The Vampire by Nick Groom

Author:Nick Groom
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300232233
Publisher: Yale University Press

A lust for life

Circulation – in many forms – is the key theme of Dracula: ‘movements of blood, money, and energy, all of which are related to each other and the flow of data’.50 These currents flow to and from characters: Dracula, for example, sails on tides, drains blood, injects money into the property market; Lucy meanwhile has thoughts and emotions flowing through her, to say nothing of the blood of four different men, as well as Dracula’s own tainted blood. The novel includes several human blood transfusions and haematological analysis, as well as drugs such as laudanum and morphine, both ingested and introduced into the blood hypodermically. And so, if – like many nineteenth-century vampire tales – the novel gives voice to folk memories regarding the dread of plague and the standard operation of bloodletting, it is also a reflection of contemporary medical practice concerning patients, diagnosis, treatment and invasive surgery. Dracula is a medical drama, an organic endgame and a perpetual deathbed scene. If vampirism was first treated as a genuine disease in the eighteenth century, and then as a mass delusion of peripheral and backward communities, Dracula reverses this flow. Harker is initially wary of East European superstitions, but the characters gradually recognize that vampirism is indeed a genuine – and worse than fatal – condition. Hence there is a clinical attention to such physical characteristics as the colour of eyes, the touch of teeth, the caress of breath, the beating of the heart. All are tiny indicators of health or sickness, but they also serve as unbearably sinister clues to illness (or crime). There are tiny puncture wounds on Lucy’s throat that do not heal; her gums shrink back and her teeth appear to lengthen, and so it appears that she will echo the earlier encounter with the she-vampires.51

Hermann von Helmholtz had proposed the principle of the conservation of energy in 1847; consequently, Dracula’s activities can be understood as ‘a thermodynamic as well as a biological threat’.52 In other words, he incorporates or absorbs what flows to him, stockpiling his power – the earth of his homeland, the blood of his victims and the masonry of his properties – in an attempt to defy entropy. Information flows, too, and Stoker shows how communications networks can be exploited: in the words of the historian of science and culture Laura Otis, ‘Future battles between good and evil, Stoker suggests, will be struggles to control information.’53 Textual exchanges, too, are circulations of information that parallel the transference of blood.54 The latest up-to-the-minute communications media are central to the plot of Dracula, and the book is suffused by occult new technologies. Mina is a medium, a receiver tracking Dracula’s movements – as is Renfield the fly-eater, in a more garbled or riddling fashion (Renfield is actually described as ‘a sort of index to the coming and going of the Count’).55 Radio communication is the same bandwidth as telepathy, as inexplicable as Mina’s transmissions under hypnosis (another weird science) or Lucy’s

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.