Abstract
Readers tend to interpret Dracula as an avatar of whatever most reflects their own anxiety, superimposing upon Stoker’s monster their various human fears of the unknown, the dark, and the hidden. Tuberculosis has numbered among these many anxieties, and has been examined through a Victorian English lens. I extend Dracula’s geographical reach, also arguing that Dracula is in most instances himself a metaphor for actual disease when considered in an Irish context, rather than vampirism or tuberculosis functioning allegorically as a vehicle for the expression of generalized anxiety. If we accept that contemporary concerns appear, intentionally or not, in fiction, we can perhaps view Dracula as tubercular vampiric vector in post-Famine Ireland. Moreover, the contagion lives on. The most advanced scientific methods available to the physicians of the 1890s proved unsuccessful in treating tuberculosis. If we also consider Mina as a vector, she is not so much a heroine as living evidence of the future potential spread of contagion, lurking in her blood, ready to re-erupt at any moment. How can we be certain that all that Dracula signifies will not return to haunt us? Dracula provides a reminder to readers that there is no more lingering condition than vampirism.
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Notes
- 1.
Laurence M. Geary, “Famine, Fever, and the Bloody Flux,” in The Great Irish Famine, edited by Cathal Póirtéir (Cork: Mercier Press, 1995), hereafter abbreviated to “Famine,” 83.
- 2.
Jonathan Harker’s journal, describing the men’s nocturnal trip to the chapel in Dracula, 267. I here use The Penguin Revised Edition, edited with an Introduction and Notes by Maurice Hindle, Preface by Christopher Frayling (London: Penguin, 2003). All subsequent citations of and parenthetical references to the primary text will be from this source.
- 3.
Dracula was first published in 1897.
- 4.
See Joseph Valente, Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), hereafter abbreviated to Crypt, 1. Katherine Byrne makes the same point about tuberculosis, noting that “Consumption’s capacity to act as a manifold metaphor made it a malleable vehicle for social expression and discussion in the art and literature of the nineteenth century,” Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), hereafter abbreviated to TVLI, 3.
- 5.
See Preface to Dracula, edited by Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal (New York: Norton Critical Editions, 1997), hereafter abbreviated to NCE, ix.
- 6.
Stephen Arata addresses both Empire and racial purity in “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization,” hereafter abbreviated to “Tourist,” Victorian Studies 33, no. 4 (Summer 1990), 621–45. Arata argues that the “vigorous and energetic” Count “has penetrated to the heart of modern Europe’s largest empire, and his very presence seems to presage its doom,” 628, 629. He further argues that Dracula “Others” his victims, deracinating and then re-racinating Lucy, for example, with the “’proper’” blood, 632.
- 7.
For a financial reading of Dracula, see Franco Moretti, “A Capital Dracula,” in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, translated by Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (New York: Verso, 1988), 90–104.
- 8.
Auerbach and Skal highlight these tensions with these ominous comments: “The human characters in Dracula surround themselves with modern gadgets and skills—shorthand, typewriters, dictating machines, cameras—but they must learn to combat an ancient enemy with ancient beliefs,” including the “Catholicism that was anathema to the enlightened secularism of sophisticated Victorians,” NCE, Preface, x. I would add that modern technology poses its own set of difficulties and inefficiencies. Van Helsing deploys blood transfusion without the availability of knowledge needed for safety, like an awareness of blood types.
- 9.
This gendered concern is a favorite among critics. Christopher Craft, for example, discusses the “murderous phallicism” of the passage detailing Lucy’s “disciplining,” beheading and subjection to the stake, noting “the vigor and enormity of this penetration,” and concluding that “a woman is better still than mobile, better dead than sexual,” in “‘Kiss Me With Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Representations 8, no. 1 (Fall 1984), 122, 123. For further discussions of the subject, see Phyllis A. Roth, “Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Literature and Psychology 27 (1977), 113–21. Carol A. Senf also interrogates sexuality in Dracula as well as attending to “the face of the vampire” as “the hidden side of the human character,” “Dracula: The Unseen Face in the Mirror,” Journal of Narrative Technique 9, no. 2 (Fall1979), 168. More recently, Lorenzo Servitje interrogates “the war between women’s sexuality and the medical establishment” in Dracula in Medicine is War: The Martial Metaphor in Victorian Literature and Culture (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2021), hereafter abbreviated to MW, 120–5.
- 10.
