Victorian Review

In the variety of classes in which I’ve taught the novel, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) usually slays. At the end of courses on British nineteenth-century fiction, its action, sex, horror, and camp have provided a chaser to the pessimism of Olive Schreiner, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, or Ella Hepworth Dixon. As a literary scholar interested in media theory and history, I developed my first classes on literature and media around the contrasts and continuities among the “discourse networks” of 1800, 1900, and 2000—as analyzed by Friedrich Kittler—from Romantic writing to fin-de-siècle texts to electronic media. Even as the doses of Kittler in later syllabi became homeopathic, Stoker’s novel held a central place because of its focus on media devices as well as its afterlives in other media. From the Anne Rice days to beyond the Twilight years, the novel’s appeal for students has seemed to remain ever-living or at least firmly undead. Beyond its sense of dark fun, Dracula offers much to students and teachers of late nineteenth-century literature. The hysteria and graphomania of its characters and the paranoia of its imperial Gothic mode allow a compendium of late-Victorian fears to crawl into the light: fears of women’s sexuality, of men’s, and of less strictly dualistic possibilities; of empire, the “East,” racial others, and [End Page 8] the reverse colonization of England; of evolution, degeneration, and bare life; of aristocrats and the masses; of history and modernity; of disease and contagion; and of threats to the supposed purities of blood, identities, or language. Moreover, the novel suggests that such objects of fear might also become objects of pleasure.

My teaching highlights Dracula’s obsessions with media and information, obsessions that richly intersect with its other fears and fantasies. The novel revels in the modern multiplicity of media (stenographic journals, letters, phonograph diaries, telegrams, newspapers) and notes their affordances and limitations (you can’t skim a phonograph recording). Yet in its final paradigm, Mina Harker’s typewriter vampirically consumes all other media, yielding the typescript that Dracula presents as neutral, deracinated modern information floating free of its original materiality and contexts. Surviving the Count’s destruction of its original sources in a deracinated, undead form, Mina’s “mass of type-writing” (Stoker 326) becomes the ostensible wellspring of the book and the ghostly double of Stoker’s own surviving typescript.¹

In my media and literature courses, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818, revised 1831) bookends our encounters with the nineteenth century’s media monsters. Indeed, it suggests an audacious experiment on Kittler’s 1800 discourse network. Kittler claims that the Romantic era naturalizes writing by treating it as an extension of orality, a process anchored by the figure of the mother, who is supposed to ease the child’s transition into phonetic literacy. Frankenstein methodically eliminates the pillars that uphold this system, excising maternity and childhood from the creature’s production as well as from his acquisitions of language and literacy. The novel vividly presents the horror that results: a creature whose smooth speech seems at odds with his outsized and insistent materiality, whose expansive flights of sensibility make his extensive career as a murderer only more shocking—shocking to the creature himself perhaps most of all. The novel’s organization around epistolarity and reproduced orality—Walton’s letters encase the story told by Victor Frankenstein, with the creature’s speech at its centre—illustrates its treatment of writing as virtual speech but also raises questions about their supposed equivalence. And with his ability to frustrate, defy, and outlive his author, the creature comes to resemble autonomous language or the technological side of writing itself. The Frankenstein/Dracula binary allows my classes to trace media multiplicity and the splits between acoustic and visual experience; to read monster theory alongside media theory; to recognize how gender, sexuality, bodies, and reproduction are critical to understanding media and can become the stuff of horror.

But this binary seems broken for my recent classes. While students have more and more to say about the talky, ponderous Frankenstein, the COVID-19 era seems to have put a stake in the heart of Dracula, at least for now. Students want to explore Shelley’s novel as a tale of artificial intelligence or of neurodivergence (not only or primarily on the part of the creature). The communications [End Page 9] and miscommunications Frankenstein describes have appeared particularly vivid to them because they centre on its isolated tale-tellers. Assembling the creature, Victor enters a self-imposed lockdown, and the creature he produces recapitulates that isolation, if more discontentedly. The confessional form of the narrative—in which Walton, Victor, and the creature all present their thoughts and experiences to the single person they have chosen as an audience—evokes for my students the dynamic of desperate connection after long solitude. For them, such moments of intense connection and self-revelation justify any melodrama or clumsiness on the part of the novel and its prose.

