Victorian Literature and Culture (2016), 44, 925–947.
© Cambridge University Press 2016. 1060-1503/16
doi:10.1017/S1060150316000280
A PARASITE FOR SORE EYES: REREADING
INFECTION METAPHORS IN BRAM
STOKER’S DRACULA
By Ross G. Forman
SINCE THE LATE 1980S and Elaine Showalter’s influential Sexual Anarchy, it has become
axiomatic to read Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula as a text that responds to anxieties
of degeneration through metaphors of infection (184). Given the obvious sexual nature
of the threat represented by the vampire, critics have focused on syphilis as the text’s
most immediate disease of reference. They have identified many important correspondences
between Stoker’s text and racialized fears of decline through blood and bloodlines, drawing
connections between Stoker’s own possible demise from syphilis, the history of contagious
diseases legislation, and the scandal surrounding Ibsen’s Ghosts (1882). But, as Martin Willis
has noted, there continues to be “a need to reassess Dracula within the contexts of disease
theories that allows for a more historically rigorous analysis of the novel” (302).
There are many possible approaches to such a re-evaluation of Stoker’s famous work,
despite the risk they carry of depoliticizing feminist, queer, and postcolonial engagements
with the novel by shifting away from what Christopher Craft terms “errant erotic impulses
and compensatory anxieties” (71). Willis himself advocates a kind of surface reading, arguing
that “Dracula’s engagement with disease is so very apparent in the novel . . . that there is
a critical desire to reach beyond its seeming superficiality to uncover the metonymic and
metaphorical ‘meanings’ of disease in alternative medical practices and debates” (302).
My approach continues to historicize the novel’s treatment of disease and science but
insists that such historicization has deep implications in terms of both politics and genre. I
argue that Stoker’s dialogue with an emerging awareness of parasitic infection, especially
malaria, and its relationship to blood in the 1890s serves as a focalizer for the different
theories and types of infection that Stoker marshals, including syphilis and tuberculosis.1
Parasitism highlights a mode of contagion that not only integrated itself into the bodies
of its victims and the body politic as a whole, but also enabled a seemingly permanent
bodily transformation and a seemingly endless process of replication that was all the more
threatening – and all the more exciting – to readers because it did not necessarily involve
finality. Dracula’s own longevity, as well as the way in which he is and is not the person
he was before his transformation, bears witness to this phenomenon, which destabilizes the
self but, in so doing, replaces it with a more stable alternative self. The parasite, in short, not
only resides within the body, but also alters its relationship to the outside world.
925
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VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Because the study of parasites was so closely linked to the Empire and to the
establishment of the discipline of tropical medicine during this period (with the School
of Tropical Medicine in London being founded in 1899), this approach makes the novel’s
imperial dimension even more significant. For instance, in his influential 1897 British Medical
Journal article “Remarks on the Possibility of the Acclimatisation of Europeans in Tropical
Regions,” Italian scientist Louis (Luigi) Westenra Sambon actually calls colonization a form
of parasitism (66). Sambon – who later taught at the London School of Tropical Medicine
and whose name suggests a possible origin for Lucy Westenra’s – reminds readers, “If
colonisation in the past has proved to be a work of mere destruction, it is not a reason to
suppose that it must be so in the future,” adding, “we must not forget that every attempt at
colonisation is a campaign not only against man, but against a host of minute living organisms
far more fearful” (66).
Malaria, in particular, was imbricated in discourses of healthy and unhealthy geography
that directly feed the antagonistic distinctions between East and West through which the novel
operates.2 At the time Dracula was published, malarial transmission was both mysterious,
implicated in older (but still extant) disease theories of miasma, and suspected of being
mosquito-borne. Miasmas themselves were strongly associated with distant or non-British
space, which had yet to be subject to the hygenizing processes of draining and clearing that
marked British and imperial environments. Germ theory, by contrast, saw individuals, rather
than geographies as a determining factor in the spread of infection (Edmond 113). Stoker
capitalizes on the ambiguity between different disease models to heighten the narrative
tension around infection and its origins. The novel shows how both people and geographies
are potentially mobile, which is why Dracula must transport not only himself but also his
land when he moves from Transylvania to Purfleet.
Because many of the major breakthroughs in understanding parasitic infection involved
a study of animal vectors – such as the Anopheles mosquito, with its long proboscis –
this approach also bolsters queer readings of the text that consider men’s desire to be
penetrated and, simultaneously, their fear of the ramifications of penetration. The effect is
to enhance the connection between blood-sucking and homosexuality as complementary
forms of “perversion of appetite” (Symonds 1). Through a symbolic fertilization process
that mimics penetration by spermatozoa, parasitic transmission is simultaneously through
ejaculatory injection and a drawing of vital fluid from the passive victim’s body. Infection is
therefore a perverse process of male creation.
Finally, situating Dracula in terms of emerging medical interest in parasites as the cause
of human disease provides an additional explanation for the efficacy of Stoker’s formula
of science and the supernatural as a powerful emotive for imperial anxieties about decline
and reverse colonization;3 for its investment in the idea of the bounded nation as a defense
against immigration (especially that of Jews, who were often likened to parasites); and for
its reliance on a model requiring an Anglo-American/Northern European alliance to control
colonization and to govern geopolitics.
I also argue that Stoker’s interest in malaria, with its emphasis on host-parasite
relationships and its shape-shifting protozoa engaged in a varied cycle of reproduction,
serves as a metaphor for the very form of the novel in a number of ways. First, his use
of bricolage and multiple strains of narration – techniques that would become familiar
patterns of modernist writing – partly mimics the relationship between amoeba and host.
In much the same way that Michael Tratner argues that modernist writers were influenced
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Rereading Infection Metaphors in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
927
by sociopolitical concepts of the collective, this essay suggests that the ideas of temporal
cycles, morphological changes, infection and propagation suggested by protozoan disease
provide a template for fin-de-siècle and modernist writers’ diegetic and formal experiments
with time, space, and motion. Second, malaria elucidates the relationship between science,
popular culture, and the reading public by clarifying how developments in medicine could
be – and were – refracted in narrative in order to raise tensions and sustain suspense. Finally,
malaria offers a way of understanding how the text functions as a body of writing to be acted
on by agents that are ostensibly both internal and external to it – agents that actively blur the
distinction between different narrative forms (the novel, the newspaper, the medical report,
the diary, etc.) and in so doing actively perform vampirism on these genres so as to co-opt
them.4
Textual parasitism reframes literary-critical discussion of the novel in the related areas
of form and context at the fin de siècle. Parasitic relations dominate not only the plots
of a number of bestselling 1890s novels, but also their relationships to other texts and
genres. This parasitism emerges primarily in works of popular fiction in part because their
popularity makes it more natural for them to channel cultural anxieties through tropes of
monstrosity, vampirism, infection, mesmerism, and exotic alterity. Parasitic relations also
fulfill this function in part because their aesthetic practice places less emphasis on notions
of originality and credibility than their more elite cousins.
The Parasitic Parameters of Genre
MANY CRITICS HAVE COMMENTED on the sources – historical and literary – that Stoker uses
in designing his novel. For example, Craft notes:
In Dracula, Stoker borrows from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde, and Le Fanu’s Carmilla a narrative strategy characterized by a predictable, if variable,
triple rhythm. Each of these texts first invites or admits a monster, then entertains and is entertained
by monstrosity for some extended duration, until in its closing pages it expels and repudiates the
monster and all the disruption that he/she/it brings. (71–72)
What has been less noticed, however, is the way in which these borrowings replicate models
of infection. Indeed, Craft’s “rhythm” could equally be described as one of contact with
monstrosity, infection by monstrosity, and recovery from monstrosity. The value of this
pattern – and its resonances in the novel’s build-up, climax, and dénouement – lies in
its greater violence, both with respect to source texts and with respect to textual events.
