The Dracula Series: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Horror and the Vampire as Late Victorian Energy Crisis (Part 2 of 3)
Part 2: “The Blood is the Life” Or; White Supremacist Fears of Racial Degeneration
Happy Halloween!
My Dracula series continues today with truly spooky topics: an exploration of scientific racism, degeneration theory, and the idea that energy language carries implicit moral weight.
If you haven’t yet, check out part 1 of this series, which explains why the Victorians considered sensitivity and mediumship fundamentally feminine, electromagnetic traits. Spiritual and technological mediation were thought to be analogous communication modalities, and biological essentialism insisted that sensitive women like Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker possessed a uniquely feminine neurology allowing them to access networks of feeling and telecommunications alike. If Mina handles the data of vampire hunting, then by channeling her, Dracula breaches the empire’s security.
You’ll notice quite a bit of overlap in this post with our previous discussion of the women in Dracula. Lucy and Mina again represent the boundary points of empire. This time, though, the loss of boundary integrity by monstrous infiltration signals racial degeneration and a reversion to a less “civilized” state. Count Dracula is coded as an ambiguously non-white parasite, threatening to turn England’s pure-blood, Anglo-Saxon race into white “savages,” one English woman at a time.
The Victorians, everyone. They really were something.
Again, there is no need to have read Dracula, but you’re bound to get more out of this analysis if you’ve brushed up on your Stoker.
Energy and Decay at the End of the Century
Dracula was published in 1897, at the fin-de-siècle, so named because the century was literally ending, but also because it was very much a mood. You may have encountered or studied the aesthetics of “decadence,” produced during this period. One day I will write about Decadence as a movement, which deserves special attention; but for now we will apply the term to describe late-Victorian anxieties about the British empire and the state of its society.
Decadence conjures up images of luxury, sensuality, hedonism… perhaps overdoing it, but without regret. Of course, decadence also means decline and decay. (Dorian Gray and his picture are a paradigmatic example of aesthetic decadence.) “Decadence” comes from the Latin verb decadere, or, to decay, as in the decay of the Roman Empire [1]. And finally, decadence has a moral valence. It signals depravity, corruption, and degeneracy. In fact, decadence is a term so rich with energy language that I’m practically jumping at the promise of unpacking it in the future. But let’s get down to business here and paint a picture of Britain at the time of Stoker’s writing.
By the end of the century, the British empire was huge but unstable. In the 1880s and 1890s, Britain had reached the apex of its imperial dominance in the so-called “scramble for Africa,” but not without opposition from the United States and Germany. And, with its increased reliance on fossil fuels, Britain depended more and more on the raw materials and labor of its peripheral territories. Britain employed what John Darwin calls “informal empire.” This means that they influenced colonial subjects “informally,” or by disrupting sociopolitical life and enacting violent cultural and economic transformations, rather than by simply conquering and dominating. Darwin reminds us, though, that this was really “the maximum influence that Victorian governments could exert… rather than the most they wanted to” [2]. So, again: the sun may have never set on the British empire, but the fear was that this victory could turn Pyrrhic if they didn’t maintain dominance as the empire grew.
And maintenance requires energy.
There is a whole word about this, actually. Entelechy, a Greek word coined by Aristotle and related to energia (see The Trouble with Defining Energy), is a special term that translates as “being-at-work-staying-the-same” [3]. Maintenance always requires ongoing effort. We understand this experientially, of course. Any homeowner will complain that maintaining a house is a never-ending saga (do not get me started about my basement water damage this Fall…). Even staying alive requires massive and ongoing work. If you are an empire, then, the larger you grow, the harder you are to maintain. So it follows that the larger the empire, the more it tips precariously towards decay.
