The Dracula Series: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Horror and the Vampire as Late Victorian Energy Crisis (Part 1 of 3)
Part 1: “Unclean! Unclean!”’ Or; The Sensitive Brides of Dracula: Feeling, But Not Thinking, Machines
Happy mid-October!
Let’s talk about energy and gothic, spooky things… like Dracula!
But if you’re picturing one of the film adaptations, especially the one where Keanu Reeves is Jonathan Harker and Dracula is in love with Winona Ryder (the biggest sigh), forget the whimsical and frankly sometimes baffling choices the twentieth century imposed on Dracula lore, pick up Stoker’s novel, and read the story of what happens in the original 1897 text. Trust me, you won’t regret it!
Detailed knowledge of Dracula is certainly not required to understand this series of posts, but you will extract more from the analysis if you’ve read the novel. Plus, it makes for great Halloween reading.
Picture this:
You are a late-century Victorian and the scariest thing totally ever is having your empire breached and your women violated by a caricature of a non-white European foreigner who wants to set up camp and turn the entire world (read: Anglo-Saxons) into equally ghastly versions of himself. That’s what went bump in the night for those people. 😑
Let’s jump right in!
“Sensitive” Mediums and Channeling Ghosts
When the esteemed Dutch polymath and vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing tries to expunge traces of Count Dracula from Mina Harker’s body by placing a communion wafer on her forehead, the plan seems to backfire. Instead of protecting her, the Host sears her skin, branding the Eucharist into her flesh and eliciting wails uttered in what her husband Jonathan describes as “an agony of abasement”: “Unclean! Unclean! Even the Almighty shuns my polluted flesh!” [1] Dracula has infected her. He has colonized her body and she is no longer pure.
Literary criticism of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) has long acknowledged the English female body as the battleground of vampire hunting. When he lands on British soil, Count Dracula chooses Lucy Westenra as his patient zero because, as Mina puts it in a diary entry, “Lucy is so sweet and sensitive that she feels influences more acutely than other people do. …I greatly fear that she is too super-sensitive a nature to go through the world without trouble” [1]. Feeling too much causes trouble for poor Lucy: she wants to marry all three dudes who propose to her; she’s such a sap that she’s easily influenced by stronger minds; and because of her ostensible sexual appetite and sympathetic receptivity, she becomes the penetration point of Dracula’s countercolonial attack on Britain.
Despite her concern that Lucy is dangerously soft and receptive, Mina is not without her own sensitive qualities. She is essentially the “mediating woman” of Dracula. It is Mina who mediates communications data: translating, transcribing, and collating the narrative that becomes the novel’s text. Through Mina’s labor, we receive the story and the sympathies of its characters. We do not receive, the editor’s note reminds us, any “needless matters”; and as such we understand that the text is mediated through a politics of selective omission. The sympathies we glean arrive only via the narrative Mina delivers. No other voices or information are included.
The points above, re: women, sensitivity, mediation, and information security are crucial, and they are what Part 1 of my Dracula Series is about.
What does sensitivity have to do with communication?
And what do emotions and mediation have to do with energy in Dracula?
Why is the sensitive, mediating woman as penetration point for a foreign invader so horrific in the fin-de-siècle Victorian imagination?
In this three-part series, I merely scratch the surface of interpreting the wealth of energy language in Dracula. I have been thinking and writing about energy in this novel for seven years and am comfortable with the extant criticism on energy in late Victorian gothic novels, so please accept my disclaimer that I am not generating any new knowledge here, but rather synthesizing some important, though not exhaustive, arguments.
For those interested, I do have an article on Dracula, colonialism, and electromagnetic field theory that’s published in the journal 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. Check it out if you can!
Now: On to the good stuff.
Women were just so extra because of their nerves. Also, maybe they could talk to ghosts.
The idea that women were inherently “sensitive” appears repeatedly in Victorian science and in late-century Gothic literature. When I say “sensitive,” I mean in qualities of sympathy and communication. Today, we might call this trait “empathic.” The Victorians believed that women instinctively picked up on others’ emotions and feelings, and that perhaps this ability followed from physiological structures that differentiated women’s nerves from those of men. The logic was that feminine nerves endowed women with what Jill Galvan describes as “sympathetic excess - an affective or spiritual quality” [2]. Women were just so extra because of their nerves. Also, maybe they could talk to ghosts.
This spiritual quality arising from women’s sensitive nerves was highly coded as electromagnetic or electric. During the transatlantic Spiritualist movement, beginning in the 1840s and ‘50s, mediums claimed to channel the souls of departed spirits, transmitting messages from the dead by reaching through the void and sensing ghostly energy. Spirit energy was thought to exist materially in the “luminiferous ether,” or the invisible yet ubiquitous medium that facilitated the propagation of heat, light, electricity, and magnetism through space. Just as the ether conveyed radiation, it supported the transmission of spiritual energies. Think of it like this: the ether allowed radiation energy to travel through space; and when you died, your spirit’s energy ended up as another kind of radiation in the ether.
