An Unseen Invasion: Vampirism as Contagion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Year 2023, Issue: 32, 1460 - 1468, 21.02.2023

Ece Çakır

https://doi.org/10.29000/rumelide.1253867

Abstract

As creatures that come back from the dead to haunt and hunt the living, vampires represent the fear of an uncontrollable, mysterious, foreign threat. Bram Stoker’s Gothic novel Dracula (1897) presents vampirism not only as a curse that resurrects the dead human body as an undead monster, but also as a metaphor for a contagious disease. Transgressing boundaries between life and death, human and animal, past and present, the vampire breaches Gothic purity by contaminating the individual. Arriving as an elusive, unseen disease to the English soil and subject, Dracula exposes his victims to his contaminated blood in his quest to invade Victorian England. Consuming the body by feeding on the life giving blood, contaminating the victim by causing illness and death, and transforming the human into a vampire, Dracula embodies a contagion upon Victorian society. Accordingly, the aim of this paper to explore the links between the Victorian vampire and infection, looking closely at the role of blood in the creation of the monstrous threat. To that end, this paper aims to analyse how vampirism as a disease and Dracula as an agent of contagion reflect Victorian anxieties regarding the individual identity, social changes, fears of degeneration, and invasion of a foreign Other bringing destruction within.

Keywords

Victorian period, Gothic, vampires, infection, monstrous transformation

References

• Arata, S. D. (1990). “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonisation.” Victorian Studies, 33(4), 621-645. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3827794
• Cozzi, A. (2010). The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Donovan, J. M. (2003). Bloody Prints: The Imperial, Racial, and Gender Tracks of Dracula, Fin de Siécle and Beyond. (Publication No. 3121805). [Doctoral dissertation, Howard University.] ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
• English Standard Version Bible. (2001). ESV Online. https://esv.literalword.com
• Foster, J. W. (2008). Irish Novels 1890-1940: New Bearings in Culture and Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Groom, N. (2018). The Vampire: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Melton, G. J. (1994). The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead. Detroit: Visible Ink.
• Oinas, F. (1998). Eastern European Vampires. In A. Dundes (Ed.), The Vampire: A Casebook (pp. 47-56). Madison: Wisconsin University Press.
• Pick, D. (1989). Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848-1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Punter, D. & Byron, G. (2004). The Gothic. Malden: Blackwell.
• Skal, D. J. (2016). Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula. New York: Liveright.
• Stephanou, A. (2014). Reading Vampire Gothic Through Blood. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Stoker, B. (2000). Dracula. Ware: Wordsworth.
• Stoker, C. (2003). Appendix II: Charlotte Stoker’s Account of ‘The Cholera Horror’ in a Letter to Bram Stoker (c. 1875). In M. Hingle (Ed.), Dracula (pp. 412-418). New York: Penguin.
• Willis, M. (2007). “The Invisible Giant, Dracula, and Disease.” Studies in the Novel, 39(3), 301-325. https://www.jstor.org/stable/29533817
• Zwart, H. (2018). “Vampires, Viruses and Verbalisation: Bram Stoker’s Dracula As a Genealogical Window into Fin-de-Siécle Science.” Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts, 16(2), 14-53. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3144694