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Malcolm Malcolmson's Bible: Rival Epistemologies in Bram Stoker's “The Judge's House”

2017; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 66; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/0148333116636985

2056-5666

Geoffrey Reiter,

Yersinia bacterium, plague, ectoparasites research

“The Judge's House,” one of Dracula author Bram Stoker's best-known works of short fiction, is a horror tale in which Malcolm Malcolmson, a young college student, rents a haunted house to study for his mathematical tripos exams. He finds himself unable to combat the spirit of a dead, malevolent judge, embodied in the form of a rat. Stoker uses this story as a way of dramatizing the inefficacy of pure reason—symbolized in Malcolmson's mathematical studies—as a foundation for epistemology. Instead, the Christian faith—represented by Malcolmson's ancestral Bible—provides him the resources to ward off a distinctly supernatural evil, though he tragically fails to avail himself of this resource.