Productive fear: labor, sexuality, and mimicry in Bram Stoker's Dracula.(Critical essay)

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 was also a time when imperial 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 an "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 native" 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 late-Victorian cultural anxieties concerned. Reading the major periodicals of this period, Samir Elbarbary finds a discourse of "primitivism and degeneracy," which undermines dominant evolutionism and scientific progressivism (113). In addition to the fears of atavism, miscegenation, and reverse colonization, some critics find obvious anti-Semitic connotations in the descriptions of Count Dracula's hoarding of money and sanguinary parasitism (Halberstam, 337-41; Gelder, 14-15). To this list one might add the fears of the "lumpenproletariat," of the Irish rebellion, of the "New Woman," of sexual transgressions, especially homosexuality perceived as "gross indecency" in the wake of Oscar Wilde's trial, or, of "sexual anarchy," to borrow Elaine Showalter's catchy book title. (2) Reacting to Dracula scholarship in the past two decades, which has dealt with various kinds of anxieties, Nicholas Daly reminds us of the phenomenal growth of the British Empire between 1870 and 1900. This period also witnessed much tighter government control, including the encroachment on the private sphere and the free market (182-83). The discourse of crisis, paradoxically, did not lead to actual collapse: "Fears there may well have been of the decline of Englishness within England, as well as assaults from without, but these fears had the effect of buttressing--not enfeebling--the power of the state" (Daly, 183). Furthermore, these fears "established a mission for a new group of professionals in human management" (183). Seeing the vampire fighters in the novel as a team of male experts, Daly relates them to the rise of professionalism in the late nineteenth century. He further claims that Dracula "uses anxiety to produce as both necessary and natural a particular form of professional, male, homosocial combination" (181).

This paper is an attempt to substantially revise and further develop Daly's intriguing "productive fear" thesis to arrive at an entirely different end. Drawing on Max Weber's study of the Protestant work ethic, I turn to the often neglected problematics of labor in the novel, highlighting the quasi-religious sense of high duty and ascetic hard work in the vampire fighters, the so-called "Crew of Light." The main thrust of my argument is that fear aroused by the paranoiac perception of sexual perversity begets a curious kind of work ethic in the imperial subject, reaffirming Enlightenment reason and scientific progressivism while, at the same time, betraying the very unreason in reason and the profound anxieties underneath the confidence in progress and empire. Contrary to Daly's reading, which overemphasizes the power of the team of male professionals to "manage" fear successfully, I side with Troy Boone and other "anxiety theorists" in stressing that the ambivalent text "retains an ironic stance relative to ... scientific [progressivism]" (Boone, 80) and offers ample room for deconstruction. Whereas Daly treats the Crew of Light primarily as a "homosocial" group of professionals, I examine Mina Harker's peculiar role among this team, focusing on her "type-writer syndrome" and her ambivalent relation with the "New Woman." Making use of psychoanalytic scholarship, I speculate on the meaning of Count Dracula as the double of the gendered imperial subject. Unlike most earlier critics who attend almost obsessively to the count's supposed primitivism and otherness, I foreground instead his puritanical hard work, intellectual power, and unmistakable modernity. The best politician, soldier, and alchemist of his time, he remains thirsty for knowledge and empire as the story unrolls in the late nineteenth century. Like Professor Van Helsing and Dr. Seward, Dracula is an industrious scholar who is curious about practically everything. (3) Even more unsettling is his incredible mimic power: he is not only able to modernize himself, familiarizing himself with modern-day legal and commercial transactions, but also able to move freely around England like an English gentleman without attracting public attention. (4) Arata argues that Dracula shocks us because he can "pass" (638), and that he is a "monstrous double" of late-Victorian culture (639). In the later part of this paper, I will demonstrate how the Crew of Light deals with Dracula's uncanny modernity and threatening sameness through subtle psychological defense mechanisms. (5) Finally, I will deepen Arata's discussion having recourse to Homi Bhabha's notion of mimicry and Freud's study of the uncanny.

