The term “eugenics” was invented in 1883 to define the growing Victorian interest in a kind of bastardized evolution, what Ledger & Luckhurst describe as “control over the breeding habits of a new mass population, an artificial intervention into a natural evolution ‘gone wrong’ in its proliferation of the ‘weakest.’” (Ledger & Luckhurst xv) This preoccupation with the so-called strength of the race emerges in Dracula, but in an ambivalent form. Dracula’s own ideas about race, and the inherent qualities of different races, complicate the eugenicist’s conception of race, such that Stoker’s own feelings on eugenics remain unclear.
Prominent in Jonathan Harker’s memories of his stay at Dracula’s castle are his long talks with the Count, which frequently turn to Transylvanian history. In one of these conversations the Count rhapsodizes on his own family’s past in explicitly racial terms: “We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship. Here, in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric tribe bore down from Iceland the fighting spirit…till the peoples thought that the were-wolves themselves had come. Here, too, when they came, they found the Huns, whose warlike fury had swept the earth like a living flame, till the dying peoples held that in their veins ran the blood of those old witches…What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins? Is it a wonder that we were a conquering race?” (Stoker 52)
The fascinating aspect of this tirade is that it contradicts the popular idea of the eugenicist as obsessed with the purity of his race. On the contrary, Dracula, though exalting the strength of his people and bloodline, in fact ascribes that strength to the mixture of strong races that has resulted in the Szekelys, rather than to any “pure-blooded” ancestors – a blatant contradiction of common European worries about the “degeneration” of race resulting from mixed blood. At the same time, however, Dracula’s description of his family’s emergence from the struggling “whirlpool” or races is perfectly in line with “the power of the evolutionary analogy in the late Victorian era.” (Ledge & Luckhurst xv) In other words, in Dracula, “survival of the fittest” holds true – but perhaps not in the way a pure-blooded Englishman might wish.
What does this treatment of eugenics say about Stoker the Irishman, who, whether he supported English policy in Ireland or not, would certainly have seen English society and preoccupations as an outsider? Is it a dig at Victorian conceptions of “pure” British identity? It is impossible to determine, of course, whether Stoker’s views were at all similar to Dracula’s, especially since this peculiar conception of eugenics is put in the mouth of a figure of utter evil. Nevertheless, that the theme of eugenics made its way into even such a piece of popular literature as Dracula, even in this ambiguous form, testifies to its power and prevalence at the close of the nineteenth century.