Dracula:  Conjuring a Familiar Contagion

 

            Bram Stoker’s Dracula is not the only late nineteenth-century novel to address the fear of an unseen contagion through the fantastic; the theme of infectious evil of the Other walking invisible among us appears in a number of late-century stories whose popularity has continued, like the vampire’s, to the present day.  Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885) tells the tale of a monster, conjured by drugs from the depths of a respectable medical man and authority figure, lurching through the streets of London, a danger to the unsuspecting who meet him in the fog.  H. G. Wells’ Invisible Man (1897) is a medical student whose chemical experiments transform him into an unseen and deranged menace, alarming the populace who cannot protect themselves or fight him effectively.  In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), the eponymous character moves about in the best London society; what is unseen by those around him is the corruption of his soul, visible only in the hidden and cursed portrait which ages in his stead. 

 

Works such as these play on the fear of the unknown and unseen in our midst and in our souls; they express the dread of a contagion moving undetected through the culture, threatening to undermine it.  In Dracula, however, Stoker returns to the Gothic tradition. Foregoing the newer convention of locating the Other within, he re-externalizes the threat.  In doing so, he puts a burden on a readership more rational-minded and skeptical than the one that had thrilled to early nineteenth-century works featuring a monster outside the human psyche; but Stoker assists his audience in the suspension of disbelief by linking his monster to a disease that was both hideously familiar and fearfully mysterious to the Victorians. 

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            Scholars have interpreted Dracula in terms of nationalism, sexuality, and gender inversion; they have found themes of cultural imperialism, misogyny and venereal disease in the text.  But as the twentieth century progressed, a decreasing familiarity with another condition may have obscured a connection that would have been disconcertingly clear to Stoker’s contemporaries. At the time Dracula was written in 1897, the mysterious and Romantic condition known as consumption had, thanks to Koch’s discovery of the tubercle bacillus in 1882, begun to transform from a catch-all term for an inscrutable wasting process infused with metaphor (Morens) to a specific disease with a known cause: tuberculosis.  But an effective cure was still decades away; the condition still claimed many lives.  The centuries-old terror had not abated, and the metaphors associated with the condition remained firmly planted in the culture’s psyche.  The association of the symptoms manifested by Dracula’s victims with consumption, familiar to many in Victorian society through personal experience as well as through art, prose, poetry and medical narratives, gave an element of realism and immediacy to Stoker’s tale of a fictional fiend.  The connection made Dracula the latest incarnation in a long tradition of Romantic metaphor about a mysterious wasting contagion that bestowed transformation, heightened sexuality, and a fearful kind of beauty even as it literally consumed its victims. 

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Throughout the nineteenth century mortality rates from tuberculosis had definitely declined; but it is impossible to get a completely accurate picture owing to the blanket diagnosis of “consumption” for any wasting disease, and the shame of hereditary weakness that continued to be associated with the condition, causing families to conceal it.  Nonetheless, despite declining numbers of deaths, tuberculosis continued to strike fear in the populace of fin-de-siècle England.  “To hear the diagnosis was a confrontation with mortality” dreaded by the wealthy as well as the poor, the highborn and the low (Caldwell, 4).  Everyone knew that there was no real defense against the disease, and that no one by virtue of age, gender, or class could consider be considered safe; by the 1870’s, consumption had appeared in enough homes and in enough publications of all types that no one doubted either its wide reach or its fatal outcome. 

 

Consumption was considered the equivalent of death itself -- protracted, perhaps, but inexorable (10).   By the late 1880’s, thanks to Koch’s discovery, the condition was understood to be contagious; but the stigma of a hereditary taint lingered.  In the 1890’s tuberculosis was responsible for about 70,000 deaths a year in England, and anyone fortunate enough not to number a family member or friend among the victims surely encountered detailed descriptions of the disease in novels, newspapers and magazines.   If the origin and process of tuberculosis were still not clearly understood, the details of the devastation of its victims were a well-known part of the culture. 

