Hello, sorry if this question is too heavy, you’re free to ignore it if you do not wish to answer or you can use DMs to answer privately. I was just curious, because a friend of mine told me you thought Bram Stoker was antisemitic. I was just wondering what led you to believe that?
I’ll answer this publicly because I keep forgetting how whitewashed “Dracula” has become in the public opinion thanks to social media.
The only issue I take with this ask is the wording. It’s not “me” who says so, the “Other” in “Dracula” being a metaphorical Jewish non-white immigrant coming to the East to conquer and infect the pure blood of innocent white British women with his disease is one (if not the most) popular interpretations of the novel, amongst scholars because of the historical context (late 19th century) in which the novel was written.
Daniel Pick, “Terrors of the night’: Dracula and ‘degeneration’ in the late nineteenth century” (1988): “The novel provided a metaphor for current political and sexual political discourses on morality and society, representing the price of selfish pursuits and criminal depravity. The family and the nation, it seemed to many, were beleaguered by syphilitics, alcoholics, cretins, the insane, the feeble-minded, prostitutes and a perceived 'alien invasion' of Jews from the east who, in the view of many alarmists, were feeding off and ‘poisoning’ the blood of the Londoner.”
Carol Margaret Davison, “Britain, Vampire Empire: Fin-de-Siècle Fears and Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (2004) : “One of the more important contributions to Dracula scholarship in recent years has been the examination of Bram Stoker's bloodthirsty Count as a stereotypical Jewish figure. […] Adapting Royce MacGillivray's claim that Stoker created in Dracula 'a myth comparable in vitality to that of the Wandering Jew, Faust, or Don Juan' (518), I would maintain that while the aristocratic figure of Count Dracula uniquely combines all three figures, he represents the apogee in the development of the vampiric Wandering Jew in British Gothic literature.”
Judith Halberstam and Jack Halberstam; “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker's "Dracula’” (1993): “Dracula, I thought, with his peculiar physique, his parasitical desires, his aversion to the cross and to all the trappings of Christianity, his blood-sucking attacks, and his avaricious relation to money, resembled stereotypical anti-Semitic nineteenth-century representations of the Jew. Subsequent readings of the novel with attention to the connections in the narrative between blood and gold, race and sex, sexuality and ethnicity, confirmed my sense that the anti-Semite's Jew and Stoker's vampire bore more than a family resemblance. The connection I had made began to haunt me; I uncovered biographical material and discovered that Stoker was good friends with, and inspired by, Richard Burton, the author of a tract reviving the blood libel against Jews in Damascus. I read essays by Stoker in which he railed against degenerate writers for not being good Christians. My conclusions seemed sound, the vampire and the Jew were related, and monstrosity in the Gothic novel had much to do with the discourse of modern anti-Semitism.”
This is the height of Colonial Britain, with colonial tensions between European nations rising (and exploding in World War I). Rudyard Kipling “The White Man's Burden” (1898) was published one year after “Dracula”; where is stated the white man has the moral obligation and duty to civilize the “non-white barbarians”. Sort of how the “White British heroes” put an end to the “non-white Jewish immigrant” reign of terror in the novel.
Robert Eggers is aware of this, as he has discussed in interviews, explaining he had no interest in adapting any of this: “My works tend to be less intentionally politically charged, and that was also something that was not necessarily front of mind for me. I think there's a lot of criticism about "Dracula" and Murnau's film, about this Other from the East coming in. But that's not what excites me about the story.
I think that what ultimately rose to the top, as the theme or trope that was most compelling to me, was that of the demon-lover. In "Dracula," the book by Bram Stoker, the vampire is coming to England, seemingly, for world domination. Lucy and Mina are just convenient throats that happen to be around. But in this "Nosferatu," he's coming for Ellen. This love triangle that is similar to "Wuthering Heights," the novel, was more compelling to me than any political themes.”
By making his adaptation a strigoi lover folktale, where everything Orlok does is connected to Ellen herself (and not “world domination”), Eggers removed the antisemitic plot of the “Reverse Colonialism panic” subtext of the book.
“In “Dracula”, the character of Lucy Westenra unfolds into two different versions: Lucy before being bitten by Count Dracula and a vampirised version of herself. The Lucy that we meet at the beginning of the novel has generally been perceived as a representation of the figure of the Victorian ‘Angel in the House’ (already, as I have argued, somewhat decadent), as she is portrayed as a passive, powerless and charming creature, possessor of an ethereal and effortless beauty […] a loving, yet defenceless young woman […]. The characters that surround her are well aware of the young lady's weak condition […] Lucy's weak disposition, along with her “angelical” appearance, is what makes those who appreciate her willing to protect her at all costs.
When the Count bites Lucy during one of her sleepwalking episodes, she becomes a vampirised version of herself; […] being “infected” by Dracula […] she becomes aggressive, especially in nocturnal encounters with the group of men […] distorted face, full of rage […] becomes antimaternal […] [The men] realize […] Lucy must be destroyed in order to preserve the integrity of their community.”
