Some of the greatest works of Victorian literature look at English culture in the 1800s through a critical or jaundiced eye; these works then find ways to expose the restrictive, oppressive and isolationist aspects of British culture that were characteristic of the empire at that time. This is particularly true of Bram Stoker’s Gothic novel Dracula, as it looks critically at race through the personification of Dracula as the feared Other from Eastern Europe, seeking to violate the women of England with his exotic sexuality and behavioral taboos. Looking at Dracula through the lens of race, it becomes clear that Stoker (and Victorian culture as a whole) feared the influence of Eastern European immigrants and their threat to the British way of life.
Looking at Dracula from an historical perspective, the aspects of British colonialism and imperialism become extremely clear. Arata notes that Dracula was written and published during “the decline of Britain as a world power at the close of the nineteenth century” – Britain saw its economy and influence in steep decline, and as such it felt a greater fear that other powers and countries would overtake it in influence (622). The characters of the book demonstrate a distinct fear of ‘reverse colonization,’ as opposed to celebrating their own colonization of other countries, which is what the British Empire had accomplished for the previous few centuries. The trip that Jonathan Harker takes into Transylvania is indicative of this, as his “attitude towards the location and its occupants indicates his innate imperial sensibility, and his intrinsic desire to designate the Transylvanian occupants as ‘other’ or opposite” (Snow 115). Unlike other works of colonial literature, Dracula demonstrates an abject fear that the Other will take over British culture in the same way that they themselves did during the height of the Empire.
The character of Dracula is perhaps the book’s most acute representation of this fear of the Other that Stoker depicts. Count Dracula is shown to be an exotic Eastern European man who demonstrates a number of inhuman features – an uncanniness that goes along with his thirst for blood and his incredible sway over those he speaks to. Dracula is seductive in his vampiric nature, representing the fear of the Other’s parasitic nature that was feared by many Englishmen at the time; as a vampire, he literally sucks the life out of hard-working white Englishmen and women. It can be argued that Dracula himself is a karmic consequence of English imperialism, as Van Helsing remarks that "He have follow the wake of the berserker Icelander, the devil-begotten Hun, the Slav, the Saxon, the Magyar” (Stoker 286).
Stoker intentionally leaves Dracula’s actual nationality up to the imagination, but establishes him as a Count (a title with significant implications of wealth and military status), making him a symbol of the overarching military threat to the West. In essence, Dracula’s overall plan is to invade Great Britain and convert everyone to his own way of life (vampirism), a fear echoed by the English character’s immense apprehension towards him. His plan extends the English fear that, just as Dracula is nourished by the blood of others, the East must support itself through fighting and conquering the West. From an imperialist perspective, Dracula represents the ideal domestic form being disrupted by foreign powers.
When Dracula decides to move to England, this threat exposes Stoker’s fears of immigration, stirring the very type of reverse colonization that would implicitly destroy English culture and turn it into the countries it once conquered. Dracula’s hypnotic powers are a great boon toward this end, as he can seamlessly imitate and personify Western values and mannerisms in order to hide his true intentions in England (Arata 368). Since Dracula can so easily mold himself into a model English citizen after moving there, despite secretly having bad intentions, Stoker shows how far Englishmen and women must worry about their ideal domestic lives being disrupted by the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing. In this case, it takes the form of an Oriental figure who successfully passes for English: “Well I know that, did I move and speak in your London, none there are who would not know me for a stranger” (Stoker 31).
Another race-related fear pertaining to Dracula is the fear of race-mixing, or miscegenation, which Dracula perpetuates as a character. Psychoanalytic readings of the novel are able to effortlessly link vampires’ violent and sexual natures (not to mention their inherent seductiveness) with Eastern exoticism – Englishmen fear their women being taken away from them by exotic outsiders who would create mixed-race babies that would threaten the purity of the Anglo-Saxon race (Arata 631). Mina Harker’s relationship with Dracula is proof positive of this anxiety, as Englishwomen throughout the novel pontificate on the exoticism and excitement of these vampire attacks: “The adventure of the night does not seem to have harmed heron the contrary, it has benefited her for she looks better this morning than she has done in weeks” (Stoker 115). In this way, Dracula appeals because he is the kind of vital, alluring sexual creature that the Englishmen do not imagine themselves to be; they fear that their women are more attracted to him than to them. Dracula’s disruption of the ideal domestic permeates English culture in this way throughout the book.
The injection of class anxieties is inextricable from the racial tensions in Dracula, and in fact enhance them. Not only are vampires representative of the exotic Easterners who will take British women and ruin British culture, they also represent a unifying force between the women and lower classes of English society. By converting the abject populations of England into vampires, they create a large force with a vested interest in destroying the hegemonic forces of upper-class white English society. This is echoed by the English characters, like Van Helsing, expanding their paranoia to women: “I fear to trust these women” (Stoker 180). Dracula’s major power is to unleash the inherent (and repressed) sexuality of British women, which then disrupts the status quo in Victorian culture. As a result, the protagonists Harker and Van Helsing fight not just against the vampiric creature Dracula, but the preservation of the kind of Anglocentric, English-based way of life where the rich, white man is able to succeed above all others.
Works Cited
Arata, Stephen D. “The Occidental Tourist: ‘Dracula’ and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization.”
Victorian Studies 33(4) (Summer 1990): 621-645.
Snow, Kristy Eve. "Colonial Hybridity and Irishness in Bram Stoker's Dracula." Undergraduate
Review 11.1 (2015): 114-119.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula.
