"There Is Something Wicked Within You"

in the wake of dracula daily and subsequent ongoing discussions of the antisemitism that drives the book, i thought i’d throw together a very brief primer based on little strands of research i’ve done in the past around some of the history that scaffolds dracula. i’m not trying to scold people for participating in the more lighthearted end of this cultural moment – i love dracula, i’m also reading dracula daily and enjoying everyone’s little jokes about jonathan harker and his paprika and so on – but i am trying to provide what i hope is a somewhat useful resource for deeper engagement with the text, a necessary critical skill if you want to have anything meaningful to say about it. i’m not really interested in coddling people’s feelings about antisemitism, and i think it’s in everyone’s best interests to provide a little bit of a framework for how we approach and think about and talk about what is a pretty unambiguously bigoted book.

for what it’s worth, i find the most productive way to approach this text, as with any text that emerges from a tradition of immense violence (ie. pretty much any work of english literature from the nineteenth century, all of which write from the heartlands of imperialist plunder and the formation of nationalist cultural norms) is as a historical document. there’s a difference in these discourses between a piece that’s made today, where we might ask why we’ve allowed particular cultural conditions to facilitate the telling of narratives that are attempting to naturalise conditions of bigotry, and one created in 1897, where our relationship to that historical moment should be one of self-reflection and analysis with an eye to informing our understanding of present-day violences. my point is that a text which locates itself within the british antisemitism of the late nineteenth century is one which can enhance our understanding of that antisemitism and its present-day legacy.

i also want to clarify that i don’t intend to reduce the bigotry of dracula to just the antisemitism – it is clearly shaped by broader strokes around racism and imperialist race science in particular, but the specific british-jewish cultural history within which it is grounded happens to be the one that i have a relatively coherent understanding of, and wanted to share. i don’t at all intend to frame this as a complete account – i’m more just putting what i have to hand out into the world for others to do with what they will and ultimately come to their own conclusions about the text and how best to engage with it.

i think it’s worthwhile to also touch briefly on the fact that dracula is by no means alone in invoking antisemitism where vampires are concerned – what often gets missed in discourses around what vampires can represent (parasitic capitalism being an incredibly common discursive invocation, to the point where it’s kind of embarrassing that so-called marxists can’t make the very short leap) is that much of the vampire mythos is shaped by antisemitism. the draining of blood closely resembles a blood libel, ie. the smear that jews drink the blood of christian children; the state of being repelled by a crucifix should be self-explanatory; the construction of the vampire as a parasite leeching off of communal social formations forged within white imperialist societies closely reflects anxieties regarding the allegedly parasitic presence of jews both in eastern + central europe and new immigrant communities in britain. the vampire is immortal as the jew is eternal – the ‘eternal jew’ is a nazi smear drawing from the antisemitic canard of the ‘wandering jew,’ which in turn dates back to the thirteenth century. the vampire threatens the national body and so does the jew. the rush to point to the vampire as an apt metaphor for the parasitism of capitalism too quickly falls into the mire of discourses that entwine capitalist violence with jewish populations (jews are all moneygrabbing leeches and so on), and redirects anger towards capitalism into antisemitism. whilst the history of the vampire as a folkloric figure is far richer than just ‘jews bad,’ it is undeniable that this cultural scaffolding exists, and informs dracula even before stoker comes to personally intervene in discourses of antisemitism specific to the conditions from which he was writing.

this excellent paper on dracula and the gothic response to anxieties of imperialist decay – ie. fear of a ‘reverse colonialism’ – that did the rounds on this website a few days ago covers a lot of important and helpful ground for this text, and i would highly recommend giving it a read. what it misses, however, is that dracula is rooted not only in these abstract notions of imperial decline and external threats to ‘britishness,’ but in the very definite, concrete historical moment in which new discourses of antisemitism were emerging in britain – and that is the history that i want to touch on now.

