Illustrated lecture with Dr. Brandy Schillace and custom cocktails and DJed music by Friese Undine
Date: Friday, November 22
Admission: $10
Time: 8:00 PM
Presented by Morbid Anatomy
Bram Stoker’s Dracula is often read as a narrative of reverse colonization, revealing fears of degeneration at the fin de siècle. Anxieties over the decline of empire and—as both symptom and consequence—the degeneration of masculinity in Victorian Britain resulted in a number of dystopic narratives, each revealing an uneasy relationship between evolution and devolution, sexuality, sexual identity and mental health. However, the signal terror of Stoker’s vampires lies not only in their overt sexuality and promiscuity—but also in their fecundity. As Van Helsing warns, the vampire is not a single foe but a potential army. Both “father” and unnatural mother, Count Dracula is capable of reproducing the undead—and yet his victims do not, it seems reproduce themselves.
In this presentation Dr. Schillace will explore accounts of syphilitic infection as a means of understanding the complexities of infection among the “innocents,” Lucy Westenra and the children she victimizes. Culminating in a re-examination of the only human birth in Stoker’s novel—Mina Harker’s son Quincy—this project seeks to provide new insight into 19th century anxieties about degeneration’s naissance.
Dr. Brandy Schillace is an interdisciplinary, medical-humanist scholar. She writes about cultural production, history of science, and intersections of medicine and literature. She is the managing editor of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, an international journal of cross-cultural health research and a guest curator and blogger for the Dittrick Medical History Museum. Dr. Schillace was the keynote speaker for the annual meeting of the Archivists and Librarians in the History of Health Sciences 2013, and is the recent recipient of the Chawton House Library Fellowship (for study of 18th century women writers) and the Wood Institute travel grant from the Philadelphia College of Physicians. She also an edited book collection under contingent contract with Cambria Press: Birthing the Monster of Tomorrow: Unnatural Reproductions. For a selection of recently published work, please visit http://fictionreboot-dailydose.com/publications-and-press.