Parasitism presupposes a hostile relationship with literary hosts and means that the resulting
work is itself monstrous. The infection is also carried across a community of readers, who
themselves are transformed through the act of reading. These forces make the parasitic text
an open text, subjected in turn to further replication or parasitism. (This factor helps explain
why Dracula has spawned such diverse offspring – some of which, like Stephanie Meyers’s
Twilight series, retain its conservative sexual and racial impulses, while others, such as Anne
Rice’s The Vampire Diaries, harbor more radical potential.) Parasitism’s association with
vectors, which obliquely link together different types of bodies, also suggests a paradigm of
intertextuality that does not assume generic conformity. In Dracula, this paradigm manifests
itself in two ways: first, through the fact that borrowings occur from multiple genres, rather
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VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
than being restricted to fiction or even the “literary,” and second through a technique of
narrative construction that invites the reader to find vectors between the different registers
of information – diaries, newspaper clippings, witness statements, telegrams, and the like –
that Stoker uses to craft his tale.
Like the parasite, Dracula draws blood from a range of non-fictional and fictional
progenitors, including the adventure tale, the penny dreadful, the mystery novel, and sensation
fiction. For instance, Stoker cribs some elements of the novel’s structure from Wilkie Collins’s
The Moonstone (1868), which also solves a mystery through multiple narrative strands often
reported in the form of testimony. The unconventional medical practitioner – Ezra Jennings
in The Moonstone and Van Helsing in Dracula – is central to the resolution of the narrative.
Dracula also reiterates mystery fiction’s conviction that the conventional police are inept or
otherwise unable to solve crimes, and that a group of individuals only loosely connected
to the profession of detection needs to be constituted in its place. This contention was a
standard feature not only of Collins’s work, but also of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock
Holmes stories.
Other elements are sucked from sensation fiction’s repertoire of melodrama and
emotional excess. These include an interest in hysteria and monomania, evinced most
powerfully in the characterization of Renfield, but also in that of Mina and Lucy’s mother.
Sensation’s stock element of bigamy also informs readers’ perceptions of Lucy’s multiple
suitors. However, Lucy’s punishment for imagined promiscuity differs from that of a character
like Lady Audley in that she must be bled of her sexual excess through vampiric attack. Thus,
on a diegetic level, the parasitic trope functions as a way to drain women of their sexuality
in what is a clear repudiation of the New Woman.
From the adventure tale, Stoker pulls the notion of the quest, with its ritual ending in
heterosexual romance and procreation, as well as the concept that this type of novel should
be part travelogue and should engage in ethnological explication. This latter aspect is most
apparent in the early pages of the work when Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania to
meet the count and gives detailed descriptions of the manners and customs of the peoples
he encounters. In this sense, Stoker taps in to a longstanding tradition in popular fiction of
devaluing originality and allowing material from published travel literature to be absorbed
seamlessly into the fictional text.5 However, whereas this parasitic relationship to other
literary genres might have been unremarkable in the first half of the nineteenth century, by
the 1890s, it was no naive act. From the more popular end of the literary spectrum, Stoker’s
caricature of the vampire, his skepticism about the efficacy of the police, and his deployment
of melodramatic convention all feed off the boys’ fiction produced by such publications as
the Boy’s Own Paper and the Illustrated Police News.
My characterization of these textual moves as parasitic might suggest a negative attitude
towards Stoker’s engagement with the novel as genre. It is not necessarily a compliment to
say that vampirism and parasitism are the hallmarks of Dracula’s experimentation with form.
Similarly, when scholars discuss literature of the period that is more aesthetically appreciated
– such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1898) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The
Beach of Falesà” (1892) – they see some of these same moves as gesturing towards
modernism, rather than parasitism. Nevertheless, I want to reclaim the parasitic in this
instance for a number of reasons: First, I believe this foregrounding of the parasitic
relationship is an important feature of fin-de-siècle literature more broadly, especially in
popular literature. As such, it speaks to obvious anxieties about such issues as women’s roles
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Rereading Infection Metaphors in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
929
and changing geopolitical relations (vide reverse colonization, damaging imperial skirmishes
in places like the Sudan, and renewed imperial self-doubt), but it does so through metaphors
of transfer and exchange that link together thematic and narrative procedures. To cite a few
examples: George Du Maurier’s 1894 Trilby focuses on the parasitic relationship between the
title character and the hypnotist Svengali; Svengali’s control over Trilby finds echoes in the
hypnotic tension between Mina and Dracula that forms a central part of the efforts to track
and exterminate the vampire. Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, published just after Dracula, also
features shape-shifting, mesmerism, and a parasitic, Orientalized alien.6 The Beetle shares
with Dracula an interest in beings who defy the strictures of time – i.e., whose life spans
are not limited in the same way as those of ordinary mortals. This resistance to aging (or
longevity through reincarnation) is also the hallmark of Ayesha, the parasitic protagonist of
H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887), and features in several prequels and sequels, such as Ayesha:
The Return of She (1905).
Closer to home, three roughly contemporary vampire tales confirm parasitism’s
utility in allowing popular writers to articulate gender and racial sentiments through an
aesthetics of terror. Like Dracula, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1896 “Good Lady Ducayne”
links mosquitoes, transfusion, and the undead. Again, vampirism is associated with the
inappropriate transgression of women’s roles and the desire to defy the processes of aging.
Like Dracula, “Good Lady Ducayne” invokes questions of class exploitation, with a wealthy
woman literally feeding off of and enervating a member of the servant classes. Protagonist
Bella Rolleston is hired as a companion to a centenarian whose doctor secretly bleeds her
in order to keep his patron alive by transfusing her with Bella’s fresh, young blood. Dr
Parravicini wards off Bella’s questions about mysterious wounds and dreams of whirring
by telling her she is susceptible to mosquitoes and informing her that she has “bad skin
for healing, and that the poison acts more virulently with me than with most people”
(196). Although mosquitoes are not the true cause of Bella’s malaise, this reference to
poison cements the connection in the reader’s mind between the withdrawal of blood
and the inauguration of social sickness. It also highlights what readers will soon come
to understand, that Bella’s neurasthenic enervation is neither of psychological origin nor
rooted in personal idleness caused by her transformation from working-class girl into rich
woman’s companion, but stems from external forces. The story’s Continental setting and
its nefarious Italian doctor, reminiscent of Collins’s Count Fosco in The Woman in White
(1860), add a racial twist to this scenario. “Good Lady Ducayne” makes little mention of
a vampire, except when Bella’s future husband is shown the “mosquito” bites on her body
and remarks, “What a vampire!” (193). However, the illustration preceding the original
Strand magazine edition shows old Lady Ducayne in the foreground with a huge bat
spreading its wings behind her and the story’s title superimposed on top of the wings (185;
Figure 8).
A similar picture graces the cover of the Arrowsmith Library’s edition of The Vampire
Nemesis and Other Weird Stories of the China Coast (1905) by Dolly (Leonard D’Oliver;
Figure 9). The black, white, and red lithograph is dominated by an enormous bat with the
face of its victim partly showing in the corner. Dolly’s title story, originally published in the
Anglo-Chinese press, is set in the British concession in Ningpo (Ningbo). It does not figure
the bat as infection. Instead, the vampire serves as the vengeance incarnate for protagonist
Fergusson’s mistreatment of Matthews, a “half-caste” subordinate, and his mixed-race wife
“May,” both of whom die through contact with him. (Fergusson steals May for his mistress.)
