"There was No Sign of Man in It": Casting Dracula as Posthuman and Valuing the Progressive Vampire

<p>Although not an immediate commercial success, <em>Dracula</em> has since become a seminal example of Gothic horror at the <em>fin-de-siècle</em>, leading not only to film, stage, and television adaptations, but also to literary reimaginings and a plethora of scholarship. I argue that the vampires in <em>Dracula </em>do not fit into the traditional critical understandings of the vampire; rather, they belong in two different but related categories recently theorized by science fiction studies and related to human evolution: transhuman and posthuman. I suggest that a reading of the novel that prioritizes the pervasive influence of evolutionary theory on Victorian literature encourages a reading of vampires as a posthuman species. Charles Darwin’s <em>On the Origin of Species</em> (1859) and <em>The Descent of Man </em>(1871) challenged and troubled the Victorians, who now had to consider humans as a species that not only evolved over time but that could also, like other species, go extinct. Humans in a state of transhuman evolution and vampires as posthuman call into question a common belief that Victorian <em>fin-de-siècle </em>literature echoes contemporary fears of regression post-Darwin. Instead, the vampires in this new reading highlight Victorian fears of the progression of another species that will naturally overtake <em>homo sapiens</em>. Having read the text as an expression of a fear of the vampire’s evolution, I will then argue that rather than limiting the discussion of Stoker’s novel to <em>fin-de-siècle</em> Gothic horror, we can also read Stoker’s novel as a work of science fiction.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts (MA)

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Year dc:date.available

2017

Author dc:creator

• Wolverton, Mary Elizabeth

Contributors dc:contributor

• Alexandra Valint
• Nicolle Jordan
• Katherine Cochran

• Dracula
• transhuman
• posthuman
• evolution
• Darwin
• vampire

Repository record dc:identifier

https://aquila.usm.edu/masters_theses/306

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:aquila.usm.edu:masters_theses-1341