Halberstam argues that "gothic sexuality, furthermore, manifests itself as a kind of technology, a productive force which transforms the blood of the native into the lust of the other, and as an economy which unites the threat of the foreign and perverse within a single, monstrous body" (101). We might argue, given how McLuhan and Fuller define ecology, that we could replace Halberstam's "economy" with "ecology" showing that gothic sexuality as a technology is, in fact, a medium by which we understand Dracula as a vampire. As Halbestam argues, we understand that Dracula is "not simply a monster but a technology of monstrosity."
For this post, I want you to pick different sections of Dracula to your own argument for the vampire as kind of technology--a technology that defines the vampire as both/and and not one or the other. For example, Halberstam says that Dracula is both a monster and a man; feminine and powerful, parasitical; repulsive and fascinating. Work from your own idea and thinking about Dracula, but make sure to use specific and direct support from the book as well as Halberstam.
250-300 words. Engage with others.
Due: Thursday, April 26, 2012 by class time.
Haraway states that “technology appears to denature everything, to make everything a malleable matter of strategic decisions and mobile production and reproduction processes”. Denaturation is the process of falling apart, losing integrity, or splitting. In a unique way, this relates the the seemingly contradictory aspects of Dracula. As a form of technology, Dracula has the ability, or perhaps I should say the need, to split into multiple pieces. He is like a molecule being heated to extraordinary levels. Soon, the molecule begins to move so fast that its stability, its integrity, is in great danger. Dracula is like this superheated molecule, because he too, is a victim of limited stability. We never know quite what Dracula will do next, because even he doesn't know what he'll do next. One moment, he is displaying obvious homoerotic tendencies towards Johnathan Harker, and the next he is reveling in the act of Mina drinking blood from his chest. But, this early homoeroticism doesn't merely conflict with his later heterosexual endeavors, it also conflicts with the great sense of power that emanates from him. We see this power when Harker attempts to bash Dracula's skull in with a shovel, but fails miserably when the shovel merely glances off as if nothing happened. We see Dracula power on display again simply by hearing about his possession of Renfield. Only someone with immense power, would have the ability to completely brainwash another being.
ReplyDeleteThe question is: how can a creature so powerful also display such prevalent homoerotic tendencies? I am by no means trying to insult the gay community, but society tends to associate masculinity with power, and feminism with both homosexuality and passivity. Dracula shows signs of homosexuality when he shows interest in drinking Harker's blood, which involved penetration of the skin, and while the penetration may not obviously be associated with sexual penetration, it also isn't obvious that's it's not associated with sexual penetration. Furthermore, there seems to be sexual tension between Harker and Dracula in the beginning of the novel, during the very lengthy, and drawnout conversations between the two figures. All in all, while there may not be anything overly obvious about Dracula's homosexuality, there definitely seems to be something there. This division of nature within Dracula proves that Dracula is a product of denaturation, of technology.
I really like what Eric said about Dracula being a person of limited stability. This made me think about how Dracula is both extremely powerful and yet extremely vulnerable. For example, Dracula has supernatural powers such as hypnosis. He can draw his victims to him without them being aware. In this way, he can sustain his life by draining the lives of others. However, apart from the fact that he needs human blood to survive, he is dependent on no one. He lives in a castle alone, has no need for earning money, and has no responsibilities. He has the power to live life however he chooses. Of course, Dracula is also very vulnerable; he can’t go out during the day, he cannot enter any place that he has not been invited, and he cannot resist the power of crucifixes, communion wafers or garlic. These weaknesses seem small, especially in the beginning of the novel when Jonathan Harker is trapped in Dracula’s lair. However, as soon as Dracula moves out of the safety of his home, he is in imminent danger. He has no permanent resting place and must rely on his horde of coffins to preserve him. As each coffin is individually destroyed, he has fewer and fewer places to turn to. There is a limited supply of coffins so there is a limited number of places where he can reside. As he is totally unconscious during the day, and therefore at his most vulnerable, the question of where to sleep is vital and can be life-threatening.