Some late Victorian scientists took this idea quite seriously. There was a whole cohort called the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) whose mission was to investigate psychic phenomena with all the rigor of institutional science. Ghosts, the SPR reasoned, weren’t so much supernatural as they were natural phenomena waiting to be mapped and described [4]. Along these lines of reasoning, the spirit medium channeling the dead became a kind of electromagnetic technology, like a radio transmitter and receiver. She was sensitive enough to “tune into” spirit energy, where regular people sensed nothing. Jeffrey Sconce goes so far as to describe spirit mediums as “wholly realized cybernetic beings - electromagnetic devices bridging flesh and spirit, body and machine, material reality and electronic space” [3].
(Brief interlude. This, by the way, is why the Nefastis Machine in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 is so funny to me. It bridges thermodynamics / information theory with notions of mediumship, sensitivity, and communication. Plus, the Medium communicating with the “actual” Maxwell’s Demon has to stare at a picture of James Clerk Maxwell, as if channeling the spirit of the physicist who made such eminent contributions to ether and electromagnetic field theories in the nineteenth century. See my Maxwell’s Demon post for more!)
For the most part, only women were sensitive enough to do the complex, affective labor of channeling the dead or sensing another individual’s mind at a distance. It was the feminine nerves that provided the crucial apparatus for telepathy. And, though this history certainly has the trappings of “hysteria” and nerve pathologies that the Victorian establishment used to control women, Spiritualism was a nuanced beast. The Spiritualist movement involved all sorts of creative resistances to patriarchal control, as well as gender fluidity - think: gender could be unstable during channeling or trance states. So Spiritualism wasn’t only about how women are affectively excessive. And, if they are, maybe that’s a good thing.
The Flow of Data: Mediums and Other High-Tech Communications Devices
Okay, great, so we’ve established that women were considered physiologically, and thus affectively, more sensitive than men, which apparently predisposed them to mediumship and telepathy. What does this have to do with communications media and administrative labor like that performed by Mina Harker in Dracula?
Where Lucy is exceptionally receptive in her affective sensitivity, Mina channels all vampire hunting data
This question is the topic of much relatively recent scholarship. For instance, Jill Galvan points out that “the development of female mediumship parallels women’s increasing involvement over the course of the period in technological modes of communication mediation” [2]. Women on both sides of the Atlantic had begun to occupy a sizeable chunk of the telegraphic workforce, and by the early twentieth century telegraphy was a feminized field. Similarly, typing, shorthand, and telephone operation were solidly female occupations [2]. Recall that this is Mina Harker’s area of expertise. She studies shorthand and teaches it to Jonathan. His knowledge of shorthand is what allows him to keep a diary in the Count’s presence (Dracula doesn’t know shorthand), so Jonathan really owes her one. Mina is also a skilled typist and produces a typed manuscript of the vampire hunters’ narrative in “manifold” (three copies at once on her typewriter) by transcribing, translating, and pasting epistles, diary entries, and other information when necessary.
Where Lucy is exceptionally receptive in her affective sensitivity, Mina channels all vampire hunting data. Dracula attacks both women, and he even uses Mina as a sort of telepathic radio. Once Dracula has exchanged blood with Mina, she unwittingly becomes a double agent, tapping into Dracula’s thoughts and feelings when Van Helsing hypnotizes her. However, she also relinquishes information to Dracula when he taps that same telepathic flow. Dracula makes rather literal here the notion of the “mediating” woman as a receiving and transmitting device. That is, the concept of the mediating woman considered the actual human woman part of the circuitry of sympathetic communication. She relayed thoughts and feelings by sensing and transmitting them, either telepathically or telegraphically.
The Victorians considered the telegraph, itself, the nerves of the empire. Seemingly wrapped around the globe, the telegraph cables carried national sympathies to Britain’s diaspora in the spirit of unifying sentimentality. The idea that the telegraph would enjoin British subjects the world over to peaceful communication was so popular that Charles Dickens even published Richard H. Horne’s poem, “The Great Peace-Maker,” in Dickens’s weekly magazine, Household Words. “The Great Peace-Maker” is a drawn-out dialogue between the Telegraph and the Sea, in which the Sea is a NIMBY and tells the Telegraph to get lost, but the Telegraph announces that he’s “the instrument of man’s desire / To hold communion with his fellow man”, and, after all, “science is man’s destiny” [5] so quit belly-aching. The future is now, old man.