Conversely, my students now complain that Dracula seems silly or obvious. The novel’s sex, camp, terror of the other, and revelation of the night side of Victorian culture have not resonated with them. Consider even the novel’s account of contagion. Over the course of several hundred years, the disorder of vampirism has apparently only infected three further victims in Transylvania (the female vampires who hope to vamp a rather willing Jonathan Harker) before it spreads to a single Englishwoman in London—a truly unimpressive infection rate when compared to the R_t transmission numbers of even the original COVID-19 virus, to say nothing of its more contagious Alpha, Delta, or Omicron variants. In contrast to the lonely principals of Frankenstein, Dracula bustles with characters and sociability, which makes Dracula’s chronic isolation merely anomalous, not representative of a more general pathology. Despite his late-night conversations with Jonathan or his bedroom experiments on Mina, Dracula wishes to feed and to victimize rather than to connect. My students still recognize the novel’s focus on media, of course, but what the novel seeks to mediate strikes them as uninteresting. As it purports to collate a set of time-stamped lexia to track the vampire, the novel might portend a world in which all our actions leave mediatic traces. But in contrast to their responses to Frankenstein’s confessions, my students don’t feel that those traces tell the stories that interest them—for instance, why Dracula leaves lockdown in rural southeastern Europe to bring contagion to imperial London, and why now?

The point of assembling a syllabus or reading list isn’t to cater to student tastes. But my recent experience teaching these novels suggests that Dracula no longer offers students what I hope it will, while Frankenstein offers more. For me, humanities teaching starts from the simultaneous familiarity and alienness of a place, time, belief system, culture, or text; this double response challenges us to enlarge or rethink the conceptions we hold about “the human.” Thinking critically about what we encounter in a text or culture helps us do the same with our own experiences and cultures. So formulating a COVID-19 or post-COVID-19 canon can let us parlay a sense of connection into critical thought about our collective experiences, including questions about mediation and fears of social breakdown. [End Page 10]

For my students, another work of turn-of-the-century fiction has made a better complement and counterpoint to Frankenstein. Like Frankenstein, E.M. Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops” (1909) is a tale that risks over-simplification into a parable about science or technology gone too far. This story, too, centres on a character who suffers from isolation, who finds himself at odds with the society around him, and who reaches out for recognition to a person who created him. On a future earth scarred by anthropogenic environmental damage, the global society of “The Machine Stops” has embraced technological mediation. Each person occupies a separate, identical underground cell where the Machine accommodates every physical need. In the centre of every dwelling is the “cinemaphote,” a videoscreen (157). As “The Machine Stops” opens, the protagonist, Kuno, demands that his mother, Vashti, meet him in person to talk about his discontent with the mediated life and his quest for direct experience. In the story’s last section, the Machine indeed stops, and the society built around it collapses, first gradually and then suddenly; in the final scene, Vashti and Kuno die in each other’s arms.

My students were hooked by the story’s predictions of videophone calls with friends one has never physically met, TED-talks on subjects of third-hand knowledge, the replacement of bricks-and-mortar shops with universal delivery. And they were struck by the resemblance between life under COVID-19 lockdown and Forster’s nightmare vision of electronic isolation. With prompting, students could recognize that Forster’s principal target is not a particular technology but a life of mediated experience, and that the story’s simultaneous attention to technologies and vagueness about them has helped it remain constantly current, a green screen for its audiences’ experiences and anxieties, including their own.

Drawing on students’ changing relationship to Frankenstein and moving from one well-known work of turn-of-the-century genre fiction to another: these are canon reshufflings, not the kinds of large-scale “undisciplining” that I’m bringing to a master’s-level class on late-Victorian literature that I haven’t taught for many years (see Chatterjee et al.). But these changes to my COVID-19 canon confirm the possibilities of a long nineteenth century that continues to inspire critical reflection on our cultural past and present via monsters, machines, and media.