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VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Figure 8. The opening image of the Strand edition of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s “Good Lady Ducayne”
(Feb. 1896: 184). Courtesy of the University of Warwick Library.
In an interesting twist on the fiend of “Yellow Peril” literature, subsequent events lead
Fergusson to believe that Matthews’s soul has transmigrated into a vampire bat, which
pursues retribution. Matthew’s own hybridity, and hence his racial instability, underlies this
potential for reincarnation and shift of form.
Like many of the other narratives discussed above, enervation is a key plot feature. In this
case, Matthews becomes addicted to opium smoking, with all its associations of feminization
and degeneration; he later tries to murder Fergusson, then commits suicide. Enervation also
provides a means for Fergusson to attempt to evade responsibility for May’s murder, after
he has mistreated and tortured her in a drunken rage. At that moment, the “Thing” appears
and begins “sucking her life’s blood” (21). Fergusson later awakes from a stupor to find
his mistress dead, with “a tiny puncture under her ear, just on the jugular vein, with a little
globule of blood no bigger than a bead exuding from it; but the pillow was bathed in blood,
soaked through and through” (22). It is as if Matthews has reclaimed what belongs to him
through an erotically charged vampirism. The vampire nemesis eventually pursues Fergusson
and leads him to his death.
Like Dracula, “The Vampire Nemesis” ostensibly eschews the supernatural but seeks
to reconcile unconventional spiritual beliefs with the rational and scientific world. (Marie
Corelli’s 1895 Sorrows of Satan does this, as well.) “I make no doubt but that all could be
readily explained away on grounds purely natural by one who had been a calm observer of
the facts, if facts they were” (7), avers the narrator, Ward, who is Fergusson’s best friend.
These terms are strikingly similar to the statement at the beginning of Stoker’s novel that
the narrative has been structured so that “a history almost at variance with the possibilities
of latter-day belief may stand forth as simple fact” (6). Such truth claims were standard
practice in Victorian novels, but here the vampire serves the specific function of transforming
the occult into the rationally plausible. Again as in Dracula, the mobility of geography
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Rereading Infection Metaphors in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
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Figure 9. The cover of the Arrowsmith Bristol Library edition of Leonard D’Oliver’s The Vampire Nemesis
(Bristol: J. W. Arrowsmith, 1905). Internet Archive.
enables the paradox of the vampire’s mode of operation; the vampire is able to transcend the
geography that supposedly contains him. “We are not in South America now . . . and there
are no vampires in China,” Ward asserts, to which Fergusson replies, “Nevertheless . . . it
was a vampire” (24). Stoker similarly draws connections across non-British geographical
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VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
space when the character of Quincey Morris compares Dracula to the vampire bats he has
encountered in South America.
Among the common traits that link “The Vampire Nemesis” to the other examples
of fin-de-siècle popular fiction discussed here are the Orientalization or exoticization of
threatening alterity, the instability of physical form, and the importance of blood as the
transmitter of heritage. These traits are also prominent in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of
a Vampire (1897). Once more, the vampire is a racially hybrid figure, signally associated
with a history of insanity, who carries the “fatal heritage that made her a terror and a curse
to her fellow-creatures” (213). Race and parasitism are necessarily intertwined, for Harriet
Brandt is afflicted with “the curse of black blood and of the vampire’s blood which kills
everything which it caresses” (188; ch. 15). This Biblically inflected notion of the curse
again legitimates itself through medical science; it is an elderly doctor with experience of
the Caribbean, from which Harriet hails, who has the role of explaining her vampirism to the
reader and to Harriet herself. A New Womanly figure, Harriet is the possessor of unnatural
appetites, both physical and sexual – she is “the epitome of lust,” according to one character
(86; ch. 7). She is voracious both at table and in her friendships. Early in the novel, she seems
to be one of those “young unsophisticated girls” who “had taken unaccountable affections for
members of their own sex” (27; ch. 3). She induces neurasthenia, if not death, in members of
her circle because she is a person who “must draw from their neighbours, sometimes making
excessive demands on their vitality – sapping their physical strength, and feeding upon them,
as it were, until they are perfectly exhausted and unable to resist disease” (195; ch. 16). Here,
Marryat explicitly ties Harriet’s parasitism to disease. She not only draws strength out of a
victim’s body, but she also paves the way for a kind of secondary infection.
Yet Harriet’s vampirism is not self-willed; she enervates and drives to extinction those
whom she befriends through her mere presence. (Unwilling vampirism is also a feature of
Dracula, where the vampire’s bite gifts characters with uncontrollable impulses to infect
others.) The realization of her parasitic effect on those she loves and her husband’s death
lead her to suicide so that, in the novel’s final line, she can “go to a world where the curse
of heredity” may be “mercifully wiped out” (227; ch. 28). Thus Marryat’s plot elucidates
what the dangers of contact – with alterity, with gender inconformity, and with excessive
desire – are in directly parasitic terms. At one point, she even has another character claim
that Harriet is an example of “[c]ases of persons who actually feed upon the lives of others,
as the deadly upas tree sucks the life of its victim, by lulling him into a sleep from which he
never wakens!” (95; ch. 8).
What all of these fin-de-siècle narratives have in common, then, is the not very surprising
deployment of tropes of infection to carry their discussions of cultural threats to British
integrity. British integrity is itself conceptualized in terms of what Laura Otis calls the
imperial immune system. What makes the narratives specifically fin-de-siècle, however, is
the way in which they relate this immune system directly to questions of energy and vitality.
Beyond popular fiction, energy and vitality were issues that rose to great prominence during
this period not only among writers such as Vernon Lee, but also among scientists and
sexologists. Parasitism in particular fits this cultural frame because it gives power to outside
agents – agents that not only breach the immune system but also integrate themselves
with their hosts in unsettling ways. At the same time, parasitism as a literary mechanism
ironically lends the texts a crucial vitality, titillating through the horror and terror of potential
individual and collective enervation. The close, historicizing reading that follows examines
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Rereading Infection Metaphors in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
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these processes in action. It details how Dracula instances the conduits between science and
popular culture and their significance to a textual politics of the Victorian social body at a
moment of imperial uncertainty.
Foreign Bodies and Ordered Selfishness
THE DISEASES UNDERPINNING THE CULTURE in which Dracula was conceived and
disseminated include not just malaria and syphilis, but also cancer (thought by some to
be caused by protozoa and by many to be infectious), cholera – another “Asiatic,” liquidborne disease that, during the nineteenth century, repeatedly affected Britain’s imperial core
through the London water system – leprosy, and other insect-related or parasitic diseases like
yellow fever, filariasis, and dengue that, while perhaps irrelevant to the health of the nation
writ small, were still of crucial concern to the empire at large.7 Plague, too, is also crucial,
as it was ravaging India in 1896–97; Stoker had two brothers working in India during this
period.8
However, malaria, then as now, was seen as the leading cause of death in the tropics –
especially in the regions of Africa where Britain was scrambling to acquire territory in the
1890s.9 A large percentage of British troops in Africa and Asia were also afflicted with the
disease. Then as now, malaria may have failed to grab as much attention as more spectacular,
sexually transmitted diseases, but it was emphatically not a disease that was off the cultural
map. As Edwin Klebs and Corrado Tommasi-Crudeli noted in the late 1880s, “Even where
its intensity is not such as to cause a great annual mortality, [malaria] induces a progressive
decadence of race, which no other endemic is capable of,” adding, “The preservation of
society from injurious influences so grave is therefore a socio-economic problem of the first
order” (1–2).
