As John Seward, the psychiatrist in Bram Stoker's Dracula, struggles to understand in scientific terms the effects of vampirism on the female subject, his colleague, Professor Van Helsing, recommends that he turn to the adjacent discipline of psychic research:

Van Helsing is trying to convince his colleague that in dealing with irregularities of female behaviour, the science of psychic research has an explanatory power at least equal to those of psychiatry and medicine. What Van Helsing cannot see is that all three discourses played a constitutive and not simply a descriptive role in the proper acquisition of gendered subjectivity. The same may be said of the genre of popular fiction to which Dracula in part belongs: the occult romance.

It is not by chance that Dr Seward and Professor Van Helsing are discussing problems in the regulation of female sexuality, since this was a subject to which writers of occult fiction turned obsessively during the final decades of the nineteenth century.