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.
Exchanges between male and female masculinities, I suggest, have the potential to go both ways.
The question, then, might be not what do female masculinities borrow from male masculinities, but rather what do men borrow from butches?
... a plethora of new masculinities that do not simply feed back into the static loop that makes maleness plus power into the formula for abuse... For the masculine woman; she is... more likely, furthermore, to give than to take.
Radclyffe Hall told her lover Souline: "If I am the 'giver' then take what I give . . . and take it without misgiving." She describes her hero Stephen Gordon's desire, furthermore, as "a bitter loving."...
In each formulation, the butch counters the power of her masculinity with her own abjection, her own loss, her own vulnerability.... for the multiple ways in which women produce and name new masculinities. Sometimes these new masculinities are produced as new renditions of male masculinities; sometimes they are produced as original forms of a growing subculture.
"Raging Bull," by British artist Sadie Lee, ... confronts us with the hard stare of a bull dyke,
a powerful and built body that is not obviously female but that is obviously not male. The face has no facial hair, and the chest gives a hint of bound breasts. The bull dyke's arms are folded in defiance, and they are disproportionately large for the body.
The raging bull wears butch drag, the white T-shirt, blue jeans, and black belt, and the red backdrop reflects the rage in the bull dyke's eyes...
The butch resists the position of becoming an object of scrutiny and returns the stare with hard resolve.
Halberstam, Judith, and Jack Halberstam. Female Masculinity. Duke University Press, 1998.
Raging Bull, Sadie Lee, 1992 ,oil on canvas, 60" x 48" Private Collection
The vampire will puncture and make the skin with his fangs [such that]...the outside becomes the inside and the hide no longer conceals or contains, it offers itself up as text, as body, as monster.
Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters
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.
“female power in TCM2 [Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2] is channeled through the perfect antidote to the hapless, aristocratic, lethargic Gothic heroine—
a white trash bitch with a chain saw” --Judith Halberstam
posted these on twitter, thought i might as well post ‘em here too. Illustrations for my thesis project on women in horror movies
While capitalism produces some people's success through other people's failures, the ideology of positive thinking insists that success depends only on working hard and that failure is always of your own doing.
