Joseph Valente tackles—or embraces, rather—“The Metrocolonial Vampire” (chapter 3) in his book Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood. In this chapter, Valente first attempts to link textual evidence in Dracula to Irishness. Then he moves on to discuss broader ideas of postcolonialism in the novel, discussing national allegory, binary opposition, colonization, and reverse colonization.
The trouble with his chapter is that he does not sufficiently connect Irishness to Dracula: What makes the text inherently Irish? It’s more acceptable to read Dracula through a postcolonial lens in general, but linking the text to the Irish specifically is problematic. Valente ties the novel to the Irish in many ways, but many of his links are tenuous. Let’s take a look at some of them (general format: evidence in the novel/Valente's associating it to Irishness):
I. Transylvania means “beyond the forest”/ “beyond the Pale” refers to “the broad expanse of Ireland that remained outside and resistant to British military and political control for most of the colonial epoch” (51)
a. “the name of Dracula’s self-identified tribal group, the Szekelys…means ‘at the frontier or beyond’” (51)
II. Jonathan Harker describes the Eastern European peasants as immodest, idolatrous/Valente says this is in line with perceptions of the Irish at the time (52)
My response: I don’t see how any “Othered” group wasn’t viewed as immodest and idolatrous.
III. Harker identifies four nationalities in the region: Wallachs, Saxons, Magyars, and Szdkelys/Valente says this provides “a suspiciously neat symmetry with the four main ethnicities of modern Ireland (Anglos, Celts, Norse, and their subdivision, the Normans) (53)
My response: Harker lists four nationalities in Transylvania, and Ireland has four major ethnicities, and this is supposed to be a connection? Next!
IV. Valente quotes Auerbach and Skal that "the history of Transylvania is the history of whom it belongs to" / Valente follows up to say “the same has of course been true of Ireland, which James Joyce likens to a ‘pawn shop’" (54). V. There was anxiety at the time of devolution/Valente identifies current Anglo-Irish distrust. VI. “Stoker’s Transylvania has suffered a famine and plague”/19th-century Ireland did as well (55). VII. Dracula is a vampire/Irish had long been viewed as “a species of parasite for which the dominant metaphor was none other than the vampire” (56)
My response: In categories IV-VII, Valente uses details from Dracula to link them to Ireland, but they all seem to be details that could be linked to many other countries. They’re not inherently Irish.
VIII. From Valente: “Although Dracula's aristocratic bearing, standing, and pedigree would seem to exempt him from any direct allegorical association with the urban underclass, it has been remarked that the Victorian bourgeoisie often divined a similar laxity, dissoluteness, impropriety, and unrespectability in the aristocratic and working classes, a likeness that the Transylvanian Count, with his rank odor, his nocturnal dissipations, his performance of menial household chores, and his fondness for dirt naps, might well be seen to embody. But what is important to remember for our purposes is that only in Ireland did this convergence of high and low social grades constitute a regular and obtrusive feature of both cultural stereotype and self-representation.” (59-60)
My response: Valente begins to make this a class issue, but it still doesn’t ensure inherent Irishness.
IX. Valente asserts that “‘Dracula-in-England’ seems to have been built trait by stereotypical trait as parody of stock perceptions of the Catholic Irish in England” (60).
a. Valente goes on to lists the traits of vampires/the perception of the Irish as follow: (1) live in squalor and spread disease, (2) reckless overbreeders, (3) congenitally and pathologically lawless, (4) resemble children in their underdeveloped rationality and want of discipline, (5) alien subversives whose arrival amounted to an ‘invasion,’ (6) just drink too much. (61)
My response: All six items listed here are superficial. How are these different from the general perception of an “Other”?
X. “As several critics have noted, the name Dracula puns on the Gaelic phrase droch fhola, meaning "bad blood," a tag that seems to trace the social anomie plaguing the imperial metropole to its Irish occupants.” (61)
My response: Can “Dracula” simply be a clever use of Gaelic phrase droch fhola, meaning "bad blood," and it doesn’t necessarily establish him as Irish?
