Passport Essay: Dracula

Dracula, with its sophisticated and exotic monster, naturally lends itself to readings that focus upon the political and economic implications of an ambiguously-ethnic vampire’s invasion of middle-class Britain. Political readings of Dracula, whether colonial or Marxist, fail, however, to account for the intimate nature of the threat that the vampire poses to the Western characters. Only an interpretation that focuses upon the “deviant” sexual desires at play in the seductive attacks upon the Western characters deepens the reader’s understanding of the horror inspired by Dracula, and the novel’s desire to reassert the success of the reproductive heterosexual at the story’s conclusion.

I. Use Craft to examine the sexuality at play in Dracula's attack on Jonathan Harker and the subsequent "male hysteria" that ensues.

II. Explore the attempts by the male characters to exclude Mina from their planning and her resulting infection by Dracula (the hunting and killing of Dracula must necessarily include a woman)

III. Note how the fear of the sexual other is implicated in colonial/Marxist readings and the historical association of deviant sexuality with both the upper class and the East.

Annotated Bibliography:

Arata, Stephen D. “The Occidental Tourist ‘Dracula’ and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization.” Victorian Studies, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Summer, 1990), p. 621-645.

Arata argues that Dracula’s entrance into England and subsequent infection of the British characters suggests a fear of invasion by the mysterious and post-empire Eastern Europe.

Craft, Christopher. ‘“Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Representations, No. 8 (Autumn, 1984), p. 107-133.

Craft argues that the scene of Jonathan’s attack by the weird sisters places him in a passive sexual position, just as the threat of Dracula’s attack threatens to place him in a homoerotic context.

Moretti, Franco. “A Capital Dracula.” Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms. Trans. Susan Fisher, David Forgacs, David Miller. New York: Verso 1988. p. 90-104.

Moretti takes a fairly traditional Marxist approach to Dracula and sees him as a emblem of the aristocracy run amuck.