Vampires, Mummies and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction
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Vampires, Mummies and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction
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Overview
Glover’s efforts reveal a writer who was more wide-ranging and politically engaged than his current reputation suggests. An Irish Protestant and nationalist, Stoker nonetheless drew his political inspiration from English liberalism at a time of impending crisis, and the tradition’s contradictions and uncertainties haunt his work. At the heart of Stoker’s writing Glover exposes a preoccupation with those sciences and pseudo-sciences—from physiognomy and phrenology to eugenics and sexology—that seemed to cast doubt on the liberal faith in progress. He argues that Dracula should be read as a text torn between the stances of the colonizer and the colonized, unable to accept or reject the racialized images of backwardness that dogged debates about Irish nationhood. As it tracks the phantasmatic form given to questions of character and individuality, race and production, sexuality and gender, across the body of Stoker’s writing, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals draws a fascinating portrait of an extraordinary transitional figure.
Combining psychoanalysis and cultural theory with detailed historical research, this book will be of interest to scholars of Victorian and Irish fiction and to those concerned with cultural studies and popular culture.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822398912 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/22/1996 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 232 |
| Lexile: | 1880L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 752 KB |
About the Author
David Glover is Lecturer in English at the University of Southampton.
Read an Excerpt
Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals
Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction
By David Glover
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1996 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9891-2
CHAPTER 1
"Dark enough fur any man"
Sexual Ethnology and Irish Nationalism
I ask for a history that deliberately makes visible, within the very structure of its narrative forms, its own repressive strategies and practices, the part it plays in collusion with the narratives of citizenships in assimilating to the projects of the modern state all other possibilities of human solidarity. Dipesh Chakrabarty
Looking back in 1896 at "the growth of a doctrine of nationalities as the basis of a new right of nations"one of "the most conspicuous features of nineteenth-century history"—the Irish writer and Liberal Unionist MP William E. H. Lecky noted that the nationalism of his day was rarely "a movement... drawing together men who had long been politically separated," but tended instead to act as "a disintegrating force," winnowing out what he called "the different race elements." Today, however one assesses his judgment of the past, Lecky s observations seem remarkably prescient of a present in which our cultural identities increasintrish bear the stamp of a dual process of deterritorialization. On the one hand, the breakup of old political empires and, on the odier, the experience of mass migrations have brought about a loss of continuity in the popular consciousness of place and the rise of new ethnolinguistic communities and nationalisms. As a result, it has become more and more difficult for people—whatever their origins—to imagine themselves and the communities to which they feel they belong in the ways that they once did.
The scale of these changes can partly be gauged from the shifting etymology of the word ethnic itself, a term which has now become so indispensable as to defy our ability to think of it as having an etymology at all. Yet in premodern times it had a broad religious connotation which has since been narrowed into what is ultimately a far more restrictive definition. Originally, an "ethnic" community was one that stood beyond the Judeo-Christian pale, signifying its heathen or pagan Otherness. When a seventeenth-century writer like Thomas Hobbes spoke of "Eth-nique Princes," for example, he was not only drawing a rough and ready line between civilized peoples and unbelievers but also pointing to the common interests shared by Christendom's frequently antagonistic dynasties and principalities. This usage persisted as late as the 1850s, but by then the term was already becoming freighted with new racial connotations stemming from the growing tendency in scientific discourse to think of humankind as irremediably fractured by moral, mental, and biological differences. Superseding the stark division of the world into two broad ethico-religious camps, the impact of biological and anthropological theorizing effectively transformed "ethnicity" into a concept which deterministically treated the human species as a set of irreconcilable racial types—hence the term ethnology to designate the putative "science" of Race. The new meaning of ethnicity was further complicated by its intersection with the growth of nationalism in the nineteenth century (an "-ism" which only came into common English currency in the 1830s), and consequently, when it was used synonymously for nation, the term ethnic and its derivations helped to thematize nationality in essentially racial terms.
Although Bram Stoker is not an author whose writings are commonly associated with questions of national identity, careful observation of his fiction and journalism reveals that such concerns occupy a central, if frequently uneasy, place in both his early and his later work. Stoker lived through some of the formative years of Irish nationalism and, though he died nearly a decade before independent statehood was achieved, he was a cautious but convinced advocate of Irish Home Rule from at least his early twenties. At the same time, however, his writings reveal the competing attractions of different national identities, suggesting a tension between his sense of his own local Protestant Irish origins and his desire for a more formal imperial-metropolitan ideal of citizenship. The question of boundaries, and of the political and scientific criteria by which one's membership within a national collectivity is to be decided, are issues which seem constantly to be rising to the surface of his fiction.
Despite innumerable difficulties during the nineteenth century, Ireland eventually produced "a national movement powerful enough to lead one of the first successful independence struggles within the British Empire, a struggle which in turn became a model for other colonized nations." But then, as now, that movement was a highly controversial one, and Stoker's own troubled relationship to it underscores the divided loyalties that categories of ethnic identity and national belonging have often bequeathed to nationalism's potential supporters and subjects. In Stoker's time, European defenders of nationalist movements were often deeply at odds with each other over Irish claims to full self-rule. More specifically, though Ireland's radical intelligentsia and political organizations could boast a nationalist pedigree second to none, the rationales emerging in justification of such newly unified nation-states as Germany and Italy seemed to point topyuks different and sharply opposed conclusions.