Dissipation, Degeneration Theory, and the Decay of (White) Englishness
There was a general and widely-debated sense of fear as the century ended that Britain’s empire was decaying, and that English society was rotting along with it. Victorians debated whether certain elements of art and culture could contribute to the downfall of society. Even science seemed to point towards decay. The laws of thermodynamics were codified mid-century, so quite a bit before the late Victorian period; but even so, we can read the virtues of productivity written into scientific law when we examine how thermodynamics was originally framed. These virtues of energy science made a difference in justifying theories of degeneration and other modes of scientific racism later in the century.
The entropy law suggests that energy in the universe, taken as a closed system, becomes increasingly dissipated, or decayed. Less work-available. In Maxwell’s Demon: A Tale of Two Entropies, Part 1, I introduced Rudolf Clausius as the scientist who coined the term, “entropy.” In 1865, Clausius adjusted the second law of thermodynamics so that it described entropy as tending towards a maximum. However, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) had originally framed the second law fourteen years earlier in somewhat different terms. Thomson’s “Law of Dissipation” stated that there is a universal tendency towards energy’s dissipation, and that energy transfers result in progressively less concentrated forms until the sun and all other sources of energy in the universe burn out. Here’s where things get political. Thomson opined that only the Creator may restore energy to its original concentration, and so we (The British) have a responsibility to use natural energy stores judiciously, directing each transfer to the benefit of mankind [4].
If you open a thermodynamics book today, you see the original equations but not the original language of the thermodynamics laws.
Exactly what the benefit of mankind meant was very clear: the expansion and progress of the British empire, and keeping that empire stable.
Unlike Clausius, Thomson didn’t coin a new term to describe energy’s increasing diffuseness in a closed system. He used the term, “dissipation.” In the nineteenth century, “dissipation” carried both moral and physical weight. The trusty Oxford English Dictionary illustrates what I mean here. During the Victorian period, and well before, “dissipation” meant:
“Waste of the moral and physical powers by undue or vicious indulgence in pleasure; intemperate, dissolute, or vicious mode of living”
“Wasteful expenditure or consumption of money, means, powers, faculties, etc.; squandering, waste”
“Distraction of the mental faculties or energies from concentration on serious subjects”
And, oh yeah, it also meant:
“The passing away or wasting of a substance, or form of energy, through continuous dispersion or diffusion” [5].
When I reference the virtues of energy, then, I mean that there is a moral undercurrent built into the language chosen by physicists to describe what they observed about energy. Here’s the code:
Waste is bad
Progress is good
Excess without purpose is bad
Work is good
Letting resources sit there without using them is bad
Growth and expansion are good
Sounds pretty good for capitalist and imperial expansion, if you ask me.
If you open a thermodynamics book today, you see the original equations but not the original language of the thermodynamics laws. I mean, really: when was the last time you cracked open your heat and mass transfer text and saw, next to your steam tables, a blurb about Englishness and a moral duty to direct energy transfers properly because only the Creator can undo entropy? That didn’t make the cut when I was in engineering undergrad.
There is so very much more to say about this, and believe me: one day soon I will.
For now, though, let’s jump back to the end of the nineteenth century and think about how decadence and fears of decay might have been received through these virtues of energy.
The Decadence movement was an aesthetic rejection of these capital-driven morals of energy logic, and so we see quite a politics of pleasure in the face of the puritanical virtues of energy. Oscar Wilde, for example, famously published during this period, although I believe he took some issue with the term, “decadent.” But despite the ironically artistically productive conditions of apparent decay, far more sinister discourses emerged that suggested the English, themselves, might be dissipating. Like, as a race.
For one thing, evolutionary discourse threatened to muddy boundaries between races previously thought to be genealogically distinct. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, just after the codification of thermodynamics, which, itself, suggested that boundaries could not be trusted. Thermodynamics held that energy was fungible and transferable, slippery and polysemous. Victorians funneled these slippages between self and other towards long-held race, class, and gender prejudices. If Natural Selection favored evolution in one direction, could not a sort of dissipative degeneration happen in the opposite direction? In the fin-de-siècle, degeneration emerged as a new figure in the cultural imaginary - as “a locus of belief about transcendent forces affecting the pace and direction of change as well as the vitality of races and nations” [6].
