with us. The Professor's actions were certainly odd

and not to be found in any pharmacopoeia that I ever

heard of. First, he fastened up the windows and latched

them securely; next, taking a handful of the flowers,

he rubbed them all over the sashes, as though to ensure

that every whiff of air that might get in would be laden

with the garlic smell. Then, with the wisp he rubbed all

over the jamb of the door, above, below, and at each side,

and round the fireplace in the same way. (171)

Surrounded by the garlic flowers, a metonymy for antiseptic that combats the metaphor of vampirism as microbe, Lucy is well protected from the microbial infection that vampirism represents. However, Mrs Westenra's conviction in the miasmatic practices of sanitary science--her aversion to "those horrible, strong-smelling flowers" and her belief in the potency of "fresh air" (174)-- undoes Van Helsing's work. She removes the garlic from Lucy's neck and opens a window to allow the passage of air into the room, to the detriment of Lucy's condition. Lucy's increasingly endangered health shows how Stoker now represents miasmatism as an exploded paradigm that should be replaced by the principles of germ theory.

Yet as the novel continues, and the Crew of Light begin their destruction of Dracula's London refuges, there is a return to the representation of vampirism as a miasmatic disease once again, even if by this time it is a response to miasma that recognizes the existence of the microbe within the offensive organic matter that characterizes Dracula's presence.[ 7] The properties that Dracula maintains around London are all sanitized by the vampire hunters in their quest to keep him from returning to them, a decision that proves successful, as Dracula eventually flees back to Transylvania. The process of sanitization is certainly representative of sanitarian advice on cleanliness and hygiene. Carfax Abbey--the first property dealt with by the Crew of Light--is exemplary. As Jonathan Harker describes it, "the whole place was thick with dust" (322), and the chapel where Dracula kept his boxes of earth was "small and close, and long disuse had made the air stagnant and foul" (323). After fumigating the boxes with communion wafers the Crew opens the doors to the chapel and succeeds in "purifying. . .the deadly atmosphere" (325). By cleaning the polluted atmosphere with fresh air as well as sterilizing the boxes of infected earth, the Crew of Light combines the theory of the germ with the practice of sanitary science.

What Stoker unconsciously dramatizes here is how sanitary science and germ theory became intertwined in the 1890s. Faced with the growing evidence in favor of germ theory sanitarians took a pragmatic view of their previous opposition to it. Rather than risk their social projects by continuing to deny the truth of this newly emergent paradigm of disease, they embraced it, remaking the central hypotheses of germ theory as improved sanitary measures. As Nancy Tomes has argued, sanitarians "simply superimposed the menace of the microbe onto existing mappings of disease dangers in the household" ( 49). For this reason we find a shift in the advice given on sanitary health, even where the causes of disease are identical. Before the emergence of germ theory, Southwood Smith and Florence Nightingale suggest that the best way to avoid infection from the "organic matter [in] the surrounding atmosphere" is "ventilation and cleanliness" (Smith, Common Nature 14), with "excessive care" given to removing the poisonous matter found in "the particle of dust" (Nightingale, "Notes on Nursing" 106-09). By the time germ theory had begun to take hold in the scientific community, however, the same organic matter is dealt with by a "cotton wool respirator" that "hold[s] back from the lungs. . .the germs by which contagious disease is said to be propagated" (Tyndall 342). Yet even with the onset of germ theory the rhetoric of sanitary science is still employed to indicate the effectiveness of new techniques. The same cotton wool respirator, for example, is so effective as to bring "the air of the highest Alps. . .into the chamber of the invalid" (Tyndall 342). The use of respirators, fumigation, and antiseptic treatments instigated by germ theory were therefore paraded by sanitary scientists as the newest methods for the assurance of cleanliness and fresh air, always their bulwarks against the onset of infection.

