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Notes
1 Alison Case, David Seed, and Matthew C. Brennan (Citation1992) have also argued that collecting knowledge is inseparable from defeating Dracula.
2 While Spencer's influence on Stoker has not been definitively established, Stoker was highly versed in the scientific discourses of his time, especially those indebted to Spencer's writings. For a recent connection between Spencer and Stoker's fiction, see Anne Stiles, who argues that Dracula “dramatizes … debates” concerning how Victorian neurology destabilized conceptions of the soul (Citation2006, 145–146).
3 Critics have established that Dracula intensifies the period's anxieties related to gender and sexuality by defying their strict limitations. See, for instance, Christopher Craft, who argues that the vampiric mouth complicates the “gender-based categories of the penetrating and the receptive,” and Elaine Showalter, who claims that Dracula and his Transylvania represent bodies and spaces of sexual “fluidity” (Citation1984, 109; Citation1990, 179).
4 See Stephen Arata, who reads Dracula's desire to immigrate to England and turn its citizens into vampires as representative of a contemporary fear of “reverse colonization,” or the infiltration of a civilization by a more “primitive” culture (Citation1990, 623).
5 Mina's relationship to the technology she productively employs is complex. See Tanya Pikula, who reads Mina as a problematic consumer of nineteenth-century technology (Citation2012, 289), and Jennifer L. Fleissner, who argues that Mina's typing eventually becomes an extension of her “wifely role of service” (Citation2000, 428).
6 Despite her demonstrated intelligence, skill, and labor, Mina is a marginalized participant in the vampire hunters’ collective project. For more on how Mina's collection of knowledge is affected by her gender, see Prescott and Giorgio, who argue that Mina's knowledge of Dracula becomes taboo under Van Helsing's suspicious gaze (Citation2005, 506), Alison Case, who argues that Mina is deprived of her role as an “interpreter” as the novel progresses (Citation1993, 236), and Rebecca Pope, who likewise argues that Mina “becomes less and less able to speak for herself” as she becomes a “medium” through which Dracula and the vampire hunters communicate (Citation1990, 203).
7 Van Helsing is introduced in the novel as “Abraham Van Helsing, M.D., D.Ph., D.Litt., etc.” (106).
8 Of course, scholars have already read Dracula as a debate specifically between science and superstition. See Rosemary Jann, for instance, who argues that Stoker cannot help but “valoriz[e] the rationalistic authority conventionally associated with scientific thought” though his novel attempts to “proclaim the power of belief, faith, and imagination” (Citation1989, 273).
9 This is far from the only instance in which a character quotes or paraphrases another character's linguistic idiosyncrasies. Van Helsing borrows words and phrases from Morris and Holmwood on pp. 218, 255, and 273. Van Helsing, additionally, uses Seward's methodology of recording information about Dracula – the phonograph – on p. 273.
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Lauren Pinkerton
Lauren Pinkerton is a doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on epistemology, education, and outsiders to nineteenth and twentieth-century British intellectual culture. Her dissertation project is on wandering scholars in Victorian and early Modernist literature.