Man’s Best Fiend: Evolution, Rabies, and the Gothic Dog

Abstract

My essay examines late-Victorian Gothic literature in the light of the rabies ‘epidemic’ that took place in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It offers an historical contextual background to the shape-shifting trope in Gothic fiction at the fin de siècle, and it reveals that rabies is a disease that is associated in literature with the act of biting and subsequent bodily change. Gothic images of shape-shifting and transformation oscillate between the historical and social context of the late Victorian period and the significant shifts in medical and scientific ‘progress’ during the 1880s and 1890s. Examining the Gothic fiction of Bram Stoker and others, I construct a new reading of the phenomenon of shape-shifting in Gothic fiction by arguing that scientific and political rhetoric associated with rabies, a rare but nevertheless much-discussed disease, influenced key Gothic writers exploring the spread of disease between animals and humans.