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LETTERATURA INGLESE (CIMAROSTI) PURITY AND DANGER: DRACULA, THE URBAN GOTHIC, AND THE LATE VICTORIAN DEGENERACY CRISIS → Despite certain disagreements as to what kind of sexuality is present in the novel, almost all readings presume a given sexuality that is repressed and displaced throughout the text, which it is the critical task to uncover and articulate. → “Dracula” is part of a literary/cultural discourse comprised not only of other tales about vampires, but of other fantastic novels and stories that also focus on sexual dynamics, whether covertly or overtly. → I will consider the relationship between Dracula’s genre, its historical context, and its popularity. I: THE FANTASTIC → Some theorists use “fantasy” and “the fantastic” interchangeably, others see them as referring to two quite different kinds of stories, others see the fantastic not as a genre at all but as an element that can appear in many kinds of tales. → A fantastic text, then, builds its fictional world as “a textual confrontation of two models of reality”. → 1°: the impossible event must genuinely be happening; 2°: the tone of the narrative emphasizes initial disbelief, and (usually) horror. → The narrative voice insistently emphasizes violation and transgression, the logical contradiction between the impossibility of the occurrence and its actuality. → Gothic fictions are traditionally distanced somewhat from the world of their audience, set back in time and “away” in space making the stories more plausible (to an English audience) by the superstitiousness of their settings, and at the same time lessening the intensity of the fear, for the readers if not the characters. → To be modern also means that science is the metaphor that rules human interactions with the universe, so the new fantastic adopts the discourse of empiricism even to describe and manipulate supernatural phenomena. II: THE ROMANCE REVIVAL → The theorists of high realism rejected the sensation novel’s emphasis on plot, arguing that it demanded less of readers than novels that required them to interpret the subtleties of human motives; furthermore, it was believed, too strong an emphasis on plot would interfere with the “naturalness” of characters. → Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, and (in his early works) H. G. Wells are the best-known figures of this new movement. III: PURITY AND DANGER → The Urban Gothic and the romance share another crucial characteristic beyond their common reliance on contemporary adventure and exoticism: a concern for purity, for the reduction of ambiguity and the preservation of boundaries. → The bulwarks of identity were reduced essentially to two: the arena of intimate relationships, and the arena of “mass ritual” of sporting events and political ceremonies, especially the fervent impersonal group identity we call nationalism. → If humans could evolve, it was thought they could also devolve or degenerate, both as nation and as individuals; such concerns underlay the tremendous public anxiety at the end of the century about the condition of the British Empire and the warnings that, like its Roman predecessor, it could fall, and for what were popularly perceived as the same reasons - moral decadence leading to racial degeneration. → Women argued for reforms of marriage and divorce laws, and in particular for the right of married women to own property in their own names; more and more women insisted on leaving the house of which they had been appointed angel, the house that, if a refuge for men, became for many middle-class wives and daughters a more or less pleasant prison. → What could be said about the men who deliberately refused to be men? Such depravity challenged not just the distinction between male and female but that between natural and unnatural as well → There is strong pressure on group members to conform, but the classification system of the society is somehow ineffective in structuring reality: it is too narrow and rigid to deal with the variety of actual experience, or it is inconsistent, or has gaps, or is in competition with another system of classification that weakens the effectiveness of both. → In such a society, the universe is dualistic: what is inside is good, what is outside is bad; evil is a foreign danger introduced by foreign agents in disguise, but abetted by deviant members of the group who must be identified and expelled for allowing the outside evil to infiltrate. → The fantastic as a genre is based on violations of reality, which means it is fundamentally concerned with defining reality; and the nature of reality is exactly the question at issue in late-nineteenth-century England.

