Invasions Real and Imagined: Stoker’s Gothic Narratives

Abstract

When Stoker wrote Dracula, he had his master vampire invade England, near ‘the ruin of Whitby Abbey, which was sacked by the Danes’ (Leatherdale, 1998: 116) in AD 867. That reference as well as other frequent references to real and imagined invasions means that Dracula can be described as an invasion narrative, a type of plot that originated with George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking in 1871 and produced more familiar novels such as The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1898). The invasion narrative remained popular during the period that Stoker was writing because the English feared invasion by other industrialized powers (especially Germany), reverse colonialism, and the encroachment of immigrants from Eastern Europe.1 Although invasions are standard Gothic fare even today, Stoker’s works, even those that are not Gothic, are unusually dominated by references to invasions. His most Gothic works – Dracula (1897), The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), The Lady of the Shroud (1909), and The Lair of the White Worm (1911) – all centre on real or imagined invasions, and references to actual historical invasions loom in the background of The Snake’s Pass (1890), The Mystery of the Sea (1902), The Man (1905), and ‘The Squaw’ (1893).