Danielle Stone/Winonan
Dr. Brandy Schillace, of Winona State University’s English department, was recently in London for a conference on Monsters and the Monstrous.
Schillace presented her paper ‘“Children of the Night”: Dracula, Degeneration and Syphilitic Births at the fin de siècle’ at the conference.
The conference was through www.interdisciplinary.net, a website that puts together conferences, with panels that, as Schillace said, “were chosen based on intellectual communication and would communicate well.”
For the panel, about 35 speakers were selected to present their papers, and the conference was open only to the presenters. Presentations lasted from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Schillace enjoyed the dialogue between all the different schools that were represented at the conference, she said.
Schillace’s paper looks at the medical world during Victorian Britain, blaming the spread of syphilis to prostitution and comparing it to the contagion of vampirism in Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.”
In the paper she notes how, during the nineteenth century in Britain, there was a spread of syphilis throughout families, producing infants born already possessing the disease. Doctors attributed the spread of syphilis to prostitution.
What the medical experts overlooked, however, was that fathers were the ones contaminating their families.
Schillace’s paper shows how the spread of vampirism is similar to the spread of syphilis because in “Dracula” the only offspring that were born as vampires were those who came directly from Dracula. In both cases, disease is spread on the side of the father.
Schillace was first inspired to write about this topic through studying medical history. “I think of myself as a medical humorist,” she said.
Schillace noticed vampirism in the texts she had read were similar to a disease. At the time she was also doing research on syphilis birth and began to notice similarities between syphilis and vampirism. What also made the topic more interesting to her was her discovery that Bram Stoker may have had syphilis himself.
Schillace’s fascination with monsters began at a young age and sparked her interest in Gothic literature. The home in which she grew up could be described straight from a book, she said. Schillace grew up in an abandoned coal-mining town, living in a house that was underground, next to a graveyard and forest. As she put it, she was “on the same level as the dead.”
Other papers presented at the conference in London discussed medieval monsters, disease contagion and viral infections, and another paper referenced the TV show “Dexter” and the changed perception of psychopathy in today’s society.
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