Are you sick of sparkly brooding vampires, fanged private eyes, and blood sucking high school hotties? Let's kick it old school and talk about DRACULA.
Plus, something equally as menacing (and a lot less fun): antisemitism.
Stephen Arata in his piece "The Occidental Tourist" offers up a decolonial analysis of Victorian Gothic fiction. Arata claims that Stoker's Dracula embodies fears of reverse colonization in a time of English empire and the anxieties of the crumbling world order therein.
The character of Count Dracula, he says, emblemizes the convergence of East and West and the potential for the East to fight back and turn the tables on the British. Dracula "probes the heart of the culture’s sense of itself, its ways of defining and distinguishing itself from other peoples, other cultures, in its hour of perceived decline" (Arata, 164). Specifically, transplanting the creepy count into London is most evocative.
Arata argues that:
"vampirism [marked] the intersection of racial strife, political upheaval, and the fall of empire."
-Stephen Arata, The Occidental Tourist (p. 166)
Setting up the vampire in London is reversing the colonial narrative, upheaving Anglo hegemony, turning London rather than, say, Bombay into the site of violent exploitation (Arata, 166).
However, I would like to raise a point of contention. Though the book very well may embody the reverse colonization fear, I believe what Arata is describing is more specific than that. I see Arata's analysis as one in which everything but name speaks to anti-semitism. Yes there are plenty of extant papers on the semitic characterization of the European vampire, and Dracula specifically, and I do not think that every analysis has to acknowledge this to be valid or to contribute valuable insight.
But Arata's writing, for me, contained a glaring elephant in the room; he was directly describing anti-semitism without naming it. Arata claims that a reading of the novel which only focuses on orientalism "misses half the point" because it ignores the very "Western" characteristics of Dracula such as his manners, his sophistication, and his extensive knowledge--particularly of English customs--as shown by his vast library.
He then goes onto assert that "[t]he truly disturbing notion is not that Dracula impersonates Harker, but that he does it so well" (Arata, 170). For me, these particular "Western" characteristics, including the fact that Dracula is truly using them as a masquerade so that he can infiltrate and destroy English society, scream anti-semitism. For one, the supposedly Western characteristics which converge to make the Count are all common--and at first glance, positive-- stereotypes/perceptions about Jewish people. Jews are wealthy. Jews are smart, learned (with lots of book knowledge), crafty even. Finally, one of the most frightening thing about Jews is that we can blend into the European population, a secret racial other cloaked in disguise. We are frequently characterized as sneaky infiltrators who deign to bring about society's demise by taking it over from the inside. We are also characterized, quite literally, as vampiric. See conspiracies of blood libel and other associations of Jews with blood alongside the frequent assertion that we are economic vampires/leeches.
Though Arata works off of the historical circumstances at the time of the book's publication, writing about the Victorian English empire and its perceived instability, he forgets some other important historical context. In the words of Anthony Julius "Dracula was published just as the modern ritual-murder accusation in Central and Eastern Europe was at its most intense, and when comparing Jews to vampires was practically commonplace" (Mulvey-Roberts, 133). Stoker would have likely been familiar with these cases, as they were covered in the English press. Dracula is not simply an "occidentalist", he is a caricatured Jew, a wealthy, insidious wanderer looking for people and places to take over. We ignore the anti-semitic implications of Stoker at our peril.
*For a thorough historical analysis of why Dracula is so heavily coded as Jewish, see Marie Mulvey-Roberts's chapter "Nazis, Jews and Nosferatu" and for a brief general history of the association of Jews and vampires, see Jeffrey Weinstock's "Circumcising Dracula".
**See also my own brief analysis of Dracula in an imagined exhibition catalogue:
Indeed, from their very entrance into the literary canon, what we think of as the vampire has been coded as exotic/eastern, semitic, and effeminate. Bram Stoker’s iconic and genre defining Dracula is the quintessential representation of these tropes and fears—and the model for the character Nosferatu. His “effeminate aristocratic airs” and his emphatically Eastern European origin and accent are clear signals of Jewishness to a reader who has been steeped in societal fears of Jews as the effeminate, degenerate outsider . These fears have old roots. Some of the most pervasive antisemitic misconceptions in medieval Europe were blood-libel adjacent (i.e. Jews drink Christian child blood, bake it into their matzo, etc.) and those related to the supposed effeminacy of the Jewish male. The latter perception was tied to his role as passive and studious, hunched over his books all day while the “masculine” woman ran the house and did the grunt work, gender roles that did indeed have a kernel truth to them in the traditional Ashkenazi home. There were even rumors of Jewish male menstruation. Besides fears of the effeminate Jew, the formation of the modern vampire also embodies a linkage between two other antisemitic tropes: the Jew’s thirst for blood and his thirst for money. It is no coincidence that these vampires are wealthy aristocrats holed up in their gothic castles.