This collapsing of the boundaries between the new germ theory and miasmatism achieved an ongoing connection of disease to immorality that had always been present in sanitary science. Even before the nineteenth century those unfortunate enough to contract an infectious disease had been categorized as sick or unclean, a form of temporary identity that was very easily transformed into dirty and wicked. Richard Mead, who completed a pamphlet for the government of 1720 on disease prevention, argued that "as Nastiness is a great source of Infection, so Cleanliness is the greatest Preservative: Which is the true Reason, why the Poor are most Obnoxious to Disasters of this Kind" ( 48). A direct line is drawn from infectious disease to poverty so that the poor are almost automatically infected, and so that it is their own "nastiness" that has led them to succumb to disease. Victorian sanitary scientists were equally persuaded of the connection between disease and immoral activity. Florence Nightingale in an 1867 letter stated: "There are sick streets, like sick people, which one can recognize at once. . .and sick streets produce sick people and bad people. . .the sick streets will always bear the same fruits--each in its degree--we shall always reap the same harvest of sickness (and consequent pauperism) and of vice from them" ("Notes on Nursing" 533). Nightingale's use of apparently anecdotal evidence that leads to a speculative correlation between infection and vice shows the permeability of the boundaries between sanitary science and social politics. As Alison Bashford has recognized, public health was greatly influenced by the easy transfer of clinical categories of disease into social structures. Elements of disease theories were readily superimposed upon already existing social distinctions between "clean and unclean, normal and pathological, healthy and unhealthy" ( 39). Even miasma's root in the word "impurity," as Margaret Pelling argues, shows how understandings of infectious disease were never entirely medical but "had a wide currency in a range of areas of thought and practice. . .[and] are inseparable from notions of individual morality" ( 16-17). It was to this that Stoker was responding when he connected disease with immorality, poverty, and economics in "The Invisible Giant," and he continues to investigate disease's contestation of sociopolitical identity in Dracula.

Brits

Writing/Recording Technologies

Folktales/Tradition/History

Railroad Timetables

Dracula

English Language/Book/maps

English Women

English Laws

"I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is." (2.30)

“Ah, my child, I will be plain. Do you not see how, of late, this monster has been creeping into knowledge experimentally. How he has been making use of the zoöphagous patient to effect his entry into friend John’s home; for your Vampire, though in all afterwards he can come when and how he will, must at the first make entry only when asked thereto by an inmate. But these are not his most important experiments. Do we not see how at the first all these so great boxes were moved by others. He knew not then but that must be so. But all the time that so great child-brain of his was growing, and he began to consider whether he might not himself move the box. So he began to help; and then, when he found that this be all-right, he try to move them all alone. And so he progress, and he scatter these graves of him; and none but he know where they are hidden. He may have intend to bury them deep in the ground. So that he only use them in the night, or at such time as he can change his form, they do him equal well; and none may know these are his hiding-place! But, my child, do not despair; this knowledge come to him just too late!

Friday Write:

Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker's "Dracula"

Judith Halberstam

Victorian Studies

Vol. 36, No. 3, Victorian Sexualities (Spring, 1993), pp. 333-352

As it developed in the nineteenth century, criminal anthropology focussed quite obviously upon the visual aspects of pathology. Scientists would catalogue and demonstrate propensities for degenerative behavior by reading bodies and faces. These practices confirm that racial stereotyping depends upon the visual. And racial degeneracy, with its close ties to a social Darwinist

conception of human development, also connects with sexual degeneracy. In describing the medicalization of sex, Foucault describes aprogressive logic by which "perversion-hereditary-degenerescence" (History 118) became the basis of nineteenth-century scientific claims about the danger of undisciplined sexuality. Sexual perversions, within this chain, arise out of inherited physical weaknesses and lead, potentially, to the decline of future generations. Furthermore, Foucault claims, theorizing degenerescence or degeneration as the

result of hereditary perversion takes the "coherent form of a state-directed racism" (119).

...

I have described this discussion at length to show how one mightbegin to theorize the shift within the Gothic novel from the threat of the aristocrat to the threat of the degenerate foreigner, from the threat of money

to the threat of blood. The bad blood of family, in other words, is replaced by the bad blood of race, and the scientific theory of degeneracy produces and explains this transition. While neither Le Gaufey nor Foucault determines the role played by the Gothic novel in producing these new categories of identity, I have been arguing that Gothic fiction creates the narrative structure for all kinds of gothicizations across disciplinary and ideological boundaries. "Gothic" describes adiscursive strategy which produces monsters as a kind of temporary but influential response to social, political, and sexual

problems. And yet, Gothic, as I have noted, always goes both ways. So, even as Gothic style creates the monster, it calls attention to the plasticity or constructed nature of its creation and thus calls into question all scientific

and rational attempts to classify and quantify agents of disorder. Such agents, Gothic literature makes clear, are invented, not discovered, by science.

