Dracula’s other modernity: liberalism and ‘Life’ at the fin de siècle

ABSTRACT

Much of the scholarship on Dracula (1897) has analysed it as a symptom of various anxieties at the core of late Victorian scientific and technological modernity. In this approach, Stoker’s liberalism in the novel has been read as part of the fragile rational world seeking to suppress the desires and fears of the erotic and other affective forces. This paper takes a different approach. In this paper, I examine the novel through the lens of a strand of modernity that developed around the concept of ‘Life’. ‘Life’ was conceived as an internal generative power of emergence and became a key metaphor for late Victorian progressive liberals, for whom it signified progress as continuously emerging potential, always free from pre-determination. I examine the modernity of ‘Life’ in Part I of the paper and take up its relevance to nineteenth-century liberalism. In Part II, I use modernity’s discourse of ‘Life’ as a frame for my analysis of Dracula’s liberalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Dracula
• Stoker
• modernity
• liberalism
• ‘Life’
• freedom
• affect
• emotion
• Romanticism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. All references in the article will be taken from the edition noted in the reference list, and inserted in parenthesis in the text.

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Notes on contributors

Jock Macleod

Jock Macleod is Associate Professor of Literary Studies at Griffith University. He has published widely on nineteenth-century literary culture, where his focus has been on periodicals, liberalism and the emotions. His most recent publications include Politics and Emotions in Romantic Periodicals (2019), edited with Will Christie and Peter Denney; Liberalism, Literature and the Emotions in the Long Nineteenth Century (2018), edited with Peter Denney; and Literature, Journalism and the Vocabularies of Liberalism, 1886–1916 (2013). He is currently working on an ARC Discovery Project with Will Christie and Peter Denney, ‘The Emotional Register of Liberal Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century’.