Close Thy Dracula , Open Thy Frankenstein

Close Thy Dracula, Open Thy Frankenstein Richard Menke (bio) In the variety of classes in which I've taught the novel, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) usually slays. At the end of courses on British nineteenth-century fiction, its action, sex, horror, and camp have provided a chaser to the pessimism of Olive Schreiner, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, or Ella Hepworth Dixon. As a literary scholar interested in media theory and history, I developed my first classes on literature and media around the contrasts and continuities among the "discourse networks" of 1800, 1900, and 2000—as analyzed by Friedrich Kittler—from Romantic writing to fin-de-siècle texts to electronic media. Even as the doses of Kittler in later syllabi became homeopathic, Stoker's novel held a central place because of its focus on media devices as well as its afterlives in other media. From the Anne Rice days to beyond the Twilight years, the novel's appeal for students has seemed to remain ever-living or at least firmly undead. Beyond its sense of dark fun, Dracula offers much to students and teachers of late nineteenth-century literature. The hysteria and graphomania of its characters and the paranoia of its imperial Gothic mode allow a compendium of late-Victorian fears to crawl into the light: fears of women's sexuality, of men's, and of less strictly dualistic possibilities; of empire, the "East," racial others, and [End Page 8] the reverse colonization of England; of evolution, degeneration, and bare life; of aristocrats and the masses; of history and modernity; of disease and contagion; and of threats to the supposed purities of blood, identities, or language. Moreover, the novel suggests that such objects of fear might also become objects of pleasure. My teaching highlights Dracula's obsessions with media and information, obsessions that richly intersect with its other fears and fantasies. The novel revels in the modern multiplicity of media (stenographic journals, letters, phonograph diaries, telegrams, newspapers) and notes their affordances and limitations (you can't skim a phonograph recording). Yet in its final paradigm, Mina Harker's typewriter vampirically consumes all other media, yielding the typescript that Dracula presents as neutral, deracinated modern information floating free of its original materiality and contexts. Surviving the Count's destruction of its original sources in a deracinated, undead form, Mina's "mass of type-writing" (Stoker 326) becomes the ostensible wellspring of the book and the ghostly double of Stoker's own surviving typescript.1 In my media and literature courses, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818, revised 1831) bookends our encounters with the nineteenth century's media monsters. Indeed, it suggests an audacious experiment on Kittler's 1800 discourse network. Kittler claims that the Romantic era naturalizes writing by treating it as an extension of orality, a process anchored by the figure of the mother, who is supposed to ease the child's transition into phonetic literacy. Frankenstein methodically eliminates the pillars that uphold this system, excising maternity and childhood from the creature's production as well as from his acquisitions of language and literacy. The novel vividly presents the horror that results: a creature whose smooth speech seems at odds with his outsized and insistent materiality, whose expansive flights of sensibility make his extensive career as a murderer only more shocking—shocking to the creature himself perhaps most of all. The novel's organization around epistolarity and reproduced orality—Walton's letters encase the story told by Victor Frankenstein, with the creature's speech at its centre—illustrates its treatment of writing as virtual speech but also raises questions about their supposed equivalence. And with his ability to frustrate, defy, and outlive his author, the creature comes to resemble autonomous language or the technological side of writing itself. The Frankenstein/Dracula binary allows my classes to trace media multiplicity and the splits between acoustic and visual experience; to read monster theory alongside media theory; to recognize how gender, sexuality, bodies, and reproduction are critical to understanding media and can become the stuff of horror. But this binary seems broken for my recent classes. While students have more and more to say about the talky, ponderous Frankenstein, the COVID-19...

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