           

​The character Stoker created in 1897 similarly eludes a clear definition and this gives extra menace to his power; Dracula is a “Thing [that] is not human – not even beast,” as Mina Harker describes him .  He has hunted the native populace around his castle in Transylvania to the point where they are so reduced in number and so wary that he finds it necessary to prey on children, who (as the fledgling vampire Lucy will discover) are easier victims.  Folklore tells of the vampire picking off members of a family one by one, or creating new vampires from his victims, who in turn preyed on the surviving members of their own family; Michael Halberg notes that given crowded conditions, and poor sanitation and ventilation, consumption could accomplish the same effect. 

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“Because TB thrives on proximity and poverty, rural and urban families alike were often struck, though not all members manifested symptoms simultaneously. After the death of one family member, others became ill, as though the deceased were striking from the grave.”  The fear of losing one’s entire family to consumption once one member had been struck was a familiar one.  Stoker’s fiend was similarly capable of slowly ravaging the families and communities around him.  At the beginning of the novel, having decimated the local population, Dracula needs a fresh and bountiful food source, and has laid his plans to reach one.    

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Just as city-dwellers were considered particularly vulnerable to consumption owing to crowded conditions, lack of sanitation, and the quality of the air, they also represent a perfect opportunity for Dracula.  Through reference books such as the London Directory, he tells Harker, the Count has “come to know your great England . . . I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst and whirl of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is.”  A new land, teeming with life, beckons; Dracula appears on England’s coast, shipborne like the plague that infested Messina before spreading to the continent five centuries before.  The inhabitants of Whitby observe, instead of vector rats running ashore, “an immense dog [which] sprang up on deck from below, as if shot up by the concussion, and running forward, jumped from the bow on the sand” to disappear into the night. 

   

Having been carried ashore like a plague, Dracula assumes a new association.  His elemental nature is suggested by the cooperation of the atmosphere; Dracula’s movements are often associated with mist or fog, which can carry other deadly threats.   The spread of consumption was widely associated with cold fog or misty weather and a single exposure to such conditions was believed potentially fatal to a weak constitution.  Though in reality the higher incidence of the disease in such conditions had more to do with close quarters and increased burning of coal, the idea of “miasma” or heavy, damp air transmitting or causing disease was a common misperception of the time.   It was believed that consumption “. . .  lurks in the damp, shaded valley but can be defeated in the open air and sunlight.”  One of the first recommendations made by doctors (knowing they could do little else) was the removal of patients to any location within their means thought to have healthier air and brighter sunshine, whether the mountains, the Mediterranean, or simply the countryside.

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Like consumption, Dracula can travel in a mist, seeks sanctuary in the darkness, and favors low-lying areas, valleys, caves and niches reminiscent of his native land, areas that afford him cover for hunting.  He avoids the light of day, and his London lair, when discovered by Van Helsing and his team, seems to reek with pestilence; the air is “stagnant and foul.  There was an earthy smell, as of some dry miasma, which came through the fouler air . . .it seemed as though corruption had become itself corrupt.”  Dracula has contaminated his dark lair, which must be purified – made unfit for his habitation – by Van Helsing and his team.

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If low-lying areas and the overpopulated cities were the locations vulnerable to both consumption and the vampire, women were the most vulnerable group and Dracula’s choice of victim. Despite the discovery of the causative organism and the widespread dissemination of that information, “tuberculosis continued for some time to be seen as an essentially constitutional ailment” ; it was also a cultural assumption that the basic nature of a woman was inherently more frail and thus more likely to weakened by the shock or stress thought to contribute to the development of consumption.  Lucy is described as physically “sweet and lovely” and Mina worries about her friend’s emotionalism in a prophetic way: “I fear she is of too super-sensitive a nature to go through the world without much trouble.” 

