!"#$%&&'(#)*+,$!-./'0*1$23/+&.,+2$+)($*"#$4)5'#*6$-7$8#9#/0#$:-,-)';+*'-) 4.*"-/<0=1$>*#?"#)$3@$4/+*+ 8#9'#A#($A-/B<0=1 >-./&#1$C'&*-/'+)$>*.('#0D$C-,@$EED$F-@$G$<>.HH#/D$IJJK=D$??@$LMINLGO P.Q,'0"#($Q61$Indiana University Press >*+Q,#$R8S1$http://www.jstor.org/stable/3827794 . 4&&#00#(1$EKTKITMKIM$IU1OG Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Victorian Studies. http://www.jstor.org Stephen D. Arata THE OCCIDENTALTOURIST: DRACULAAND THE ANXIETYOF REVERSECOLONIZATION "Fashionsin monstersdo change." Joseph Conrad BRAM STOKER S DRACULA (1897) PARTICIPATES IN THAT "MODERNIZING" of Gothic which occurs at the close of the nineteenth century. Like Steven- son's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Wilde's Pictureof Dorian Gray (1891), Stoker'snovel achieves its effects by bringingthe terrorof the Gothic home. While Gothic novelists had traditionally displaced their stories in time or locale, these later writers root their action firmly in the modem world. Yet critics have until recently ignoredthe historical context in which these workswere written and originallyread. Most notably, criticismhas per- sistently undervaluedDracula's extensive and highly visible contacts with a series of cultural issues, particularly those involving race, specific to the 1890s. This neglect has in part resultedfrom the variouspsychoanalytic ap- Fortheir advice and support,I wouldlike to thankAndrea Atkin, JulieEarly, Sheila Sullivan, and OrrinWang. I owe a specialdebt to WilliamVeeder for the time, patience, encouragement,in- sight, and generalgood sense he has providedin such generousquantities. The divorceof Gothic and "history"goes back at least to WalterScott's famousdistinction be- tween the two in the introductionto Waverly(1814). By contrast,I take as one of my starting points David Punter'ssensible claim, in his Literatureof Terror:A Historyof GothicFictions from 1765 to thePresent Day (London:Longman, 1980), that "withinthe Gothic we can find a very in- tense, if displaced,engagement with politicaland social problems"(p. 62). Recently,critics have begunto place Draculain the context of late-Victorianculture, usefully complementing the tradi- tionalpsychoanalytic readings of the novel. CarolA. Senf sees Stokerreacting to the phenomenon of the "NewWoman" of 1890sfiction; Charles Blinderman relates Dracula to aspectsof Darwinian materialism;Erest Fontanasees most of the novel's characters,including the Count himself, as typesof Lombroso'scriminal man; Mark M. Hennelly,Jr., arguesthat the novel'sBritish characters are engagedin a gnosticquest to redeemthe late Victorian"wasteland"; Christopher Craft relates the novel's"anxiety over the potentialfluidity of genderroles" to late Victoriandiscourses on sex- ual "inversion";and FrancoMoretti sees Draculaas a "metaphor"for monopolycapitalism that late- Victorianbourgeois culture refuses to recognizein itself. See Senf, "Dracula:Stoker's Response to the New Woman," VictorianStudies 26 (1982), 33-49; Blinderman,"Vampurella, Darwin, and Count Dracula,"Massachusetts Review 21 (1980), 411-428; Fontana,"Lombroso's Criminal Man and Stoker'sDracula," Victorian Newsletter 66 (1984), 25-27; Hennelly, "TheGnostic Quest and the VictorianWasteland," English Literature in Transition20 (1977), 13-26; Craft," 'KissMe With Those Red Lips':Gender and Inversion in BramStoker's Dracula," Representations 8 (1984), 107-133; Moretti,"The Dialecticof Fear,"New LeftReview 136 (1982), 67-85. SUMMER 1990 622 StephenD. Arata proachestaken by most criticsof Gothic. While such approacheshave greatly enriched our understandingof Dracula,and while nothing in psychoanalytic critical theory precludesa "historicist"reading of literarytexts, that theory has in practicebeen used almost exclusively to demonstrate,as Stoker'smost recent critic puts it, that Draculais a "representationof fears that are more universalthan a specific focus on the Victorian backgroundwould allow."2 Yet the novel's very attachment to the "Victorianbackground" - what The Spectatorin 1897 called its "up-to-dateness"- is a primarysource of Stoker's continuing power.3 Late-VictorianGothic in general, and Draculain partic- ular, continually calls our attention to the culturalcontext surroundingand informingthe text, and insists that we take that context into account. In the case of Dracula,the context includesthe decline of Britainas a world power at the close of the nineteenth century;or rather, the way the perception of that decline was articulatedby contemporarywriters. Dracula appearedin