Degeneration theory contributed to this with the central assumption that civilization was an unstable condition, or that there were “degenerate types” lurking within characteristics of race, class, and gender that threatened to pollute English society.
Degeneration theory tied Victorian concern over energy dissipation, species isomorphism, and questions of origin to racial and social anxieties. Moreover, it found a way to use science to describe those anxieties, thereby reaffirming the authority of the British imperial project using the language of natural law. As Patrick Brantlinger explains, “an aspect of colonial modernity, racism in its supposedly scientific forms was basic to the colonizers’ mapping, census taking, legal and taxation systems, anthropology, and general understanding of the colonized” [7]. Degeneration theory contributed to this with the central assumption that civilization was an unstable condition, or that there were “degenerate types” lurking within characteristics of race, class, and gender that threatened to pollute English society.
In the logic of degeneration discourse, races that had developed into higher states of civilization (read: white) might slip backwards, regressing to a lower moral state by allowing its degenerate populations to thrive. Clearly, the virtues of energy abhorred this possibility because it suggested dissipative laziness and general waste: not keeping up with the work required to maintain a productive state of civilization. At the same time, however, races that were considered naturally degenerate (read: not white) might mimic civilized races with the assistance of higher races, but they could never reach the full achievement of Europeans, even if they were morally developed. You know, through the civilizing project of missionary work or somesuch. Therefore, Brantlinger argues, “[t]he threat of racial degeneration among whites at home or in the colonies raised the specter of ‘the imperial race’ itself falling prey as a collective form of going native” [7]. The fear was that the Anglo-Saxon race would waste its resources and slip into some kind of atavistic form, while a non-white race advanced just enough to mimic English society, take over, and control civilization.
Yeesh.
But wait! There’s more.
The physician Max Nordau wrote a whole book (it was titled Degeneration, big surprise) in which he claims one can actually diagnose the “disease” of degeneration, based on its symptoms. He argues that forces of culture can create degeneration in individuals and, once present, these traits can be passed to offspring [8]. Degeneration was dedicated to Cesare Lombroso, the founder of the Italian School of Positivist Criminology, and a key figure in nineteenth-century theories of degenerate “types.” Lombroso famously wrote a book titled The Criminal Man, which was published in five editions between 1876 and 1897, the latter the year that Dracula was released. Lombroso’s criminology was famous for its essentialized notions of race, class, and gender. Whereas Nordau mentions the inheritance of acquired characteristics, Lombroso refers to stigmata as markers of “born” criminals. For Lombroso, you either are a criminal or you aren’t [9].
Even before Stoker’s novel, the fear of Britain’s “going native” en masse within the heart of civilization is a striking overtone in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, a journalistic account of urban poverty. Like a good humanist, Mayhew attempts to taxonomize London’s urban population. He works hard to transform a chaotic mixture of humans, animals, and refuse into categories legible to sociology. Street people are therefore grouped under six “distinct genera.” And as he describes the people belonging to each “genera,” Mayhew appropriates the language of race to illustrate them, calling the unhoused “the wandering tribe of this country,” for example [10].
The composition of London’s street population was in flux with Irish immigrants escaping Ireland’s famine, but Brantlinger points out that many of these unhoused and disenfranchised of London were, in fact, non-British or non-white [7]. For example, Mayhew dedicates an entire chapter to “The Negro Crossing-Sweeper, who had lost both his legs.” Regardless of the actual racial composition of Mayhew’s subjects, there is slippage in his use of racialized language to describe the race-marked actions of generally class-marked bodies. For example, just as he maps racist descriptions of “nomadism” and “tribalism” onto London’s unhoused population, he also describes the street children as “Arab” thieves [9]. Mayhew’s account of the parasitic [10] drain on England’s resources by its street population is indicative of a growing zeitgeist in mid-to-late Victorian culture, captured by a fear of unbounded and contagious bodies consuming the neatness of empire.