→ The romance is traditionally a psychomachia, a struggle between the forces of good and evil in which evil is defeated; the Urban Gothic extends the tradition in a peculiarly modern way by defining the enemy as not only evil but unnatural. → The struggle for power and stability under these social conditions leads inevitably to scapegoat rituals; both the romance and the Urban Gothic drive to purify the inside and expel the foreign pollution: at the heart of both lies the scapegoat ritual. IV: RITUAL VICTIMS IN “DRACULA” → What all sacrificial victims have in common is that they must recognizably belong to the community, but must at the same time be somehow marginal, incapable of fully participating in the social bond - slaves, criminals, the mad, the deformed; their death does not automatically entail an act of vengeance. → It would seem that Lucy belongs to the class Victorians would find least sacrificeable rather than most and that, in any case, she is a victim not of her own community but of a monstrous outsider. → Lucy’s character is “flawed” in a way that makes her fatally vulnerable to the vampire: she really would like to marry all of her three suitors; she is a sleepwalker, a habit traditionally associated with sexual looseness, and she is therefore doubly vulnerable to Dracula’s approach. → Lucy is both the image of purity, sweetness, and beauty and the creature of sexual appetites, the sleepwalker, who accedes to violent penetration by the vampire. → As Stoker describes it, the final killing of Lucy is quite clearly both a religious act and a communal one; she also becomes a bond between her three rivals, where in life she could only have been a source of division. → The violent hysteria, the decisive act of violence perceived as religious experience, the succeeding calm and the atmosphere of holy mystery covering the participants, all function to fuse the men into a closed and harmonious community. → Civilized adult men control their appetites; his failure to do so marks the crucial distinction between Dracula and his opponents: he is degenerate, “a criminal and of criminal type” which means he has an “imperfectly formed mind”. → The Count represents precisely those dark secret drives that the men most fear in themselves, which are most destructive to both poles of identity - the intimate self of the family man, threatened by unrestrained sexual appetites, and the communal self of the nation, undermined by violent internal competition more than by external invasion. → The scene of Dracula’s death contains all the elements of the primordial religious experience; the atmosphere is terrifying and hallucinatory: the two parties desperately racing the sun, each fighting for life. → The violence and horror are succeeded by holy awe and peace, which is capped when Quincey Morris sees Mina’s forehead now clear of its shameful scar, and vows with his last breath that this outcome is worth dying for; it is the ultimate confirmation that the community has been saved. V: WHAT IS LOST AND WHAT IS SAVED → Solitude greatly increased sexual danger: the solitude of privacy allowed one to indulge in masturbation, while the different solitude of anonymity left one free to indulge in the kinds of sexual experiences one would, as member of a family, have been ashamed to admit desiring; Jonathan is both alone and anonymous. → If we had any doubt about the equation of violence and sexing the novel, this scene would dispel them: Dracula’s own language conflates erotic desire and feeding, the mouth both kisses and consumes, the same organ gratifying two different hungers. → While Lucy satisfies her own unconscious desires in yielding to Dracula, Mina’s vulnerability results as much from the failures of others as her own weakness; it is no action of Mina’s that allows the Count access to her bedroom, but Renfield’s betrayal in giving his master the necessary permission to enter the house. → Dracula has drained not only her blood, but also her will to resist; he is, in sexual terms, more seducer than rapist and, for a modern reader, this might lessen the crime, but for a Victorians seduction would have been infinitely worse: it is sexual desire rather than sexual activity that is the true source of danger, and as Mina herself makes clear, she experiences desire under Dracula’s attentions. → The fantastic element has been expelled, and we return to the safe, ordinary reality of the opening; the story we have just been told is, despite its elaborate detail and fundamentally documentary nature, unsupported by any original documents. → The fictive audience, are left to accept or reject based purely on the internal evidence, and - since the danger is safely past - need not react at all if we choose. VI: “DRACULA” AND THE URBAN GOTHIC → Thus sex is paradoxically seen as both social and anti-social, it helps to define individual identity while at the same time threatening the collective; no wonder, then, that sex is such an explosive issue for the late Victorians, for whom these two poles of identity had become so crucial and so fragile.

