A Communal Future: Through the Degenerative Eugenics and Autoimmune Crisis in Dracula
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This essay attempts to read Bram Stoker’s Dracula using Roberto Esposito’s theory on immunity, contending that the Victorian novel written by a British author displays eugenic principles preceding the German Nazism in the next century. By uncovering the analogy between the Victorian period’s anxiety on foreignness and the text’s portrayal of the vampire, it ventures to bring focus on how otherness is perceived as a pathological threat that must be disinfected. This is done through examining the nineteenth-century discourse on degeneration, which relies on theories such as the Lombrosian criminology and biologically organic community. Supporting Esposito’s claim that the perspective of degeneration as a source of contagion existed in Victorian England before the Nazi regime, this paper also argues that Victorian novels, though seemingly adhering to such biopolitical approach at the exterior of their plots, contain criticisms about the binary depiction of otherness as infection. Such analysis implies a universal thread that transpierces disparate countries and periods in terms of human perception associating foreignness with degenerative disease. Dracula’s overrule of the collective attitude on degeneracy through its theme of autoimmune crisis serves as a reminder to recognize its destructiveness when confronting differences for future communities.
Abstract
This essay attempts to read Bram Stoker’s Dracula using Roberto Esposito’s theory on immunity, contending that the Victorian novel written by a British author displays eugenic principles preceding the German Nazism in the next century. By uncovering the analogy between the Victorian period’s anxiety on foreignness and the text’s portrayal of the vampire, it ventures to bring focus on how otherness is perceived as a pathological threat that must be disinfected. This is done through examining the nineteenth-century discourse on degeneration, which relies on theories such as the Lombrosian criminology and biologically organic community. Supporting Esposito’s claim that the perspective of degeneration as a source of contagion existed in Victorian England before the Nazi regime, this paper also argues that Victorian novels, though seemingly adhering to such biopolitical approach at the exterior of their plots, contain criticisms about the binary depiction of otherness as infection. Such analysis implies a universal thread that transpierces disparate countries and periods in terms of human perception associating foreignness with degenerative disease. Dracula’s overrule of the collective attitude on degeneracy through its theme of autoimmune crisis serves as a reminder to recognize its destructiveness when confronting differences for future communities.
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