Reading Stoker’s work through malaria clarifies the novel’s depiction, in cultural
terms, of parasite-host relations, blood-based disease transmission, and cures based on a
combination of traditional knowledge and the tools of science and reason. With its incubation
period, its alternate and extended periods of activity and dormancy, and its hot and cold
stages, malaria almost exactly matches the symptomology of vampiric infection. Anaemia,
like that suffered by the female victims of Stoker’s vampire, is a common effect of the
disease;10 so are the sorts of delusions and paroxysms that afflict the maniac Renfield, who
is described in Seward’s diary as having a “sanguine temperament” (83; ch. 5). Remittance
and intermittence – where periods of better and worse health, or lucidity and insanity,
alternate – are also key characteristics of the active phase of the illness, just as they are
of Lucy and Mina’s slow deterioration in the novel. Moreover, contemporary descriptions
of malaria, in conjunction with other diseases of the period, also highlight the fact that the
word degeneration – a term of immense cultural relevance during the late Victorian period –
originates not simply in racial science, but also in medicine, where it might be used to describe
the deterioration of a patient’s condition or changes in a patient’s cells during the course of
an illness. This other, overlapping usage of the notion of degeneration may explain some
of the efficacy of the connection between disease and individual and imperial decline that
the novel seeks to arouse, and which it refracts, in part, through an idea of medical science.
Klebs and Tommasi-Crudeli’s assertion that malaria incites progressive racial degeneration
is particularly apt when applied to Dracula and its reliance on the notion of evolutionary or
anachronistic time.11 Like similar ideas about hereditary syphilis, it links together the text’s
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employment of medical, evolutionary, and Orientalist discourse. The novel therefore relies
on an accretion of medical malaise associated with various domestic and imperial ailments
that give its vampiric threat greater resonance.
Dracula was published only months before Ronald Ross of the Indian Medical Service
conclusively proved mosquitoes to be the vector of malarial transmission (in a study published
in December 1897) and four years after Patrick Manson first formulated the mosquito-malaria
hypothesis (in the British Medical Journal in 1894), although the initial idea of the connection
between mosquitoes and malaria dates to the early 1880s.12 By 1896, Ross was supporting
Manson’s theory of mosquito-involvement based on his studies in Secunderabad in work he
published in the British Medical Journal.13 Mosquitoes were also known to transmit filariasis
to humans by this period, while Carlos Finlay had proposed that they were responsible for
transmitting yellow fever in 1881; the connection between the “voracious” tsetse fly and
“fly disease” was also becoming known.14 “The rôle of the mosquito is beginning to be
recognised; that of the tsetse is now established, and, possibly, ere long, other bloodsuckers
will be found to possess similar properties, either as active agents in the biological cycle
of disease germs, as in the case of the mosquito, or as media for the conveyance from one
human being or from one animal to another, as in the case of the tsetse fly,” noted the British
Medical Journal in 1896 (“The Tsetse Fly” 1220). The neurological phase of so-called
African sleeping sickness (or “Negro Lethargy”) caused by infection through the tsetse fly,
incidentally, can be characterized by sleeping during the day and insomnia at night, much
like vampiric infection. Patients also refuse food, much as Mina does after she has been
forced to ingest Dracula’s blood. The early stages of the disease also cause symptoms of
mania, which the Victorians likened to general paralysis of the insane.15
The novel’s interest in garlic as a means to keep away the vampire is also suggestive of
the relationship between insects and disease. Critics have variously interpreted Van Helsing’s
prescription of wild garlic flowers to ward off the vampire’s visits to Lucy’s room. Some
sources known to have been used by Stoker identify garlic as a folk treatment.16 Meanwhile,
in his analysis of the novel’s disease context, Willis sees the garlic as part of Van Helsing’s
introduction of germ theory into a novel earlier characterized by concepts of miasma (312–
13): “Surrounded by garlic flowers, a metonymy for antiseptic that combats the metaphor of
vampirism as microbe, Lucy is well protected from the microbial infection that vampirism
represents” (313). There are good grounds for making this argument, not the least being
that Van Helsing insists on importing the garlic from a greenhouse in Haarlem. This fact is
suggestive of garlic’s induction into the doctor’s pharmacopeia, of sterile/laboratory growing
conditions to ensure its purity and efficacy, and, of course, of the scientific method underlying
the “grim purpose” for placing the substance in Lucy’s room (171). Yet there is also a more
obvious explanation for this scene. Rubbing the garlic around the windows and hanging
the flowers around Lucy’s neck is suggestive of insect prophylaxis. Garlic, a substance
antithetical to the British diet in the late Victorian era and generally considered to be noxious,
here functions as a repellent. Such a use of garlic makes its appearance in a known source
of Stoker’s: Thomas Joseph Pettigrew’s On Superstitions Connected with the History and
Practice of Medicine and Surgery. Discussing Luis Navarrete’s visit to the Philippine Islands,
the book notes that a commemoration of St. George was made to keep scorpions away when
sleeping. “The bed was also rubbed with garlic, which doubtless was the efficacious part of
the remedy” (78).17 It keeps away the vermin that is the vampire. Indeed, some medical texts
of the period suggested the use of garlic to forestall malarial infection.18 The bulb was also
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Rereading Infection Metaphors in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
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used in agriculture to keep insects away from crops (what today is called the “garlic barrier”)
and was placed with grain to ward off rats.19 Thus repelling the vampire with unsavory fumes
again knits together the medical and social contexts of the novel.
If conclusive evidence of the mosquito’s role in spreading malaria and other diseases
was only just emerging at the time Stoker’s novel appeared, nevertheless speculation on such
connections was often in the air during this period. In an 1883 article entitled “Insects and
Disease: Mosquitoes and Malaria” that appeared in the journal Popular Science Monthly,
for instance, Professor A. F. King stated, “Viewed in light of our modern ‘germ theory’
of disease, the punctures of proboscidian insects, like those of Pasteur’s needles, deserve
consideration, as a probable means by which bacteria and other germs may be inoculated
into human bodies, so as to infect the blood and give rise to specific fevers” (644).
King’s comment offers an important window into the way in which Stoker’s novel sees
vampirism both as a draining of bodily and spiritual content (as the mosquito sucks the
blood from its victim) and as an injection of dangerous, evil, and potentially infectious
agents (as the mosquito implants the parasite, which then replicates itself in the blood of
the individual). This is the conundrum that underlies the vampire kiss, which relies on the
parallel processes of drawing something from the body and introducing something else into
it. The text does little to clarify how Lucy and Mina are actually “turned” from the living
into the un-dead (in other words, from humans into “hosts”), nor is there the suggestion that
a certain concentration of an infectious agent is necessary to effect this transformation. Yet it
is clear that, as with tuberculosis (another commonly identified disease referent in Dracula),
repeated exposure is required, and that this exposure is seen as a mode of insemination. The
suggestion of insemination is bolstered by the vampire’s two elongated teeth, which bear
a more than passing resemblance to the proboscises of the mosquito described above by
King, proboscises which “puncture” the skin just as Dracula’s fangs do. That King compares
these proboscises to the hypodermic needle – similarly used to puncture, draw from, and
infuse into the body – and speaks of a process of inoculation is equally predictive of the
tensions the novel describes between external and internal sites of embodiment, conceived
metaphorically in explicitly broad terms.
By the 1890s, work on the Continent had allowed scientists to be more secure than
King was as to the cause of malaria. Studies of slides of blood taken from infected patients
had confirmed that malaria was a parasite, rather than a bacterium, and accurate diagnosis
became possible. Indeed, the New Sydenham Society released a translation of French doctor
Alphonse Laveran’s key book Paludisme in 1893, and by the time Stoker’s novel began
circulating, there was scientific consensus that a parasite was the cause of malarial fevers.
Laveran had also suggested the possibility of the mosquito’s involvement in malaria.