 

Dressed in fragile white lawn that emphasizes her delicacy, Lucy is vulnerable to Dracula’s thoughts even before he lands in England; she is restless at night and obeys his summons without a struggle.  In little more than a month she is moribund and even the multiple transfusions of blood from four strong men cannot save her. “Lucy had got a terrible shock, and it told on her more than before, for though plenty of blood went into her veins, her body did not respond to the treatment as well as on the other occasions.  Her struggle back into life was something frightful to see and hear.” Dr. Seward’s description paints a picture of Lucy transforming and sinking quickly, overcome by the vampire’s power.  Mina is also described as “a sweet-faced, dainty-looking girl,” and though she will show inner strengths that carry her through her ordeal, Harker and the other men at first determine to keep her ignorant of their plans, lest the shock of the knowledge prove fatal:  “Mrs. Harker is better out of it . . . it is no place for a woman, and if she had remained in touch with the affair, it would in time infallibly have wrecked her.” 

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Dr. Seward here voices the fear that Mina too would inevitably succumb, like Lucy, because a woman’s constitution was innately too frail to withstand such an attack.  In The Diary of a Late Physician, Dr. Samuel Warren expresses similar worry for his patient Eliza Herbert in 1844, but what he fears is consumption.  Eliza is also a “delicate and fragile being” for whom the suggestion that she might be ill, gleaned from her uncle’s anxious state, was sufficient to bring on a fatal case of consumption (109).  Her heightened sensitivity and inherently frailer constitution, like Lucy’s, make her a vulnerable target for the contagion, and she sinks into it with little resistance; sadly, Eliza’s case was not unusual.  

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 Dr. Warren expressed the pain and frustration of many medical men and family members when he addressed the disease that he considered his enemy, with a description that could have as easily been aimed at Dracula:

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Consumption!  Terrible, insatiable tyrant! Who can arrest thy progress or number thy victims?  Why doest thou attack almost exclusively the fairest and loveliest of our species?  . . . By what infernal subtilty hast thou contrived hitherto to baffle the profoundest skill of science, to frustrate utterly the uses of experience, and disclose thyself only when thou hast irretrievably secured thy victim, and thy fangs are crimsoned with its blood?

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Dr. Warren’s metaphor is apt because once Dracula begins to prey on his victims, their symptoms are uncannily like those of tuberculosis.   Early on, victims of both the vampire and of consumption suffer from breathing difficulties. Mina describes Lucy’s condition after an encounter with Dracula: “. . . she was breathing – not softly as usual with her, but in long, heavy gasps, as though striving to get her lungs full at every breath.”  Dr. Warren’s patient’s first real symptom (watched for obsessively) is “a cough – of sort of faint churchyard cough . . .”   Mina’s frequent references to Lucy’s pallor evoke another symptom of consumption – “I do not understand Lucy‘s fading away as she is doing. . . the roses in her cheeks are fading. . .” – as do the descriptions of wasting flesh.  Lucy’s “poor, pale thin hands” are like those of the consumptive Lady Studley in “The Horror of Studley Grange,” whose parched lips, sunken cheeks, and “long, white emaciated hands” tell unmistakably that the disease is consuming her.

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Dracula’s very nature centers around blood, which not only nourishes him but carries the agent which he can use to transform his victim into a vampire.  Tuberculosis is “most fundamentally a disease of the blood in general."  The highly vascular lungs are particularly susceptible, but tuberculosis can and does spread to every organ of the body, where the bacilli essentially consume or liquefy the tissues.  By the time symptoms appear there is not much hope of recovery.  Care, rest, removal to the country, and a variety of palliatives can be tried but, in the end, the diagnosis proves to be a death-knell; in this same way Lucy succumbs to a systemic infection, becoming profoundly prostrated despite Van Helsing’s watchfulness, precautions, and the medical treatment of the multiple transfusions. 

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Consumption in further stages brought with it “sparkling eyes” and the tell-tale bright flush on the cheeks; Dr. Warren notes that his patient Miss Herbert’s “eyes were lustrous as diamonds; and the complexion of her cheeks, pure and fair as that of the lily, was surmounted with an intense circumscribed crimson flush – alas, alas!  the very plague-spot of hectic – of consumption." In “The Horror of Studley Grange,” the consumptive Lady Studley, described by her doctor, “looks “terribly weak and excited – the hectic spots on her cheeks, the gleaming glitter of her eyes . . .all showed only too plainly the strides the malady under which she was suffering was making.”  Similarly, Lucy, in a transformed state just before she dies, regards Arthur with eyes that were “dull and hard at once," and regains the blooming color in her cheeks and lips after her death.

