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ABSTRACT: The titular antagonists of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) and Richard Marsh's The Beetle (1897) embody a queer repudiation of reproductive futurity through an erotic logic that ends not in reproduction but in monstrous consumption. Existing across and recalling a vast history, the characters of Dracula and the Beetle stand in opposition to the progress- and procreation-oriented culture of fin-de-siecle England. This paper examines the Gothic queerness of stopped time, arguing that a subtle figuration of these characters as trans- underlies their radical break from a contemporary eugenic logic. A trans- impulse in these texts-one that encompasses taxonomic, temporal, and gender boundaries- initially marks the monstrous body but ultimately engulfs the English subject.
She paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and could feel the hot breath on my neck. . . . I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited-waited with beating heart. (Stoker 70)
As his stay at Castle Dracula nears its climax, Jonathan Harker writes these rapturous lines, recalling a near-seduction. Harker has fallen asleep in a distant, forbidden bedroom of the castle and, in one of the novel's most famous sequences, has been visited by three "voluptuous" women (69). They are on the verge of "kissing" him before he is saved by his host, the king vampire himself (70). Harker cannot help but admit that he strongly desires that kiss, and this desire-his "languorous ecstasy"-marks him as complicit in the queer intimations of this nightmare of sex (70). In a sense, Harker spends much of the rest of the novel lingering and waiting "with beating heart" (70). This paper is an attempt to understand the Gothic queerness of stopped time as embodied in the fin-de-siecle horror of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) and Richard Marsh's The Beetle (1897).
Published only months apart, these two novels have become increasingly useful as cultural curio cases, loci for critical discussions of British anxieties in the approach to the new century and positioned less as innovative than as indicative of their historical moment....