Biopolitics, Technology, and the Sanitization of the Subject in Dracula and The Island of Doctor Moreau

This thesis examines Late Victorian Gothic fiction as a “biological laboratory of empire”, focusing on Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). Concerns about the fatal decay of the Anglo-Saxon race were prevalent in English writing at the fin de siècle. Using Michel Foucault's framework of biopower, this research explores how power shifted from the sovereign right of death to a regulatory power over life, identified by interventions such as “births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity of the population” (Foucault 2003, 243). In Dracula, this biopolitical intervention is shows itself through the Gothic heroes, this time as working-class professionals. Arthur Holmwood and Lucy Westenra represent the passive landed gentry, and they remain vulnerable to atavistic regression. In contrast to this, Jonathan and Mina Harker embody a meritocratic shift; their mastery of shorthand, typewriters, and phonographs enables the group to defeat the vampire. This paper argues that Mina, the assistant schoolmistress with a "man's brain," stands in for the disciplined, technical character necessary to defend Western borders from what Arata (1990) refers to as "reverse colonization", the worry that a primitive force will colonize the city center. By contrast, The Island of Doctor Moreau moves the "laboratory" from the urban city to a deserted island under British imperial hegemony. On this island, the "bestial mark" of race is inscribed onto the body through monstrous surgeries of Doctor Moreau. The island serves as a site of failed biopolitical governance, where the attempt to "make live" through eugenics and vivisection results in "biological and creative decay". Thus, by comparing the "sanitary engineering" of Van Helsing to the surgeries of Moreau, this thesis demonstrates how the Gothic laboratory functions as a space to test "imaginary solutions" to the deep-rooted anxiety in the Victorian society toward science. Finally, this research identifies Doctor Moreau as a dark, scientific evolution of Shakespeare's Prospero by locating Moreau's island within a colonial genealogy. Moreau uses the scalpel and 'The Law' to force a biological evolution that ultimately fails, highlighting the fragility of the imperial aim to civilize and assimilate people under British rule, while Prospero utilizes language and magic to domesticate the 'savage' Caliban. This is further explored through the lens of late-century anxieties regarding the 'bestial' foreign body, most notably seen in the cultural reaction to the Jack the Ripper murders. According to Dryden (2003), the press identified the 'monstrous killer' by analyzing eugenic and physiological traits and 'Eastern' origins. This paper argues that both Dracula and The Island of Doctor Moreau reflect a broader social effort to map and exclude the 'alien' from the British metropolis. The House of Pain of Doctor Moreau and the Transylvanian castle of Dracula mirror a society trying, and inevitably failing, to employ science as a last line of defense line against the decaying empire.