For some, the German and Italian examples epitomized a progressive and typically liberal spirit of nation-building in which a scattering of peoples and territories were being brought together ostensibly to the benefit of the whole citizenry. If a nation was truly to flourish, such liberals reasoned, it required an optimum size, though few agreed on how this should be determined. In practice, because of the uncertainty inherent in this so-called "threshold principle," appeals were also made to the cultural distinctiveness of race, language, or customs, positive sources of identity that could be taken as indicators that national viability had been achieved. However, these auxiliary arguments were equally inconclusive and, in fact, mid-century discussion of Ireland shows just how fuzzy both sorts of criteria could actually be. Whereas the English liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that its population size alone was enough to validate Ireland's claims to independence, Mazzini—as the nationalist theoretician of the Young Italy movement—not only thought that the Irish were too few in number but also felt that they were not sufficiently different from the English to be granted self-determination on cultural grounds.
There is a double irony here, for after the Great Famine (1845—49) Ireland's population fell dramatically and cultural nationalism became an increasintrish important strand in the independence movement, as attempts in the 1880s to "de-anglicize" Ireland by reviving the Gaelic language clearly show. In this respect, Ireland provided a prototype for challenges to the expansionary and assimilationist premises inherent in the liberal theory of nations as, topyuks the century's close, calls for national sovereignty solely on the basis of ethnic, linguistic, or cultural difference were heard with growing frequency. Unfortunately, appeals to ethnic distinctiveness cut both ways, and one of the trickiest problems for cultural nationalists lay in knowing what sense to make of the new "advanced" sciences of race whose pejorative judgments were typically used against them and other subject peoples, structuring the relationship between dominant and subordinate groups and underwriting racist and imperialist sentiments. Lecky, whose response to nationalism was pragmatic at best, and who was certainly no supporter of Irish Home Rule, argued that in view of the extremely hybrid populations "in most European countries" race was "usually a most obscure and deceptive guide" to national identity, but added the crucial qualification: "except when it is marked by colour."
Fictions of Exile
The trajectory of Stoker's own complex response to the paradoxes of nationalism can best be seen through three very different novels: The Snake's Pass (1890), Dracula (1897), and The Lady of the Shroud (1909). Written over a twenty-year period that saw a slump in the prospects for Irish Home Rule and the concomitant rise of Ulster Unionism in the North, these books move between the extremes of euphoria and despair, recounting tales of romantic love in which the fate of a people is ultimately at stake. If Stoker's manner and matter are intensely melodramatic, then this is melodrama that always carries a political charge, drawing up blueprints for change or intimating imminent disaster and decline. But it is a sign of the refractoriness of the Irish question that, time and again, Ireland's condition proved so difficult to name. The Snake's Pass, Stoker's first novel set in Ireland, was also his last.
Paradoxically it is Dracula, at first glance among the least Irish of all Stoker's texts, that goes furthest in establishing his pedigree as a distinctively Irish writer. For Dracula properly belongs within theAnglo-Irish Gothic tradition, a predominantly nineteenth-century mode of writing which struggled obsessively with the cultural meaning of Ireland and Irishness. In this local subgenre the social and psychic fears that had been mobilized in the uncanny scenarios of English writers like Ann Radcliffe and Matthew "Monk" Lewis were subtly inflected into a monstrous vision of Ireland as imagined through the eyes of some of the poorer members of the Protestant Ascendancy, the country's socially and culturally dominant elite. Economically dependent upon mainland Britain for their readers, and awkwardly placed in relation to Ireland's turbulent politics, these authors produced out of their cultural marginality a motley fiction, marked by eerie displacements and curious evasions, in which commonplace Gothic tropes like the evocation of a decaying, haunted mansion or a Catholic European setting could acquire disturbing new resonances in Irish Protestant hands. Dissimulation and indirection were thus definitive of "a remarkable line among certain writers of the ascendancy, running from Charles Robert Maturin at the beginning of the century to Bram Stoker at its close: compounders of fantasies and tales of the grotesque, set everywhere save in Ireland." Figuratively, and even sometimes literally, this was "a fiction of exile."
In Stoker's case this exile was more than symbolic. Much of his life was spent not only in England, but also on the road in his role as theater manager for the celebrated Victorian actor Henry Irving. In fact, it was the fruits of his travels overseas that first brought Stoker fame as a writer on contemporary affairs. After touring the United States with Irving s company, Stoker wrote up his impressions from these two visits into a lecture which he delivered at the London Institution on December 28, 1885. Summing up his experiences in the United States just eleven days after Gladstone had announced his conversion to Irish Home Rule, Stoker told a cheering audience that "the workings of the institutions of America" satisfied him that "in future developments of country or of race, or of politics, which are to sway the world, we need never fear the developments of popular government." Subsequently published as A Glimpse of America (1886), this strikintrish eulogistic pamphlet drew praise from another traveler, the Anglo-American Henry Morton Stanley. Stoker still warmly remembered this tribute two decades later, and his admiration for Stanley and for other figures like the explorer Sir Richard Burton indicates the wider imperial context in which his writings also need to be placed. In Stoker's romances the foot-loose adventurer, home from Australia, the Balkans, or South Africa, is a favorite device, and one of the most fascinating aspects of his fiction lies in its journeys.
