Sexuality as Disease in Bram Stoker's Dracula and Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla

Abstract

This paper examines how the Victorian medical theories of ‘contagionism’ and ‘miasmatism’ (Willis 113 – 114) relate to the female characters of two key Victorian Gothic texts, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872). The extended metaphor in both texts of female sexuality as a disease, curable only by methods of extreme violence, is discussed primarily in relation to the physical figure of the sick woman, and the fact that sexuality is equated with infection in the characters of Lucy Westenra in Dracula, and the eponymous antagonist and narrator Laura in Carmilla. Roth’s discussion of the ‘fear of the devouring woman’ (419) in relation to Dracula proves a particularly useful corroboration of this argument. Male medical figures in both texts are also compared; their collective bewilderment, contagionist methods of treatment, and ultimate violence as a result of the problem of sick women, are likened to unease with active female sexuality. Contagionist methods are employed by the doctors in both texts, though contagionism’s effectiveness is questioned to some extent in Carmilla. The role of the figure of the New Woman (Auerbach and Skal xi) is also applied to the female characters in the texts; the male medical figures’ determination to suppress female agency through medicine is another confirmation of the parallel between sickness and female sexuality. Ultimately, the paper shows that imagery of disease and contagion serves to equate female sexuality with disease in Dracula and Carmilla, using the conflict between two different ideologies of medicine as a framework.