ReplyDeleteAs Halberstam states, Dracula is a technology and a contradiction. His hypnosis power makes him very powerful in the human realm, but his weakness make him very vulnerable in the monster realm.
Dracula is both fascinating and repulsive. By embodying both traits, he represents a macabre fascination within society. While we cringe and shutter at the horrors of the world, we are curiously drawn toward such horrors as well. The Holocaust, while horrifying and repulsive is something that we want to read more about, know more about. It is this very paradox that comes into play with Dracula. As Halberstam says, “The vampire, indeed has no voice, he is read and written by all the other characters in the novel. Dracula’s silence in the novel… is pervasive and almost suffocating and it actually creates the vampire as fetish.” The lack of details, only the horror and implications of an event, creates curiosity. Just as we are repulsed by the image of Mina with “her white nightdress… smeared with blood” we are drawn closer to Dracula, wanting to understand the reasons behind and an odd fascination with the horror as well.
ReplyDeleteEric makes a good point by saying that Dracula is peculiar as he represents both “masculinity with power, and feminism with passivity.” Readers just like the main characters of the novel, have an obsession with trying to decode that Dracula is. The fetish with the monster is this desire to see the fascinating and the repulsive combined into one. Why do people always stare at car wrecks? The scene much like Dracula is gruesome and logically we should want to shy away. Dracula represents to the audience the need to look. By killing and possessing his victims, he forces the characters to see his destruction. His supernatural behaviors and abilities, so different from our own, represent a fascinating item that we want to stare at. For being such a reclusive character at first, once he is in the open he is usually spotted or brings attention to himself.
First, I would like to address a great connection between this piece and the blogs we read by Rai. Halberstam says that the monster is “…never unitary but always an aggregate of race, class, and gender.” This is a superb example of the monster as ontology. As we talked about in our SRR this refers to the grafting together of all these different things to create the monster we know today as Dracula.
ReplyDeleteMoving on from that, by examining both the book Dracula and the character himself as a technology, we can gain a new productivity from the two and gain better understanding of the both. Dracula is a technology, and in tern a technology of sex. Dracula is littered with references to sexuality both subtly and very blatantly. One example of this sexuality comes from the homoerotic econounter between Harker and Dracula. While there is obviously room for interpretation, in my opinion, this is an obvous example of the homosexual nature of Dracula. On top of this, however, we see Dracula take great pleasure from having Mina drink the blood from his chest. These two examples point to the fact that Dracula is, as you put, “both/and and not one or the other.” He escapes the bounds of normal humans and this is why he is monstrous. A great quote to represent this idea also comes from Halberstam: “For Dracula is the deviant or the criminal, the other against whom the normal and the lawful, the marriageable and the heterosexual can be known and quantified.” One of the main reasons that Dracula is so compelling is that he allows us to situate ourselves as something separate from him. Because Dracula is a monster and something that cannot exist in a rational world, we gain comfort from looking at his deviancies. We can view those things as monstrous and then completely separate ourselves from them. This makes it easier to view these acts in the real world because they are no longer the acts of men, but of monsters.
Eric. Excellent post. I really liked the depth you went into for your analysis and thought it to be very well thought out.
Halberstam defines Gothic fiction as “a technology of subjectivity, one which produces the deviant subjectivities opposite which the normal, the healthy, and the pure can be known…multiple interpretations are embedded in the text and part of the experience of horror comes from the realization that meaning itself runs riot.” This directly ties into Eric’s point that Dracula consists of “seemingly contradictory aspects.” This spitting of nature within the monster can be used as a standard for other vampires as well, especially when looking at Lucy and her transformation. Two instances in particular portray this in the novel. The first is right before Lucy dies. On her deathbed, she clings to Arthur and says goodbye. As this is happening, though, Van Helsing notices a marked change in Lucy’s eyes. Arthur, unaware of this, is shocked as the doctor tears him from his dying beloved and robs him of one last kiss. When considering the vampire as a technology of subjectivity, Lucy-as-victim and Lucy-as-vampire (two very contradictory states) become one being in the last moments of her life. Her beautiful and weak appearance remains, while the hunger of the vampire has already begun to develop. This in and of itself becomes horrific, as one cannot understand how the purest good and the ultimate evil are then encompassed within Lucy frail form. Another very critical incident in which one can see the vampire’s embodiment of the technology of subjectivity is when the group of men encounter Lucy-as-vampire in the cemetery. Seward himself is struck by the horrific being undead-Lucy has become. Her earthly beauty has seemingly been intensified after death, and yet the blood dripping from her mouth makes it very obvious that her beauty is deceiving. Again we encounter the contradictory aspects of the vampire, as a being that is considered the very embodiment of evil inhabits a form of death-defying beauty (pun totally intended). It is through the study of Lucy’s transformation, and undead-ness thereafter, that Halberstam’s concept of the technology of subjectivity (and the monster’s/vampire’s ability to be a technology in and of itself) can be seen.
