Abstract
This chapter brings together contemporary affect theory with nineteenth-century psychological science to read affect and ethics in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). O’Donnell focuses on the phenomenon of fainting in the novel, reading it as a representative example of the connection between non-conscious affect and feelings of otherness. Linking non-conscious affect to vampirism, O’Donnell explores how the alterity of feeling is related to ethics in the novel through the connection of bodies and objects, the automatic responses of the body, and the otherness of the self. She suggests that rather than a narrative of power over the other, an alternate reading of Dracula via affect reveals an ethics of respect for uncertainty and alterity.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
See, for example, William Hughes (2009).
- 2.
Kristy Martin (2013) makes a similar claim—though she proceeds somewhat differently—when she analyzes affective entanglements in literature as embodied forms of sympathy occasionally revealed by forms of shock. While Martin acknowledges the significance of the nineteenth century to embodied feeling, her study is focused on modernist novels.
- 3.
Elisha Cohn (2016) has similarly turned to consideration of affect in Victorian novels to explore moments of subjective interruption, but she is more interested in their non-instrumentality as necessary pauses in the progression of the Bildungsroman.
- 4.
- 5.
For a reading of Dracula as a narrative of immunity from the contagion of degeneration, see Roberto Esposito (2008).
- 6.
- 7.
When Deleuze and Guattari (1987) turn to fainting (in a novel by Heinrich von Kleist), they read it as desubjectification, as a representation of an affect that is “too strong for me,” repeated until “the Self … is now nothing more than a character whose actions and emotions are desubjectified…” (356).
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
Massumi (2002) writes: “The body doesn’t just absorb pulses or discrete stimulations; it infolds contexts, it infolds volitions and cognitions that are nothing if not situated. Intensity is asocial, but not presocial—it includes social elements but mixes them with elements belonging to other levels of functioning and combines them according to a different logic” (30).
- 12.
- 13.
This sense is suggested, if implicitly, by Douglas Thorpe (1991), who notes that when Lady Deadlock faints in BleakHouse, the heat of the fire ostensibly may be to blame, but “characters in fiction rarely faint for physiological reasons” (105). The implication is that if the faint does not have a physiological cause then it must have an emotional one; but if emotions are physiological, this statement becomes less clear. Thorpe also notes that fainting women in Victorian novels disrupt the boundary between passive and active; Christiane Zschirnt (1999) similarly notes the passive-active paradox as a feature of the “unconscious consciousness” of fainting women in eighteenth-century novels (48).
- 14.
See Dames (2011) for a discussion of physiological psychology and subjective “unknowability” as hallmarks of Victorian literary representations of character.
- 15.
Similarly, in taking issue with Massumi’s theory, Gatens (2014) describes how scholars arrive at a place of possibility from non-conscious affect: “These Spinozists take our ignorance of the causes of our affective states as the starting point for the possibility of the transformation of the body and the refiguring of imagination as we transition from one way of being to another” (30).
- 16.
I agree with Senf’s claim that the subjective nature of the vampire hunter’s narrative challenges their moral authority, revealing the novel to be about the similarities between good and evil.
- 17.
When Massumi (2002) makes this comment, he is glossing Alfred North Whitehead and William James on experience: “Experience is an additive ‘form of transition,’ a continual motion of intersecting process lines: a co-motion (commotion) of mutual nonexclusion. As William James puts it, experience never stops ‘streaming,’ and its streaming snowballs” (213).
- 18.
For the importance of affect management to subjectivity in the Romantic period, see Burgess (2010).
- 19.
In discussing laughter as a syncope, Nancy (2008) writes, “Health … is only acquired or secured by a moment of syncope” (134).
- 20.
My formulation is influenced by Massumi (2015), as he claims the inseparability of affect from rational choice.
References
Anger, Suzy. 2009. Rev. of “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata” [1874], by Thomas Huxley. Victorian Review 39 (1): 50–52.
Armstrong, Nancy. 2005. How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719–1900. New York: Columbia University Press.
Behlmer, George K. 2003. Grave Doubts: Victorian Medicine, Moral Panic, and the Signs of Death. Journal of British Studies 42 (2): 206–235.
Blackman, Lisa. 2014. Affect and Automaticity: Towards an Analytics of Experimentation. Subjectivity 7 (4): 362–384.
Brennan, Teresa. 2004. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Burgess, Miranda. 2010. Transport: Mobility, Anxiety, and the Romantic Poetics of Feeling. Studies in Romanticism 49 (2): 229–260.
