Stephen D. Arata on Dracula

          Hide yo’ kids, hide yo’ wives, and hide yo’ husbands too.  According to Stephen Arata’s The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization, Dracula is colonizing everybody out here.  Arata presents the interpretation of Dracula as a mirror of British imperialism, reflecting both the monstrosity of the ideology and the Victorian fear of foreign powers, as well as a symbol of the British Empire’s impending collapse.  He argues Stoker’s choice in Dracula’s national identity and the Transylvanian setting adds heavy political and racial implications to the story.  Stoker blurs the lines of vampires and warriors to create a monster that seeks to conquer territories and the identities of those inhabiting his conquered lands.

          Stoker’s Irish nationality is offered as one piece of evidence for Arata’s interpretation.  The author states “As a transplanted Irishman, one whose national allegiances were conspicuously split, Stoker was particularly sensitive to the issues raised by British imperial conquest and domination” (469).  This calls to mind another notable “transplanted Irishman”.  James Joyce famously painted his writings, as may be seen in Finnegans Wake, with his desire to “wipe alley english spooker, multaphoniaksically spuking, off the face of the erse”.  The height of Joyce’s career was chronologically toward the end of Stoker’s career, and both Ireland natives lived in a time of high tension and resentment between the Irish and English.  Joyce’s infamous and conspicuous resentment of British colonization adds context and validity to the idea of a nearly contemporary fellow Irishman weaving similar resentment throughout his own work. 

          While both a fascinating and highly credible interpretation, Arata’s essay exaggerates his evidence in a manner that diminishes other important themes.  The author overstates his point to an extreme by cherry-picking a superfluous cluster of details (including character hair color) that it seems Arata feels Stoker’s sole intent was to tell a tale of imperialism.  Arata reduces the classic monster and the timeless horrors of Count Dracula to little more than the personification Victorian England politics.