The Colonization of Quincey Morris: the American Other in Bram Stoker's Dracula
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iii The Colonization of Quincey Morris: The American Other in Bram Stoker's Dracula By Jessica Wojtysiak, B.A. A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English California State University, Bakersfield In Partial Fulfillment for the Degree of Masters of English Spring 2015 ii Copyright by Jessica Wojtysiak 2015 The Colonization of Quincey Morris: The American Other in Bram Stoker's Dracula By Jessica Wojtysiak This thesis or project has been accepted on behalf of the Department of English by their supervisory committee: Dr. Andrew Troup Committee Chair Dr. Glenda Hudson iv Table of Contents Introduction........................................................................................................................1 Research Justification ............................................................................................4 Review of the Literature.....................................................................................................5 The Debate over Politics.........................................................................................5 Doubling in Dracula..............................................................................................14 Remembering Quincey..........................................................................................16 Stoker's Politics and Treatment of History........................................................................19 The Author's Background and Politics..................................................................19 Stoker's Play with History and Truth....................................................................22 Quincey and Dracula ........................................................................................................26 Vampiric America..................................................................................................26 Quincey: The Stoic Savage and The Seductive Socialite..................................................30 Quincey's Attractiveness........................................................................................30 Quincey's Stoicism..................................................................................................35 Quincey's Death and 'Resurrection'....................................................................................44 A Brief Recap.........................................................................................................44 Quincey's Sacrifice.................................................................................................45 Conclusion .........................................................................................................................50 Works Cited .......................................................................................................................53 1 The Colonization of Quincey Morris: The American Other in Bram Stoker's Dracula "A brave man's blood is the best thing on this earth when a woman is in trouble. You're a man, and no mistake. Well, the devil may work against us for all he's worth, but God sends us men when we want them."1 Introduction During the nineteenth century, British authors successfully appropriated Eastern and Slavic folklore to craft vampire stories appreciated by their Western European and American readers.2 John Polidori, James Malcolm Rymer, Sheridan Le Fanu and arguably Edgar Allan Poe transformed the mindless revenant who plagued superstitious peasants into an aristocratic and deadly seducer of the socially refined and innocent.3 Bram Stoker continued this revision of myth by making his eponymous figure a proud member of Transylvanian nobility, but he also offered his own unique contributions to the evolving vampire mythology. For example, Stoker 4 incorporated many conventions from the then popular travel literature genre into his novel, and 1Abraham Van Helsing to Quincey Morris. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002), 162. 2 For surveys of vampire folklore, see Jan Louis Perkowski's Vampire Lore and Alan Dundes' The Vampire A Casebook, especially chapters 1, 3, 4, and 8. 3 The authors of The Vampyre (1819), Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood (1845-1847), Carmilla,(1871) and Berenice (1835), respectively. While the former three are explicit vampire tales, the fourth has been interpreted by several scholars as Poe's first attempt to recreate and elevate the vampire myth without explicitly using the term. In addition to James Twitchell's The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature, see Allen Tate's "Our Cousin, Mr. Poe" for the mention of Berenice prior to the identification of Morella and Madeleine Usher as vampires, D.H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature, Volume 2 for a brief paragraph on "Berenice" within the broader discussion of vampirism in "Ligeia" and "The Fall of the House of Usher." Twitchell, Bailey and Kendall all point to "Berenice" as the first of Poe's vampire stories. 4 Discussions of the influence of the travel literature genre upon Stoker's work include Brantlinger's "Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Occult in the British Adventure Novel, 1880−1914" and Stephen Arata's "The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization." 2 he expanded the international boundary of English-language vampire stories to incorporate aspects of the Western hemisphere. Many of Stoker’s additions, such as the identification of the vampire bat, an animal indigenous to Central and South America, as a favored form of the shape- shifting monster,5 remain encoded within the contemporary cannon. However, another American aspect of Stoker’s novel has been largely ignored by both scholars and the public: Quincey P. Morris, the cowboy hero who gave his life to destroy Dracula. This thesis investigates the politics of Dracula by analyzing the character of Quincey Morris, the novel's lone American character, as the embodiment of the threat posed by the ascendant United States at the turn of the century. Late Victorian literature is often characterized by anxiety over the gradual erosion of British cultural hegemony, particularly the view that the English nation was suffering from a state of irreversible decline. In this case, Stoker's novel is no exception. As Stephen Arata observes in the article "The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization," a political reading of Dracula provides insight into the mind of the author: "In the case of Dracula, the context includes the decline of Britain as a world power at the close of the nineteenth century; or rather, the way the perception of that decline was articulated by contemporary writers" (622). Specifically, this interpretation of the novel provides a mechanism for interrogating how Stoker transformed his own personal and social anxiety over the future of the empire into a cogent horror narrative. Stoker's mother was Irish and his father was Protestant English; as a youth, he expressed sympathy with those Irish who faced discrimination within the empire but supported Irish Home Rule as a peaceful alternative to open 5 J. Gordon Melton identifies Stoker as the first to formally incorporate the vampire bat into the vampire literature, although the cover of the collected Varney the Vampire featured the image of a bat with no mention of the animal in the actual narrative. Melton subsequently discusses the effort by biologists to run a "public relations program" for the maligned mammal during the Post World War II vampire boon (51-52). 3 rebellion (Riquelme 16). Within this historic context, Quincey Morris represents the nation most threatening to the waning power of the declining Britain. Morris serves as Dracula's light double, a peripheral figure that is both more civilized than the Transylvanian count but less civilized than the other protagonists. Quincey's sexual attractiveness, reticence, and predilection for decisive and often violent action, are all defining characteristics shared by the Count, and the cowboy’s aggressive actions are often contrasted with the intellectual pursuits of Mina Harker, Abraham Van Helsing and John Steward. Yet, Quincey is also a wealthy gentleman capable of curbing his rough speech and traveling within distinguished social circles. Quincey invades the British community, demands the respect of its men and earns the love of its women in ways that Dracula could never hope to accomplish. Quincey is both invader and friend, but he is never truly part of the inner circle. Quincey's reliance upon violence and firsthand knowledge of the vampire threat distance him from his more refined companions, and his failure to contribute any documents of substance to the novel's narrative relegate him to a more primitive, vampire-like state. In addition to being the novel's only American character, Quincey is also the only hero to die at the novel’s conclusion, and his death conveys Stoker's solution to both the British Empire's decline and the rising threat of the United States. Dubbed "The Texan" in Bram Stoker's notes, Quincey Morris represents the author's construction of the American West as a frontier that, like Transylvania, must be civilized and ultimately conquered by the British Empire. Quincey's inevitable death and replacement via Mina’s newborn son conveys Stoker's ambivalence toward the United States, and suggests that Stoker viewed the re-assimilation of the United States as a mechanism for reinvigorating the declining British Empire. 4 Research Justification The debate