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Patients with tuberculosis suffer alternatively from restlessness and agitation, and lethargy.   They are often unable to sleep at night or stay awake during the day, mirroring the vampire’s transposed schedule.  Even before her first encounter with Dracula, when he is nearing the coast, Lucy is unable to rest at night, walking in her sleep, trying to get dressed, and trying to get out of the room.  By day she is fatigued, sometimes to the point of stupor.  Mina notes on more than one occasion that “Lucy was very restless all night” and then “languid and tired, and slept on after we were called.”  As Lucy’s condition progresses, Mina notes that “Lucy seems to be growing weaker . . . she gets weaker and more languid day by day; at night I hear her gasping as if for air.” Lady Studley, her doctor notes, “has had dreadful nights for some time: perspirations, cough, restlessness, bad dreams, and all the rest of it” while growing steadily weaker during the day.  And Dr. Warren notes Miss Herbert’s restlessness as her disease progresses: “[she] has suffered severely from the agitation experienced at the last visit I had paid her, and was in a low, nervous fever.” All three women are described as alternating between the states of restlessness and exhaustion.  These states seem to feed one another in a relentless cycle that steadily saps their strength and leads them inexorably toward death.

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Yet as tuberculosis progresses, the patient may seem to improve temporarily, giving false hope to the family. Dr. Warren notes that Miss Herbert “sank very rapidly.  She exhibited all those sudden deceitful rallyings, which invariably agonize consumptive patients and their friends with fruitless hopes of recovery.” The fearful vigil of a consumptive patient’s family, as they gauged the progress of the disease from the changing symptoms and prayed for a hopeful sign, would have been only too familiar to Stoker’s readers.  Similarly, Lucy’s condition changes from day to day, from “well and gay” to languor after “another bad night.”   A considerable part of the narrative suspense of Dracula relies on this tense watchfulness – first Mina’s for Lucy, then the men of Van Helsing’s team for Mina – that is the reader’s only indication, much of the time, of the movement and actions of the hidden monster.  He, like the consumptive process, is carrying on his destructive works and movements unseen except for the reactions and symptoms displayed by his victim.  Stoker effectively uses the uncertain progress of failing and rallying health in both Mina and Lucy as a ghastly dark mirror through which the reader senses the relentless presence of the monster – a technique far more terrifying than a direct description of his actions.

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As consumption reached its invariably fatal conclusion, patients often suffered a hemorrhage of blood from the lungs through the mouth.  Broken blood vessels in the dissolving lung tissue caused the coughing up of bright red, highly oxygenated blood, and a sudden copious hemorrhage in advanced cases often resulted in death.  The fatal hemorrhage of the consumptive is echoed in the appearance of the vampire in his or her coffin.  “There lay the Count, but looking as if his youth had been half renewed . . .the mouth was redder than ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood which trickled from the corners of the mouth and ran over the chin and neck.”  Harker is revolted by the Count’s appearance and the evidence of his recent feeding.  As Jon Halberg notes, a post-mortem hemorrhage in a tuberculosis victim could give this appearance and contribute to the association. 

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Lucy presents the same image as the Count in her coffin after her night prowls and feeding on children: “She seemed like a nightmare of Lucy as she lay there; the pointed teeth, the bloodstained, voluptuous mouth. . .”  She has undergone a transformation; she is not truly dead but has changed to an un-dead state, in which “all [her] loveliness had come back to her.” If the vampire chose, his victims did not die, but became vampires themselves.  For women in particular – as evidenced by the three vampires in Dracula’s castle, and Lucy and Mina -- to be attacked by the vampire was to be transformed; to come down with consumption was to enter a similar state, .between life and death, that was neither fully one nor the other. 

