Content warning (how do I keep getting myself in these situations?): genital mutilation, bad doctors<\/p>\n
Dracula<\/em> wants and expects us to trust the experts. In a scene from Seward\u2019s diary, Van Helsing explains that Lucy is \u201cUn-Dead\u201d and that the only way to save her is to put a stake through her heart while she sleeps (with some garlic for good measure). \u00a0Keep in mind that this \u201cUn-Dead\u201d paradigm, and, in fact, most paradigms about the Vampires are information Van Helsing has supplied. Seward is initially upset: \u201cIt made me shudder to think of so mutilating the body of the woman whom I had loved. And yet the feeling was not so strong as I had expected<\/em>. I was, in fact, beginning to shudder at the presence of this being, this Un-Dead, as Van Helsing called it, and to loathe it. Is it possible that all love is subjective, or all objective?\u201d (Stoker 214, emphasis mine). He admits that he has accepted Van Helsing\u2019s theories. It is a gradual process, but eventually Seward says he would kill the vampire Lucy \u201cwith savage delight\u201d (225).<\/p>\n Stoker\u2019s handling of Lucy\u2019s treatment is in some ways analogous to those of hysteria. Take this account from 1844: a young, middle-class Frenchwoman is thwarted in a love-match by her parents and noticed symptoms that her doctor diagnosed as hysteria. They included irregular menstrual periods and convulsive attacks which led to a \u201clethargic coma.\u201d The doctor treated her with topical oils and \u201cvaginal douches of anti-spasmodic drugs.\u201d She awoke later with only a vague memory of what had happened, and her senses restored (Hellerstein 111). Treatments for hysteria also included genital stimulation and leeches to the vulva (112). These doctors have levied a diagnosis and used it to perform invasive and violating experiments and procedures to cure their patient. In this way, these proceedings would have been somewhat familiar to a Victorian audience.<\/p>\n Other feminine diseases were more peculiar to the anxieties of the day, and their treatments more horrific (and not in a fun way). William Acton, expert on VDs in the fin de siecle, mentions in a footnote that a rival expert\u2019s cure for nymphomania is to cut off the clitoris (Hellerstein 177). As we see with this and the leech treatment, too much sexual arousal in a woman calls not only for violation but mutilation. Lucy\u2019s staking is a violating procedure if I ever saw one. Arthur\u2019s lack of reticence shows how wholeheartedly he endorses Van Helsing\u2019s recent explanation that doing this will save Lucy\u2019s soul. Staking Lucy and destroying the clitoris of a nymphomaniac, for example, do the same thing: they brutalize a woman to save her from the horrors of a big appetite, whether that be for blood or sex.<\/p>\n Lucy\u2019s symptoms are not completely analogous to either of these \u201cconditions,\u201d and I think diagnosing her is beside the point. Dracula<\/em> asks us questions of what trusting a diagnosis and treatment path can lead people to do, and how and why people are diagnosed with illnesses in the first place. Apart from the mentally disturbed, Acton says that women feel little to no sexual desire, and little sensation in the clitoris. The only sexual pleasure, and it is slight, is felt in the vagina. Also, \u201cloose women\u201d are faking their sexual appetites (Hellerstein 177-8). This is the scientific truth to Acton and women who do not follow this are unnatural and probably ill. It sounds like lunacy to the modern reader, but in his day, he was highly respected. Though he was an \u201cexpert\u201d and a \u201cscientist,\u201d he is obviously a product of his time. The hysteric, the nympho, and the vampire were all born of Victorian anxieties, as we explored Christopher Craft\u2019s claims about Dracula<\/em> as an anxious text.<\/p>\n Below are my sources. The book is called\u00a0Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women’s Lives in 19th Century England, France, and the United States<\/em>, edited by Erna Olafson Hellerstein, Leslie Parker Hume and Karen Offen.<\/p>\n Hellerstein Documents Victorian Women Part I<\/a><\/p>\n Hellerstein Documents Part Two<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Content warning (how do I keep getting myself in these situations?): genital mutilation, bad doctors Dracula wants and expects us to trust the experts. In a scene from Seward\u2019s diary, Van Helsing explains that Lucy is \u201cUn-Dead\u201d and that the only way to save her is to put a stake through her heart while she … Continue reading How to Cure Vampirism: Lucy vs. Victorian Medicine<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5331,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125361],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2023-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5331"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}