Vampires:
Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil

Thursday 22nd May - Saturday 24th May 2003
Budapest, Hungary

Session 2: Dracula
Kim Hoelzli - Exorcising the Beast: Darwinian Influences on the Narrative of Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Department of Literature, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada

In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin discusses humanity’s progression from ape origins. Now removed from creation in God’s image to no better than an accident of nature, humanity loses divinity. Though conservative in the way it claimed time was necessary for change, this idea hid the possibility of chaos; what was humanity progressing toward? If humanity had descended from primates through a series of accidents of nature, was it possible another accident could cause it to slide back?
These were the anxieties plaguing the Victorian mind when Bram Stoker published Dracula. Dracula symbolized the Victorian fear that man wasn’t a divine entity created by a Supreme Being. The book featured a supernatural creature described in animalistic terms. The novel begs the question, is this creature what man is progressing towards, or is it Darwin’s ape-man?
In the narrative of Dracula Stoker confronts this idea with religion. Van Helsing educates his followers in the uses of religious icons and symbols and the ways in which they can combat vampires.
Van Helsing and Dracula become parallels to Jesus and Satan. Van Helsing has his “cross” to bear in that he must defeat Dracula or the world will be lost. He brings the word of God with him. Dracula becomes an insidious presence, found in the Edenic home of Lucy Westenra. He tempts her and she succumbs. Her fall brings sorrow to those around her. It requires a sacrifice, which comes from the body of Quincey Morris.
Stoker kills Dracula eliminating the fear, but never the fear itself. Quincey Morris is resurrected in Jonathan and Mina’s son, Quincey. Humanity evolves on towards something new and presumably better. Have the heroes proved to be the fittest of the species, or have they simply killed what they will eventually become?

Paul Marchbank - Dracula: Degeneration, Sexuality and the Jew
Senior Lecturer, Southampton Institute, Southampton, United Kingdom

He who rejects with scorn that his own canines... [are] formidable weapons, will probably reveal by sneering the line of his descent... For though he no longer intends... to use these teeth as weapons, he will unconsciously retract his `snarling muscles'... so to expose them ready for action. (Charles Darwin, The Descent, 1, p.127).

Arguably, one interpretation of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) missed by many readers is the novel's anti-Semitism: Dracula’s distinctive physique, his parasitical desires, his `blood-sucking', his aversion to the crucifix and Christianity, and his rapacious relation to money, parallel stereotypical anti-Semitic nineteenth-century representations of the Jew.' However, because no direct reference is made within Dracula which unequivocally establishes the Count as Jewish, it would seem difficult to establish this relationship. Nonetheless, if a comparison is made between the representation of the vampire and the perceived image of the Jew, then a startling analogy arises. Dracula, like the perceived image of the Jew, seemingly transmits an inherent connection between blood and gold, between a threatening sexuality and ethnicity which seems to confirm the novel's depiction of the vampire as the anti-Semite's Jew. Here, the Jew is portrayed as a multi-faceted `monster', where the Gothic novel's creation of monstrosity is never completely unitary but is a composite of race, class, and gender'. Within the creation of monstrosity there exists a synthesis of nineteenth-century anti-Semitic, scientific, and sexual discourse. As such, anti-Semitism and the myth of the vampire share a kind of, what has been called `Gothic economy' in their ability to incorporate many `monstrous' characteristics into one body. Under these circumstances Dracula can be viewed as the personification of otherness - he is a polymorphous perverse reproduction of all the others constructed by and within fictional texts, sexual science, and psychopathology. As will be seen, Dracula's `otherness' - as sexual, as racial, as degenerate, as criminal - altogether his stereotypical Jewishness - threatens the stability of the British anima, sexuality, race, class, and Empire.
This paper makes a multidisciplinary reading of Dracula which incorporates literature, history, cultural studies, sexology and psychoanalysis in its attempt to analyse the cultural significance and, possibly unconscious, ideological structures within the text. Areas for discussion may include (Eastern) Jewish migration to Britain in the late nineteenth century, literary depictions of the Jew (i.e. Shakespeare, Dickens, Du Maurier, Wilde etc.), the constructions of Gothic monstrosity (particularly the links between the British Empire and the Darwinian biological theories of eugenics, degeneration, sexology and psychology, the rise of the New Woman) and the fear of the homosexual.

© Wickedness.Net 2003