See, for example, Talia Schaffer, “‘A Wilde Desire Took Me’: The Homoerotic History of Dracula,” English Literary History 61, no. 2 (1994), 381–425. Schaffer discusses the relevance of Wilde’s trial in 1895, arguing that “Stoker used the Wildean figure of Dracula to define homosexuality as simultaneously monstrous, dirty, threatening, alluring, buried, corrupting, contagious, and indestructible,” 399.
- 11.
See Senf, cited in note 8 above, and also Nina Auerbach’s invaluable study, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995).
- 12.
Judith Halberstam, “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula,’” Victorian Studies 36, no. 3 (Spring 1993), 333. See also Hannah Ewence, “Blurring the Boundaries of Difference: Dracula, the Empire, and ‘the Jew,’” Jewish Culture and History 12, nos. 1–2 (2010), 213–22, and Daniel Renshaw, “‘A fine fellow…although rather Semitic’: Jews and antisemitism in Jules Verne’s Le Château de Carpathes and Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Jewish Culture and History 23, no. 4 (2022), 289–306. Renshaw interrogates “the confluence between antisemitic expression and the figure of the vampire,” 289.
- 13.
Laura Otis, Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
- 14.
Ian Bell, Review of Laura Otis, Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics, Modernism/modernity 8, no. 2 (April 2001), 376.
- 15.
Byrne also briefly discusses the physical fragility of Le Fanu’s “erotically charged” female vampire Carmilla, stop** short of suggesting illness but noting her slender frame and “her extraordinary physical weakness and constant fatigue,” a lethargy “occasionally interposed with intervals of feverish passion,” TVLI, 140–1.
- 16.
Harker compliments the Count on his excellent command of English, Dracula, 27.
- 17.
See Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke, vols. 1 and 2 (Arkose Press, 2015).
- 18.
Seamus Deane, “The Production of Cultural Space in Irish Writing,” boundary 2 21, no. 3 (Autumn 1994), 132.
- 19.
Seamus Deane, “National Character and the Character of Nations,” in Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 89.
- 20.
Joseph Valente, “‘Double Born’: Bram Stoker and the Metrocolonial Gothic,” Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 3 (Fall 2000), 632–45.
- 21.
Sarah Goss, “Dracula and the Spectre of Famine,” in Hungry Words: Images of Famine in the Irish Canon, edited by George Cusack and Sarah Goss (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006), 84.
- 22.
Julianne Ulin, “Sheridan Le Fanu’s vampires and Ireland’s invited invasion,” in Open graves, open minds: Representations of vampires and the undead from the Enlightenment to the present day, edited by Sam George and Bill Hughes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), hereafter abbreviated to “Le Fanu’s Vampires,” 53.
- 23.
Stoker was born in 1847 and did not move permanently to London until 1878, when he became the acting manager of Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre. He was educated in Ireland, attending Trinity College, and subsequently worked in Dublin Castle for the Irish Civil Service and as drama critic for the Dublin Mail. For detailed biographical information see Daniel Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker (London: Michael Joseph, 1975), and Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker and the Man Who Was Dracula (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1996).
- 24.
Quoted by Susan Kelly in “Stigma and silence: oral histories of tuberculosis,” Oral History 39, no. 1 (Spring 2011), 65 and n.1.
- 25.
Alan Francis Carthy, The treatment of tuberculosis in Ireland from the 1890s to the 1970s: a case study of medical care in Leinster. Thesis for the degree of PhD, Department of History, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, 2015, hereafter abbreviated to TTI, 107.
- 26.
I discuss the best-known treatments from the time in Chap. 1 of this study. Also see Carthy, TTI, 292–3, and Greta Jones, “Captain of all these men of death”: The History of Tuberculosis in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Ireland (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2001), hereafter abbreviated to “Captain,”160.
- 27.
Ernie O’Malley, On Another Man’s Wound (London: Anvil, 1979), 91.
- 28.
Thomas Dormandy, The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis (New York: New York University Press, 1999), hereafter abbreviated to WD, 79. For a full account of the appalling conditions to be found in the Dublin slums, see Jacinta Prunty, Dublin Slums, 1800–1925 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998).
- 29.
Williams himself died of consumption in 1862. For the full text of the poem, see The Ballads of Ireland, collected and edited by Edward Hayes, vol. 1 (1857), 331–2. Digitized by Google Books, 2013. https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Ballads_of_Ireland_Collected_and_Edi/1fum8gc62BYC?hl=en.