It is important to note that late Victorian terminology regarding the insects involved
in parasitic infection differs from today’s standard usage of the word “mosquito.” Medical
literature of the period often refers to these insects as “gnats,” and the concept of what
constituted a fly was more elastic than it now is. This fact bears a relevance to Renfield’s habit
of consuming flies during the early period of his insanity in that it explicitly associates him
with vectors of blood-borne infection, and thus with the vampire. Renfield’s periodic bouts of
lucidity and psychosis are also in some ways consistent with fever-induced delirium (which
Seward, as an alienist, might potentially misdiagnose as insanity). Such an interpretation
of the character of Renfield’s madness also implicitly draws connections between him and
Harker, whose experience in Transylvania leaves him with a “brain fever” that recurs later in
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the novel during the hunt for Dracula. Recurrence and intermittency are often the hallmarks
of parasitic infections like malaria.
With malaria in mind – though brain malaria is the deadliest form of the disease! – I
will now turn to Stoker’s novel to trace the way in which certain strands of the narrative may
reiterate ideas about the strains of the disease.20 Dracula himself is associated both with the
miasmas of earlier conceptions of illness and with the newly transcendent germ theories of
infection, two sometimes contradictory systems which were being reconciled by science in
the 1890s. This reconciliation occurs in medicine’s emerging understanding of the infectious
agents or vectors (like insects) present in the miasmas themselves. Malaria, a word which
means “bad air” in Italian, encapsulates these two modes of medical practice (as does the
French term paludisme, from the word for marsh, palus). In fact, medical texts of the time,
such as the 1893 Hygiene and Diseases of Warm Climates, even refer to the malaria parasite
as the miasma vivum that causes the disease (Davidson 114). Prior to the discovery of the
mosquito connection, medical researchers theorized that pathogenic microorganisms were
present in marsh air; they spoke of “malarial mists” rising up from the soil. In the eighteenth
century, as Ronald Ross noted in a lecture in 1900, “Morton, Lancisi, Pringle and others
observed the connection of the disease with stagnant water and low-lying ground, and first
emitted the theory – which in one form or another has found general acceptance up to the
present date – that the fever is due to a miasm which rises from the soil or water of malarious
localities” (Malaria and Mosquitoes 1).
Dracula is linked to the miasma in several ways. First, Dracula’s home is associated with
special and peculiar geological features, the air after crossing the Borgo Pass being described
as a separate “atmosphere” and “heavy” (8–9; ch. 1).21 Second, the swirling particles out of
which Dracula’s female companions emerge (intending to prey on Harker during his visit
to Transylvania) are as suggestive of teeming insects and floating pathogens as they are of
the Biblical creation myth.22 As such, Dracula is an embodiment, in a single figure, of the
multiple organisms necessary for parasitic infection. [Ross’s Instructions for the Prevention
of Malarial Fever, first published in 1899, opens with the statement that 250 million to 1
billion parasites are needed to produce an attack of fever (3).] In this sense, too, he is an
emblem of a threatening alternative sort of collective to the nation, able to flourish within its
bounds and transform them.23
Third, the mist which surrounds Dracula’s ship during its voyage from the Black Sea
to the north of England is a literal instantiation of this infectious miasma; it accompanies
Dracula on his voyage and fells the ship’s crew. Dracula enshrouds himself in this mist when
he arrives in Yorkshire. The fictitious publication the Dailygraph remarks on the “oppressive
stillness” of the air that precedes Dracula’s landing at Whitby, and describes the mist from
the ship as “so damp and cold that it needed but little effort of the imagination to think that the
spirits of those lost at sea were touching their living brethren with the clammy hands of death”
(76; ch. 7). Many critics have noted that as part of the novel’s rabidly anti-feminist stance,
Lucy is punished for her immoderate desires and New Womanly “looseness,” aberrations
that result in her sleepwalking in Whitby on the night in which Dracula first attacks her. Yet
this sleepwalking scene is also marked by miasma; in effect, the unconventional behavior
for which she must be punished is what leads her directly to a place where infection resides
in the form of “bad” night air and exposes her to its ravages.
Similarly the “night soil” in which Dracula must rest and which he carries with him from
the East is a marker of his anachronistic relationship to the modern urban environment and
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his threat to industrialized Britain’s sense of the hygienic self. Dracula’s association with
soil has rightly been tied to ideas of death, rottenness, plague, and the perversion of tropes of
growth and planting. And soil, because of its connections with death and decay, obviously
has a direct correlation with disease. It is soil that often harbors pathogenic organisms, and
foreign and colonial earth was potentially the most lethal of all.
Nevertheless, there may be a specific linkage here to malaria, a disease that nineteenthcentury scientists saw as “intimately connected with the soil”; as “generated only in
connection with the soil” (Hygiene 130); “it is said to ‘hug the ground’ or ‘love the ground’”
(King 649). That Dracula must carry his soil with him in order to survive has justly been
considered an elaboration of the “blood and soil” discourse that underlies many modern
conceptions of nation and citizenship, but a tandem way of understanding this representation
is to see Dracula as literally carrying the unhealthy miasma with him to places where a
natural miasma no longer survives. Here, it is significant that late nineteenth-century science
considered malaria to be primarily a rural or tropical disease; even if those involved in public
health did not understand mosquito breeding to be the necessary precondition for malarial
infection, they did know that the disease was less prevalent in urban and industrialized
areas and in areas of the empire where progress had cleared away marshes and stagnant
water for modern forms of agriculture. Indeed, medical texts predating the confirmation of
the mosquito’s role in the transmission vector repeatedly cite the draining of wetlands as a
generally successful sanitation measure in various parts of the world. That Dracula chooses
a decrepit and abandoned house in Purfleet as his base near London again links together
notions of decay and degeneration with those of the stagnant and malignant atmosphere that
medicine had long identified with the spread of disease.24
Another way in which malaria and the vampire seem to complement each other is in their
similar relationship with time. Malaria, like other mosquito-born illnesses, has something of
a time cycle. As any traveler today will know, it is a threat which wakes at dusk and comes
out at night, much like Dracula. Or, as King puts it, “Malaria is most dangerous when the
sun is down, and it seems almost inert during the day” (649) – “inert” being an apt term
for Dracula’s daytime behavior, as well. While this pattern conforms to the marsh and mist
theories of contagion, in that miasmas are primarily a function of night, the specific parasitic
element common to the novel and contemporaneous speculations on the etiology of malaria
is relevant. Moreover, the cycle of malaria – which, like many other epidemic diseases, was
supposedly introduced to England from more temperate parts of the world – is tied to a
calendar that we see reproduced in Dracula: infection occurs principally in late summer or
autumn, but subsides in winter. And it is in winter that the vampire retreats to his lair, where
he can be hunted down and exterminated. Significantly, it is in summer that Mina and her
friends return to Transylvania at the end of the novel to commemorate their personal history.
It is tempting to think about the relationship between a disease cycle like this one and ideas
about the British Empire bringing the light of progress to benighted peoples, or introducing
an endless summer to its colonies. In this context, the motto that the sun never sets on the
British Empire takes on new and particularly salutary meanings for the Victorians.
Malaria is also an illness that is defined by change or transformation; the amoeba
that causes the disease changes shape and function according to cycles that the vampire
may be said to mimic. Thus there is a clear parallel between Dracula’s ability to change
form – from bat to wolf to vampire – and his parasitical function, as understood according
to contemporary medical terminology. Indeed, shape-shifting was one of the factors that
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initially posed difficulties in the identification of malaria as a parasitic infection, and as
a mosquito-borne one, as well. Spores and flagella only appeared at certain points in the
life cycle, there were discrepancies in samples taken from mosquitoes and humans, and
characteristic formations disappeared quickly once outside the body because the protozoa
died. Like a parasite, Dracula’s vulnerability to outside forces is determined by his shape,
and transformation is key to his survival.
