Bram Stoker's Reproach of Fin-De-Siècle Britain in Dracula

Victorian Literature and Culture (2018), 46, 425–442. © Cambridge University Press 2018. 1060-1503/18 doi:10.1017/S1060150317000481 VAMPIRE VERSUS THE EMPIRE: BRAM STOKER’S REPROACH OF FIN-DE-SIÈCLE BRITAIN IN DRACULA By Ertu˘grul Koç and Ya˘gmur Demir I. Introduction MUCH HAS BEEN SAID ABOUT Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the out-of-tradition exemplar of the Gothic which, perhaps, has had a more pervasive effect on our understanding of life and death, gender roles and identity, and sex and perversity than any other work of the genre. The vampire from the so-called dark ages has become a symbol standing for the uncontrollable powers acting on us and also for all the discarded, uncanny phenomena in human nature and history. The work, however, has usually been taken by the critics of Gothic literature as “a paradigmatic Gothic text” (Brewster 488) representing the social, psychological, and sexual traumas of the late-nineteenth century. Hence, it has been analysed as a work “breaking [the] taboos, [and in need of being] read as an expression of specifically late Victorian concerns” (Punter and Byron 231). The text has also been seen as “reinforc[ing] readers’ suspicions that the authorities (including people, institutions and disciplines) they trust are ineffectual” (Senf 76). Yet, it has hardly ever been taken as offering an alternative Weltanschauung1 in place of the decaying Victorian ethos. True, Dracula is a fin-de-siècle novel and deals with the turbulent paradigmatic shift from the Victorian to the modern, and Stoker, by creating the lecherous vampire and his band as the doppelgängers of the sexually sterile and morally pretentious bourgeois types (who are, in fact, inclined to lascivious joys), reveals the moral hypocrisy and sexual duplicity of his time. But, it is also true that by juxtaposing the “abnormal” against the “normal” he targets the utilitarian bourgeois ethics of the empire: aware of the Victorian pragmatism on which the concept of the “normal” has been erected, he, with an “abnormal” historical figure (Vlad Dr˘aculea of the House of Dr˘aculești, 1431–76) who appears as Count Dracula in the work, attacks the ethical superstructure of Britain which has already imposed on the Victorians the “pathology of normalcy” (Fromm 356). Hence, Stoker’s choice of title character, the sadistic Vlad the Impaler, who fought against the Ottoman Empire in the closing years of the Middle Ages, and his anachronistic rendering of Dracula as a Gothic invader of the Early Middle Ages are not coincidental (Figure 8). In the world of the novel, this embodiment of the early and late paradigms is the antagonistic power arrayed against the supposedly stable, but in reality fluctuating, fin-de-siècle ethos. However, by turning this personification of the “evil” past into a sexual enigma for the band of men who are trying to 425 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Cankaya Universitesi, on 23 Mar 2020 at 11:16:29, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150317000481 426 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE Figure 8. “Duality: the Vampiric and the Victorian.” Illustration by Barı¸s Emre Alkım. preserve the Victorian patriarchal hegemony, Stoker suggests that if Victorian sterile faith in the “normal” is defeated through a historically extrinsic (in fact, currently intrinsic) anomaly, a more comprehensive social and ethical epoch that has made peace with the past can be started. Stoker brings together the ungendered vampire of the primitive past with the bourgeois males and females of the civilized world whose thwarted, sterile sexuality is the main target of the vampire. Ironically, however, the vampire helps them release their repressed sexual energies and lets them enjoy uncanny delights: by sexualizing Jonathan, Lucy, and Mina through abnormal ways, and by metamorphosing the rest into anomalous sexual beings, the vampire plans to found a new (but also the old) world of sexual freedom in contrast to the empire built on patriarchy and its subsequent gender and power relations. In fact, the medieval vampire’s bite transforms the gendered bourgeois stereotypes into ungendered characters with anomalous sexualities, and Stoker suggests that this is not an evil mutation. On the contrary, it is through these “abnormal” figures that the fabricated bourgeois ethics on sex and gender can be challenged to pave the way for the construction of a more inclusive sexual superstructure with individuals free from the gendering, sexually limiting influence of Victorian moral ideology. Therefore, Stoker’s Dracula, if it is considered as offering an alternative paradigm, relies on the clashing norms of the past and present from which emerges a new understanding of the “normal” and the “moral.” Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Cankaya Universitesi, on 23 Mar 2020 at 11:16:29, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150317000481 Vampire versus the Empire 427 Through such a clash, Stoker does voice his interest in the historical and cultural heritage of Europe, and by extension, in the paradigmatic shift the empire is facing. He sees the past world as more straightforward than the repressive, hypocritical Victorian ethos, and wishes to evoke a comparable awareness through generating sexual epiphany in the work. For him, this late period of the Victorian Age is still half in love with rationalism, denying, therefore, the need for the magical and the mysterious and the existence of the irrational forces in men and women. Hence, by introducing a faux-medieval setting (Transylvania in Romania), which stands for the European past, and by reconstructing the western folkloric vampire through homoerotic language and imagery, which signifies the arousal of the buried or eruption of the repressed, he draws out the reasons for the denial of the natural and illustrates the resultant hypocritical understanding of sex, gender roles and relations, and the widespread social and individual anomaly in fin-de-siècle Britain. He points out the major problems of his age, yet he is hardly optimistic about the evolution of the Victorian culture to a better form: although Dracula brings the Victorian pathology to the surface, the defeat of the Count at the end of the novel signifies both the incurability of the actual disease and Stoker’s cynicism concerning the emergence of a new and a better paradigm. II. Dracula the Vampire Demolishing the “Glamorous” Façade of Victorianism CONTRARY TO THE CONVENTIONAL Victorian novelists, who usually deal with the dichotomy between the upper and the lower classes in urbanising Britain, Stoker is more concerned with history, and with the lack of interaction between the ancient and the modern. In fact, Dracula compares and contrasts the “barbaric” past with the “civilised” present over representative settings and characters: feudal Transylvania and modern London are pitted against each other through the vampiric and the Victorian characters. The novel opens with the young English solicitor, Jonathan Harker, traveling to the still feudal and sinister Transylvania on the periphery of Europe, where Count Dracula’s ancient castle, which, for centuries encountered the violent attacks of foreign invaders, is located. This in-betweenness of Transylvania separating the civilised and the barbaric (or the European and the non-European), and the crumbling castle where the undead Count resides with his vampire wives, are the evocative geographical and historical allusions used by Stoker to reveal that, though discarded, the past as an amalgam of the rational and irrational powers still prevails over the present. Hence, Jonathan’s visit to the medieval castle in Transylvania does not only explain the author’s wish to create a surprise effect and uncanniness for the character and the reader; by juxtaposing the sterile, stereotypical bourgeois male of the contemporary late Victorian world with the noble, passionate, and androgynous Dracula from the Middle Ages, Stoker reverses the clichéd conception of the past as a dead, foreign country. The ancient Dracula is far more alive, and far more familiar than the modern Victorians. According to Stoker, the undead Count residing in his ancient abode is a metaphor not only for the ghostly incarnation of the “dark ages” affecting the present but also for lost bodily freedoms, and for chivalry and wisdom. In fact, he and his she-vampires demonstrate “dangerous subversive desires which disrupt Victorian moral and sexual codes” (Mighall 63). The first Victorian whose moral unity is disrupted by such desires is Jonathan: he “falls victim” to the aggravated perverse sexual assaults of the three women who “threw no shadow on the floor,” and whose “piercing eyes . seemed to be almost red when contrasted with the pale yellow moon” (Stoker 44; ch. 3). The Count, however, “saves” him from the Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Cankaya Universitesi, on 23 Mar 2020 at 11:16:29, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150317000481 428 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE she-vampires, telling them that “this man belongs to [him and that] . when [he is] done with him [they] shall kiss him at [their] will” (46; ch. 3). In this way, through his insinuations aimed at the she-vampires and Jonathan, the Count reveals his androgynous sexual identity. The young solicitor Jonathan Harker and his associates stand in the novel as the microcosmic society for the culturally diverse, yet gendered and sterile, bourgeoisie that replaced the sexual frankness of the previous aristocratic paradigm. Despite their diversity in origin, class, and nation, the characters of Dracula constitute the predominant bourgeois Weltanschauung: the young schoolmistress and Jonathan’s fiancée, Mina Murray; the rich and flirtatious Lucy Westenra; Lucy’s three suitors — the aristocrat Arthur Holmwood, the American adventurer Quincey Morris, and the asylum director Dr.

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