in 1882, in the wake of the assassination of tsar alexander ii for which the jewish population of the russian empire were scapegoated, a set of highly repressive laws known as the ‘may laws’ were passed. in short, these laws heavily restricted jewish freedom of movement within the empire, almost entirely limiting jewish settlement to the pale of settlement (a portion of land in the westernmost part of the russian empire, encompassing modern-day belarus, lithuania, and moldova, and parts of poland + ukraine) and restricting property ownership + establishing strict administrative quotas across various sectors that severely limited jewish participation in russian society. this in turn brought about expulsions of portions of the jewish populations of moscow and st petersburg where these quotas were exceeded. crucially, these repressive laws were tightened over the next decade, which, alongside a series of brutal pogroms, caused mass emigration of the ashkenazi population from the russian empire. one significant epicentre for jewish settlement at the end of the nineteenth century was the east end of london. this was, of course, coterminous to the writing of dracula, in which an eastern european man imbued with a number of antisemitic smears attempts to inculcate himself within the population of london and imitate britishness with the eventual intent of sucking it dry – you see the very obvious lines being drawn here.

it goes without saying that the establishment of a new immigrant population in london would stoke the sort of reactionary sentiments that we can locate in dracula; however, we might look beyond just a loose historical correlation and consider the possible relationship between the whitechapel murders (colloquially known as the jack the ripper murders – whitechapel is located in the east end if you didn’t know) and stoker’s novel (published seven years after the last of the murders) amidst the adjacent discourses that said murders generated. in addition to the fascination with an ‘underside’ to victorian society in which sexual + social moralising was inverted and voyeurised by the moralist bourgeois class that these murders, targeting poor sex workers, amplified (think the kind of sensationalism we see with true crime culture today – very much the prototype of that), the projection of sensationalised sexual degeneracy and lechery onto the murders in turn invoked antisemitic discourses in which the east end’s jewish population became a nodal point of sorts where these spectral anxieties could be projected. a physical description of jack the ripper at one point included a dark beard and a foreign accent, with a sketch that added a hooked nose, and the famous goulston street graffito in 1888 which read ‘the juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing’ has, though unproven, been treated as though it were written in connection with the whitechapel murders. john pizer, a jewish man, was at one point arrested for the murders (and later released), and police reports around this referred to emergent broader anti-jewish sentiment in whitechapel. the point is, there’s a case to be made for the whitechapel murders having amplified already-extant antisemitism in the east end, and a further case to be made for this specific blood libel adjacency to have shaped bram stoker’s novel. (to compare; this is, for example, the same discourse that scaffolds the joke in what we do in the shadows about laszlo being jack the ripper.) whilst we don’t know that stoker consciously, explicitly had jack the ripper in mind, 1) it is a theory that has been critically posited before, and 2) at the very least, the novel’s unambiguous antisemitism that locates itself most prominently within a blood libel would have been informed by discourses specific to london, of which this was a major one.

