Feeling Other(s): Dracula and the Ethics of Unmanageable Affect

Abstract

This chapter brings together contemporary affect theory with nineteenth-century psychological science to read affect and ethics in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). O’Donnell focuses on the phenomenon of fainting in the novel, reading it as a representative example of the connection between non-conscious affect and feelings of otherness. Linking non-conscious affect to vampirism, O’Donnell explores how the alterity of feeling is related to ethics in the novel through the connection of bodies and objects, the automatic responses of the body, and the otherness of the self. She suggests that rather than a narrative of power over the other, an alternate reading of Dracula via affect reveals an ethics of respect for uncertainty and alterity.