ReplyDeleteDracula takes many different forms in the book – animal, natural and pseudo-human. The nature of these different forms seems to be in contradiction with one another. For example, when Dracula meets Harker, in spite of being old, he is still a really authoritative character. However, this doesn’t stop him from initially being a really gracious host – enticing Jonathan with his library and good manners. It isn’t until later in Jonathan’s stay that he starts to feel like a captive and Dracula starts to actively assert his will by having Jonathan write letters to his boss and Mina. Similarly, Dracula takes the form of some kind of beast when he departs the ship and when he feeds on Lucy while she’s sleep walking, but later on when Lucy is dying in her bed Dracula occupies the room as mist. At first glance these two forms seem to be in contradiction with one another, one being really primal and the other being really sneaky and subversive. However, Halberstam writes that Dracula – as a technology of monstrosity – is a “composition of Otherness,” suggesting that Dracula is a highly concentrated distillation of all of the negative aspects of the Other. By making Dracula both a primal force and a more subversive mist Stoker might be suggesting that Dracula (the Other) is uniquely dangerous because he is able to sneakily permeate society (as he does by getting the fiancée of his future victim to be his relator) , just as mist fills a room, right before executing his evil will. In this sense Dracula is dangerous because he embodies the characteristics of both predator and prey in that he hunts and kills humans like a predator but is able to blend in and hide like prey.
ReplyDeleteHalberstam consistently refers to the sexuality of Dracula in “Technologies of Monstrosity”. Most, if not all, vampires are highly sexualized and Dracula is no exception. But Dracula’s sexuality is also a sort of duality, a dichotomy of personality traits that seemed both familiar and also strange and alien to the late 19th century.
ReplyDeleteI agree with what Eric said in that I see some homosexual tendencies in Dracula’s behavior, especially in the beginning of the novel with his very restrained and drawn-out conversations with Harker – some that in my mind shows tension on Dracula’s part. Dracula is shown to be very powerful (strong enough to deter three female vampires) and power is typically associated with masculinity – both through strength and money. The fact that Dracula also forcefully takes what he wants could be an allusion to robbery or even rape. This is not to say that Dracula is travelling around London raping people, though. Rape and robbery are all about power and dominance, which Dracula is shown to have in great abundance. However, Dracula also has a very strong feminine side, a side that, in the 19th century, would be associated with homosexuality. Halberstam refers to the drinking of Dracula’s blood by Mina and associates this act with the maternal act of breast-feeding. Dracula also is the one to “give birth”, as it were, to new vampires, something associated with women and the female body.
The character of Count Dracula is a very strange mixture of male and female, monster and man. I believe that Dracula, and by extension the vampire in general, is a melding of things both familiar and unfamiliar to us. He is frightening and yet at the same time alluring. He represents everything people living in the 19th century despised (homosexuality, disturbing bodily features, and greed) but also everything the same people were attracted to (power – both monetary power and sexual power).
I totally agree with everyone's posts here. Zach comments on the homosexual tendencies in Dracula's behavior, especially right when Harker gets to Transylvania. Dracula often gets very close to Harker, has long conversations, and talks to him until the early hours of the morning. I like how Eric talks about the differences between homoerotic tendencies and power, and he does a good job of explaining where that comes about.
