"The Occidental Tourist"

In his thesis statement of his essay “The Occidental Tourist”, Stephen D. Arata introduces Dracula to be an original work that breaks with the established views of vampires in the Gothic genre. In a first step, he examines the settings introduced in the novel. Hereby, he states that the significance of Transylvania does not lie in its mystic charm, but in its “political turbulence and racial strive (463).” This links the superstitious vampire to a conqueror, a military leader. However, the same metonymy – the imagery of the British Empire – is also mirrored in the vampire theme itself. The death of the human being shows the conquest and domination of an invading party – here the British – and the revival shows the upheaval of the colonized party. And it is the upheaval – according to Arata – that frightens Victorian society – it causes anxieties of a ‘Reverse Colonization’. In fact, it is the vampire attack that “designates a kind of colonization of the body (465)”. Moreover, the vampire’s strong and robust health stands in direct contrast to the condition of the Empire, which is also shown in the development of the physical conditions of Jonathan Harker and Count Dracula. Furthermore, he also suggests that the boundaries between good and evil are blurred throughout the novel since they are shown as highly subjective. Here, he poses the question of who was the right to colonize whom; which culture has the right to dominate and which does not? In a last step, he adds Stoker’s Irish roots to the vampire tale. However, his last argument – which is supposed to be his strongest regarding the established form of the hour glass essay – is not very convincing, since he does not provide any proof for the thesis of his paragraph. Arata hereby takes a wild guess of what Stoker’s beliefs were or might have been. As a result, he falls victim to the intentional fallacy – it is not significant of what the author wanted to say, but the core meaning of the text matters.