“A Parasite For Sore Eyes: Rereading Infection Metaphors in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.”

摘要

Dracula’s bite ineluctably changes his victims, transforming them into vampires andalso into the pale and wasted “Undead.” So obviously at stake (in every sense) are ideasof contagion, infection, degeneration, and epidemic in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897),that critics have identified diseases from rabies to cholera, tuberculosis to syphilis,cancer to leprosy, as symbolic presences within the novel. That Dracula “responds toanxieties of degeneration through metaphors of infection”, has become, as Ross G.Forman notes in this impressive essay, “axiomatic” (925). Forman’s intervention in thiscritical tradition is to argue that parasitic infection, and infection with malaria inparticular, offers a particularly fertile way to understand the text.