At the same time, malaria is a disease that, like the vampire attack, is inherently
sexual in that the parasite reproduces within and through the blood of the host. Thus the
blood itself becomes a locus for perverse sexual congress. Victorian cultists might have
imagined fairies and other benign creatures reproducing within the body under conditions of
perpetual orgasm;25 parasitic infection proposed a much more sinister sort of insemination.26
Conceiving of Dracula as parasite therefore complements criticism of the novel that sees
the multiple transfusions that Lucy receives in terms of sex and theorizes Dracula’s actions
in terms of sexual aggression. As critics have noted, both the vampiric inoculation and the
transfusions used to counter it – which leave Lucy with “four men’s blood in her poor veins”
(247; ch. 14) – conjure up polygamy and polyandry, and thus sexual transgression. But they
also raise the specter of miscegenation, typically defined for the Victorians as “mixed blood.”
From inside the bloodstream, the parasite perverts on multiple levels by changing the locus
of reproduction and by replicating Otherness within it.
Contemporary medical discourse suggests that such an understanding of the function
of the parasite did exist at the fin de siècle. “The sudden rises of temperature which occur
in this disease [malaria], and which are often accompanied by shivering (ague), are due
to the parasites scattering their spores in the blood-fluid,” noted Ross in his Instructions
for the Prevention of Malaria Fever. “The parasites grow up together and scatter their
spores, or ‘eggs,’ simultaneously” (3). Intermittent fevers were therefore caused by waves of
parasites achieving maturity, then reproducing. Moreover, late nineteenth-century comments
by scientists on their observation of the parasite in blood samples often noted the flagella
that appeared at certain stages of the organism’s development; this emphasis underscores a
sexually oriented etiology in that it literally focuses the gaze on the parasite as an image
of sperm (Figure 10). Indeed, flagella were often described as the parasite in a reproductive
phase; by 1900, Ross was referring to them as microgametes – that is, “bodies of the nature
of spermatozoa” (Malaria and Mosquitoes 7). They came to be a key means of diagnosing
the infection, since the “motile filaments” developed after blood had been drawn to enable
the parasites to pass into the stomach cavity of the mosquito.
Dracula’s uncorporeal status – his lack of a shadow – has been variously interpreted by
critics. Franco Moretti, for instance, sees this as indicative of Dracula’s position vis-à-vis
alienated labor and capital (91). Yet it is also suggestive of the transparency of the parasite or
bacillus. Parasites were generally immediately noticeable in blood taken from patients, but
this identification was often dependent on the quantity, type, and moment in the protozoa’s
life cycle. Stained with a substance such as methylene blue, however, they were more easily
visible on a microscope slide. And if Dracula is the negation of individual liberty, monopoly
as foreign threat, the malarial parasite, too, remains in and retains its hold over the body for
the lifespan of its victims.
Finally, if the (malarial) parasite is taken to be the alien growing within the subject, this
lens provides another way to understand the perversion of maternal roles that characterizes
women who are transformed by the vampire kiss, with the parasite literally replacing the child
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Rereading Infection Metaphors in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
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Figure 10. An image from the 1898 edition of Patrick Manson’s Tropical Diseases (London: Cassell: 13),
suggestive of the pictorial analogy between the malaria parasite and sperm. Internet Archive.
inside the body. Parasitism thus provides Stoker with a potent metaphor for the dissolution
of the distinction between self and other within and through the body – a key component of
the titillating danger of difference through which Dracula operates.
A number of critics have speculated on the reason behind the inclusion of an American,
and specifically a Texan, named Quincey Morris in Stoker’s novel. These include Texas oil,
Anglo-American alliances and rivalries, and notions of rugged masculinity. Yet an additional
reason may have to do with the discovery of another parasite-borne disease: Texas cattle
fever, which had decimated ranchers’ herds since the 1860s. In 1893, Theobald Smith and
Fred Lucius Kilborne published pathology research indicating that the disease was caused
by a blood parasite and transmitted by ticks. The association of Texas with parasitic infection
gives a new valence to Moretti’s well-known reading of Quincey Morris as a vampire (94–97).
What is also curious is that the parasite that Smith and Kilborne found to cause Texas cattle
disease had been discovered in 1885 by a Romanian scientist, Victor Babeş, a pioneering
bacteriologist of the late nineteenth century.27
Morris himself is directly linked to the vampiric infection of livestock through his
comments on the vampire bats he has encountered in the Pampas. However, it is necessary
to draw a distinction between how both Morris and Van Helsing describe these bats and the
vampire’s mode of sucking and inoculation. Both characters emphasize that the bats open a
vein, leading to the uncontrolled bleeding and death of the victim. With Dracula, however,
the wound is repeatedly marked as small – almost unnoticeable – and the process subject to
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VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
repetition. Thus the analogy between Dracula and the vampire bat also points to a distinction
between the human and the animal and hints at the more subtle mode of attack needed when
preying on a higher life form.
Stoker may or may not have been aware of the particulars of medical etiologies
surrounding malaria, though three of his brothers were doctors (Richard, William Thornley,
and George), and two (Richard and Thomas) were serving in India at the time of Ross’s
discoveries; William Thornley Stoker was also president of the Royal College of Surgeons
in Ireland from 1894–96.28 Nonetheless Dracula is a text that operates around the axis of
medical knowledge and its ability or inability to solve or resolve issues of individual and
social importance. However, despite the novel’s intense investment in blood and circulation –
with its semi-parodic articulation of the mantra “The blood is the life” – it is noteworthy that at
no point does Van Helsing subject the blood of Dracula’s victims to a laboratory evaluation
(although Seward does examine some accidentally spilled blood for signs of anemia).29
This “oversight” on Van Helsing’s part is in keeping with what many critics have seen
as the connection between vampiric infection and hysteria.30 Physical testing is therefore
superfluous because the cause of the illness is not pathogenic. Yet given that the Dutch
doctor does believe there is a malign force at work, and given the increasing extremity of its
physical manifestations, Van Helsing’s lack of interest in testing Lucy’s blood testifies to the
unconventionality of his treatment of Dracula’s victims, that is, his combination of allopathic
practice with other means of cure. Such evaluations of blood were already standard to the
diagnosis of diseases like malaria, which uniquely pigments red blood cells with melanin.
And medical texts such as Laveran’s formulaically describe how to take a blood sample from
a patient’s finger and how to prepare slides for analysis.
In a true doctor’s surgery at the end of the nineteenth century, Van Helsing’s and Seward’s
failure to use the microscope to explore the pathogenic properties of the patients’ blood would
be inexcusable, yet there is no suggestion in Stoker’s novel that either man is a poor doctor.
Instead, they simply refuse to accept that the origins of a physical illness that causes such
horrible character changes (as opposed to a mental illness, like that which ostensibly afflicts
Renfield) could reside within the body – and especially within the body of a woman. In fact,
their dismissal of internal causes makes the very surprising external cause they postulate –
vampiric infection – all the more believable.
Thus what is most significant about Van Helsing’s means of treating the vampire infection
is that aside from transfusion – which is merely a means of gaining time and which does
not fundamentally alter the constitution of the patients – they are all topical or outside of the
body of the victims. The garlic, the cross, and the wafer, for instance, all combat the exterior
threat that the vampire poses, rather than his internalization within the women’s bodies.
In short, Van Helsing sees the surface of the body, the skin, as a membrane of resistance,
protecting the patient from external threat and maintaining the integrity of the self unless or
until penetrated.
