Abstract
There is an apocryphal tale circulating within Gothic criticism that claims Bram Stoker and Richard Marsh engaged in a bet to determine who could write the more successful Gothic novel.1 According to this critical myth, the respective results of the wager were Dracula (1897) and The Beetle (1897). Other critics assume that Marsh simply imitated Stoker’s novel, a claim that is even more unfounded than the first: after all, the serial publication of The Beetle pre-dated that of Dracula by at least two months.2 Yet it is easy to see why readers have been keen to establish a direct connection (however tenuous) between the two books. Both novels garnered their authors unprecedented popular and financial success so that by 1913 Dracula had reached its tenth printing and The Beetle its fifteenth.3 More importantly, however, both novels follow a similar structural pattern, they feature comparable character constellations and they negotiate nineteenth-century knowledge about degeneration in a largely analogous way.
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Notes
See Judith Halberstam, ‘Gothic Nation: The Beetle by Richard Marsh’, in Andrew Smith, Diane Mason, and William Hughes (eds), Fictions of Unease: The Gothic from Otranto to The X-Files (Bath: Sulis Press, 2002), pp. 100–18 (101);
Julian Wolfreys, ‘Introduction’, in Richard Marsh, The Beetle, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2004), pp. 9–34 (11).
Prior to its book publication, The Beetle was serialised in the magazine Answers as ‘The Peril of Paul Lessingham: The Story of a Haunted Man’ from 13 March to 19 June 1897 (see Minna Vuohelainen, Victorian Fiction Research Guide, vol. 35: Richard Marsh (Canterbury: Canterbury Christ Church University, 2009), p. 12). The first edition of Dracula, by contrast, was published either in late May or early June 1897. Stoker’s publisher Constable did not clearly mark first editions from later reprintings so that a more precise dating of Dracula is impossible
(see Robert Eighteen-Bisang, ‘The First Dracula’, in Elizabeth Miller (ed.), Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A Documentary Volume (Detroit, MI, et al.: Thomson Gale, 2005), p. 258).
See William Baker, ‘Introduction’, in Richard Marsh, The Beetle (Stroud and Dover, NH: Allan Sutton (1897) 1994), pp. vii–x (vii).
Christopher Craft, ‘“Kiss Me with Those Red Lips”: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ (1984), in Glennis Byron (ed.), Dracula: Bram Stoker (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp. 93–118 (94).
Qtd in Minna Vuohelainen, ‘Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897): A Late-Victorian Popular Novel’, Working with English: Medieval and Modern Language, Literature and Drama 2 (2006), pp. 89–100 (94).
Dracula is an unusually productive piece of writing — ‘a veritable writing machine’ (Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 90), which seems ‘to generate readings, rather than close them down’
(Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 65).
David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Time, vol. 1: The Gothic Tradition (London and New York: Longman (1980) 1996), p. 15.
See Daniel Pick, ‘“Terrors of the Night”: Dracula and “Degeneration” in the Late Nineteenth Century’ (1988), in Lyn Pykett (ed.), Reading Fin-de-Siècle Fictions (London: Longman, 1996), pp. 149–65.
Many critics after Fontana have highlighted Stoker’s debt to Lombroso’s writings on the ‘born criminal’ in his characterisation of Count Dracula: some examples are: Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), p. 123, n.; Halberstam, Skin Shows, pp. 253–4;
Bridget M. Marshall, ‘The Face of Evil: Phrenology, Physiognomy, and the Gothic Villain’, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 6 (2000), pp. 161–72 (167); and Pick, ‘Dracula and “Degeneration”’, p. 157. A comprehensive critical review of the academic trend to view vampirism as code for sexual perversity is provided by Elizabeth Miller, who traces how Dracula has been subjected over the years to a painstaking search for linguistic fig-leaves as the words are squeezed for every erotic potential’
(Elizabeth Miller, ‘Coitus Interruptus: Sex, Bram Stoker, and Dracula’, Romanticism on the Net 44 (2006), pp. 1–24 (9)), at the danger of sliding down ‘the slippery slope of reductive textual nitpicking and revisionist biography’ (Miller, ‘Coitus Interruptus’, p. 2). William Hughes also draws attention to the dangers involved in this pervasive attitude towards Stoker’s novel: ‘Modern criticism’s preoccupation with sexuality dominates — and indeed inhibits the development of — the debate on vampirism. Regarded as erotic, the vampire functions as a vehicle through which criticism may advance with equal ease either psychoanalytical or cultural assertions. The sexualised vampire is thus read alternately as the embodiment of authorial neuroses and as the coded expression of more general cultural fears of which the author is, consciously or unconsciously, an observer. Vampirism is a practice that lends itself to such a reading’
(William Hughes, ‘Fictional Vampires in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in David Punter (ed.), A Companion to the Gothic (Malden, MA, et al.: Blackwell Publishing (2000) 2001), pp. 143–54 (145)). The reason why vampirism lends itself to such readings is obvious to critics such as Richard Dyer: ‘[T]he act [of the vampire’s bite] is so like a sexual act that it seems almost perverse not to see it as one. Biting itself is after all part of the repertoire of sexual acts; call it a kiss, and, when it is as deep a kiss as this, it is a sexual act; it is then by extension obviously analogous to other forms of oral sex acts, all of which (fellatio, cunnilingus, rimming) importantly involve contact not only with orifices but with bodily fluids as well’
(Richard Dyer, ‘Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality, Homosexuality as Vampirism’, in Susannah Radstone (ed.), Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender and Popular Fiction (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1988), pp. 47–72 (55)). And this is to say nothing of the body’s penetration with stiff objects and the vampire’s subsequent climactic writhing.
