Dear readers,
Disease is very much present in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But not in the way you think; No one in Dracula is literally sick with an illness but rather, it is the behavior and spread of vampires along with disturbing scenes that is a disease. Readers, you may be asking why this is. As we briefly mentioned in class, you should understand that “Dis-ease” is the sense of uneasiness. Dracula makes us feel uneasy because of the violence, animalistic sexuality, and depictions of corrupted purity it provokes.
One of the best examples of this unease is Lucy. “She seemed like a nightmare of Lucy as she lay there ; the pointed teeth, the bloodstained, voluptuous mouth – which it made one shudder to see – the whole carnal and unspiritual appearance, seeming like a devilish mockery of Lucy’ s sweet purity.” (Stoker 366 [online version]) While Lucy is described to be this sexual creature, readers must remember that Lucy is, well, dead. It raises questions of foreshadowing and apprehension: To start, why is Lucy’s purity mentioned in conjunction with her new vampire self? And to end with the most disturbing, why is a corpse being viewed with a “voluptuous mouth” in such an attentive sexual matter?
What’s even more puzzling is Lucy’s feeding habits as a new vampire. Readers, did you notice how she only sucked children’s blood?? I know we read this and think huh thats kind of, just a LITTLE, bit pedophilic. And you’re not wrong. But perhaps this is just because Lucy is what we have coined as a “baby” vampire so she’s only starting off on little kids. But what if there was more to it? What if we’re meant to understand this as Lucy trying to purify herself with children who are the epitome of innocence? Let us delve even deeper into the possibilities. Lucy as a now tainted “virgin”, as Stoker describes her, is now corrupting other innocents. Regardless of what the answer may be, I believe that Lucy and her victims are a metaphor that signifies the spread of infection/disease.
Sincerely,
Alucard
I’m honestly not sure how you can argue that vampirism is not an illness. Once someone is fed on and thereby infected, they die and pass on the infection to others. That sounds like an illness to me. As to your point about why it’s mentioned in conjunction with purity, I think you’re missing a key fact: that Stoker wrote this novel in the midst of a syphilis epidemic, and likely had already contracted the disease that later killed him. He likely felt some shame in regards to how he caught the disease, and might have felt that that was his punishment for immoral behavior. Taking this into consideration sheds a lot of light on how vampirism operates in the novel, as well as why purity is tied up in Dracula’s victims. And yes, Lucy and her victims are obviously a metaphor for the spread of disease, but what does that tell us about the novel and the time in which it was written?