I. Sexual Perversity and Monstrosity

Whatever shapes of fear vampirism might evoke elsewhere, in this novel the dominant form has to do with sexual menace or the dreadful perception of sexual perversity. In fact, even the most erotic scene ends with utter revulsion and the chilling recognition of demonic threats posed by the Other. Kept prisoner in Castle Dracula, one night Harker is approached by three beautiful vampiric women with pearl teeth and ruby lips. Their attractive features and "silvery, musical laugh" arouse in Harker's heart a burning sexual desire. While he is lying quietly "in an agony of delightful anticipation," the fair one makes her advances. Passively, Harker experiences something "honey-sweet"; yet at the same time, there is a "bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood" (Stoker, 42). The temptress's bestiality is represented not only by her odor but also by her animal-like licking. Just when Harker has closed his eyes "in a languorous ecstasy," Dracula suddenly appears in a fury, yelling: "This man belongs to me!" (43) In response, the fair one answers: "You yourself never loved; you never love!" Surprisingly, in a "soft whisper," Dracula replies: "Yes, I too can love; you yourselves can tell it from the past." Instead of Harker's body, Dracula offers his brides a living child as the substitute. This sickening scene, at once erotic and repulsive, shamelessly literal and artfully suggestive, calls for careful unraveling. First, there is in Harker a certain guilt-ridden complicity. He finds it hard to resist the fair vampiric temptress, yet he cannot overcome the uneasy feelings of nameless fear and intense guilt. The perception of her bestiality gradually sharpens as the sexual act approaches consummation, when he feels "the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of [his] throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there" (43). Still, a sense of passive helplessness lingers on, as if there were something missing, without which Harker could not fully regain his rational self, to conform to the "reality principle." Right at this moment, the count interrupts much like what Freud calls a "disturber of love," or the "dreaded father." (6) The appearance of the count complicates the picture. Lovemaking is initially confused with blood-feeding, and then deliberately juxtaposed with the nauseating cannibalistic image of child murder. The dialogue between Dracula and his brides further suggests polygamy and bisexuality. (7) Evidently, vampirism here does not guarantee longevity and sexual prowess; on the contrary, it means victimization--consumption, imprisonment, and the threat of promiscuity.

The most repulsive part of the novel begins when the count intrudes into the Harkers' bedroom. One night, when Professor Van Helsing and Dr. Seward go there to check for Mina's safety, they are baffled by the following scene, utterly shocking and enigmatic. The count slits open his bare breast and forces Mina to suck his blood, as his hands are "tenderly and lovingly" stroking her ruffled hair (Stoker, 249). Meanwhile, her husband is lying by her side, "his face flushed and breathing heavily as though in a stupor" (246). Mina's act is often interpreted as a variant of forced fellatio. More thought-provoking is Christopher Craft's analysis: "Dracula here becomes a lurid mother offering not a breast but an open and bleeding wound ... and we have the suggestion of a bleeding vagina"(111). (8) If monstrosity, as Peter Brooks puts it, is "that which cannot be placed in any of the taxonomic schemes devised by the human mind to understand and to order nature" (218), then what is truly monstrous here is not so much Mina's unintended sexual transgression as the "anatomical displacements and the confluence of blood, milk, and semen [that] forcefully erase the demarcation separating the masculine and the feminine" (Craft, 111). Equally unsettling is the suggestion in the text that this utter alien, a "lurid mother" in the form of a tall old man, with pale but strong aquiline face, heavy moustache, extremely pointed ears, and gleaming red eyes, is nonetheless capable of "tender love," reminding us of the astonishing "soft whisper" in a previous scene which tells us that Dracula "too can love" (43). (9) Vampirism, thus, threatens through subverting proper gender definitions and behavioral expectations which keep the imperial subject in place. In fact, there might still be something absolutely profane missing in Craft's account, should we dare ask what it is that Harker lies by the "adulterous" pair, "face flushed and breathing heavily" (246), a curious description recalling Lucy's "long, heavy gasps" when first visited by Dracula at Whitby (88).

The dreadful perception of uncleanliness by Harker in Transylvania, the margin of European civilization, marks only the beginning of horror. Most frightening in the story is the extreme mobility and power of the "King-vampire." He can penetrate the imperial center and even creep into any room, turning a decent male "professional" into a stupor and relishing his woman in a way which would confound all good Victorians with the most ghastly, revolting, unspeakable excess. In the middle of the story, Dracula sneers at the "Crew of Light" headed by Van Helsing to fight him back: "Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine--my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed" (Stoker, 267). If "reverse colonization" by Dracula could be likened to "going native," then contrary to what we ...