Paranoia and Boundary Loss in the Imperial Gothic
So let’s think about how anxieties of degeneration and decay appear in Stoker’s novel. The European characters in Dracula represent the zenith of western civilization. They are, for the most part, rich white guys who mobilize technologies like the Kodak camera, the telegraph, and the typewriter with ease, even as a racially-ambiguous monster cannibalizes the blood of British women and infects the purity of the metropole. The figure of the vampire as a liminal, decayed state of Britishness is what we will discuss now.
In her book, Imperial Leather, Anne McClintock argues that women were consistently the “boundary markers of empire,” ritualistically “planted like fetishes at the ambiguous points of contact, at the borders and orifices of the contest zone” [11]. McClintock describes the “virgin” territories of land occupied by Indigenous peoples but considered unknown and unsettled by Europeans. She argues that the aesthetics of imperial conquest involves an “erotics of engulfment.” And while this may seem somewhat straightforward along a patriarchal binary, McClintock insists that, actually, the whole business of feminizing contested zones hints at a deeper paranoia of boundary loss and “male boundary confusion” [11].
If any of that is confusing, let’s place it into some context. Dracula performs the colonial anxieties of boundary loss, liminal status, and transitional states. The Count, himself, is a racially-ambiguous Other, a “whirlpool of European races” [12]. Recounting the history of his lineage, Dracula asks Jonathan Harker, “What devils or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?” Blood in Dracula signifies not only sustenance for the vampire, but also racial composition and, for England, clear lines of inheritance.
Gesturing back to the fear of “going native,” Dracula is described by Van Helsing in terms similar to so many western renderings of Indigenous peoples: Dracula has not progressed, he’s atavistic, under-developed, and he’s supposed to be extinct.
The women Dracula turns into vampires become both monsters and boundary figures. Although Lucy dies, becoming a vampire and a cannibal figure preying on street children, she is considered salvageable until her ultimately irreversible “undeath.” Her fiancé, her two unrequited lovers, and Professor Abraham Van Helsing pump Lucy full of male, virile, western blood in an attempt to counteract the Count’s drain on her pure Englishness. Similarly, Mina Harker is tainted by Dracula’s baptism of blood, but she is still a liminal body until the Count’s extermination at the novel’s conclusion, when her purity is redeemed.
When Lucy does become a vampire, however, she becomes unreadable, unclassifiable, and must be eliminated by a penetrative death: a stake through the heart. When all the boys in the vampire hunting club approach Lucy’s tomb, they check out her vamp face for the first time and it is not cute. Seward attempts to describe it, but he does a terrible job, overusing words like “voluptuous” and “wanton.” Lucy’s face, ultimately, is unreadable to him:
“Never did I see such baffled malice on a face; and never, I trust shall ever be seen again by mortal eyes. The beautiful colour became livid, the eyes seemed to throw out sparks of hell-fire, the brows were wrinkled as though the folds of the flesh were the coils of Medusa’s snakes, and the lovely, blood-stained mouth grew to an open square, as in the passion masks of the Greek and the Japanese. If ever a face meant death - if looks could kill - we saw it at that moment” [12].
Because Seward does not have a suitable heuristic for making Lucy’s changed face legible to him, he attempts to read her features through a comfortable western template. He compares the expression on her face to the “coils of Medusa’s snakes,” using Greek mythology to read the new configuration of her flesh. Likewise, he sees the “open square” of her mouth as akin to passion masks, which reflect on but do not reproduce human facial expressions. When this fails to categorize Lucy’s new form accurately, she becomes monstrous. She’s a body out of control, the “bloofer lady,” cannibalizing the children she didn’t have the chance to produce during her natural life.