You can’t shut the telegraph up in Horne’s poem; but, really, personifying the telegraph was a popular trope at the time. Telegraphy was often allegorized in political art. Below, for instance, the joined hands of America and Britain create the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable. In the image of white women’s bodies, peace and goodwill, like a telegraphic message, flow from one nation to another through physical touch and feeling. It’s hard to read, but the message flowing from one woman to the next is: “Glory to God in the highest, on Earth peace goodwill toward men.” (And all this despite telegraphy’s totally unabashed and pivotal role in exercising authority and military control over Britain’s colonial territories! More on this when we get to Part 3 of this series - on logistics!) Women, of course, mediate international sympathies at the boundaries of empire, simultaneously protecting national integrity and expanding national influence.
But because women mediate sympathies (and, frankly, information) at Britain’s infrastructural seams, penetrating the sensitive and mediating woman was most horrific to the late Victorian cultural imagination.
Enter Count Dracula. Dracula violates the purity of England’s women, but he also makes a beeline for the sensitive ones who will submit to his thrall, and whom he can tap to breach data crucial for a successful countercolonial campaign.
Mina’s “Man’s Brain”, “Woman’s Heart”, and Precious Womb
The thing about the sensitive, mediating woman was that, though she provided a service in transferring energy, it didn’t drain her own resources. In a trance state, a spirit medium was a vessel for energies that moved through her. Analogously, the telegraph operator, typist, or secretary was responsible for transmitting and organizing information, but not for producing it. Jill Galvan suggests that a reversion to automatism or a state of unconsciousness is a key trait depicted in portraits of female mediumship of all sorts [2]. If the woman in charge of your messages (spiritual or technological) is a feeling automaton, but not a thinking one, then she can transmit your data while protecting its privacy.
As the Victorians saw it, this was good news for everyone involved. For Britain, having a feeling automaton with her brain idling at the switchboard was a win because she could patiently and confidentially organize and transmit information without interfering with its message. For the women doing the labor, reverting to a sensitive, automatic state freed up energy for her womb, which was thought to require so very, very much. Biological discourses at the time interpolated the conservation of energy law to argue that women should devote most of their resources to child bearing, rearing, and tending the home. There was only so much energy a woman could draw upon in the first place, and her silly womb sucked most of it dry [6]. That’s why women were no good at book learning, didn’t you know?
But they could be great telegraph operators and typists because that kind of work required lots of sympathetic reception and little original thought.
So, in Dracula, the vampire hunters really don’t know what to do with Mina. She poses a problem for them because even though she, like Lucy, is a sensitive woman, Mina is also sharp as a tack. Unlike sweet Lucy, who is, until her death, an empathic airhead (and the object of desire for nearly all the men in this book), Mina is a feeling and thinking woman. It simply won’t do. Van Helsing decides she is not vampire hunting material and the men have to cut her out of their boys’ club. He explains to Jack Seward that Mina “has a man's brain… and a woman’s heart.” Moreover, if they let her play Buffy any longer, who knows what might happen? “Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer… And, besides, she is young woman and not so long married; there may be other things to think of some time, if not now” [1].
Read: We have to protect her womb from that vampire hunting nonsense. Can’t let that thing go barren.
Combining these threads, then, we can understand why Dracula goes for English women first when he mounts his attack on Britain, and why this choice would have been specifically monstrous to a late Victorian readership. Remember: the British empire at the end of the century was large, but unstable. Nineteenth-century technologies like telegraphy facilitated even more growth, and allowed Britain to use its “Great Peace-Maker” as a military tool within its colonial sphere of influence. As more women occupied jobs in technological modes of communication, particularly following the trans-Atlantic Spiritualist movement, Victorians began to conceptualize the mediating woman as an especially sensitive, electromagnetic apparatus. There she sat at the switchboard, receiving and transmitting messages to and from all over the empire. She was an infrastructural node.
By tapping that especially sensitive, electromagnetic woman, Count Dracula not only draws on the insecurities layered into discourses of telepathy and gender, but he also penetrates (literally and figuratively, in a number of ways…) an imperial node through which information flows. He breaches the security of the empire and violates its women in one fell swoop.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this Dracula series, where I’ll discuss more about Dracula, race, and theories of degeneration in the nineteenth century. Finally, I’ll wrap up all the Dracula stuff by analyzing logistics and energy flows in Part 3.
Citations
[1] Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. Dover Publications, 2000.
[2] Galvan, Jill. The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, The Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859-1919. Cornell University Press, 2010.
[3] Sconce, Jeffry. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Duke University Press, 2000.
[4] Luckhurst, Roger. The Invention of Telepathy: 1870-1901. Oxford University Press, 2002.
[5] Horne, Richard Henry. “The Great Peace-Maker: A Sub-Marine Dialogue.” Household Words. 14 June 1851. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/ucl.b3352548.
[6] Gold, Barri J. ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science. The MIT Press, 2010.