Gothic anti-Semitism makes the Jew a monster with bad blood and it defines monstrosity as a mixture of bad blood, unstable gender identity, sexual and economic parasitism, and degeneracy. In this section I want to flesh out my premise that the vampire as represented by Bram Stoker bears some relation to the anti-Semite's Jew. If this is so, it tells us nothing about Jews but everything about anti-Semitic discourse which seems able to transform all threat into the threat embodied by the Jew. The monster Jew produced by nineteenth-century anti-Semitism represents fears about race, class, gender, sexuality, and empire: this figure is gothicized or transformed into an all-purpose monster.

By making a connection between Stoker's Gothic fiction and late nineteenth-century anti-Semitism, I am not claiming a deliberate and unitary relation between fictional monster and real Jew; rather I am attempting to make an argument about the process "othering." Othering in Gothic fiction scavenges from many discursive fields and makes monsters out of bits and pieces of science and literature: Gothic monsters are over-determined, and open therefore to numerous interpretations, precisely because they transform the fragments of otherness into one body. That body is not female, not Jewish, not homosexual, but it bears the marks of the constructions of femininity,

race, and sexuality.4

Dracula, then, resembles the Jew of anti-Semitic discourse in several ways: appearance, his relation to money and gold, his parasitism, his degeneracy, his impermanency or lack of allegiance to a fatherland, and his femininity. Dracula's physiognomy is a particularly clear cipher for the specificity of his ethnic monstrosity. When Jonathan Harker meets the Count at Castle Dracula in Transylvania, he describes Dracula in terms of a "very marked physiognomy": he notes an aquiline nose with "peculiarly arched nostrils," massive eyebrows and "bushy hair," a cruel mouth and "peculiarly sharp white teeth," pale ears which were "extremely pointed at the top," and a general aspect of "extraordinary pallor" (18). This description of Dracula, however, changes at various points in the novel. When he is spotted in London by Jonathan and Mina, Dracula is "a tall thin man with a beaky nose and black moustache and pointed beard" (180); similarly, the zookeeper whose wolf disappears after a visit by Dracula to the zoological gardens, describes the Count as "a tall thin chap with a 'ook nose and a pointed beard" (145). Most

descriptions include Dracula's hard cold look and his red eyes.

Friday Write:

• 2 phrasings
• 1 structural
• 1 "conceptual"

--and how each would help your paper

Faces and bodies mark the Other as evil so that he could be recognized

and ostracized. Furthermore, the face in the nineteenth century which supposedly

expressed Jewishness-"hooked nose, shifty eyes," etc.-was also seen

to express criminality and degeneration within the pseudo-sciences of physiognomy

and phrenology. "Nineteenth century science," writes Sander Gilman,

"tried to explain the special quality of the Jew, as perceived by the

dominant European society, in terms of a medicalization of the Jew" ("Sexology"

87). Degeneration and Jewishness, one could therefore conclude (or

indeed ratify scientifically), were not far apart. Stoker draws upon the relation

between degeneration and physiognomy as theorized by Cesare Lombroso and

Max Nordau for his portrayal of Dracula.

During the final pursuit of the vampire, Van Helsing, Seward, and Mina

carry on a discussion of criminal types. Van Helsing defines Dracula as a criminal

with "a child-brain ... predestinate to crime" (361). As Van Helsing struggles

to articulate his ideas in his broken English, he turns to Mina for help. Mina

translates for him succinctly and she even adds sources for the theory Van

Helsing has advanced: "the Count is a criminal and of criminal type. Nordau

and Lombroso would so classify him, and qua criminal he is of imperfectly

formed mind" (361). Since Mina the provincial school teacher mentions

Lombroso and Nordau, we may conclude that their ideas of criminality and

degeneracy were familiar to an educated readership and not merely a small

medical community. As Mina points out, Lombroso would attribute Dracula's

criminal disposition to "an imperfectly formed mind," or, in other words, to

what Van Helsing calls a "child-brain." Lombroso noted similarities between

the physiognomies of "criminals, savages and apes" and concluded that degenerates

were a biological throwback to primitive man (xv)

The Invisible Giant': Dracula, and Disease By: Willis, Martin, Studies in the Novel, 00393827, September 1, 2007, Vol. 39, Issue 3

