Productive Fear: Labor, Sexuality, and Mimicry in Bram Stoker's Dracula

Abstract

The anxieties of empire expressed in Dracula, Bram Stoker's classic vampire novel, have attracted a great deal of critical attention lately. Although the rise of vampirism can be traced back to medieval folklore, Dracula is decidedly modern, and much of the story actually takes place in London in a vigorous phase of Britannia's commercial and military expansion. Stoker began working on the novel in 1890 but did not have it published until 1897, the very year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee and the height of jingoism; it also a time when decadence became known.1 While Friedrich Kittler might have gone too far in claiming that Jonathan Harker, the English solicitor who visits Count Dracula's castle, is imperial spy (60), Patrick Brantlinger has fruitfully identified the novel as a piece of imperial Gothic. The main themes of this genre, according to Brantlinger, include individual regression or going and an invasion by the forces of barbarism and demonism (230). Dracula's invasion of London, as Stephen Arata lucidly explains, is a nightmarish incident of reverse colonization. Reminding us of Stoker's Anglo-Irish hyphenated identity and the debate over Irish Home Rule at the time, Arata argues that Stoker must be keenly aware of the tensions caused by colonial aggression and the racial problems that ensued. Transylvania, the count's native land, was known primarily as part of the vexed 'Eastern Question' that so obsessed British foreign policy in the 1880s and '90s, a land noted not only for the belief in vampires but also for political turbulence and racial strife (Arata, 627). I shall not dwell on the various sources of the lateVictorian cul-