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Consumption could be a transformative spiritual experience; “among illnesses, tuberculosis was seen as the most spiritual, the most ennobling, a purger of base qualities and distiller of lofty ones.”  The physical realities of sputum, hemorrhages, and diarrhea were often overlooked in nineteenth-century accounts of the dying consumptive, in favor of an ethereal refinement that reduced the sufferer to a spirit while still inhabiting the body.  This image, far from being repulsive, was unearthly and yet beautiful.  Dr. Warren’s patient Eliza Herbert had undergone a transformation by the end of her illness to “a lovely unfortunate . . . She was wasted almost to a shadow – attenuated to nearly ethereal delicacy and transparency; and there was a softness and languor in her azure eyes beaming through their long silken lashes.”  Dressed in the requisite filmy white gown of the female consumptive/vampire victim, Eliza does not seem to him so much reduced in health as transformed to more of “an exquisite chiselling of Canova, the representation of beauty, than flesh and blood. . .” The disease has taken her life but left her with an eerie beauty.  When Van Helsing and his band visit her tomb, they find Lucy “more radiantly beautiful than ever . . .on the cheeks was a delicate bloom."  Like the consumptive patient, she has been given a startling new loveliness that alarms as well as enchants the onlooker.  

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But there is also a troubling erotic aspect to the transformation of the female vampire; Dracula as a supernatural force at once empowers and consumes his female victims, creating subversive and dangerous beings that must be destroyed.  Men are also victims of the vampire, but their experience is significantly different.  Dracula diminishes men in a nonsexual way; his power over Jonathan is to keep him imprisoned “without that protection of the law which is even a criminal’s right and consolation” by the threat of violence from himself, his vampire wives, and his wolves.   Lucy, being female, immediately comes under the Count’s power even at a distance; but like Renfield, Jonathan is vulnerable because he cannot physically escape and because Dracula’s physical strength is greater than his own. Though terrified beyond imagination, Jonathan retains his sanity and free will, and does not completely succumb to Dracula’s mesmeric influence.  He is subject, though to the sexual/mesmeric effect of the Count’s wives, experiencing a “langorous ecstasy.” a combination of fearful dread and desire for communion with them.  Once he escapes from the castle, however, the vampire women are not a threat; they do not venture beyond the bounds of the castle unless given permission by their master.

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Lucy and Mina, however, are not safe anywhere, and are transformed by their contact with the Count. As a result, unlike his male victims who are confined and diminished, the female victims become less restricted and more powerful than they were before.  As John Stevenson notes, female vampires are “creatures who have been profoundly changed. The pure and spiritual become voluptuous, the passive become aggressive. . .”    Under the influence of the Count, Lucy eludes the protective efforts of Van Helsing and his team, removing the safeguards he has placed around her.  Near the physical death that will mark her transformation, she displays an eroticism that horrifies the men who once cherished her purity and innocence. 

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In a sort of sleep-waking, vague, unconscious way she opened her eyes, which were now dull and hard at once, and said in a soft, voluptuous voice such as I had never heard from her lips – “Arthur!  Oh, my love, I am so glad you have come!  Kiss me!” . . . we saw a spasm of rage flit like a shadow over her face; the sharp teeth champed together.

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Lucy has become seductive and cunning, like the Count’s wives.  She escapes physical death and is changed into a subversive creature: no longer an Angel in the House, Lucy has become the Demon in the Graveyard.  She has supernatural power of movement and strength.  Unlike her living incarnation, she can range where she wills in the night.  She seduces men and preys upon children in a frightening perversion of her rightful role in life as their help meet and caretaker.  As such, Lucy must be destroyed by Van Helsing and his team.

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Female consumption victims, surprisingly, were also invested with a strange sexuality.  Although it is hard for us to associate the modern-day clinical picture of tuberculosis with eroticism, in its earlier incarnation as consumption it carried a connotation, in the art and literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of spes phthisica, a heightened sense of creativity and passion. This concept would evolve into the popular belief, lasting into the mid-twentieth century, that people with tuberculosis experienced increased sex drives.  Caldwell notes that literary descriptions of women dying of consumption often sound as if they intend to evoke

an erotic frisson.  The spectacle of the victim revealing more and more of herself through ever more diaphanous veils of flesh arouses the keeper of the bedside vigil, even as the consumptive’s increasing weakness and passivity put her more and more within his power. Supine, perhaps, she is no longer potentially a demanding partner; weakness has rendered her safe for the observer’s imagination (24).