→ It might also help explain the novel’s popularity at the time of imperialistic fervor concealing deep anxieties about the future of the empire: Dracula is not merely fantastic, it is an example of the Urban Gothic, that modern version of the fantastic marked by its dependence on empiricism and the discourse of science. → While “Carmilla” resembles a traditional ghost story, “Dracula” is constructed like that other form which comes into its own in the 1890s, the detective story. → A method for dealing with the supernatural must be created, drawing on the most powerful and prestigious tools at their disposal: the methods of science, shaped by a secular world view - paradoxically, the very world view that was initially overthrown by the fantastic intrusion. → The central appeal of fantastic literature is that, like the violent scapegoat rituals it mimics, it allows its writers and readers simultaneously to acknowledge and deny those aspects od themselves and their world that they find most troubling - to see them both as part of the community and as available for sacrifice.

THE OCCIDENTAL TOURIST: DRACULA AND THE ANXIETY OF REVERSE COLONIZATION → Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” (1897) participates in that “modernizing” of Gothic which occurs at the close of the nineteenth century: Stoker’s novel achieves its effects by bringing the terror of the Gothic home. → Dracula is a “representation of fears that are more universal than a specific focus on the Victorian background would allow”. → 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. I → The fear is that what has been represented as the “civilized” world is on the point of being colonized by “primitive” forces; these forces can originate outside the civilized world or they can inhere in the civilized itself. → A terrifying reversal has occurred: the colonizer finds himself in the position of the colonized, the exploiter becomes exploited, the victimizer victimized, and such fears are linked to a perceived decline. → Dynamite novels, with their emphasis on anarchist or nihilist activities, originated partly in the Victorian fascination with the “criminal element”, especially as it was thought to exist among the growing urban underclass; by contrast, reverse colonization narratives are obsessed with the spectacle of the primitive and the atavistic. → Unlike dynamite or invasion-scare narratives, which generally aim at a documentary-like realism, turn-of-thecentury fictions involving the empire often inhabit the regions of romance and the supernatural. → 1°: narratives of invasion and colonization, not central to the plot, intrude always upon the main action of the story; 2°: emphasis on atavism, demonism and the supernatural, and the psychic regression. → The travel narrative clearly displays aspects of imperial ideology; the travel narrative concerns itself with boundaries - both with maintaining and with transgressing them. → The Count’s transgressions and aggressions are placed in the context, provided by innumerable travel narratives, of late-Victorian forays into the “East”; the Gothic and the travel narrative problematize, separately and together, the very boundaries on which British imperial hegemony depended: between civilized and primitive, colonizer and colonized, victimizer and victim. II → Stoker moved his Gothic story to a place that, for readers in 1897, resonated in ways Styria did not; Transylvania was known as part of the vexed “Eastern Question” that so obsessed British foreign policy in the 1880s and 1890s. → In Stoker’s version of the myth, vampires are intimately linked to military conquest and to the rise and fall of empires. → The ambiguity underscores the impossibility of untangling the two aspects of Dracula’s essential nature, since his vampirism is interwoven with his status as a conqueror and invader. → For Stoker, the vampire “race” is simply the most violent and threatening of the numerous warrior races -Turk, Berserker, Hun, Saxon, Slovak, Magyar, Szekely- inhabiting the area. → By situating Dracula in the Carpathians, and by continually blurring the lines between the Count’s vampiric and warrior activities; Stoker forges seemingly “natural” links among three of his principal concerns: racial strife, the collapse of empire, and vampirism. → Dracula’s move to London indicates that Great Britain, rather than the Carpathians, is now the scene of these connected struggles; the Count has penetrated to the heart of modern Europe’s largest empire, and his very presence seems to presage its doom. → The Count can threaten the integrity of the nation precisely because of the nature of his threat to personal integrity, his attacks involve more than an assault on the isolated self, the subversion and loss of one’s individual identity; Dracula imperils not simply his victims’ personal identities, but also their cultural, political, and racial selves.

