When it is Appropriate to Racially Appropriate: Reverse Colonial Miscegenation in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Abstract

This presentation uses Victorian science to examine the racial conflict between Dracula and England in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. The novel’s horror situates itself in the context of Late Victorian England and its contemporary fear of Reverse Colonization: the fear that England’s empire, already in its onset of decline, will be invaded and colonized by an uncivilized other people. The development of evolutionary theory stimulated concern that the opposite of evolution – degeneration – was not only possible, but already in effect. Stoker expresses England’s decline in accord with degeneration theory by portraying English men as weary. He establishes fear of Reverse Colonization by portraying Dracula to possess the animalistic vitality England lacks. Dracula invades and disrupts notions of English identity by mirroring the nation’s intelligence and consuming its women’s blood. Blood symbolizes racial identity, political allegiance, and, according to persisting medieval medical theory, semen. Thus, Dracula effectively consumes English racial identity, causes his victims to politically defect, and proliferates the vampire race through rape when sucking women’s blood. The lattermost invasion tactic is facilitated, according to contemporary studies of craniology, by women’s latent sexuality and criminality. Despite critics’ assertions that Dracula portrays miscegenation (the interbreeding of different races) as racial annihilation, the birth of Quincey Harker from mixed racial inputs at the novel’s end symbolizes the revitalization of the English race. The novel thus responds to contemporary degeneration theory by proposing miscegenation (with vital races and in which England remains the dominant racial input) as a solution to Late Victorian decline.