Fear

Dracula and Darwin

Agenda

• The Omnipresence of Dracula

• Fear and phobia

• Fear in / and Dracula (Aristotle, Freud, Marx)

• Literary Darwinism

Dracula is Everywhere!

• Fiction

• Cartoons

• Film

• The Internet

• Video and computer games

Fear and phobia

• “The emotion of pain or uneasiness caused by the sense of impending danger, or by the prospect of some possible evil.” (OED)

• ”A fear, horror, strong dislike, or aversion; esp. an extreme or irrational fear or dread aroused by a particular object or circumstance.” (OED)

Fear in / and Dracula

What produces fear in Dracula?

What kind of fear is produced by Dracula?– Tragic: Pity and terror (Aristotle).– Gothic: The Uncanny (Freud).– The fear of liberal humanism: Capital (Marx)– Evolutionary: natural and sexual selection

(Darwin)

The fear of tragedy: Pity and terror.

• Tragic hero; tragic flaw.

• Hamlet: hesitation

• Macbeth: ambition

Gothic fear:The Uncanny

• Das Unheimliche– Heimlich: a) homely, known; b) secret, hidden.– Unheimlich: unhomely, yet strangely familiar

• Dracula = the uncanny: he (unconsciously) reminds us of our own Id.

• The hunt for Dracula = (unconsciously) reminds us of our own Id, our repressed oedipal desires.

The fear of liberal humanism: Capital

• Liberal humanism: freedom, liberty, and equality– Money must have a moral end: amelioration,

improving, making better, the human condition.

• Monopolistic capitalism– The accumulation of capital is an end in itself

• Dracula as an image of capitalism

Evolutionary fear: Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1858)

• Natural selection, or how to survive:– The bodies and minds of organisms are the

result of evolved adaptations designed to help the organism survive in a particular environment

– Organs, skin, bones– The senses– The emotions: fear

Evolutionary fear: Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871)

• Sexual selection, or how to secure a mate:– Organisms (male / female) can evolve traits

designed to secure a mate (female / male) through attraction or competition

– The peacock’s tail– Antlers– Beauty – Courtship (dating) rituals and conventions

Attraction and Sexual Selection

Competition and Sexual Selection

Beauty and Sexual Selection

Courtship and Sexual Selection

Courtship and Sexual Selection

A receipt for courtship (1805)

A receipt for courtship (1805)

• Two or three dears, and two or three sweets; • Two or three balls, and two or three treats; • Two or three serenades, given as a lure; • Two or three oaths how much they endure; • Two or three messages sent in a day; • Two or three times led out from the play; • Two or three soft speeches made by the way; • Two or three tickets for two or three times; • Two or three love letters writ all in rhymes; • Two or three months keeping strict to these rules, • Can never fail making a couple of fools.

Literary Darwinism

• “One thing literature offers is data. Fast, inexhaustible, cross-cultural and cheap.” (Jonathan Gotschall).

• Literature is data that helps elucidating human nature

Literary Darwinism

• General aim:• To demonstrate that human behaviour is the

result of innate rather than culturally specific patterns

• To identify the universals of life: child bearing and rearing, love, efforts to acquire resources (money, property, influence) and competition and cooperation within families, groups, and communities.

First focus: Characters and action as referencing universal patterns of behaviour

• Pride and Prejudice• 2nd generation: Women compete to marry high-status

men. Men compete to marry the most attractive women): • Darcy• Elizabeth• Wickham• Lydia• 1st generation: By marrying off their daughters to the

right males, parents secure that their genetic material is passed on in the most effective way.

• Mrs Bennett• Mr Bennett

First focus: Characters and action as referencing universal patterns of behaviour

• Hamlet

• Hamlet’s dilemma is personal and political and biological and genetic: Either Hamlet rises to power by killing his uncle, i.e. his mother’s new husband or he lets his uncle live, paving the way for a batch of half-brothers and – sisters with whom he has genes in common.

First focus: Characters and action as referencing universal patterns of behaviour

• But what about:

• The narrator? (irony)

• The genre? (the novel, drama)

• The medium? (writing, the stage)

• Modes and periods?

Second focus: What is the point, purpose, and end of literature? Why do human beings read and write

fiction?

• Literature instructs us (Horace: To teach and delight):– It teaches us about space, time, and patterns of

cause and effect, making us more adaptive and more capable of passing on our genes.

– Literature is designed to help us cope with life’s complexity: enhances our interpretative competences.

– Literature is a kind of fitness training: by imagining situations you stand a better chance of succeeding when they occur in real life.

– Strong narrative bias: what about, for instance, lyric poetry? What about rhyme? Metre?

Second focus: What is the point, purpose, and end of literature? Why do human beings read and write

fiction?

– Literature is a sex display designed to waste the competition (antlers)

– Rarely handed down, though!

Second focus: What is the point, purpose, and end of literature? Why do human beings read and write

fiction?

• Literature is a sign of abundant resources (material, physical, psychological)

• By its utter uselessness, literature is a sign of the fact that the reader or writer has resources to spare (the peacock’s tail)

• Rarely handed down, though!

Second focus: What is the point, purpose, and end of literature? Why do human beings read and write

fiction?

• Literature is a community builder– Literature integrates humans into a single

culture. Cultural and social cohesion produces survival advantages.

– But are cultural communities really unifying in this way? Today?

Second focus: What is the point, purpose, and end of literature? Why do human beings read and write

fiction?

• Literature is a kind of magic, religion, or wish fulfilment.– We like to tell and listen to stories of success

in order to ensure success in the future.– But this seems a bit like sublimation?

Dracula and the issue of natural selection• Dracula does not concern natural

selection, or the evolutionary struggle to survive through adaption

• Humans and vampires do not compete over the limited resources

• Host – parasite, prey - predator

Dracula and the issue of sexual selection

• Jonathan Harker and the three female vampires (51-52)

Dracula and the issue of sexual selection

• Lucy Westenra and her three male suitors (Quincy Morris, Dr Seward, Arthur Holmwood) pp. 73-77

Dracula and the issue of sexual selection

• Lucy’s sleepwalking (p. 108)

Dracula and the issue of sexual selection

• Mina satirising New Woman as sexual selector (111)

Dracula and the issue of sexual selection

• Vampire Lucy’s preference for Arthur (253-54)

Dracula and the issue of sexual selection

• Mina’s refusal of Dracula:– Seward’s point of view (336)– Mina’s point of view (343)

Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the issue of sexual selection

• The Dracula and Mina scene