A Call for Older, Holier States: Blood as Ink and the Count's Electric Telegraphy in Bram Stoker's Dracula
Humanities
LTEL 190C: Victorian Literature & Science
This research paper focuses on Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula, and the relationship between 19th century communicative technology and Victorian women with a particular focus on the electric telegraph and the tragic victim of Count Dracula, Lucy Westenra. Lucy’s transformation into a vampire has been read as a realization of her ulterior vice, as her desire for three men transgresses Victorian gender conventions despite her ideal Victorian beauty and use in aristocratic society. Beneath this, however, is a struggle that maintains the tensions between progressive and conservative gender ideals though with a particular focus on emerging communicative technologies. This research paper explores how Lucy’s encounter with Count Dracula transforms her into a human telegraph who embodies Victorian fears surrounding the electric telegraph. These include anxieties about the unusual ways in which the electric telegraph transfers information unseen, and the notion that electric telegraphy somehow taps into women's supposedly innate irrationality. As a human telegraph, Lucy is depicted as both a vulnerable female telegraphist and an unusual, exploitable, machine. The bloody scene in which Lucy's husband, Arthur, drives a stake into her heart implies a conservatively masculine victory: the Victorian male drives his pen into the corrupted female telegraphist/telegraph to release a fountain of ink which had constantly been sent to Count Dracula, unseen like information sent across distant telegraph machines.
