Mothering by Other Means: Parasitism and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla

Abstract

Who are my kin in this odd world of promising monsters, vampires, surrogates, living tools, and aliens? Bram Stoker’s Dracula was both a gentleman and an animal. He took on the form of bats and dogs, he controlled packs of wolves and rats, and he is likened to a panther, a lion, and a “wild beast” (247). The significance of Dracula’s “bestiality” (Arata 634) has been convincingly interpreted as a metaphor for fears of reverse colonization, anxieties triggered by Darwinian theories of humanity’s animal ancestry, or nineteenth-century panic surrounding cases of rabies.1 Dracula’s contagious hybridity undermines the purity of English bloodlines and patrilineage. In his landmark essay on Dracula, Stephen Arata notes that the Count threatens to deracinate English women and to release a “monstrous” sexuality within them that defies their domestic roles as wives and mothers (632). Similarly, Maurice Richardson famously links Dracula’s sexual monopoly on his ever-growing pantheon of vampire brides to the primal father figure imagined in Freud’s Totem and Taboo. Speculating about ancient human social structures, Freud posits a patriarch who hoards female sexual partners, leaving none available for his sons. Like Van Helsing’s Crew of Light in Stoker’s novel, the sons must band together and slay the father, freeing the tribe’s women to be more evenly distributed among them. Moreover, as Roxana Stuart points out, Stoker’s Dracula fuses fatherhood with sexual partnership, making “his sex partners his children, by turning them into vampires” (183). The Count does not operate through standard means of sexual reproduction, by which the genetic material from two organisms blends to create offspring that contains material from both parent organisms. Instead, by infecting his victims, Dracula changes their ontological status, transforming them into vampires. Dracula is monstrous in his animality, and he renders his victims monstrous through infecting them and gathering them into his horde of wives/children.