a Jubilee year, but one markedby considerablymore introspec- tion and less self-congratulationthan the celebrationof a decade earlier.The decay of Britishglobal influence,the loss of overseasmarkets for Britishgoods, the economic and politicalrise of Germanyand the United States, the increas- ing unrestin Britishcolonies and possessions,the growingdomestic uneasiness over the moralityof imperialism- all combinedto erodeVictorian confidence in the inevitabilityof Britishprogress and hegemony.4 Late-Victorianfiction in particularis saturatedwith the sense that the entire nation - as a race of people, as a political and imperialforce, as a social and culturalpower - was in irretrievabledecline. What I will be examining is how that perception is transformedinto narrative, into storieswhich the culture tells itself not only 2 John Allen Stevenson, "A Vampire in the Mirror:The Sexuality of Dracula," PMLA 103 (1988), 139-149. Stevenson's remark is somewhat surprising, since his essay convincingly places Dracula in the context of late-century thought on marriage, race, and exogamy. Psychoanalytic readings of Dracula include C. F. Bentley, "The Monster in the Bedroom: Sexual Symbolism in Bram Stoker's Dracula," Literatureand Psychology 22 (1972), 27-32; Stephanie Demetrakapoulous, "Feminism, Sex-Role Exchanges, and Other Subliminal Fantasies in Bram Stoker's Dracula," Frontiers 2 (1977), 104-113; Carrol L. Fry, "Fictional Conventions and Sexuality in Dracula," VictorianNews- letter42 (1972), 20-22; Gail Griffin," 'YourGirls That YouAll LoveAre Mine':Dracula and the VictorianMale Sexual Imagination,"International Journal of Women'sStudies 3 (1980), 454-465; MauriceRichardson, "The Psychoanalysis of GhostStories," Twentieth Century 166 (1959), 419-431; Phyllis Roth, "Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker's Dracula," Literatureand Psychology27 (1977), 113-121. I am not suggestingthat thereis a singlepsychoanalytic paradigm that thesewrit- ers all follow; but each considerspsychoanalysis as the criticalapproach best suitedfor Stoker's novel. 3 TheSpectator 79 (31 July 1897), 151. 4 Standardaccounts of the late-Victoriancrisis of confidenceand its relationto the imperialideal includeElie Halevy, Imperialismand theRise of Labour(1927; rpt. New York:Bames and Noble, 1961); EricHobsbawm, The Age of Empire1875-1914 (New York:Vintage, 1989);Ronald Hyam, Britain'sImperial Century 1815-1914 (New York:Barnes and Noble, 1976);Richard Shannon, The Crisisof Imperialism(London: Granada, 1976); and A. P. Thornton,The Imperial Idea and Its Ene- mies(London: Macmillan, 1959). VICTORIAN STUDIES ANXIETY OF REVERSECOLONIZATION 623 to articulateand account for its troubles, but also to defend against and even to assuagethe anxiety attendant upon culturaldecay. I Draculaenacts the period'smost importantand pervasivenarrative of decline, a narrativeof reversecolonization. Versions of this story recurwith remarkablefrequency in both fiction and nonfiction texts throughoutthe last decades of the century. In whatever guise, this narrativeexpresses both fear and guilt. The fear is that what has been representedas the "civilized"world is on the point of being colonized by "primitive"forces. These forces can originate outside the civilized world (in Rider Haggard'sShe, Queen Ayesha plans to sack London and depose Queen Victoria) or they can inhere in the civilized itself (as in Kurtz'semblematic heart of darkness). Fantasiesof re- verse colonization are particularlyprevalent in late-Victorianpopular fiction. They occur not just in Haggard'snovels, but in RudyardKipling's early fic- tion ("The Markof the Beast," "At the End of the Passage,"The Lightthat Failed), in Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories (The Sign of Four, "The Crooked Man"), in H. G. Wells's science fiction tales (The Time Machine, The War of theWorlds), and in many of the numerousadventure novels of G. A. Hope, Henry S. Merriman,and John Buchan. In each case, a terrifying reversalhas occurred:the colonizer finds himself in the position of the colo- nized, the exploiter becomes exploited, the victimizervictimized. Such fears are linked to a perceived decline - racial, moral, spiritual- which makes the nation vulnerable to attack from more vigorous, "primitive"peoples. But fantasiesof reversecolonization are more than productsof geopo- litical fears. They are also responses to cultural guilt. In the marauding, invasive Other, British culture sees its own imperialpractices mirrored back in monstrousforms. H.