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While there is an erotic aspect inherent in the transformation of both the victim of consumption and the victim of the vampire, the former become the object of desire, and the latter the subject.   Dr. Warren’s patient has become in her terminal stage almost an immobile objet d’art upon which he gazes, her beauty becoming more refined as she herself becomes more passive and stationary.  Lucy is conversely more powerful and active than she was in life, ranging alone in the night, seeking victims to fulfill her needs and trying to prey upon the man who had loved her.  Like Dracula’s wives in the Transylvania castle, she is now the hunter, and men are her prey.  For the Victorians, this is the ultimate perversion; if this contagion were to spread, society would be rocked to its foundations. Van Helsing and his team are racing to save more than Mina’s life as they pursue the monster back to his homeland.  As the doctor notes, Dracula’s successful infection of England could be “the end of you and of me and of many another.” They are saving themselves and the values of their culture.

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In creating a menace terrifying in its hidden aspect and capable of such destructive transformative power, Stoker invests Dracula with special dread.  When he associates the vampire with a horrific and untreatable disease familiar to his readership, he invests his story with authority and gives it an authenticity absent in other supernatural fiction of the time.  The average Victorian could maintain a comfortable psychic distance from tales of chemical experiments that released the Inner Beast or rendered one invisible; relatively few would relate to Wilde’s empty-souled socialite with his possessed portrait.  But consumption was a very real danger, one against which there was no guarantee of protection for oneself or one’s family, and the evolving medical authority could only watch helplessly as the young (more often than not) wasted away with symptoms of pallor, agitation, lethargy, and hemorrhage.   Stoker also connects his monster to an artistic tradition that changed a common but mystifying disease process into a transformative, illuminating and erotic state between life and death for women, its most vulnerable victims.  At a time when the New Woman was infiltrating areas of society hitherto reserved for men, the parallel between them and Dracula’s empowered female victims surely announced itself at some level.  But by the end of the novel science and rationality, necessarily aided by religion and ancient mysteries – and the fine British character – have triumphed.  They have, for the moment at least, contained the contagion.  It is ironic to realize that consumption would return to menace the modern world, even as Stoker’s fiend resists destruction and appears in new incarnations with a strength and regularity that undoubtedly would have surprised its creator.

 

                                                                                                   ~ K. R. Bailey, 2008

 

 

References

 

 

Caldwell, Mark.  The Last Crusade:  The War on Consumption 1862 – 1954.  New York: Atheneum, 1988.

 

Halberg, John, M.D.  “Film Rouge.”  Minnesota Medicine, June 1999, Vol. 82. http://www.mmaonline.net/publications/MnMed1999/June/Hallberg.cfm

 

Hardy, Anne. “Diagnosis, Death, and Diet:  The Case of London, 1750 – 1909.”  Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 18, No. 3.  (Winter 1988), pp 387-401.

 

Morens, David M.  “At the Deathbed of Consumptive Art.”  Another Dimension, Vol 8, No. 11.  http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol8no11/02-0549.htm

 

Rosenberg, Charles E.  “The Bitter Fruit:  Heredity, Disease and Social Thought in Nineteenth-Century America.”  Perspectives in American History 8:189-235.

 

 John Allen.  “A Vampire in the Mirror:  The Sexuality of Dracula.”  PMLA, Vol 103, No. 2 (March 1988), pp. 139 – 149.

 

Smith, Elizabeth Thomasina and Halifax, Clifford.  “The Horror of Studley Grange.” Stories From the Diary of a Doctor.  New York: Arno Press, 1976.

 

Stevenson, John Allen.  “A Vampire in the Mirror:  The Sexuality of Dracula.”  PMLA, Vol 103, No. 2 (March 1988), pp. 139 – 149.

 

Stoker, Bram.  Dracula.  Nina Auerbach, ed.  New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.

 

Warren, Samuel.  “Consumption.”  Diary of a Late Physician.   Edinburgh:  William Blackwood and Sons, 1844.