Prominent examples of this critical tradition are C. F. Bentley, ‘The Monster in the Bedroom: Sexual Symbolism in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, Literature and Psychology 22 (1972), pp. 27–34; Craft, ‘Gender and Inversion’;
Carrol L. Fry, ‘Fictional Conventions and Sexuality in Dracula’ (1972), in Margaret L. Carter (ed.), Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics (Ann Arbor, MI, and London: UMI Research Press, 1988), pp. 35–8;
Maurice Richardson, ‘The Psychoanalysis of Count Dracula’, in Christopher Frayling (ed.), Vampyre: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (London and Boston, MA: Faber and Faber, 1991), pp. 418–22;
Phyllis A. Roth, ‘Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ (1977), in Glennis Byron (ed.), Dracula: Bram Stoker (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp. 30–42;
Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Virago (1991) 1992), pp. 179–82;
Judith Weissman, ‘Women and Vampires: Dracula as a Victorian Novel’, in Margaret L. Carter (ed.), Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics (Ann Arbor, MI, and London: UMI Research Press, 1988), pp. 69–77;
and Leonard Wolf, A Dream of Dracula: In Search of the Living Dead (New York: Popular Library, 1972).
Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Maud Ellmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press (1897) 1998), p. 341. All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.
Judith Halberstam thinks Dracula’s features are suggestively Jewish, a circumstance that would link the Count to Fagin and Svengali — the respective villains of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837) and George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) (see Halberstam, Skin Shows, p. 92). Carol Margaret Davison also notes Dracula’s ‘stereotypical Jewish physiognomy’
(Carol Margaret Davison, ‘Blood Brothers: Dracula and Jack the Ripper’, in Carol Margaret Davison (ed.), Dracula: Sucking through the Century, 1897–1997 (Toronto, ON et al.: Dundurn Press, 1997), pp. 147–72 (154)). However, the only Jew in the novel, Immanuel Hildesheim, does not enter into a special relationship with the vampire, and the Count’s supposedly Jewish features betray him as degenerate and criminal, rather than Semitic. William Hughes remarks on this point: ‘Count Dracula is not Jewish, and the one Jew in the novel, implicated as he is within Stoker’s characteristic anti-semitism, is clearly delineated as such, set aside as separate from his occasional employer, the Boyar Count who respects the sacred emblems of the West’s Christianity’
(William Hughes, ‘A Singular Invasion: Revisiting the Postcoloniality of Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, in William Hughes and Andrew Smith (eds), Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 88–102 (91)). The stigmatic markers of degeneration were formulated in such comprehensive fashion that they could easefully encompass any conceivable group of ideological Others. Jews could thus be subjected to degeneration’s levelling mechanism in the same way as non-white races, criminals, prostitutes, perverts and the insane. In this respect, it becomes somewhat irrelevant to attempt the detection of an ethnically specific Otherness in Dracula. Even Howard L. Malchow — who associates Dracula with ‘the most tangible alien immigrant threat of the time, the eastern European Jew, rather than a more generalized and metaphoric image of the unspecific colonial “Other”’
(Howard L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 162) — concedes that ‘[i]n a sense, the question of whether Dracula at some level represents the colonial Other or the domestic Jew is moot’ (Malchow, Gothic Images, p. 150). As William Hughes notes with regard to the variant images that Dracula is made to represent in academic criticism: ‘All are signifiers in a discourse which constructs a perceived cultural or racial Other as both degenerate and potentially infectious’
(William Hughes, ‘“Terrors That I Dare Not Think of”: Masculinity, Hysteria and Empiricism in Stoker’s Dracula’, in Elizabeth Miller (ed.), Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow: Papers Presented at ‘Dracula 97’, a Centenary Celebration at Los Angeles, August 1997 (Westcliff-on-Sea: Desert Island Books, 1998), pp. 93–103 (94)).
Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man, ed. and trans. Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press (1876) 2006), p. 51.
See Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, intro. Adrian Desmond and James Moore (London: Penguin (1871) 2004), p. 33.
John Glendening, The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels: An Entangled Bank (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), p. 122.
In line with his critique of the ‘anxiety model’, Robert Mighall detects a farreaching epistemological problem in the conflation of vampirism and nonnormative sexuality: ‘A tautology operates which insists that the vampire is erotic, and because it is monstrous this testifies to sexual anxieties which the critic then identifies. Vampirism is used to demonstrate what the critic already knows about Victorian sexuality’ (Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press (1999) 2003), p. 211). Instead, Mighall shows how the contemporary disciplines of psychopathology and sexology produced the sexuality of vampirism from which, he argues, modern criticism has not yet freed itself. The gist of Mighall’s analysis is that Stoker’s vampire does not represent a sexually subversive figure, threatening bourgeois codes of morality, but a straightforwardly supernatural creature of folkloristic origin. In his view, Dracula was such an immense immediate success because ‘a vampire was sometimes only a vampire and not a sexual menace’ (Mighall, Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction, p. 247). Mighall’s criticism hinges on the accusation that scholars frequently try to establish the vampire’s erotic nature despite the novel’s factual reticence about sexual matters. (Indeed, none of the original reviews of Dracula betray the recognition of an erotic element in Stoker’s novel (see Miller, ‘Coitus Interruptus’, p. 1). Even though Mighall’s rigorous historicist approach has produced many genuinely new insights, his claim that the erotic content of Dracula can only ever be perceived by critics in ‘disguised’, ‘masked’, ‘camouflaged’ or ‘displaced’ form reads like a wilful overstatement (see Mighall, Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction, p. 268).
A remarkable exception to this view of Dracula as transgressor is provided by Nina Auerbach’s intriguing chapter on Dracula in her study Our Vampires, Ourselves (1995), in which she reads Stoker’s novel within the generic tradition of the vampire story, arguing that (when contrasted with his literary ancestors John William Polidori’s Lord Ruthven and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla) Count Dracula enforces the concepts of heterosexuality and monogamy
(see Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 80). Another subversive reading is provided by Christine Ferguson, who sees Dracula as characterised by obstinate limitations rather than by an endless potential for transgression. Ferguson reads Dracula’s inability to negotiate non-standard forms of English as a major reason for his eventual defeat
(see Christine Ferguson, ’Nonstandard Language and the Cultural Stakes of Stoker’s Dracula’, ELH 71.1 (2004), pp. 229–49 (230–1)).
David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Time, vol. 2: The Modern Gothic (London and New York: Longman (1989) 1996), p. 21.
Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 112.
Halberstam, Skin Shows, p. 88. Laura Sagolla Croley rightly remarks that ‘transgressing spatial boundaries could be identified as the controlling metaphor of Dracula’ (Laura Sagolla Croley, ‘The Rhetoric of Reform in Stoker’s Dracula: Depravity, Decline, and the Fin de Siècle “Residuum”’, Criticism 37 (1995), pp. 85–108 (98)).
Carl Thompson, Travel Writing (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 9.
See David Seed, ‘The Narrative Method of Dracula’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 40 (1985), pp. 61–75 (69).
Some of the most important of Stoker’s sources are: Charles Boner’s Transylvania: Its Products and Its People (1865),
Sabine Baring-Gould’s The Book of Werewolves: Being an Account of a Terrible Superstition (1865),
and Emily Gerard’s two-volume The Land Beyond the Forest: Facts, Figures, and Fancies from Transylvania (1888). Selections from these texts are provided in Glennis Byron’s Broadview edition of Dracula
(see Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Glennis Byron (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press (1897) 1998), pp. 439–50).
