ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the ways in which secretarial work, and particularly typewriting, was refashioned in the latter decades of the century as work with a particularly feminine cast, for two main reasons. Its mechanical aspects were said to mimic the female body's own mechanics, and it was said to resemble the activity of the domestic woman, capable of transforming the stem, masculine office into a cheerfully homelike world. In the period during which Dracula was composed, rather, typewriting was increasingly becoming viewed as part of an acceptable narrative of a middle-class woman's life. After all, the women who operated the new office machines were presumed likely to depart soon enough for married life, and their supposedly natural talents for stenography would be wasted were they to be promoted to posts that left those skills behind. The disturbing split between writer and writing machine is refigured as a difference between the man dictating, and the woman typing.
