Abstract
Susan Sontag’s metaphor of illness as the night-side of life throws light on how the tropological language of sickness can be articulated through the Gothic.1 While the archetypal blood-sucker, the literary vampire, provides us with the most comprehensive symbol of disease, vampirism itself is symptomatic of a number of clinical and psychosomatic conditions ranging from erythropoietic proto-porphyria to auto-haemofetishism.2 Dracula is, of course, far more than a novel about pathologies. It is itself pathological in that it perpetuates an image that continues to replicate itself throughout our culture like a virus. More disturbing still, the novel renders pathological both the female and the feminine. Its gendering of male blood as good and female blood as bad signals that it is menstrual blood and its pathologies that provoke a sense of horror. Dracula can be read as an anti-menstrual text wherein menstruation is personified by the figure of the vampire. As I shall argue, Stoker’s attention to the relationship between women and blood is a surrogate for menstrual taboo, which is also eroticised haemo-fetishism. At the same time, it is a reinforcement of the Victorian conservative medical view that menstruation should be morbidified.
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Notes
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and Aids and Its Metaphors (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991) p. 3.
See Herschel Prins, ‘Vampirism — A Clinical Condition’, British Journal of Psychiatry, 146 (1985) 666–8.
See Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove, The Wise Wound: Menstruation and Everywoman (London: HarperCollins, 1994) p. 63. Their claim that the word ‘Taboo’ or ‘sacred’ in Polynesian is the same word as ‘menstruating’ is inaccurate. Rather, it refers to a state of being that has the potential for life, and in this respect relates to rituals about the protection of women.
One old belief was that the glance of a menstruating women could dim a looking-glass. See Patricia Crawford, ‘Attitudes to Menstruation in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past and Present, 91 (1981) 47–73.
See James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1957) pp. 790–5; and
Janice Delaney, Mary Jane Lupton and Emily Toth, The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988) p. 19.
See Talia Schaffer, ‘A Wilde Desire Took Me: The Homoerotic History of Dracula’, English Literary History, 61 (1994) 381–425.
See Nina Auerbach, Women and Other Glorified Outcasts (New York; Columbia University Press, 1985) pp. 269–70.
Brain Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, 2 vols (London; Heinemann, 1906) Vol. 1, pp. 3–4.
Reprinted in Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Maurice Hindle (Harmondsworth; Penguin, 1993), p. 496.
See Ben Barker-Benfield, ‘The Spermatic Economy: A Nineteenth-Century View of Sexuality’, Feminist Studies, 1 (1972) 45–74.
William J. Robinson, Married Life and Happiness (New York: Eugenics Publishing Company, 1922) p. 90.
Brain Stoker, Dracula (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) p. 149. All subsequent references to this edition, and are given in the text.
Quoted ibid., p. 9. Robert Graves draws attention to some of the beneficial aspects mentioned by Pliny as when a menstruating woman can rid a field of pests by walking around it naked before sunrise. See R. Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (London: Faber and Faber, 1961) p. 166.
The painting is reproduced in Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) p. 338.
Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works (London: Pelican Books, 1977) p. 269.
Liz Lochhead, Dracula (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1989) p. 105; Shuttle and Redgrove, The Wise Wound p. 52.
See Adam Douglas, The Beast Within (London: Chapmans, 1992) p. 39. He discusses this theory from Chris Knight’s book Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991). Apparently this female synchrony, which does provide a biological basis for sisterly solidarity, does not apply to mother and daughters.
Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb, Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) p. 224.
See Jules Zanger, ‘A Sympathetic Vibration: Dracula and the Jews’, English Literature in Transition, 34 (1991) 33–43.
Marie Stopes, Married Love (London: Victor Gollancz, 1995) pp. 948–9.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990) p. 104. It is horribly ironic that in Transylvania and the rest of modern Romania during the period of Ceausescu, doctors attempted to control women’s fertility and regulate their menstrual cycle in order to police abortion and birth control, which were illegal. I am indebted to Arica Dumitrescu at the Institute for Educational Sciences in Bucharest for this information. Mariana Jaimes Guerrero has drawn my attention to the Human Genome Diversity Project which involves the collection of blood samples from so-called ‘endangered’ indigenous communities. Since the implications of this should be a cause for concern, it is appropriate that it has been nicknamed the ‘Vampire Project’.
See Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, pp. 25–36; also Elaine Showalter, ‘Victorian Women and Menstruation’, in Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972) pp. 38–44.
Quoted by Jane Ussher, Women’s Madness: Misogyny or Mental Illness?, (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991) p. 76.
See Sigmund Freud, ‘Female Sexuality. Medusa’s Head’, Collected Papers, Vol. 5 (London: Hogarth Press, 1950); and
C.D. Daly, ‘The Menstruation Complex in Literature’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 4 (1935) 307–40.
See Marie Mulvey Roberts, ‘“A Physic against Death”: Eternal Life and the Enlightenment,’ in Literature and Medicine During the Eighteenth Century, ed. Marie Mulvey Roberts and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993) pp. 151–67.
The Spectator, ed. D. Bond (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1965) Vol. 5, pp. 88–90.
Dorothy Porter and Roy Porter, Patient’s Progress: Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989), p. 55.
Almroth Wright had published a letter in The Times on Thursday, 28 March 1912. Its reprint bears the unintentionally telling title ‘Suffrage Fallacies. Sir Almroth Wright on Militant Hysteria’ and has been reproduced in Marie Mulvey Roberts and Tamae Mizuta, The Campaigners in Controversies in the History of British Feminism (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1995).
Ellis Ethelmer, Life to Woman (privately published, 1896), p. 15. Since there is a variation of the spelling of Ethelmer elsewhere, I have used the spelling that appears on the title-page. All subsequent references are to this edition, and are given in the text.
See ‘The Vampire as Menstrual Monster’, in Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1995) pp. 62–6.
Harry Ludlam, A Biography of Dracula: The Life Story of Bram Stoker (London: W. Foulsham, 1962) pp. 13–14.
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Mulvey-Roberts, M. (1998). Dracula and the Doctors: Bad Blood, Menstrual Taboo and the New Woman. In: Hughes, W., Smith, A. (eds) Bram Stoker. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26838-2_6
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