Intro
Yeah, like Frankenstein, Dracula is another one of those stories that everybody has grown up with. It's the Little Engine that Could of the horror world.
And—we know—it might seem pretty shady to look at horror novels from the perspective of disability. Disability may not always be fun (and, yeah, it may even suck at times) but it isn't the stuff of horror, now, is it?
Au contraire! After all, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has shown us, extraordinary bodies always collect our deepest anxieties, our deepest fears. And they always require the creation of a story to help us make ourselves feel better. To restore our sense of our world and ourselves.
And sometimes, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, those stories are horror stories. But just like every good Law and Order episode, these, too, are often dramatizations of actual events.
Not to suggest that there were real bloodsuckers roaming the streets of London in the 1890s—unless you count mosquitoes? But Dracula has a lot to show us about our culture's fears of the body in this era.
As we've seen, modern medicine as we know it today was just beginning to emerge in this time period. And there were lots of new insights—not to mention a whole lot of bunk—floating around out there (did somebody say phrenology?).
One of the most important and controversial of these was the germ theory of disease. See, before the mid- to late-19th century, it was believed that most disease originated from the environment (a theory known as the miasma theory), but the germ theory that emerged in the late century centered the origins of disease squarely in the body of the patient—and it ain't as easy to clean up the inside of a body as it is to clean up the outside of a street.
Even worse, it began to be understood that these internal pollutants, these microbial germs, could be transmitted from one body to another. And that meant that these germs were not just a threat to their host but to everyone. No one could be considered safe and well if any one were sick. So it wasn't just about steering clear of dirty puddles anymore. It was about identifying and containing the infectious person.
Enter Dracula, spreading his blood all about town and transforming the girls he kissed into equally infectious, but really kinda-hot-until-they-kill-you sex maniacs.
Quote
The figure stopped, and at the moment a ray of moonlight fell upon the masses of driving clouds, and showed in startling prominence a dark-haired woman, dressed in the cerements of the grave. We could not see the face, for it was bent down over what we saw to be a fair-haired child. There was a pause and a sharp little cry […] And then as we looked the white figure moved forwards again […] My own heart grew cold as ice, and I could hear the gasp of Arthur, as we recognized the features of Lucy Westenra. Lucy Westenra, but yet how changed. The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness.
Analysis
This passage is a virtual smorgasbord for literary theorists, whether they're working from feminist, or post-colonial, or racial/ethnic studies. But it's really in disability studies that everything converges.
Lucy has succumbed to the vampire's kiss and, because she is now infected and infectious, she is also entirely changed. From being the beautiful virgin that all the men want to marry, she has become the dark menace threatening the purity of the light-haired child. From being the woman every man wants as the mother of his children, she is the destroyer of children. Because of her infection, she breeds death, not life.
Now, that's a pretty depressing scenario today, but in Victorian Britain, such an idea was downright horrifying. See, in this era, the idea of the British Good Woman was sort of the hallmark and the ideal of what all English women should be: moral, virtuous, and chaste.
She should also be the ultimate Suzy Homemaker, creating a haven for her husband (with dinner always piping hot on the table when he gets home, of course) and giving birth to lots of babies (but having sex only for the purposes of reproduction, not for enjoyment), whom she would raise up to continue the cycle, nurturing sons and daughters who would themselves go on to be husbands/fathers and wives/mothers.
Think Leave It to Beaver with corsets and horse-drawn carriages.
But there's another wrinkle to this idea of the British Good Woman that Dracula plays on and picks at like a nasty scab: it's the theory that the Good Woman was immediately and directly connected to the survival of the nation. Yup, you heard us. See, getting married, having babies, and raising them up right was not just about the individual family that was being created—it was about the entire country, the entire British Empire, really.
That's because the building of a family was seen as a patriotic duty. Britain would only endure for as long as there was a new generation of proper little Englishmen and women (in training) growing up to replenish its ranks. This was important because the British Empire in this era was facing increasing threats, both from the growing power of the US and European economies and militaries and from the increasing resistance of natives within its colonies, especially in India and Africa.
So, England had gone in the space of a few decades from being the world's great economic, political, and military superpower, with territories circling the globe (hence the expression "The sun never sets on the British Empire") to being increasingly threatened both from within and without.
What in the world does this have to do with disability studies, you ask? Great question, Shmoopers! As we've learned from RGT, when a society finds itself threatened, when it is afraid or anxious, the first outlet for its fears is those with non-normative bodies.
Dracula is a foreigner (Romanian, to be exact) and as such he embodies what was known at that time as the Eastern Threat, the fear that the Ottomans, who were perceived as dangerous because of their ostensible differences racially, ethnically, and religiously, would overwhelm and destroy the British Empire and the English way of life.
Likewise, Lucy, because she is a woman, is also considered a threat. Women, it was believed, had to be rigidly controlled, protected, and contained by the men in their lives, or else their natural and more sinister side would take over. This side was promiscuous, selfish, and a little bit cuckoo crazy.
So, basically, both foreigners (especially Eastern Europeans, Africans, and Indians) and women were thought to be kind of naturally disabled, vulnerable not only to physical defects—like the infectiousness of Dracula's kiss—but also to moral ones, such as those unleashed by Lucy's vampirism, which shows itself in her wanton sexual behavior and in the danger she poses to "fair-haired" English tots.