The Woman and the Dragon: Dinosaur, New Woman, and Degeneration Anxiety in The Lair of the White Worm by Bram Stoker

Abstract

With the concept of progressive and single temporal axis, the violence in The Lair of the White Worm by Bram Stoker is caused against The White Worm, a living dinosaur, and Lady Arabella March, a figure similar to a New Woman, by degeneration anxiety concerning the human race. Dinosaurs, in Victorian period, reminded human beings of devolution as the famous Victorian dinosaur exhibition at The Sydenham Park had organised the route of the exhibition back in primaeval times, with terrifying dinosaur sculpture at the end of the route. Moreover, the White Worm is seen in the novel as primitive and thus hardened and incapable of sympathy. However, the description of the carcasses of both the Worm and its supposed victims, after being eradicated by a group of human characters, show violence and “inhumanness” as the idea about human sympathy for animals had become prevalent in the nineteenth-century Britain. As the story turns out to merge The Worm with Lady Arabella March, who often devises rich marriage for herself, it could be interpreted that, out of the anxiety of devolution and decadence, the novel attacks New Woman and suffragettes, some of whom question feminine sexuality, as they could lead to no posterity. As Lady Arabella could merge herself with The Worm, she becomes a phallic mother, who disrupts patriarchy and evokes castration anxiety among men, making her gender and sexuality ambiguous. However, the strength of male power in the novel also requires homosocial relationship among men in order to conquer “the beast” in the novel, and yet homosocial relationship could also lead to the end of human race, with no posterity. Thus, this paper aims to show that the novel questions the justification of violence with the idea of progress and futurity by showing ironies at the heart of the preservation of the human race.