— Maria Magdalena Veny Planiol; “Patriarchal Propaganda and Manipulation in Bram Stoker's Dracula: In Search of a New Model of Victorian Femininity” (2020)
“Do extend my tardy congratulations to your wife. She truly is beautiful. A nonpareil. Almost a… sylph.” // “You mustn't be swept up in her fairy ways.”
“[Leah] Wyman and [George N.] Dionisopoulos […] claim that the “powerful whore” is a character who “uses sex for her own pleasure and to gain advantage”. In this regard, Lucy is blamed for the “power” her sexuality has over the men, and this leads to her needing to be punished for it. Wyman and Dionisopoulos note that the “powerful whore” is “depicted as evil and viewed as a danger that needs to be stopped”, which might make the male characters feel justified in their mission to kill and mutilate Lucy. The notion of Lucy as being able to use her sexual power against the men, coupled with her being the monster that needs to be sacrificed in order to rid the community of the threat she poses, establishes why the men need to rid themselves of Lucy. The men also try to rationalize punishing her because she “let” Dracula try to corrupt their view of femininity.
Lucy, who became the monster and, through her transgressive sexuality, is seen as “evil”, has been made pure by being sacrificed, but she was never fit to be a mother and wife [like Mina] [...] Lucy never fills the role of the ‘angel in the house’ in the novel, and it can also be argued that her role transforms from “whore” to “monster”. […] As Anne Cranny-Francis “Sexual Politics and Political Repression in Bram Stoker's Dracula”notices: “whereas vampiric Lucy represents a threat to the male order, the passive, feminine Mina functions as a kind of patriarchal patsy”.
[…] Lucy, on the other hand, starts as a “whore” and then, through her increasingly transgressive behavior, is seen as a monster. The repercussions these different roles have for the womens' fates in the novel is that Mina, while being punished in the form of exclusion from the group, gets to be “purified” while she is alive, while Lucy has to be killed and mutilated before she gets to be viewed as “purified” in the eyes of the men”.
— Julia Bergstrand; “Mina, the ‘Angel’, and Lucy, the ‘Monster’: Two sides of Femininity in Bram Stoker's Dracula” (2020)
“[…] the vampire women are examples of sex-role reversal, with the women assuming the active, aggressive role […] Clearly, Stoker is both employing and reversing a number of conventional stereotypes: “vampire women not only reject motherhood, they dine on children, as special gourmet items peculiar to the female palates.” […] In Lucy's depiction we see concrete evidence that “the vampires … suggest not marauding sexual assault so much as awakening sexuality.” However, the sexuality, once awakened, is terrifying, requiring for its defeat “all the resources of society and religion”.
Not only is Lucy the more sexualized figure, she is the more rejecting figure […] in “Dracula”, the split between the sexualized female and the madonna is especially vivid and obvious. The consequence of this perception of women is both the ambivalence toward and the doubling of Lucy [the whore] and Mina [Madonna] […]
Thus, it is not surprising that the central anxiety of the novel is the fear of the devouring woman. The threatening pre-Oedipal fantasy, the regression to a primary oral obsession, the attraction and destruction of the vampires of Dracula are, then, interrelated and interdependent. What they spell out is a fusion of the memory of nursing at the mother's breast with a primal scene fantasy which produces the fear that the sexually desirable woman will annihilate if she is not first destroyed. The fantasy of incest and matricide evokes the mythic image of the vagina dentata evident in so many folktales, in which the mouth and the vagina are identified with one another by the primitive mind and pose the threat of castration to all men until the teeth are extracted by the hero.”
— Phyllis A. Roth; “Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (in “Dracula: Criticism” edited by Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal, 1997)
“There is a monster in the room!” // “Papa! Papa! Don’t let her feed me to the monster! Stab him!” // “I thought it was agreed you were to keep the girls from her. […] You mustn't be swept up in her fairy ways.”
“Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) engages both contemporary medical models and common-sense conceptions of female criminality and sexuality. From Dracula, the figure of Lucy Westenra emerges as a quintessential femme fatale. Lucy's neck bears the characteristic marking of the vampire, but we never witness the bite[s]; as a result, ambiguity surrounds the causal relationship in the process of becoming a vampire. The novel produces this ontological ambiguity to perpetuate and to exacerbate contemporary views regarding the radical instability of female nature.”
These “bites” are connected with her somnambulism and dreams, and “under this logic, Lucy's encounter[s] with the vampire brings only latent impulses to the surface. Stoker's narrative exploits this physiological uncertainty to perpetuate the sensational terror that all female sexuality is monstrous, threatening to render the British man a debased specimen of his former glory. […] Stoker's novels enact the same anxious rhetoric that likewise informs the portrait of female sexuality in nineteenth-century sexology.”
— Beth Shane; “‘Your Girls That You All Love Are Mine Already’: Criminal Female Sexuality in Bram Stoker's Dracula” (2016)
Well thanks for answering the post so soon but I do have some follow up questions. If that’s alright.
First and foremost being, a lot of these sources seem to be the opinions of others on his work, all from people of the modern day, not people who knew him personally. That is how we got the famed misconception that Vlad Tepes was Dracula (“Scholars” who read his work coming to their own conclusion). All three sources you provided even stating in their own text that “It would seem” or “I believe” as their reason to come to this conclusion. And even overlook the fact Quincy and Helsing are foreigners themselves. Can you direct me to anything by Stoker himself that would imply this to be the case?