A really nice yes AND

When Dracula was reintroduced into critical debate in the 1970s it was largely due to the enthusiasm of psychoanalytic critics for the novel's evocative interpretations of unconscious fantasies of desire. Such analyses quickly widened into an intense interest in gender and sexuality, perceived both psychoanalytically and historically, that has tended to dominate critical opinion for over two decades. As early as 1984 Christopher Craft, in his influential essay on gender inversion, noted the pervasiveness of the focus on sexuality when he claimed that "modern critical accounts. . .almost universally agree that vampirism both expresses and distorts an originally sexual energy" (107). By the 1990s it had become commonplace to signal this critical consensus, as exemplified in the work of Rebecca A. Pope and Elisabeth Bronfen, and even at times to challenge its superiority, as Stephen D. Arata did in his important reading of Dracula as a text grounded in colonial confrontations. More recently critics have expressed their disappointment in the limited range of critical approaches to Stoker's work. One of the leading scholars of Stoker's work, William Hughes, has argued that "modern criticism's preoccupation with sexuality dominates--and indeed inhibits the development of--the debate on vampirism" (Hughes, "Fictional Vampires" 144-45). Hughes's expressed disappointment with the limitations of Stoker criticism has been effective: since 2000 critical approaches to Dracula have been increasingly inventive and varied, adding greatly to our understanding of the novel's place within Irish literary history, Victorian popular culture, and modern technologies.[ 1]

Nevertheless one area of criticism that has still to re-emerge alongside these others is the historicizing of Dracula within the various scientific contexts that pervaded Victorian culture in the final decade of the century. In particular Dracula, and Stoker's work as a whole, suffers from a lack of attention (save that from Sparks) to debates of the late nineteenth century that inform the creation of the vampire as a symbol of Victorian anxieties of impurity and corruption arising from illness and disease. This is surprising as it was clearly an area of interest for several Stoker critics in the 1980s and 1990s.[ 2] Part of the reason for this, I contend, is that Dracula's engagement with disease is so very apparent in the novel (vampirism is clearly both infection and illness) that there is a critical desire to reach beyond its seeming superficiality to uncover the metonymic and metaphoric "meanings" of disease in alternative medical practices and debates. That is what Kathleen Spencer does in her excellent article dealing partly with theories of degeneracy, and it is likewise the strategy of Robert Mighall, who reads the novel within the context of medical discussions on the effects of onanism. However, such criticism leaves disease itself as an ahistorical place marker for other aspects of late Victorian medicine. Yet theories of disease were constantly in flux in the second half of the nineteenth century and had reached a point of such significant controversy in the 1890s that it is critically reductive to read Stoker's vampiric disease as no more than a transparent signifier of something else. There is, therefore, a need to reassess Dracula within the contexts of disease theories that allows for a more historically rigorous analysis of the novel. From this will emerge a clearer recognition of Stoker's imaginative attempts to consider the effects of disease on the social and cultural body--the body politic of the 1890s--as well as on the body of the individual.

In this article, therefore, the acts, processes, effects and meanings of vampiric infection are investigated through an analysis of Victorian disease theory. In the final decade of the nineteenth century the germ theory of disease gradually became the dominant scientific paradigm of infection, replacing the contagionist and miasmatist theories that had previously been regarded as scientific orthodoxy. Dracula examines the shift towards germ theory in its portrayal of the vampire and in its construction of the opposition to vampirism by the text's scientific authorities, Abraham Van Helsing and John Seward. The novel also clearly draws on contemporary disagreements over the sources of contagion and the etiology of infectious disease, most effectively in its lengthy evocation of Lucy Westenra's treatment and her eventual (un)death from vampiric infection. Lucy's outcome will lead us to conclude that her position as sexual transgressor is not so determinedly fixed as previous critical opinion would have it. Moreover, Dracula also pays close attention to the social and cultural repercussions of disease transmission, as well as to the disruption of political and economic capital caused by infection. In particular, Stoker's deliberate analysis of Lucy Westenra's and Jonathan Harker's position as infected individuals, on whom the effects of disease have repercussions for their status within the social and economic order of late Victorian Britain, significantly reveals the novel's conflicting liberal and conservative discourses. This, in turn, will make us re-evaluate the common critical view of Stoker as a predictably conservative writer whose ideologies are made all too clearly manifest in his popular fictions, a view that is only now beginning to be questioned (e.g., by Maunder). Instead, a close analysis of the disease theories of contagionism, miasmatism, and germ theory--in their medical, social, and political contexts--uncovers a version of Dracula that is politically contingent, sensitive to the power of Victorian social orthodoxy, and able to articulate the complex interactions of the values of liberalism and conservatism.

Dracula

technology, empire, and the monstrous