Are We There Yet?: Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism

8. Moving through Media

200 Are We There Yet? asylum. The initial powerful image of the Count as a bat who can fly anywhere and see anything is qualified by increasing awareness of the many physical constraints that mark him as a creature not of this place or time. Van Helsing describes him as “more prisoner than the slave of the galley, than the madman in his cell” (287). Harker and his friends, by contrast, are very much products of a particular place and time, and they take full advantage of the freedom afforded by new technologies of travel as well as new technologies of communication. In the end, they manage to destroy the Count by denying him the resting place that he would need if he were to be transplanted to foreign soil, what Van Helsing calls “his earth-­ home, his coffin-­ home, his hell-­ home” (287), and pursuing him to his real home in Transylvania. Thus, the novel associates mobility, particularly the modern form of mobility represented by rail travel, with the forces of good, and immobility with evil. Count Dracula’s rootedness in his own land is a symptom of the aristocratic decay that can only be expunged through the use of modern technology. Thomas Richards has described the development of what he calls“the imperial archive” in the nineteenth century, a “fantasy of knowledge connected and united in the service of state and Empire” (1993, 6). Not only did the Victorians seek“a comprehensive knowledge of the world” in all aspects of scholarship and inquiry (4), they hoped to use that knowledge, Richards suggests, to hold together an empire that seemed in danger of disintegration. It is perhaps not surprising to find that the railway occupies a central place in this “collectively imagined junction of all that was known or knowable” (11). For the Victorians, the railway symbolized the networks of communication that would become the foundation of modern culture. In the Victorian imagination, the experience of railway travel was not about going somewhere in particular, it was about unmooring one’s body from physical constraints and throwing it into the matrix. The process of sending oneself“like a parcel” was an exhilarating, even frightening , experience of the virtual that future media would attempt to emulate. 8. Moving through Media The“mobility of vision” that, according to Schivelbusch, characterizes the visual experience of train travel has been linked to capitalism and the development of commodity culture in the nineteenth century. Schivelbusch suggests that the “commodity character of objects” (186)—­ even of passengers, as seen in the epigraph by Ruskin—­ is enforced by the railway’s speed and efficiency, and he posits an analogy between“panoramic perception” and“the accelerated circula- High-­ Speed Connection: The Railway Network 201 tion of commodities,” and the visual plenitude and “fragmentation” of department store displays (186). As we noted in Part One, Anne Friedberg, following Schivelbusch, also describes the“mobilized virtual gaze” as a key component of commodity culture (5). This sense of the centrality of “panoramic” perception to emerging modernity has led critics to seek connections to other forms of consumer culture and mass entertainment. Many critics have posited a connection between the “panoramic” visual perception of train travel and the development of moving pictures at the turn of the century. Film historians have explored the continuities between nineteenth-­ century entertainment media, such as the panorama, kaleidoscope, and magic lantern, and the development of motion pictures, and generally seem to agree that film is less indebted to still photography than to these more dynamic forms of visual display. Thus the panorama can be seen as a conceptual hinge linking rail travel and cinema in the visual experience of movement that they both offer. As Mary Anne Doane suggests, the essential modernity of film derives from the fact that cinema is“a privileged machine for the representation of temporality ” (138), and its emphasis on the“present tense of the filmic flow” (140) evokes other modern forms of movement. More recently, film historians have noted direct connections between railway travel and early film,evident in the dominance of railway images and plots in early films like Lumière’s famous Train Entering a Station (1895), the American Edwin S. Porter’s Romance of the Rail (1903) and The Great Train Robbery (1903), and the Biograph Company’s Hold-­ up of the Rocky Mountain Express (1906). Tom Gunning has suggested that the radical “transformation of experience” (1995, 15) created by the railway is similar to the magical...