John William Polidori, The Vampyre: A Tale, ed. Russell Ash (Tring: The Gubblecote Press (1819) 1974), p. 13.
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly, ed. Robert Tracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press (1872) 1993), p. 257, emphases added.
Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Olalla’, in Barry Menikoff (ed.), The Complete Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson: Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Nineteen Other Tales (New York: Modern Library, 2002), pp. 420–57 (424).
I follow critical practice in using Christopher Craft’s term for the group led by Abraham Van Helsing (see Craft ‘Gender and Inversion’), while being aware of its limitations. William Hughes draws attention to the disadvantages of this influential metaphor, which enforces an overly simplistic binary between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ on the novel (see William Hughes, Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A Reader’s Guide (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), p. 73). In the discussion of Dracula’s ‘normative’ characters below, the phrase is only used in inverted commas to signal its problematic deceptiveness.
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings, ed. David Womersley (London and New York: Penguin (1757) 1998), p. 86.
Richard Marsh, The Beetle, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press (1897) 2004), p. 41. All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.
Victoria Margree reads Robert Holt as a border crosser in terms of social class and gender (see Viktoria Margree, ‘“Both in Men’s Clothing”: Gender, Sovereignty and Insecurity in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle’, Critical Survey, 19 (2007), pp. 63–81 (64–8)). According to her reading, it is Holt’s violation of social boundaries that makes him vulnerable to the beetle-creature’s attacks and causes a loss of gender identity through feminisation (see Margree, ‘Gender, Sovereignty and Insecurity’, p. 66). Below, I read Holt’s emasculation as a form of contagious degeneration.
See Hurley, Gothic Body, p. 131 and Kelly Hurley, ‘“The Inner Chambers of All Nameless Sin”: The Beetle, Gothic Female Sexuality, and Oriental Barbarism’, in Fred Botting and Dale Townshend (eds), Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 3: Nineteenth-Century Gothic: At Home with the Vampire (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 241–58 (247).
See Fredric Jameson, ‘Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre’, New Literary History 7.1 (1975), pp. 135–63 (140).
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: With Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Forensic Study, trans. Franklin S. Klaf (New York: Arcade Publishing (1886) 1998), p. 264.
Critical readings of Marsh’s The Beetle that interpret aspects of the novel in the light of Said’s thoughts on Orientalism are given by Rhys Garnett, ‘Dracula and The Beetle: Imperial and Sexual Guilt and Fear in Late Victorian Fantasy’, in Rhys Garnett and R. J. Ellis (eds), Science Fiction Roots and Branches: Contemporary Critical Approaches (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Paigrave Macmillan, 1990); Hurley, Gothic Body; and Julian Wolfreys, ‘Introduction’. Wolfreys provides a short summary of Said’s ideas (see Wolfreys, ‘Introduction’, p. 18, n. 1) and an extended account of Britain’s engagement in Egypt and the Middle East in the nineteenth century (see Wolfreys, ‘Introduction’, pp. 20–2). Kelly Hurley analyses the novel’s ‘conflation of abject female sexuality with Oriental barbarism’ (Hurley, Gothic Body, p. 125), and Rhys Garnett considers the novel as a response to the processes of British imperialism and expansionism (see Garnett, ‘Dracula and The Beetle’, p. 34).
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 8.
Julian Wolfreys, ‘The Hieroglyphic Other: The Beetle, London, and the Abyssal Subject’, in Lawrence Phillips (ed.), A Mighty Mass of Brick and Smoke: Victorian and Edwardian Representations of London (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 169–92 (189).
See Cannon Schmitt, (2007), ‘Victorian Beetlemania’, in Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay (eds), Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 35–51 (39).
Yuri M. Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, trans. Ann Shukman, intro. Umberto Eco (Bloomington, IN, and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press (1990) 2000), pp. 136–7. Lotman uses the term ‘semiosphere’ to denote the semiotic space of all cultural activity. One of the central characteristics of the semiosphere is its inherent heterogeneity (see Lotman, Universe of the Mind, p. 125). Lotman postulates that, in an attempt to confine an excess of diversity, cultures respond through acts of self-description, which prevent them from threatening disintegration (see Lotman, Universe of the Mind, p. 128).
