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.
Being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant. The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production around which I would like to map a few detours. Indeed terms like serious and rigorous tend to be code words, in academia as well as other contexts, for disciplinary correctness; they signal a form of training and learning that confirms what is already known according to approved methods of knowing, but they do not allow for visionary insights or flights of fancy. Training of any kind, in fact, is a way of refusing a kind of Benjaminian relation to knowing, a stroll down uncharted streets in the “wrong” direction; it is precisely about staying in well-lit territories and about knowing exactly which way to go before you set out. Like many others before me, I propose that instead the goal is to lose one’s way, and indeed to be prepared to lose more than one’s way. Losing, we may agree with Elizabeth Bishop, is an art, and one “that is not too hard to master / Though it may look like a disaster.”
In this quintessential work of queer theory, Jack Halberstam takes aim at the protected status of male masculinity and shows that female masculinity has offered a distinct alternative to it for well over two centuries. Demonstrating how female masculinity is not some bad imitation of virility, but a lively and dramatic staging of hybrid and minority genders, Halberstam catalogs the diversity of gender expressions among masculine women from nineteenth-century pre-lesbian practices to contemporary drag king performances.
Through detailed textual readings as well as empirical research, Halberstam uncovers a hidden history of female masculinities while arguing for a more nuanced understanding of gender categories that would incorporate rather than pathologize them. He rereads Anne Lister's diaries and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness as foundational assertions of female masculine identity; considers the enigma of the stone butch and the politics surrounding butch/femme roles within lesbian communities; and explores issues of transsexuality among “transgender dykes”—lesbians who pass as men—and female-to-male transsexuals who may find the label of “lesbian” a temporary refuge. Halberstam also tackles such topics as women and boxing, butches in Hollywood and independent cinema, and the phenomenon of male impersonators.
Mod opinion: I've tried to read this book and am really, really not a fan of the constant misgendering of trans man in here and how stone butches are conflated with all of butch identity (and I AM a nonbinary stone butch), I had to dnf.
"Butch is always a misnomer-- not male, not female, masculine but not male, female but not feminine, the term serves as a placeholder for the unadmissable, for that which remains indefinable or unspeakable within the many identifications that we make and that we claim."
"Masculinity, of course, is what we make it; it has important relations to maleness, increasingly interesting relations to transexual maleness, and a historical debt to lesbian butchness."
"The Greek word, catachresis, means the rhetorical practice of misnaming something for which there would otherwise be no words.
[...]For Derrida, catachresis captures the inherent linguistic instability in all signifying practices and for Spivak it names the inherent colonial violence lurking in the practice of naming and identifying, systematizing and translating."
In an interview in The New York Times Magazine in 2016, Alison Bechdel, who appeared in the photograph accompanying the piece dressed in a very smart tailored suit, was asked: "In Fun Home, you wrote about becoming a connoisseur of masculinity at a young age. Today a young person like you would be more likely to identify as transgender than gay. Is the butch lesbian endangered?" "Well, first of all, great question!! Second, wow, in the New York Times? Really? Third, well, is the butch endangered?" Bechdel answers adroitly: "I think the way I first understood my lesbianism, before I had more of a political awareness of it, was like: Oh, I'm a man trapped in a female body. I would've just gone down that road if it had been there. But I'm so glad it wasn't, because I really like being this kind of unusual woman. I like making this new space in the world."
So, is butch the designation of a new space or an old space? The article is ambivalent and implies both that butch is an old-fashioned form of identification that is in danger of being eclipsed by transgenderism and that it is a "new space in the world." And maybe that captures perfectly what shall hereafter be known as "the temporal paradox of the butch" —s/he is out of time and ahead of his/her time and behind the times all at once. Butch is simultaneously a marker of what Elizabeth Freeman calls "temporal drag" or "the visceral pull of the past on the supposedly revolutionary present" and of certain forms of what Juana Maria Rodriguez terms "sexual futures." The uncanny, uncertain, dislocated, and indefinable terrain of the butch competes with our sense of the stubborn, recalcitrant, unmoving, and unmoved essence of the butch. Butch was supposed to fade away as a category precisely because it encapsulated the ugly, the dowdy, the backward, and the tragic, but its calcified intransigence may actually have equipped the category for survival!
Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Addition of Female Masculinity, Jack Halberstam, 2018. (emphasis my own)
