Dracula and the Degeneration and Corruption of the External And the Unconscious

Bram Stoker's Dracula, published in 1897, was written in the late-Victorian era, during the high point of imperialistic culture in England. The large expansion of the British Empire that occurred in this era led to an overshadowing feeling of fear in much of Victorian culture. One such consequence of this expansion “was the subsequent entry into England of a whole range of peoples from different cultures, prompting a fear of racial degeneration, of the contamination of 'Englishness'” (Byron 20). To a Victorian society who saw themselves as the epitome of the civilized world, degeneration, or a reversion from excellence into primitiveness, was a concept much feared. It is this fear of degeneration and corruption that Stoker targets in Dracula, specifically through his use of travel and “invasion” to explicitly embody these fears externally, and to parallel this external fear with the internal, unconscious manifestation of degeneration and corruption. As Michael Kane maintains, “Stoker's Dracula constitutes an early example of what has come to be termed the 'invasion literature' of the years preceding the First World War in England” (8). Count Dracula's invasion of the west represents not only the incursion of degeneration and corruption into Victorian society through a similar, if not identical, method to the spread of disease, but also the degeneration and corruption of the unconscious self. Stoker affirms his fear of this exact corruption in an article on his desire to repress “degenerative” writing. 

It may be taken that such works are here spoken of deal not merely with natural misdoing based on human weakness, frailty, or passions of the senses, but with vices so flagitious, so opposed to even the decencies of nature in its crudest and lowest forms, that the poignancy of moral disgust is lost in horror. This article is no mere protest against academic faults or breaches of good taste. It is a deliberate indictment of a class of literature so vile that it is actually corrupting the nation. (“The Censorship of Fiction” 437) 

Ultimately, Dracula and all he represents is destroyed, suggesting that Bram Stoker perceived an extreme danger in both external and internal degeneration, and thus considered it should be repressed and eliminated. 

It is with the external and overt fears of invasion that Stoker begins his characterization of Dracula. Dracula is a figure of corruption and degeneration and as such he adheres to the Victorian concept of the degenerative criminal as described by Cesare Lombroso, who depicts such a criminal as possessing “the irresistible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, and drink its blood” (136). Dracula reveals the beginnings of these qualities during a confrontation with Jonathan Harker in the opening chapters of the novel: 

I saw that the cut had bled a little, and the blood was trickling over my chin. I laid down the razor, turning as I did so half-round to look for some sticking-plaster. When the Count saw my face, his eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury, and he suddenly made a grab at my throat. (Stoker Dracula 26) 

Harker makes his first voyage to the east not knowing what to expect, but after his encounter with the Count's evil and sexually ambivalent ways, as implied by the Count's reaction to Jonathan's blood, his desire to flee back to England, where life is “pure”, is extreme. “And then away for home! Away to the quickest and nearest train! Away from this cursed spot, from this cursed land, where the devil and his children still walk with earthly feet!” (Stoker Dracula 53). Dracula now symbolizes the degenerative east, and it is at this point that he sets his corrupting gaze on the west as he prepares to “invade” and degenerate the modern world. 

Stoker equates Dracula's invasion with the invasion or encroachment of a deadly disease, as indicated in the passage that describes Dracula's first “step” in England: 

To add to the difficulties and dangers of the time, masses of sea-fog came drifting inland – white, wet clouds, which swept by in ghostly fashion, so dank and damp and cold that it needed but little effort of imagination to think that the spirits of those lost at sea were touching their living brethren with the clammy hands of death, and many a one shuddered as the wreaths of sea-mist swept by. (Stoker Dracula 77) 

The inhabitants of Victorian England saw “minute particles”, such as those in fog, as one of the most deadly and fearful methods of the transmission of disease. 

It is proved by indubitable evidence that this morbidic matter is as capable of entering the system when minute particles of it are diffused in the atmosphere as when it is directly introduced into the blood vessels by a wound. … So deadly is its nature that one physiologist has lost his life by incautious inhaling it while using it for the purpose of experiment. (May 17) 

At this point, Dracula, who fits Lombroso's sketch of the degenerative criminal, has invaded England through means commonly associated with the onslaught of deadly diseases. Stoker does not rest at merely implying disease, but in fact equates Dracula with it, as is evident from Dr. Seward, Van Helsing, Holmwood, and Harker's “invasion” of one of Dracula's houses in England: 

None of us ever expected such an odour as we encountered … the place was small and close … the air stagnant and foul. There was an earthy smell, as of some dry miasma, which came through the fouler air. But as to the odour itself, how shall I describe it? It was not alone that it was composed of all the ills of mortality and with the pungent smell of blood, but it seemed as though corruption itself had become corrupt. (Stoker Dracula 257) 

Dracula has brought a degeneration and corruption so intense that “it seemed as though corruption itself had become corrupt.” 

Stoker does not restrict Dracula solely to this external disease and corruption, but rather, as Dracula's invasion continues, Stoker parallels the initial geographic invasion of England with a subversive invasion of Lucy and Mina's unconscious. In his article, “The Censorship of Fiction”, Stoker suggests that the more intense of the two forms of invasion is that of the internal: “It is through the corruption of individuals that the harm is done” (436). Dracula was also published during the rise of psychoanalysis as is evident by the inclusion of Dr. Seward's “modern” mental asylum. Carl Jung's (who was studying at the time of Dracula's publication) postulation that “consciousness is what we know, and unconsciousness is all that we do not know” (Stein 16), is relevant to the interpretation of the Count's invasion. As Dracula's external invasion of England is an invasion by an unknown, it parallels the invasion of the unconscious. 