Anna Maria Jones provides an original reading of The Beetle that focuses on Atherton’s dubious inventions. She claims that the novel follows two distinct narrative trajectories that question progressive England’s moral superiority over the degenerate monster: ‘In the novel the problem of the incalculability of individual agency creates a suspenseful “terror-Gothic” plot that runs counter to and mitigates its “horror-Gothic” monster plot’ (Anna Maria Jones, ‘Conservation of Energy, Individual Agency, and Gothic Terror in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle; or, What’s Scarier than an Ancient, Evil, Shape-Shifting Bug?’, Victorian Literature and Culture 39 (2011), pp. 65–85 (72)).
Anna Maria Jones speculates that many late-Victorian readers would have been familiar with such anti-vivisectionist novels as Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science (1883)
and H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and would thus link Atherton to other fictional mad scientists of the period (see Jones, ‘Conservation of Energy’, p. 78).
Max Nordau, Degeneration (New York: D. Appleton, 1895), p. 19.
Henry Maudsley, The Pathology of Mind: Being the Third Edition of the Second Part of the Physiology and Pathology of Mind’, Recast, Enlarged, and Rewritten (New York: D. Appleton (1879) 1880), p. 84.
See Kaley Kramer, ‘Madmen in the Middle: Folklore and Science in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, in Karen Sayer and Rosemary Mitchell (eds), Victorian Gothic (Leeds: Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies, 2003), pp. 69–80 (74).
Ernest Fontana, ‘Lombroso’s Criminal Man and Stoker’s Dracula’, The Victorian Newsletter 66 (1984), pp. 25–7 (25).
See Glennis Byron, ‘Bram Stoker’s Gothic and the Resources of Science’, Critical Survey 19 (2007), pp. 48–62 (55).
In a fascinating article, Martin Willis reads Dracula as ‘the most significant fictional intervention in the nineteenth century’s debates on contagionism, miasmatism and germ theory’ (Martin Willis, ‘“The Invisible Giant”, Dracula, and Disease’, Studies in the Novel 39 (2007), pp. 301–23 (321)). Willis argues that one of the reasons for the protracted ordeal of Lucy Westenra is her mother’s misguided belief in miasmatic theory, which prompts her to open the windows to Lucy’s sickroom. Miasmatic theory held that disease particles would be transmitted through the air, whereas contagionism claimed that disease always required physical contact to spread (see Willis, ‘Invisible Giant’, p. 315). Willis also notes that Dracula needs Harker’s support to transfer to England: ‘It is relatively straightforward to make connections between Dracula’s foreignness and his role as carrier of disease, but his arrival in Britain, what we can call the transmission of disease to Britain from abroad, is only achieved with the help of Jonathan Harker’ (Willis, ‘Invisible Giant’, p. 317, see also p. 319).
Several critics point out the group’s criminal behaviour. Carol A. Senf was one of the first to offer a reading that focuses on the similarities between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in Dracula, rather than on the conquest of the latter by the former (see Carol A. Senf, ‘Dracula: The Unseen Face in the Mirror’ (1979), in Margaret L. Carter (ed.), Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics (Ann Arbor, MI, and London: UMI Research Press, 1988), pp. 93–103). The dubious methods employed by the ‘Crew of Light’ are also noted by, for instance,
Sos Eltis (‘Corruption of the Blood and Degeneration of the Race: Dracula and Policing the Borders of Gender’, in John Paul Riquelme (ed.), Dracula: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical, Historical, and Cultural Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Contemporary Critical Perspectives (Boston, MA, and Basingstoke: Bedford and St. Martin’s — now Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 450–65 (464)) and Glendening, Evolutionary Imagination, p. 127.
Katie Harse, ‘High Duty and Savage Delight: The Ambiguous Nature of Violence in Dracula’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 10 (1999), pp. 115–23 (121–2).
See Debbie Harrison, ‘Doctors, Drugs, and Addiction: Professional Integrity in Peril at the Fin de Siècle’, Gothic Studies 11 (2009), pp. 52–62 (60).
See William Hughes, ‘Habituation and Incarceration: Mental Physiology and Asylum Abuse in The Woman in White and Dracula’, in Andrew Mangham (ed.), Wilkie Collins: Interdisciplinary Essays (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), pp. 136–48 (141–4).
Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1989) 1993), p. 168.
Glennis Byron, ‘Introduction’, in Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Glennis Byron (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1998), pp. 9–25 (15).
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Karschay, S. (2015). Othering the Degenerate: Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle . In: Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137450333_4
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