The second being, it seems (as suggested in the original post and confirmed from our mutual that you’ve spoken to in DMs) you believe Bram as being a Brit and therefore carried their values. You are aware he was an Irish man who grew up during the great famine? Therefore he had a first hand experience with a superior empire (The English) enforcing its own power over a foreign land, bringing misery, blight, death. Flipping the script on the English in his novel helped capture the horrors these people of Ireland had to endure and allowed them to view it from their own perspective. Wouldn’t you agree?
Thirdly, all of these sources didn’t cite who Dracula actually was based off of. Bram Stoker served under the famed actor Sir Henry Irving (best known for his role as The Devil in “Faust”), who was one of the physical and characteristic inspiration for how Dracula was to look and control the room he was in. Were you aware of this before hand?
Fourth and final, I swear I won’t continue after this, it is stated by Dracula himself that he’s a descendant of Attila The Hun in the novel. Are you certain “Other” is in reference to him being a Jewish stand-in and not carrying Asian heritage? Or even the fact that he’s just a foreigner in general. Like, Helsing even says “Could be a Turkish Lord”.
My apologies for so many questions, be much appreciated if I can get a response. Thank you for your time.
I’m not an intelectual authority on “Dracula” studies and Literature isn’t my area of expertise either (although one of the many sources we Historians use), so I don’t know why I’m being asked all of this when I shared papers from actual intelectual authorities on the matter. Which you clearly haven’t read since they feature the biographical facts you are asking. I don’t know who you are, but you seem to think you have the scholarly expertise and intellectual influence to argue against them because social media gave you that illusion.
The only reason I’ll engage with this is the anti-intellectualism and anti-academia sentiment. To have these “opinions” (as you call them) and for them to be validated among their peers (which isn’t you nor your average Joe) these people spend years or even decades of their lives studiying and investing on their own education. Also, in academia you can’t make a claim without citing sources/documentation (kind of how you are doing by throwing a bunch of unsourced “facts”). You have to earn your intellectual authority and credibility among your peers, too. That’s why some “opinions” are more “valid” than others in academic context, and there’s a thing called consensus among academics; when most share the same thesis/theory and it becomes the most viable interpretation.
Which is the case with Count Dracula possibly being inspired by the Draculs from Romania. Also from “Dracula” in Ch.18:
“I have asked my friend Arminius, of Buda-Pesth University, to make his record, and from all the means that are, he tell me of what he has been. He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land. If it be so, then was he no common man, for in that time, and for centuries after, he was spoken of as the cleverest and the most cunning, as well as the bravest of the sons of the `land beyond the forest.'”
There’s a reason Dracula being inspired by Vlad the Impaler is the consensus among Dracula scholars, and the “Dracula was actually based on Irish history” (mostly from Bob Curran) doesn’t really stand and it’s also a case of “Stoker was Irish and was into Irish folklore” when he extensively researched Transylvanian folklore for his book, a process which is well-documented. Stoker might have never set foot in Transylvania, but he read a lot about it. Also, this theory fails to acknowledge European vampire folklore was not only widespread but fairly similar, so Ireland having vampire folktales comparable to Eastern Europe isn’t, at all, unexpected (because so does Germany, Italy, Greece, etc., and that doesn’t make Dracula Italian). Ironically, Romanians aren’t really fans of this association between one of their national heroes and villainous Dracula, either (but it’s good for the tourism).
Ethnically, in the book Count Dracula is Transylvanian and Székely, not “Asian”, nor is he ever called a “Turkish Lord”, his fight against the Turks is often mentioned. The reference to Attila the Hun and a bunch of “conquering races” in Ch.3 is connected to his plan of “world domination”: “My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side. Your girls that you all love are mine already.” (Ch. 23). Romania was part of the Ottoman Empire (“Turkey-land”) for centuries, including during the lifetime of Vlad III (who fought hard against the Ottomans), and apparently fictional Dracula, too, as Van Helsing says.
In Ch.1, Jonathan Harker writes: “the impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule”. The East is the “exotic” in the novel, because Orientalism was all the rage in the late 19th century (which was also used to advocate the superiority of the West concerning the East).
Ireland was a part of the British empire, and Stoker not only began writting and publishing while in London (not on his home country), but he was also a known supporter of the British Empire and viewed the imperial project as a positive, civilizing force (not unheard of as Colonialism goes). Lucy Westenra is the character who’s usually considered to have some Irish inspiration, mostly her surname was associated with aristocratic Irish family (the Lords Rossmore); but given what happens to her in the book, I don’t know how positive that is.
“Dracula” takes places in London (the heart of the British empire) and the heroes are British, not Irish. Van Helsing is Dutch and Quincy Morris is American, which, in European terms isn’t exactly the same as Eastern Europeans or even Southern Europeans. We might all be Caucasian, but we don’t share the same “whiteness” as Northern Europeans because of the Ottoman and Moors rules.