Lucy's complete transmutation into a vampire introduces the threat of internal invasion as being potentially more serious than the Count's external invasion of England. Stoker's notes on “Unconscious Cerebration” are applicable to the situation of Lucy's first encounter with Dracula. 

mental changes, of whose results we subsequently become conscious, may go on below the plane of consciousness, either during profound sleep, or while the attention is wholly engrossed by some entirely different train of thought. (Byron “Unconscious Cerebration” 460) 

Lucy first encounters Dracula while in a “profound sleep”, as observed by Mina: 

but it seemed to me as though something dark stood behind the seat where the white figure shone, and bentover it. What it was, whether man or beast, I could not tell.…As I came close she put up her hand in her sleep and pulled the collar of her night-dress close around her throat.
(Stoker Dracula 90-91) 

Dracula is invading Lucy through her unconscious, and she is unconsciously being “modified” as evidenced by her covering of her wounds. Stoker uses Lucy to represent the real possibility of complete personal corruption. 

The most powerful parallels between the Count's external and his internal invasion occur in his attempt to corrupt Mina. His first encroachment upon Mina transpires in the same method as his first encroachment into England, through “minute particles” suggesting a spreading disease. 

All was dark and silent, the black shadows thrown by the moon-light seeming full of a silent mystery of their own. Not a thing seemed to be stirring, but all to be grim and fixed as death or fate; so that a thin streak of white mist, that crept with almost imperceptible slowness across the grass towards the house, seemed to have a sentience and a vitality of its own. (Stoker Dracula 258) 

Max Nordau, an influential criminologist who published Degeneration two years prior to Dracula, notes that, “The two psychological roots of moral insanity, in all its degrees of development, are, firstly, unbounded egoism, and, secondly, impulsiveness – i.e., inability to resist a sudden impulse to any deed; and these characteristics also constitute the chief intellectual stigmata of degenerates” (19). Mina exhibits this “inability to resist a sudden impulse” when Dracula begins to suck her blood. “I was bewildered, and, strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him. I suppose it is a part of the horrible curse that this happens when his touch is on his victim” (Stoker Dracula 287). Mina is becoming a degenerate and represents the ultimate corruption of the unconscious by the degenerative forces of Dracula. Stoker recognizes both the unconscious and the external in “The Censorship of Fiction”, “Let us apply it to the subject in question – the union or at least the recognition of two values, the excellences of imagination and of restraint. Restraint may be one of two kinds – either that which is compelled by external forces, or that which comes from within” (435). Dracula thus represents both external and internal fears of degeneration, and it is his corruption that must ultimately be destroyed in order to save Mina and the Western world. 

It is with the intent of a re-establishment of Western, Victorian values, and the destruction of the degeneration that Stoker has his characters pursue and destroy Dracula, effectively counter-invading the East. As Kane asserts, “In Dracula the threat of invasion appears to be equated with a threat of polymorphous perversity” (20), and it is this perversity that is destroyed as evidenced in the final scene: 

But, on the instant, came the sweep and flash of Jonathan's great knife. I shrieked as I saw it shear through the throat; whilst at the same moment Mr Morris' bowie knife plunged in the heart. It was like a miracle; but before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight. … With one impulse the men sank on their knees, and a deep and earnest 'Amen' broke from all as their eyes followed the pointing of his finger as the dying man spoke:- 'Now God be thanked that all has not been in vain! See! The snow is not more stainless than her forehead! The curse has passed away! (Stoker Dracula 377-78) 

Dracula's degeneration into dust is symbolic of the degeneration of disease, with the dust being the “minute particles” which are so vehemently feared in Victorian society. Mina's scar disappears, completing and affirming the re-establishment of Victorian societal dominance. 

Stoker's parallels between the external and the internal invasions that Dracula attempts on both the Western world and the Western characters indicate ambivalence in Victorian society itself in regards to this issue. Carl Jung's studies find that the line between the external and the unconscious “is an area that behaves in a psyche-like way but is not altogether psychic. It is quasi-psychic. In these gray areas lie psychosomatic puzzles, for example. How do mind and body influence each other? Where does one leave off and the other begin? These questions have still not been answered.” (Stein 26). Dracula embodies these questions of Jung's just as he embodies the Victorian fear of the “invasion” of degeneration and corruption. It is this degenerative and corrupting ambivalence that Stoker and his contemporaries fear, and thus to eliminate fear Stoker destroys its source with the destruction of Dracula. 

 (c) 2000 Shea Coulson 
 

 Works Cited

Kane, Michael. “Insiders/Outsiders: Conrad's The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' and Bram Stoker's Dracula.”  In The Modern Language Review. Vol. 92 pt 1. January 1998. pg. 1-21. 

Lombroso, Cesare. Criminal Man According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso. Intro. London: Putnam, 1911. 

May, Leila S. “'Foul Things of the Night': Dread in the Victorian Body” in The Modern Language Review.Vol. 93, part 1. Januarry 1998. pg. 16-22. 

Nordau, Max. Degeneration. 9th ed. London: Heinemann, 1896. 

Stein, Murray. Jung's Map of the Soul. USA: Carus Publishing Company, 1998. 

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. 

Stoker, Bram. Introduction. Dracula. Ed. Maud Ellmann. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. 

Stoker, Bram. Introduction. Dracula. Ed. Glennis Byron New York: Broadview Press, 1998 

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Ed. Glennis Byron “Of Unconscious Cerebration” New York: Broadview Press,1998. 

Stoker, Bram. “The Censorship of Fiction,” The Nineteenth Century. September 1908, 47: 479-87. 

(c) 2000 Shea Coulson