Dracula and Chloral: Chemistry Matters

Abstract

It has long been noted that nineteenth-century Gothic literature, from Frankenstein to Dracula, addresses the rapid development of the new sciences, including Darwinism, diagnosing disease, new understandings of psychiat ric methods, and the limits of technology.1 Like the scholarship on science in Frankenstein, the scholarship on science in Dracula emphasizes the author's ambivalence toward new scientific developments and examines the limitations of the scientific method and its language. Specifically, the vampire in Dracula has been seen in relation to the biological mysteries of blood, disease, and death; he embodies conditions beyond the understanding and cure of all English physic and Western medical practice. As this article will show, the tension in Stoker's novel between the potentiality of science and its limitations alludes not only to Darwinian biology and numerous new Victorian technologies but also to what some Victorians regarded as the science with the greatest potential of all?chemistry. While there has been wide-ranging discussion of Mary Shelley's use of chemistry2, in particular of her familiarity with the chemist Humphrey Davy's work and the physician Luigi Galvani's electrical experiments, Stoker's atten tion to science?specifically to chemistry in Dracula?has been comparatively limited in depth though broadly based. Concerns have ranged from question ing Stoker's attitude to science and technology to ascertaining whether he was criticizing or proselytizing its development and increased use. Examinations of the science in Stoker's writing have typically been related to his treatment of women and their sexualization through the new medical treatments of the period.3 In Dracula, such attention has, for example, been placed on blood transfusions and their scientific development and symbolic implications.4 In the novel, transfusion as a symbolic action, with its connection to primal fluids, subordinates the medical science itself. The narrative accords no consideration