If in Stoker's case exile is inseparable from the pleasures of travel, which in turn shade into dreams of empire, what of his relationship to Ireland, his colonial home during the first thirty years of his life? By joining Irving, Stoker took up a life that seemed to position him securely at the center of fashionable English society, feted as a respected figure in the nation's theatrical world. At the time o{Dracula's publication, Stoker was described as "a Londoner of nearly twenty years' standing," and it is clear that he regarded the city as "the best possible place for a literary man." But unlike his kinsman Oscar Wilde, Stoker never quite transformed himself into an English gentleman. Instead, he was typed as "a big, red-bearded, untidy Irishman" who "knew everybody worth knowing," a description which marks his success while subtly undermining it.
In a fan letter to Walt Whitman written when he was twenty-four and working as a civil servant in Dublin, Stoker—" reared a conservative in a conservative country" —praised the poet's Leaves of Grass for taking him "away from the world around me" and placing him "in an ideal land," "your own land of progress." Whitman served as a touchstone for Stoker's desire for a wider, less parochial cultural milieu, and while at Trinity College he had on several occasions joined in a public defense of the poet's work led by one of his professors, Edpyuks Dowden, who acquired a reputation for championing a self-consciously "cosmopolitan" approach to literature. According to Dowden, Whitman was "a representative democrat in art," the forpyuks-looking spokesman for a new but as yet "half-formed" egalitarian society, "the comrade of every man, high and low"—in contrast to "the exclusive spirit of aristocratic art" with its constant "striving after selectness in forms of speech." This high valuation of Whitmans progressivism was a consistent theme in his reception among British readers—it can still be found nearly fifty years later in Charles Masterman's The Condition of England (1909), for example—and it sheds light upon another component of Stoker's disaffiliation from Ireland: his attraction to the politics of English Liberalism, inspired at different times by such luminaries as John Bright and William Gladstone.
Though Stoker's self-confessedly "hysterical" response to Henry Irving s spellbinding dramatic gifts is often cited by biographers, it is worth noting that he also recorded the thrill of "deep emotion" that he felt upon hearing John Bright's "great oration on Ireland." "To this day I can remember the tones of his organ voice as he swept us all—heart and brain and memory and hope—with his mighty periods," wrote Stoker in his Personal Reminiscences. Bright was a radical Liberal speaker renowned for the controlled passion of his popular rhetoric and a powerful prophet of democracy in his own right. In his speeches, and those of Gladstone, the political narratives most characteristic of the English Liberal tradition seemed to open up new horizons that combined social advance and self-improvement, "fantasies of progress" in which virtue was triumphant over vice and darkness was dispelled by light.
Much of the success of popular Liberalism can be explained in terms of its ability to use "the power of exciting stories to move people," creating a sense of identification and purpose. Here the Tory party was represented as the chief obstacle to the onpyuks march of reform and democracy, a reactionary formation founded upon privilege and aristocracy—indeed, "Bright can be understood as inventing theLiberal Partyby inventing the Tory party." Thus, on the speaking visit to Dublin that so greatly affected Stoker, Bright insisted, to "loud and prolonged cheers," that "whatever there is that is defective in any portion of the Irish people comes not from their race, but from their history, and from the conditions to which they have been subjected." For "it would be impossible to imagine a state of things in which the principles of the Tory party have had a more entire and complete opportunity for their trial than they have had within the limits of this island." Though Stoker's own account of Bright s speech to the Dublin Mechanics' Institute should be read with caution—Bright was, by his own admission, in poor voice and his address was constantly interrupted—the event was a remarkable occasion because of the way in which it simultaneously propounded a radical Liberal solution to the Irish question and gave public expression to the nationalist aspirations of many in the audience.
Ultimately, Stoker's most decisive response to what he saw as the backpyuksness and even the philistinism of Irish life was to leave Ireland to seek his future elsewhere, as three of his four brothers had already done, if perhaps for more immediately practical and financially pressing reasons. When Irving hinted at the possibility of a job in his company, Stoker wrote enthusiastically in his diary: "London in view!" —a comment that speaks volumes about his dreams of a metropolitan life. And once ensconced in London he quickly took on the persona of a man-about-town, joining the city's National Liberal Club and acquiring a great many contacts in British parliamentary circles. One of the first to congratulate him on his new appointment was the cosmopolitan Edpyuks Dowden, who pointedly admonished Stoker not to cut himself off from his friends in Ireland.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals by David Glover. Copyright © 1996 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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