- 30.
Wilhelm Roentgen discovered the x-ray in 1895.
- 31.
de Ville reappears more than a century later, in Claire Kilroy’s post-Celtic Tiger Gothic novel The Devil I Know (New York: Black Cat, 2012).
- 32.
While a detailed consideration of why the denizens of the metropolis ignore everything about the Count but his dazzling whiteness is beyond the scope of this study, it is interesting to speculate on whether their unnoticing is willful. Are they more fearful of those whom they designate as non-white and racially Other than they are of the monster roaming their streets?
- 33.
Siobhán Kilfeather, “The Gothic Novel,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel, ed. John Wilson Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 82.
- 34.
Servitje compares the crew’s map** of Dracula’s movements to “modern epidemiological map**,” observing that “Dracula, like cholera, does not respect the social and classed borders that were imagined to be physical boundaries of disease. As the Crew collects their archive of information, they take to cartography to track his various safe houses,” MW, 17. Tuberculosis likewise does not respect borders.
- 35.
Marion McGarry offers a reading of Dracula as the embodiment of cholera in “Dracula as Cholera: The Influence of Sligo’s Cholera Epidemic of 1832 on Bram Stoker’s Novel Dracula (1897),” Journal of Medical Humanities 44 (2023), 27–41. McGarry notes that Stoker’s mother would have been a “chief inspiration” and source of information through the “first-hand” descriptions of the epidemic she shared with her son and subsequently wrote down, 27. McGarry points to “several similarities between the monster Bram Stoker created and the real-life horror or Sligo’s cholera in 1832,” arguing that the Count can “be read as the personification of Sligo’s cholera.” Among other parallels McGarry cites “a devastating contagion traveling from the East by ship that people initially do not know how to fight; a great storm preceding its arrival; the ability to travel overland by mist and the stench it omits,” 39.
- 36.
See Jones,“Captain,” Chapter 2, “The Tuberculosis Epidemic in Ireland: 1,” 29–62.
- 37.
Charles Cameron was Dublin’s public analyst and medical superintendent at the time. See Jones, “Captain,” 102.
- 38.
See Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000 (London: Profile Books, 2004), 55.
- 39.
See, for example, Imani-Fooladi, Sattari, and Saeidi, “Antimicrobial Effect of Chloroformic Garlic Extract on Mycobacterium Tuberculosis,” Pakistani Journal of Biological Sciences 9, no. 12 (2006), 2381–3. The researchers’ “study showed that garlic extract is successful in inhibiting growth of not only drug sensitive, but also drug resistant, isolated of mycobacterium tuberculosis,” 2381.
- 40.
For example, Carthy notes that Enniscorthy sanatorium in the 1920s had an “isolation hut,” TTI, 238. See also 185, 232.
- 41.
Servitje rightly observes that “Dracula is replete with images of quarantine,” and provides several additional examples, MW, 131.
- 42.
See P. Learoyd, “The History of Blood Transfusion Prior to the 20th Century – Part 2,” Transfusion Medicine 22, no. 6, (2012), 372–6. I am indebted to Cassidy Allen for this observation and the reference to Learoyd.
- 43.
Carol A. Senf, Review of Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood. Criticism 44, no. 2 (Spring 2002), 210.
- 44.
“Tuberculosis in Pregnancy,” Cancer Therapy Advisor, https://www.cancertherapyadvisor.com/home/decision-support-in-medicine/obstetrics-and-gynecology/tuberculosis-in-pregnancy/.
- 45.
“Tuberculosis in Pregnancy,” https://www.cdc.gov/tb/publications/factsheets/specpop/pregnancy.htm.
- 46.
My thanks to Mollie Kervick for bringing my attention to this passage.
- 47.
See Ulin’s essay for a full reading of Carmilla. I do not include Carmilla here because the narrative does not lend itself to a detailed Hibernian tubercular reading as does Dracula. While, as Ulin argues, Hibernian referents are prevalent, they are best understood in the context of colonialism. Ulin contends that Carmilla and other Irish vampire narratives can be understood as “structurally re-enacting Ireland’s colonial origin story of an invited invasion through a figure that embodies mixed and spilled blood,” “Le Fanu’s vampires,” 53.
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Sealy Lynch, R. (2024). Dracula, Ireland’s Vampiric Vector. In: Tuberculosis and Irish Fiction, 1800–2022. New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40345-3_4
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