Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Breaking the imperial-anthropological time

Abstract

Abstract While Dracula can be thought of as a vehicle of British Imperial ideology, the novel also evinces the emergence of a political unconscious which subverts that intention through projections, inversions and displacements, making Dracula both a representation of British imperialism and its other. This is enacted through a conflict between two temporal representations: a linear present time, congruent with a Social Darwinism that postulates western civilization at the peak of evolution and science as a guarantee of social order and progress; and a circular past time, which is associated with the permanence of barbarism and atavism, the supernatural, and religious spirituality returning cyclically with the force of the repressed. At the end of the nineteenth century, the signs of the times are so complex and their limits so blurred, confusing and ambiguous, that they are associated both with the Crew of Light and the uncanny, sublime Dracula. They are symptoms of the crisis of Modernity and the imperial Victorian decay, in which – following Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History – civilization implies barbarism (Benjamin 1985).