The “bloofer lady” is the nickname given to Lucy by her child victims as transcribed by the Westminster Gazette [12]. The nickname is a class marker for these children, since they seem to be describing her as “beautiful” in their Cockney accents [13]. Both the Westminster Gazette journalist and John Seward miss the signification of the word, however, and instead reproduce in writing the phonetic spelling of the children’s sounds. What is meant to be “beautiful,” or what means lovely, pleasant, and positive is transformed into the monstrous “bloofer” word, a mystery in signification and utterly foreign to a formal British imagination. But if the lower-class children Lucy preys on find her beautiful in vampiric form, John Seward certainly does not. Instead, the best way he can describe her is a thing resembling yet perverting Lucy. The vampire is a boundary: a monstrous seam between Lucy and not-Lucy.
As McClintock suggests, women are boundary markers of empire, and in Dracula it is no different. Lucy is a “bloofer lady,” somewhere between beautiful and monstrous, an object unrecognizable to its observer. Similarly, the threat of “going native” in Stoker’s novel plays out at the traditional margin of imperial conquest, or the feminine body.
Lucy can degenerate, but the Count can aspire to only mimicry of Englishness. Dracula, who has spent centuries studying the British and planning his counter-colonial attack, could not possibly fool these vampire hunters, who can see straight through what Van Helsing repeatedly calls his “child-brain,” and his failure to be successfully assimilable [12]. Actually, Van Helsing parrots this child-brain refrain throughout the back half of the novel, to the point where it really gets old. He uses the language of degeneration theory and Lombroso, specifically, to insist that Dracula is a born criminal, predestined to crime. He is a degenerate “type” whose brain has not matured and cannot mature to the intellectual capacity of his western vampire hunters. Gesturing back to the fear of “going native,” Dracula is described by Van Helsing in terms similar to so many western renderings of Indigenous peoples: Dracula has not progressed, he’s atavistic, under-developed, and he’s supposed to be extinct.
Summing It All Up
As always, I am left gobsmacked by the Victorians. What a time to have been alive. I’m convinced, though, that the vestiges of even the most unconscionable Victorian discourses (like degeneration theory) linger in our own cultural (sub)consciousness, and in the way we treat one another. As such, we should take the study of Victorian literature and culture seriously, even as we shake our heads and click our tongues at them.
So let’s sum up and wrap this thing.
The end of the nineteenth century invited a general mood of decay, as the British empire required more peripheral labor and resources to maintain and expand its limits, and as scientific discourses like evolution and thermodynamics suggested that society might degenerate. The fear was that Englishness, and indeed whiteness, might collapse into some kind of atavistic, pre-evolved state, while other races advanced enough to occupy British territory and respectability. In Dracula, women serve as liminal bodies at the contest points of empire, and while English bodies can degenerate, Dracula can advance enough to only mimic Englishness. You know, with his “child-brain” and all.
What a ride! Thanks for sticking with me through it all. The Dracula series will conclude next time, and we’ll talk about logistics! Stay tuned!
Citations
[1] Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “decadence, n., Etymology,” September 2023. <https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/9917799144>
[2] Darwin, John. “Imperialism and the Victorians: The Dynamics of Territorial Expansion,” The English Historical Review 111, no. 447 (June 1997): 617-619. https://www.jstor.org/stable/576347.
[3] Daggett, Cara New. The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work. Duke University Press, 2019.
[4] Thomson, William. “On the Dynamical Theory of Heat, with numerical results deduced from Mr. Joule’s equivalent of a Thermal Unit, and M. Regnault’s Observations on Steam.” The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 4(1852): 8-21.
[5] Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “dissipation, n.’, September 2023. <https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/6954397392>.
[6] Chamberlain, F. Edward. Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, edited by F. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman, Columbia University Press, 1985.
[7] Brantlinger, Patrick. Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians. Cornell University Press, 2011.
[8] Nordau, Max. Degeneration, 5th ed. Translated from the 2nd edition of the German work. D. Appleton and Company, 1895.
98] Gibson, Mary. Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminology. Praeger, 2002.
[10] Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor. 1851. Oxford University Press, 2012.
[11] McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. Routledge, 1995.
[12] Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. Dover Publications, 2000.
[13] Wike, Jennifer. “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media.” ELH 59, no. 2 (1992): 467-493, www.jstor.org/stable/2873351.