Even the final destruction of Dracula and the sisters, which restores Mina to health and
rids her of the mark of Cain on her forehead, relies on action outside the body. Significantly,
Dracula himself does not bleed when he is killed. Mina describes him as “just like a waxen
image” (484; ch. 27), as if he were desiccated, his entire circulatory system emptied of blood.
Moreover, in dying, Dracula turns to dust in a “moment of final dissolution” – dissolution
being a word that by its very nature associates itself with fluid – in a motif that reflects his
true age. In this regard, his demise resembles that of Ayesha in Haggard’s She, who shrinks
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and shrivels like parchment as she dies, and Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of
Dorian Gray (1890), who withers and wrinkles at his death. Dracula therefore may be said
to have no biological interiority, just as he has no real soul or reflection.
Van Helsing’s method of cure is in stark contrast to orthodox medicine of the period,
with its emphasis on infusion and ingestion as modes of treatment. Thus it is Dracula who
ironically mimics the practices of conventional medicine, with his reliance on bloodletting
and infusion, as does his amanuensis, Renfield, when he looks to ingestion as a way to
transform his body into one like his master’s. Dracula’s acts of bloodletting in particular
figure the vampire as the doctor’s double, whereas it is Van Helsing’s refusal to draw
anything from the body that marks his unconventional union of medicine, religion, and law.
Stoker prepares the reader for Dracula’s role as a perverse doctor once he pitches up
in England much earlier in the novel, during Harker’s visit to Transylvania. When Harker
first sees the sleeping Dracula, he likens him to “a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion”
(71; ch. 4). It is an interesting description, given the leech’s role as a parasite that acts on
the body’s surface, but also its history as an instrument for the medical practice of bleeding.
Bleeding – drawing strength from the body – is both an outdated medical procedure and the
direct antithesis to the procedures Van Helsing will use to counteract the vampire – adding
strength to the body through blood transfusion or protecting against the loss of strength
through the sapping of bodily fluids. Dracula thus is connected to a medical past that bolsters
his connection to the unsettling historical past that imperialism has brought into contact with
the modern world.31 Van Helsing, by contrast, will need to reconcile scientific method with
superstition, ancient and eccentric medical knowledge, and religious praxis to effectively
counter his nemesis’s actions.
Above all, Van Helsing’s course of treatment reinforces the metaphor of an external threat
to the wellbeing of nation and empire – of Dracula as the outsider, the reverse colonizer,
the invader who hides in the bloodstream of virtue and disrupts imperial domesticity. This
emphasis on Dracula’s outcast status is central to the novel’s xenophobic message, just as
the success of locating and destroying the source of the infection in Transylvania mirrors the
slum clearances, marsh drainages, and other sanitation works occurring in the late Victorian
period in order to externally eradicate those epidemics prevalent in urban Britain and across
the Empire by eliminating the habitats that nurtured them. This discourse engrafts the notion
of a hereditary taint – the Dracula “blood” that the Count so proudly extols to Harker at
the novel’s start – onto geographic models of pathology; Transylvania, itself the site of
a “whirlpool of European races” (42), represents something akin to the “tropical” in the
emerging field of tropical medicine. Dracula’s threat therefore resonates on various registers
with different chords of medical pathology: inheritance, geographic/climatic determinism,
germ theory, parasitology, and sexually transmitted disease among them.
Yet the novel’s most ironic twist comes in the notion of how the body politic might rid
itself of that which threatens it: by surrounding it and, in effect, isolating it, which is, of
course, what happens when the Crew of Light place circles of communion wafer around
Dracula and his companions in order to contain them and keep them from drawing their
victims to them so that they can be eliminated. Early on in the novel, Stoker foreshadows
this method of dealing with the dangerous when Seward describes Lucy’s mother’s devotion
to her daughter’s recovery in the following terms: “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
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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” (112; ch. 10). The notion of harm by contact
and of ordered selfishness can, of course, be tied to the text’s articulation of the threat of the
foreign and perhaps a Little England model of retrenchment for the protection of the British
species. Read in terms of medicine, Lucy’s mother narrates the body’s means of dealing with
the invasion of a foreign object, such as a splinter or thorn. Stoker’s description also resonates
with emerging medical opinion about the action of antibodies. In fact, scientist Emil von
Behring (whose name bears some resemblance to Van Helsing’s) had begun publishing his
findings on serum therapy in 1891 (based on the idea that the blood serum of someone
recovering from disease contained antitoxins).32 In 1896, Paul Ehrlich proposed the first
comprehensive theory of antibodies, the so-called side-chain theory, according to which
antibodies attacked antigens within the body. It is another instance of Stoker parlaying not
simply social, but also medical notions of invasion and defense into this most popular of texts.
The medical notion of enveloping here functions as a kind of imperial immune response.
The idea of antibodies also helps resolve Stoker’s problematic relationship with the
American character Quincey Morris. Several critics have seen Morris’s presence in the novel
in relation to appeals for Anglo-Saxon union (itself typical of fin-de-siècle adventure tales,
such as those about the Boxer Rebellion in China) and a fictional representation of the
“Greater Britain” proposed by Charles Dilke, among others (Hughes 100).33 When, in the
novel’s postscript, Mina and Jonathan name their child after him, “the American becomes
once again reassuringly British.”34 This, too, is a kind of enveloping, like an antibody that,
in this instance, disables the threat of American competition.
Yet there are other crucial ways to understand Stoker’s passage about Dame Nature. Read
in terms of gender, Stoker’s vision of Mother Nature as engaged in cocooning dangerous
alterity highlights the novel’s assumption that nature itself is feminine and that the role of
procreation and nurturing belongs to woman. Read retrospectively in terms of character, these
words are replete with echoes of Dracula’s and Renfield’s terrible monomania, expressive
of an egotism which, unlike that of Lucy’s mother, has no deeper goal or noble object in
view. Read in terms of verisimilitude, the comment recalls the alternate truth claims which
open and close the novel – the preface which states that everything is true and in order
and the concluding “Note” which invites and then dismisses the reader’s disbelief. Above
all, in a novel that so famously pits internal against external, domestic against foreign, and
self against other, this image of Dame Nature’s envelope is a picture of the construction
of narrative that provides an alternative to the model of parasitism. For it is the “ordered
selfishness” of the process of composition that defines the act of narration, and it is the words
that make up the narrative that envelope and ultimately eradicate the very foreign body that
is the novel’s subject and central figure.
University of Warwick
NOTES
1. Stoker worked on Dracula between 1890 and 1897, when the novel first appeared. According to
Belford, he made his first notes on the novel in 1890 and his last notes in 1896, and sketched out a plot
in 1892 (261).
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Rereading Infection Metaphors in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
943
2. Although readers may find mosquito-borne malaria and other parasitical infections too rooted in
the tropics to be relevant to the Eastern world of Dracula’s gypsies and Székely, it is important to
remember how overdetermined the Victorians were in their imagination of the “East,” especially in
popular literature. It is also salutary to recall that in the late nineteenth century, malaria was not confined
to the tropics and was associated with popular expatriate spots like Italy, where “Roman fever” was a
seasonal menace – and the killer of the protagonist of Henry James’s 1878 novel Daisy Miller.
3. See Arata 107–32.
4. It is not that Stoker is the first writer to extend the form of the novel in this “rhizomatic” way, nor
that subsequent modernists necessarily modeled themselves on him. Instead, I am claiming that his
engagement with malaria and protozoan-borne illnesses provides a powerful, interpenetrative model
for some of the changes in and experiments with the form of the novel that were taking place at the fin
de siècle.
5. Edmond’s reading of R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858) in Representing the South Pacific
gives one example of this pattern of inputting material from travel literature into the adventure tale
with little or no change and little desire to acknowledge authorship.