→ In Dracula vampirism designates a kind of colonization of the body; horror arises not because Dracula destroys bodies, but because he appropriates and transforms them. → All the novel’s vampires are distinguished by their robust health and their equally robust fertility; the vampire serves, then, to highlight the alarming decline among the British, since the undead are, paradoxically, both “healthier” and more “fertile” than the living: a vampire attack can serve to invigorate its victim. → Harker becomes tired and white-haired as the action proceeds, while Dracula, whose white hair grows progressively darker, becomes more vigorous. → The arrival of little Quincey Harker at the story’s close signals the final triumph over Dracula, since the Harkers’ ability to secure an heir is the surest indication that the vampire’s threat has been mastered. → That Dracula propagates his race solely through the bodies of women suggests an affinity, or even an identity, between vampiric sexuality and female sexuality; both are represented as primitive and voracious, and both threaten patriarchal hegemony. → Female sexuality has only one legitimate function, propagation within the bounds of marriage: once separated from that function, as Lucy’s desire is, female sexuality becomes monstrous. → Dracula’s invasion and appropriation of female bodies does not distinguish him from his Western antagonists as much as at first appears; instead of being uncannily Other, the vampire is here revealed as disquietingly familiar. → The lack of autobiographical materials makes it difficult to determine the extent, if any, to which Stoker consciously felt himself in solidarity with his Irish brethren. → Dracula suggests two equations in relation to English-Irish politics: not just, Dracula is to England as Ireland is to England, but, Dracula is to England as England is to Ireland; Dracula’s journey from Transylvania to England could be read as a reversal of Britain’s imperial exploitations of “weaker” races, including the Irish; Dracula’s physical mastery of his British victims begins with an intellectual appropriation of their culture, which allows him to delve the workings of the “native mind”. III → Jonathan Harker’s initial journey to Castle Dracula constitutes a travel narrative in miniature, and the opening entries in his journal reproduce the conventions of this popular Victorian genre: Harker’s early journal entries clearly reveal his Orientalist perspective, which structures what he sees and what he misses as he travels through the Carpathians. → Harker’s first two acts - nothing that his train is late, and then traversing a boundary he considers symbolic function as a kind of shorthand, alerting readers that Harker’s journal is to be set against the background of lateVictorian travel narratives: Harker’s first three journal entries are so thoroughly conventional as to parody the travel genre. → For Harker, as for most Victorian travel writers, that “sense” begins with the assumption that an unbridgeable gap separates the Western traveller from Eastern peoples. → His favorite word in this first section is “picturesque”, that stock term of the travel genre; throughout his journey, he is able to reduce everything he encounters to an example of the picturesque or the poetic, and, by Harker’s criteria, Dracula is the most “Western” character in the novel. → Dracula’s preoccupation with English culture is not motivated by a disinterested desire for knowledge; instead, his Occidentalism represents the essence of bad faith, since it both promotes and masks the Count’s sinister plan to invade and exploit Britain and her people. → Dracula can “pass”: to impersonate an Englishman, and do it convincingly, is the goal of Dracula’s painstaking research into “English life and customs and manners”, a goal Dracula himself freely, if rather disingenuously, acknowledges. → A large part of the terror he inspires originates in his ability to stroll, unrecognized and unhindered, through the streets of London; as he tells Harker, his status as “master” resides in this ability, so long as no one recognizes him as a “stranger”, he is able to work his will unhampered. → Stoker’s text never explicitly acknowledges the continuity between Dracula’s actions and British imperial practices, but it continually forces us to see the first as a terrifying parody of the second. → Since Dracula’s growth is not bound by a single lifetime, but instead covers potentially limitless generations, the proper analogy for his development is not that of an individual; he is in effect his own species, or his own race, displaying in his person the progress of ages. → He is dangerous as the representative or embodiment of a race which, all evidence suggested, was poised to “step forward” and becomes “masters” of those who had already “spent their strength”. → Dracula “first invites or admits a monster, then entertains or is entertained by monstrosity for some extended duration, until in its closing pages it expels or repudiates the monster and all the disruption that he/she/it brings”; this triple rhythm also characterizes many narratives of reverse colonization.

→ The novel in fact ends twice; the narrative proper closes with a fantasy of revitalized English supremacy: his invasion repulsed, the Count is driven back to Transylvania, and destroyed there. → Morris thus leads a double life in Dracula; he stands with his allies in Anglo-Saxon brotherhood, but he also, as representative of an Ame...