ReplyDeleteI also like how Halberstam says that "In Dracula vampires are precisely a race and a family that weakens the stock of Englishness by passing on degeneracy and the disease of blood lust. Dracula, as a monster/master parasite, feeds upon English wealth and health" The way that Stoker describes Dracula after a feeding is really interesting as well, how he says that "the lids and pouches underneath were bloated. It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood" It's interesting to compare it to, say, an emaciated child who just got fed. We would never say "gorged with food" or "bloated" in this way. Halberstam then connects this whole passage to the "parasitism" of Jewishness in the 1890s. This is something that I've never heard of before - a comparison of Dracula to a Jew.
Here, in this scene, we see Dracula as powerful and filled with strength - in a very negative way. When he drinks blood, and sucks the energy and power out of his victim, he becomes this parasite that is feeding off of his victim's health and welath. He gets hit with a shovel and it simply bounces off. However, in the beginning parts of the novel, we picture Dracula as a tall, thin, pointy-looking man - definitely not a bloated and "full of life" figure. This is one discrepancy that Stoker does a good job of doing.
Like Katherine said, Dracula is both powerful and vulnerable, which I attempted to explain above. There are also other examples that show this. He tends to speak in a certain way that bothers Harker frequently. The things that Dracula says before departing or before saying goodnight really give Harker an eerie feeling - making Dracula seem like he is in control. However, there are times where he shows his vulnerability. When Harker is shaving and cuts himself, Dracula lunges to his neck, but then stops abruptly when he sees the crucifix. This is a sign of his weakness - one of the few things that he fears.
I like how Billy connected this to Rai's blog posts. Halberstam states "The technology of Dracula gothicizes certain bodies by making monstrosity an essential component of a race, a class, or a gender or some hybrid of all of these". Rai made a very good point when he said that the monster as punctum takes the monstrosity out of the monster. The monster is a monster because of evolution, a growing collage of monstrosities. This is what the technology of Dracula is all about. "Dracula is . . . a distilled version of all others produced by and within fictional texts, sexual science, and psychopathology."
To me, Halberstam’s interpretation of the vampire is not that the vampire is a vampire itself, but rather that it is an embodiment of societal opinions and contradictions. I like Billy’s concept, tying this view of the monster back to the ontology of the vampire. The vampire is not a punctum or an instantaneous creature, but a buildup of different ideas.
ReplyDeleteThe idea I brought away from the book, based on this concept is that Dracula is both nurturer and murderer. During his attack on Mina, Dracula has her drink from his chest, originally maternal imagery, while simultaneously draining the life from her. For the women vampires he creates, Dracula brings them into the world of the vampire almost as a (very creepy) mother figure, while killing them and taking them out of the world they once know. He brings a small child to the vampires in Transylvania, in order for them to live while killing the child of another. He is the provider for his kind and the murderer of others. He is the best and worst mother; the most terrible yet most protective father. In this way, Dracula furthers the Victorian idea that “loose” mothers make bad mothers, in that he is known for his sexuality and thus in the context of humans, he is a terrible parental figure. Zach states that the Count is a very strange mixture of male and female. In this context, I see him as the female when creating other vampires, stealing their lives to make them something new and terrible; a terrible mother to human kind with his loose morals. Later he becomes more of a male in the situation, providing for and interacting with the seemingly weaker women.
Dracula’s character serves as a paradox, which further contributes to his ambiguity and monstrosity. His characteristics are in direct opposition of one another, yet in conjunction, they create a monster that is both feared and revered. Throughout the novel, Dracula is an object of terror. Harker is repulsed by Dracula’s physical appearance. He describes the vampire’s long, dirty fingernails, sharp pointy eyes, and unusually hairy palms. His ice-cold grip reminds Harker more of a dead man than a living one. Dracula’s actions are just as sickening. The vampire lunges at Harker’s neck when he cuts himself while shaving. At the same time, Dracula serves as an object of desire. He represents unlimited power and immortality. The vampire boasts of his family’s name and shares stories of his country’s battles. He overpowers Harker and convinces him to write a letter to Mina explaining how his stay with the vampire will be extended. Halberstein states “The vampire indeed has no voice, he is read and written by all the other characters in the novel. Dracula’s silence in the novel… is pervasive and almost suffocating and it actually creates the vampire as fetish.” Dracula’s silence contributes to his apparent dichotomy. The interpretation of his character depends on the image Stoker creates through his text. This representation serves as the medium that evokes fear or attraction, depending on the reader’s mental construction of the vampire formed from his description and interactions.