6. See Wolfreys’s introduction to Marsh’s The Beetle, in which he maps out some of the similarities
between Dracula and The Beetle and draws connections to Showalter’s discussion of syphilophobia
(12–14).
7. See Edmond 134 for a reading of Mina’s contagion in terms of leprosy. On the importance of cholera
to the Victorians and the narratives they produced, see Gilbert.
8. According to Thom’s Irish Who’s Who, Thomas Stoker served in the Indian Civil Service from 1872–
99 and was secretary to the Government Scarcity Department and Chief Secretary to the Government
of India from 1896–99 (239), so he would have had direct involvement with the famine and plague.
9. Klebs and Tommasi-Crudeli describe malaria as “the chief obstacle to the exploration and colonization
of the African continent” in the opening of On the Nature of Malaria (1). Manson, in the published
form of a lecture delivered at Charing Cross Hospital in January 1896, noted that malaria was “a
disease which, as Africa becomes more opened up and more frequented by Europeans, is bound to
occupy a greater amount of attention from medical writers than it has hitherto done” (“Benign and
Pernicious Malarial Fevers” 260). Ross, in Malaria and Mosquitoes, estimated that almost a third of
the British army in India suffered from malaria in 1897 and put the mortality in India as a whole at
over five million for that year (2).
10. See Laveran, Paludism (1893): “Moreover anaemia is the most constant symptom of paludism” (107).
See also Mannaberg, The Malarial Parasites (1894): “The anaemia is explained in just as indisputable
a manner as the melanaemia, because we can ascertain directly that by the parasites the infested
blood-corpuscles are consumed and destroyed” (2: 383).
11. On evolution in the novel, see Glendening.
12. Manson, “On the Nature and Significance of the Crescentic and Flagellated Bodies in Malarial Blood”
(1894); Ross, “On Some Peculiar Pigmented Cells Found in Two Mosquitoes Fed on Malarial Blood”
(1897). As is well known, Manson’s theory did not properly account for how the infection passed from
mosquitoes to humans, which is what Ross would prove in August 1897.
13. See “Observations of Malaria Parasites”: “It should be added here that his [Ross’s] observations on
malarial fevers in Secunderabad strongly suggest the truth of that same theory, on the ground that the
poison appears to have a much more localized and particular origin than would be possible on the
supposition of a miasm generally diffused in the air” (261).
14. See, for example, Manson, “Geographical Distribution, Pathological Relations, and Life History.” See
also “The Tsetse Fly.”
15. See Manson, Tropical Diseases 254. Manson also notes the research of one Dr. Sims, who claims “that
hypodermic injection of testicular fluid has cured several cases,” an interesting treatment, given the
spermatozoic economy of the period (255).
16. For excerpts and information on some of the sources used by Stoker, see Leatherdale.
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VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
17. Frank Cowan’s Curious Facts in the History of Insects (1865) also reports on a Filipino practice of
rubbing garlic around beds to keep away scorpions (327).
18. See, for instance, Frederick T. Roberts, A Handbook of the Theory and Practice of Medicine (1890).
In his section on “Prophylaxis,” he notes, “It is a useful practice to give cinchona bark or quinine daily
to those who are unavoidably exposed to malaria. Garlic and eucalyptus globulus have also been used
as preventatives” (231).
19. See the British Farmer’s Magazine 2 (1866): “It is said that putting garlic in the bottoms of stacks will
protect the stacks from vermin” (201).
20. Indeed, I might make a typically postmodern gesture by suggesting that the release of pigment within
the bloodstream, or melanemia as it was called by the Victorians, that characterizes the Plasmodium
amoeba in its reproductive phase is in some sense a writing of the disease on the body. This is analogous
to the textual construction of the vampire and his processes of emptying and voiding the narrative
through the metaphor of blood drainage. Here, it is salient to recall Mina’s function, late in the novel, as
the empty vessel through which the brave “band of men” can connect with Dracula’s subconscious; her
body becomes a kind of pen in this instance through which other inks flow. At this point, a transfusion
of knowledge replaces that of blood in a reverse circuit of exchange.
21. This depiction of the landscape around Dracula’s castle also echoes Isabella Bird’s depiction of Hong
Kong in The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither, a book from which Stoker was known to have
taken extensive notes when writing Dracula. Describing Hong Kong Island, Bird comments, “Standing
in and on rock, one fancies that fever would not be one of its maladies, but the rock itself seems to
have imprisoned fever germs in some past age, for whenever it is quarried or cut into for foundations,
or is disturbed in any way, fever immediately breaks out” (36).
22. See also Willis 311.
23. Stoker himself described the United States of America in such collective, physical terms, writing,
“Thus the whole structure of the Republic is cellular, and built up from entities through various minor
forms and agglomerations into a compact, cohesive, and structurally perfect mass.” See A Glimpse of
America 30.
24. Britain’s capital itself was associated with the debilitating effects of bad air, which were not necessarily
a function of industrial capitalism. James Cantlie, a doctor who served in Hong Kong before returning
to London and becoming a founder of the Journal of Tropical Medicine (1898) and the London
School of Tropical Medicine (1899), proposed the term urbo-morbus to describe this phenomenon in
Degeneration among Londoners (1885). Cantlie believed a lack of ozone in cities was the source of
the problem.
25. See Willburn’s discussion of the Swedenborgian New Life Cult (1). Willburn’s notion of possession
is apt in the context of the vampire’s control over the body of victims.
26. On blood as a foil for semen, see Mighall.
27. Smith and Kiborne discuss Babeş’s scientific work (published in German) and conclude that Texas
cattle fever and the fever described by Babeş are identical (143).
28. George Stoker served as a medical doctor for the Red Cross on the Turkish side during Turkey’s war
against Russia in the 1870s and was the author of a travelogue, With “The Unspeakables;” or, Two
Years’ Campaigning in European and Asiatic Turkey, as well as a number of medical treatises. He
also served in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, where, he says, he principally developed ideas about the
use of oxygen treatment for open wounds. (See Oxygen Treatment 5.) According to the Roll of the
Indian Medical Service 1615–1930, Richard Nugent Stoker served in India between 1874 and his
retirement in 1900 (187). Records at the British Library also indicate that he was granted two years
furlough out of India from June 1892. Richard, who served in Bengal just as Ross did during the final
stage of his discovery of malaria transmission, therefore might have been familiar with the studies of
malaria transmission published in Indian medical periodicals during this time; he could conceivably
have relayed this information to his brother. For biographical material on William, see the obituary in
the British Medical Journal (1912): 1399.
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Rereading Infection Metaphors in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
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29. Scholars often analyze the phrase “the blood is the life” in religious terms, though this phrase would
also have had a medical resonance in the 1890s. For instance, Thomson and Steele’s A Dictionary of
Domestic Medicine and Household Surgery (1899) begins its entry on blood thus: “THE BLOOD. –
The vital fluid. ‘The Life.’” (70).
30. See, for instance, Hughes’s chapter “The Sanguine Economy: Hysteroid Pathology and Physiological
Medicine” in Beyond Dracula (139–77).
31. My reading here supplements Willis’s contention that “[v]ampiric disease’s long journey to the heart
of the British empire begins, then, with Harker’s cultural desecration of Transylvania coupled with his
economic exploitation of Dracula” (319) and the links he draws between history and ancestral disease.
32. Stoker’s working notes indicate that Van Helsing was originally meant to be German. See Murray 172.
33. Stoker himself wrote of the “instinct of a common race” (47) in A Glimpse of America, noting, “There
is every reason we can think of why the English on both sides of the Atlantic should hold together as
one. Our history is their history – our fame is their pride – their progress is our glory” (47).
34. Hughes is discussing Moretti’s reading of the novel.
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