Cohn, Elisha. 2016. Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dames, Nicholas. 2011. 1825–1880: The Network of Nerves. In The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English, ed. David Herman, 215–239. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Dixon, Thomas. 2003. From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Esposito, Roberto. 2008. Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Trans. Timothy Campbell. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gatens, Moira. 2014. Affective Transitions and Spinoza’s Art of Joyful Deliberation. In Timing of Affect: Epistemologies, Aesthetics, Politics, ed. Marie-Luise Angerer, Bernd Bösel, and Michaela Ott, 17–33. Zurich: Diaphanes.
Glover, David. 1996. Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Questions of Character and Modernity. In Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction, 58–99. Durham: Duke University Press.
Greenway, John L. 2002. ‘Unconscious Cerebration’ and the Happy Ending of Dracula. Journal of Dracula Studies 4: 1–9.
Guy, William A. 1861. Principles of Forensic Medicine. 2nd ed. London: Henry Renshaw.
Hoeveler, Diane Long. 2006. Objectifying Anxieties: Scientific Ideologies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and The Lair of the White Worm. Romanticism on the Net 44.
Hollander, Rachel. 2013. Narrative Hospitality in Late Victorian Fiction: Novel Ethics. New York: Routledge.
Hughes, William. 2000. Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and Its Cultural Context. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
———. 2007. On the Sanguine Nature of Life: Blood, Identity, and the Vampire. In Post/Modern Dracula: From Victorian Themes to Postmodern Praxis, ed. John S. Bak, 3–12. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
———. 2009. Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A Reader’s Guide. Continuum Publishing.
Huxley, Thomas. 1874. On the Hypothesis that Animals Are Automata and Its History. The Fortnightly Review, May 1865–June 1934, 16 (95): 555–580.
James, William. 1884. What Is an Emotion? Mind 9 (34): 188–205.
Khader, Jamil. 2012. Un/Speakability and Radical Otherness: The Ethics of Trauma in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. College Literature 39 (2): 73–97.
Lewes, George. 1877. Animal Automatism. In The Physical Basis of Mind, 345–463. Boston: James. R. Osgood and Company.
Leys, Ruth. 2011. The Turn to Affect: A Critique. Critical Inquiry 37 (3): 434–472.
Malabou, Catherine. 2013. Go Wonder: Subjectivity and Affects in Neurobiological Times. In Self and Emotional Life: Merging Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience, ed. Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou, 1–72. New York: Columbia University Press.
Martin, Kristy. 2013. Modernism and the Rhythms of Sympathy: Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press.
———. 2015. The Power at the End of the Economy. Durham: Duke University Press.
Matus, Jill. 2009. Shock, Memory, and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Micale, Mark S. 2008. Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Mitchell, Rebecca N. 2011. Victorian Lessons in Empathy and Difference. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Moss, Stephanie. 1997. The Psychiatrist’s Couch: Hypnosis, Hysteria, and Proto-Freudian Performance in Dracula. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Sucking Through the Century, 1897–1997, ed. Carol Margaret Davison, with the participation of Paul Simpson-Housley, 123–146. Toronto: Dundurn Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2008. The Discourse of the Syncope: Logodaedalus. Trans. Saul Anton. Meridian. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Otis, Laura. 2011. Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century. Ann Arbor: University of Minnesota Press.
Senf, Carol A. 1997. Dracula: The Unseen Face in the Mirror. In Dracula: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal, 421–431. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Smith, Roger. 2013. Free Will and the Human Sciences in Britain, 1870–1910. Vermont: Pickering & Chatto.
Sorial, Sarah. 2004. Heidegger, Jean-Luc Nancy, and the Question of Dasein’s Embodiment: An Ethics of Touch and Spacing. Philosophy Today 48 (2): 216–230.
Stiles, Anne. 2012. Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Cerebral Automatism. In Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century, 50–82. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Stoker, Bram. (1897) 1997. Dracula: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Thorpe, Douglas. 1991. ‘I Never Knew My Lady Swoon Before’: Lady Dedlock and the Revival of the Victorian Fainting Woman. Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 20: 103–125.
Thrift, Nigel. 2004. Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect. Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography 86 (1): 57–78.
Thurschwell, Pamela. 2001. Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Zschirnt, Christiane. 1999. Fainting and Latency in the Eighteenth Century’s Romantic Novel of Courtship. Germanic Review 74 (1): 48–66.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
O’Donnell, K. (2019). Feeling Other(s): Dracula and the Ethics of Unmanageable Affect. In: Ahern, S. (eds) Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice. Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97268-8_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97268-8_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-97267-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-97268-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)