Provincializing Late-Victorian Masculinity: Liberal Multi-Sidedness and Cosmopolitan Monstrosity in Dracula

초록

Recent criticism on Bram Stoker’s Dracula frequently focuses on two significant aspects of late-nineteenth-century England depicted in the gothic novel: one common area of study analyzes the manner in which the figure of the vampire represents racial, sexual, social, and political anxieties repressed by late-Victorian culture while another area of research analyzes the emergence of British modernity associated with new technologies and mass media. The former readings emphasize the vulnerability, weakness, and hysteria lurking beneath representations of late-Victorian patriarchy and empire while the latter readings focus on the ways in which the novel’s protagonists draw upon the modern institutions of the metropolis to defeat Dracula. This article places these opposing pejorative and celebratory views of modernity into dialogue with one another by analyzing the novel’s monstrosities as a vehicle for producing competing liberal and cosmopolitan subjectivities. On the one hand, the novel celebrates open-mindedness and multi-sided individualism as the basis for producing a balanced liberal subjectivity advocated by Van Helsing and exemplified by the figure of Mina Harker and her capacity to wield modern technologies and media. On the other, the novel conjures the vampire in order to imagine a threatening form of cosmopolitan transcendence associated with the figure of the aristocratic cosmopolite and to use this racialized and eroticized monster to provide an impetus for synthesizing the various fragmented bourgeois perspectives through his defeat. Although the novel seems to posit liberal, middle-class multi-sidedness as a viable alternative to aristocratic, cosmopolitan transcendence, the ultimate collation and synthesis of the fragmented subjectivities into a coherent, linear narrative undermines its celebration of open-mindedness and necessitates the novel’s misogynistic and chauvinistic denouement. The Crew of Light’s defeat of Dracula and marginalization of Mina in the novel’s ending reveals the inherently problematic and contradictory nature of cultivating liberal and cosmopolitan masculine subjectivities in late-Victorian culture.

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