that dracula himself is something of an antisemitic caricature is, i would hope, obvious; and of course, the text is laced with the language of physiognomy and the fear that an immigrant might sufficiently imitate britishness to the point of being able to pass himself off as british wholesale. to take this further, we might, for example, think about how stoker depicts lucy westenras – a ‘blonde, demure’ white woman representative of the british imperialist fantasy of white womanhood becomes a vampire and feeds off of the same children that she (as a white woman) is socially conditioned to care for and reproduce, thus rendering the vampiric threat as one that targets white women and their reproductive roles within the imperial social formation. we might similarly point to the whitechapel murders and the simultaneous sensationalising of sex workers’ murders against the figure of the ‘good’ bourgeois white woman + the subsequent anxiety that the jewish population of the east end might represent a real, immediate threat to london’s womanhood.i don’t want to be overly didactic about this book, and i think that after a certain point this scaffolding is such that people can go away and do the work themselves – like, i’m not going to sit here drawing out point after painstaking point about how dracula is peppered with the language of race science and imperialist anxiety at points x, and y, and z. my intention here was to provide a bit of specific background context for how & why this novel came about, from the relatively meagre well of information that i have to hand. my closing remarks might be that we could use all of this discourse as a launchpad for thinking about the points of convergence of subjugation within the vampire myth, and what that can tell us about how imperialism refortifies itself + against which values it does so – in dracula, in sheridan le fanu’s carmilla, in samuel taylor coleridge’s christabel, and in the broader corpus of myth to which all of these texts are responding, we can identify repeated convergent themes of othering the jew, the irish population (le fanu was anglo-irish and a popular reading of carmilla is as representative of the colonisation of ireland), the homosexual (dracula is incredibly homoerotic, and both carmilla and christabel are fairly explicitly lesbian), the racialised + colonised populace, and the projection of lechery and sexual degeneracy onto all of these subjects in the ultimate interest of reifying white gentile imperialist sexual formations. the somewhat effete feminising of dracula comes against the masculinising of the imperial british man, for example; the ‘othered’ populace exists in threat & opposition to the imperial norm (and the feminised jewish man is a classic of antisemitism, eg. as far back as the medieval smear that jewish men menstruated). all of these figures clustered under the broad umbrella of the vampire are rendered as threats to reproductive white heterosexuality, and as such, to the reproduction of the imperial order, and to capital, and i’ve always found this to be the most elucidating angle from which i can engage with the text critically. i hope at the very least this is a helpful little conjunction of Thoughts that people can do something with?

the squad

Theme [27]: Astralis by glenthemes

Astrālis, e, adj. astrum, relating to the stars. This is a space-inspired theme featuring 12 zodiac constellations made from CSS, with love (and pain). Color aesthetics inspired by @jaesthm.

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Theme features:

container: customizable frame thickness, tiled/repeated image

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PXU photoset tutorial, lightbox tutorial, video resizing script, like & reblog button tutorial by shythemes

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shoutout to my fellow aroallos tbh. shoutout to cishet aroallos who keep hearing theyre not queer enough (you are), shoutout to hypersexual aroallos, shoutout to aroallos who dont want to have sex, shoutout to aroallos in fwb situations and aroallos in qprs and aroallos in romantic relationships and shoutout to aroallos who like one night stands, shoutout to loveless aroallos, shoutout to gay aroallos, to lesbian aroallos, to mspec aroallos, shoutout to aroallos who like to walk around in little clothing and shoutout to aroallos who dont, shoutout to religious aroallos, shoutout to aroallos who still havent completely come to terms with their aroallo identity (its okay to struggle with identities like these) and shoutout to aroallos who are open about their identity and shoutout to aroallos who arent either, shoutout to aroallo trans folk, shoutout to aroallo men and aroallo women and nonbinary aroallos and all other aroallos and shoutout to aroallo poc

we only have one menu so please pass it to the next table (reblog) once you've decided.

I decided to make a little October prompt list!! I honestly don't know how much I'll participate myself but I hope y'all have some fun with it :3

Stickers / Washi Tape

Part Time Princess Shop on Etsy

she/he c!iskall can we get this to 10k

[ID: three images. All contain loosely rendered hands on a grey background. Image 1: Etho and Joel. Both hands are drawn facing away from the viewer, Joel’s hand has his fingers slightly splayed. Both have a yellow string in tied in a clove hitch knot. Text reads: Etho and Joel: Clove hitch knot. A boating knot that is quick and easily formed, but easily comes apart. — Image 2: Impulse and Bdubs. Their hands are drawn as if about to shake hands. Both have a green string tied in a true lovers knot. Text reads “impulse and bdubs: true lovers knot. Mostly decorative, still stable. Yknow, cause they really go for the whole ‘soulmates’ thing. There are three different knots with this name, it’s not relevant, just neat!”— image 3: Tango and Jimmy- both are drawn as if reaching out for something, both have a yellow string tied in a double constrictor knot. Text reads “Tango & Jimmy: double constrictor knot. Used in sutures. Incredibly strong and stable, to the point where it can damage and disfigure what it’s tied to. Nearly impossible to undo without cutting it. End ID]

Ideas about design, knot tying and “soulmate” relationships :]

here’s the original post for context , and the previous post!