ReplyDeleteI find Eric’s post about the homosexuality of Dracula really interesting. I agree with the idea that the vampire is associated with both masculinity and homosexuality. I also think that Katherine’s remark about how the vampire is both an object of vulnerability and power is an accurate representation of Dracula. His contradiction builds him up, but at the same time, it can tear him down.
Halberstam pinpoints Gothic fiction as “a technology of subjectivity, one which produces the deviant subjectivities opposite which the normal, the healthy, and the pure can be known-multiple interpretations are embedded in the text and part of the experience of horror comes from the realization that meaning itself runs riot.” As both Eric and Miles have mentioned, Dracula is seemingly a contradiction of facets.
ReplyDeleteThe book of Dracula and the character are a technology. The components that construct Dracula’s persona are competing factors. For instance, when Harker first meets Dracula he seems both hospitable and endearing. “The light and warmth and count’s courteous welcome seemed to have dissipated all my doubts and fears” (Stoker 28). However, his domineering and strong presence brings conflicting facets to his character. “The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth…The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point” (Stoker 30). Dracula is pinpointed as both charming and chilling.
Chelsea’s analogy to the Holocaust touched my soul and drew about a daunting point, “The Holocaust, while horrifying and repulsive is something that we want to read more about, know more about. It is this very paradox that comes into play with Dracula.” While the Holocaust was unfathomably nauseating, Dracula is also incomprehensibly sickening, but the allure from his pure horror is hard to turn away from. Dracula is illustrated as both captivating and ghastly.
As Halberstam notes, “The vampire, indeed has no voice, he is read and written by all the other characters in the novel. Dracula’s silence in the novel… is pervasive and almost suffocating and it actually creates the vampire as fetish.” This inaccessibility of Dracula is exasperating and intensifies the frustration that is felt when one is mesmerized by his malice.
Halbestam argues that Dracula is, “not simply a monster but a technology of monstrosity.” This definition of Dracula as a technology brings forth the idea that he embodies the images of antiquity versus modern (for the time) ideals. Upon first being introduced to Dracula by Johnathan Starker, we see an Eastern European Count firmly set in antiquity. He lives in a remote castle decayed by time. His formal mannerisms and his appearance of being an older man with gray hair only add to this imagery of antiquity. However, Stoker contrasts this image of Dracula with his inexplainable ability to merge with modern day London. It seems absurd when Dracula is speaking to Johnathan about the legal issues involving his new estate in England, but he continues to express a relatively good working relationship with modern legalities. Likewise in London, when Johnathan sees him in a square in the city he has become progressively younger, now with black hair. This is the physical change supporting the existence of these two different ideals in Dracula. At the beginning of the story he is a reclusive Count surrounded by primitive society and the remnants of an era long past. However, by the end of the book we are familiar with a very different monster. He has evolved and adapted to the modern world, and this coexistence of age with newfound savvy make him all the more terrifying to those who read his story. His ability to be both old-fashioned yet completely comfortable in our modern world make him a much more elusive monster. No longer does the gothic monster stay locked in his castle, but now he can roam the streets of any modern city debating real estate law and drinking blood on his coffee breaks. The ambiguity this situation describes is a key tool used by Stoker to make Dracula's monstrosity more capable of being feared by all readers.
ReplyDeleteMiles very effectively described this ambiguity by bringing up Halbestam's belief that Dracula is a “composition of otherness.” The fact that he cannot be defined nor pinned down in one niche make his ideals so much more terrifying because he can exist in any human's personal world.