Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Dracula and duty

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502360802622284

1470-1308

Srdjan Smajić,

Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes I follow Christopher Craft [‘“Kiss Me with Those Red Lips”: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula’, Representations, 8 (1984), pp. 107–133] in referring to the vampire hunters as the Crew of Light. The team name, now commonly used in Dracula criticism, is derived from an etymological extraction of light from Lucy Westenra's first name. Whereas most scholars reserve Crew membership to Dracula's male vampire hunters (Abraham Van Helsing, John Seward, Jonathan Harker, Arthur Holmwood, and Quincey Morris), I include Mina Murray in the group as well for reasons that will become clear. Bram Stoker, Dracula (hereafter D) (New York and London: Norton, 1997), pp. 157, 158. Here and elsewhere I preserve Van Helsing's speech idiosyncrasies. Scholarship dealing with Dracula's heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality is extensive. Beside Craft, see C. F. Bentley, ‘The Monster in the Bedroom: Sexual Symbolism in Bram Stoker's Dracula’, Literature and Psychology, 22 (1972), pp. 27–34; Stephanie Demetrakopoulos, ‘Feminism, Sex Role Exchanges, and Other Subliminal Fantasies in Bram Stoker's Dracula’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 2.3 (1977), pp. 104–113; Phyllis A. Roth, ‘Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker's Dracula’, Literature and Psychology, 27 (1977), pp. 113–21; Marjorie Howes, ‘The Mediation of the Feminine: Bisexuality, Homoerotic Desire, and Self-Expression in Bram Stoker's Dracula’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 30.1 (1988), pp. 104–19; John Allen Stevenson, ‘A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula’, PMLA, 103.2 (1988), pp. 139–49; Talia Schaffer, ‘“A Wilde Desire Took Me”: The Homoerotic History of Dracula’, ELH, 61.2 (1994), pp. 381–425. The loss of individualism and autonomy can be read differently: a necessity which the Crew of Light strategically embrace to ensure the survival of their species. In How Novels Think: The Limits of British Individualism from 1719–1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), Nancy Armstrong picks Dracula as representative of the late-Victorian literary trend to endorse what she calls polygenetic thinking. ‘Dracula has the edge on his European antagonists because his thinking is not his own but a fundamentally synthetic process. Having transcended the limits of individual embodiment [vampires are less individuals than members of a collective vampiric body], the vampire's mind can travel across categories of gender, class, nation, and species … . To conquer the vampire, the vampire hunters have to think like their prey. Each has to shed his autonomy, for individualism only hampers a campaign where each exists only to defeat a common foe. Forget privacy, reason, and morality of the conventional kind … . What matters is the survival of human reproduction’ (p. 130). Holmwood inherits the title Lord Godalming after his father's death. The automatic response to the call of duty, and the pathologizing of the duty-driven subject, is a recurrent trope in the novel. On their wedding day, Mina and Harker make a pact not to read his journal, ‘unless, indeed’, she reports him saying, ‘some solemn duty should come upon me to go back to the bitter hours, asleep or awake, sane or mad, recorded here’ (D, p. 100, my italics). Mina later slightly, but significantly, misquotes Harker's words: ‘I remember how on our wedding-day he said: “Unless some solemn duty come upon me to go back to the bitter hours, asleep or awake, mad or sane”’(D, p. 161). ‘[S]ane or mad’ becomes ‘mad or sane’, suggesting that madness rather than sanity is the first and correct diagnosis for a dutiful subject. In ‘Dracula: The Unseen Face in the Mirror’ [The Journal of Narrative Technique, 9 (1979), pp. 160–70], Carol A. Senf argues that Stoker's novel, by foregrounding the unreliability of its multiple narrators, encourages us to see through their efforts to mask ‘their lust for power under the rubric of religion, their love of violence under the names of imperialism and progress, their sexual desires within an elaborate courtship ritual’ (p. 166). ‘In fact, Stoker implies that the only difference between Dracula and his opponents is the narrators’ ability to state individual desire in terms of what they believe is a common good' (p. 165). Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (New York: Dover, 1993), p. 27. When it first appeared in 1906, its title was The Cynic's Word Book. Previously, Mina is able to talk herself out of feeling pity for Dracula because, she reasons, he is not human: ‘I suppose one ought to pity any thing so hunted as is the Count. That is just it: this Thing is not human – not even beast. To read Dr Seward's account of poor Lucy's death, and what followed, is enough to dry up the springs of pity in one's heart’ (D, p. 202). Dracula's essential humanity, however, soon resurfaces as indispensable to the Crew's pityingly imagining him as someone who must be destroyed in order to be saved: such salvation, it seems, can be bestowed only upon an equal. The secret of Dracula's seductive hold over readers and critics lies in the metaphoric malleability of the figure of the vampire. If, as Ken Gelder observes, ‘this is a novel which seems (these days, especially) to generate readings, rather than close them down’ [Reading the Vampire (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 65], the reason has predominantly to do with Dracula's function as a sort of vacant signifier. The Count ‘is so suggestively amorphous in Stoker's novel’, remarks Nina Auerbach, ‘that he is free to shift his shape with each new twentieth-century trend’ [Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 83]. Franco Moretti, for instance, argues (somewhat incongruously) that ‘the vampire is a metaphor for [monopoly] capital’ as well as the return of the repressed: ‘the monster metaphor, the vampire metaphor … . “filters”, makes bearable to the conscious mind those desires and fears which the latter has judged to be unacceptable and has thus been forced to repress, and whose existence it consequently cannot recognize’. Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms (1983; London and New York: Verso, 2005), pp. 92, 103. In order to ‘mak[e] [him]self master of the facts’ of Renfield's madness, Seward resorts to what he knows is ethically borderline medical practice: exacerbating the patient's insanity to develop its full potential. ‘In my manner of doing it there was, I now see, something of cruelty. I seemed to wish to keep him to the point of his madness – a thing which I avoid with the patients as I would the mouth of hell’ (D, p. 61). But as Michel Foucault has shown, this was standard practice in the nineteenth-century asylum, which operated as a controlled site where mental illness was not just diagnosed and treated but also produced in its pure form. ‘The great asylum physician … is both the one who can tell the truth of the disease through the knowledge [savoir] he has of it and the one who can produce the disease in its truth and subdue it in its reality, through the power that his will exerts on the patient himself’. Foucault, ‘Psychiatric Power’, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, trans. Robert Hurley et al., ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), p. 43. On Dracula and degeneration, see Ernest Fontana, ‘Lombroso's Criminal Man and Stoker's Dracula’, Victorian Newsletter, 66 (1984), pp. 25–27; Daniel Pick, ‘“Terrors of the Night”: Dracula and “Degeneration” in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Critical Quarterly, 30.4 (1988), pp. 71–87; Kathleen L. Spencer, ‘Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis’, ELH, 59.1 (1992), pp. 197–225. Shoshana Felman, ‘Turning the Screw of Interpretation’, Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 195. On ‘stigmata’ in nineteenth-century degeneration theory, see Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Identity and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), particularly Chapter One, ‘Strange cases, common fates: degeneration and fiction in the Victorian fin de siècle’. Lucy is unique, Van Helsing explains, because ‘bitten by the vampire when she was in a trance, sleep-walking … . In trance she died, and in trance she is Un-Dead, too. So it is that she differ from all other’ vampires, namely when she is not awake, ‘she go back to the nothings of the common dead’ (D, p. 179). Harker's journey through the Carpathians takes him past a mountain peak called ‘God's seat’ (D, p. 15) and into a ‘cursed land, where the devil and his children still walk with earthly feet!’ (D, p. 55). Overtly symbolic, the journey is a hybrid of Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and Dante's Inferno. To survive, Lucy must receive numerous transfusions. ‘She wants blood’, Van Helsing bluntly puts it, ‘and blood she must have or die’ (D, p. 113). On Dracula's obsession with blood, one of several motifs that confound the novel's efforts to distinguish between superstition and religion, see Christopher Herbert, ‘Vampire Religion’, Representations, 79 (2002), pp. 100–121. Herbert persuasively argues that ‘the image of the vampire is not that of the depraved or primitive other of religion after all, but of religion itself, and that all the organized labor of eradication dramatized in Dracula may best be construed as an effort to mystify the essential bond between vampirism and Christian faith’ (p. 111). That the guard ‘on duty’ should confess to having dozed off, arguably undermines the veracity of his testimony. Interestingly, the Crew do not doubt his sincerity, perhaps because they know that the cry ‘God! God! God!’ is precisely what one might expect to hear from a madman. ‘I suppose’, Lucy ruminates in a late metastasis of vampirism, ‘it is that sickness and weakness are selfish things and turn our inner eyes and sympathy on ourselves, whilst health and strength give Love rein’ (D, pp. 117–18). Likewise, her mother's terminal illness transforms her into an exemplary egotist. But, Seward explains, this is really in everyone's best interest: ‘It is something like the way Dame Nature gathers round a foreign body an envelope of some insensitive tissue which can protect from evil that which it would otherwise harm by contact. If this be an ordered selfishness, then we should pause before we condemn any one for the vice of egoism, for there may be deeper roots for its causes than we have knowledge of’ (D, p. 112). Seward's theory of ‘an envelope of some insensitive tissue’ anticipates Sigmund Freud's speculations in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) on ‘a special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli’, a ‘protective shield’ guarding the psyche from excessive and harmful external stimuli. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York and London: Norton, 1989), p. 30.