XI. Valente notes that the Irish are depicted as blood-sucking bats in 1885 (64-65)
My response: What immigrant group at the time wasn’t viewed as vampiric?
XII. Valente says the novel pulls more from Irish tales than “vampire lore” (52-53)
My response: Bram Stoker was of Irish descent. Where else would he get his fairytales from? What if Stoker was Swedish and incorporated Swedish lore? Would we think Dracula was actually a Swede? Admittedly, that’s an oversimplification; however, a person will pull from what he or she knows, and I feel that Stoker is just pulling from the lore with which he is familiar. I realize that this kind of opens the door to a potential connection. One could posit that Stoker could have been acutely aware of England’s treatment of Ireland and this could have emerged unconsciously, but I’m not so sure this is the case.
In sum, a postcolonial approach can be applied to the text, and Valente does a fine job in doing this. However, he does not provide sufficient evidence that issues in colonialism/reverse colonialism in the novel are inherently Irish.
Are there any thoughts on this? Do you believe that Valente’s connections are strong? He provides more examples than the twelve that I provided here. I didn’t strategically leave out the most compelling, so please provide any that you think should be included in the discussion.
I also have a question of form. I believe most critics don't try to pretend that they are presenting the author's intent, but Valente seems to assert that Stoker was envisioning an Irish Dracula. He says that "Stoker set about representing Ireland's otherness to itself" (51), and "Stoker entertains the popular association of Irishness with racial inferiority for the express purpose of disrupting the logic of essentialism whereby such an association might be sustained" (67). Valente seems to be making the case that Stoker consciously intended for the Irish Question to emerge in his text. Is this an acceptable approach?
I agree, Juliette; I thought Valente worked awfully hard to make his case with mediocre evidence. His conclusions seemed too narrow and overconfident. I think that basically you've identified the fundamental problem: the evidence he cites is easily generalizable to others beside the Irish. I don't have any problem with using the Irish as one example of a certain tendancy that we can read in Dracula's relationship to England, especially since Ireland does have a unique relationship to Britain; however, it seems too much simply to characterize the vampire as Irish. I found the article much more interesting when it suggested the ambivalences and ambiguities that come through when considering not only the Irish but other colonial or non-Anglo groups. For instance, whether read as Jewish, Irish, or some other Other motif, he gets more to the heart of the matter when he writes of such motifs "destabilizing such racial typologies through a proliferation of overlapping categories" (69).
ReplyDeleteJuliette, this is my favorite blog post of the semester. Funny stuff.
ReplyDeleteI think there is definitely merit to your argument that Valente sells a poco reading without necessarily making an airtight case for a particularly Irish Dracula. I do have a couple of counterpoints.
1. I find that I'm a little uncomfortable with the term "inherently Irish." What, exactly, does it mean to be inherently Irish? Are we approaching essentialism when we try to nail down a definition of inherent Irishness--or suggest that such a thing exists? (Perhaps this doesn't even matter to the points you are making--I just found that the term made me a little squirmy.)
2. I think Valente does try to make the overall tenuousness of his connections part of his argument's strength. From the outset, he says that "the two spaces [Ireland and Transylvania] cannot be aligned in a straightforward vehicle-tenor relationship." Does this caveat have value, or is Valente simply hedging his bets?
3. In response to category IX, I do think that some of the categorizations of the Irish (overbreeding, drinking too much, etc) might have been connected specifically to the Irish, not just a generic Other. For instance, reckless procreation is definitely associated with Catholicism--and thus the Irish.
4. What did you think about Valente's ideas about Dracula's "passing"? This is certainly a fear that would have been more associated with the Irish than with other of the Crown's colonized peoples--the Irish look a hell of a lot like the British.
I found Valente's approach to be acceptable! At first I was lost and irritated with the complicated plurality of tenor for vehicle, but after plowing further, I appreciated that this was a symptom of the book's complex historical context. Granted Valente is taking a deductive position, deducing from the very important fact that Stoker is Irish, and deducing from a historical context, but I found the information on the political cartoons—that both the Irish, or Ireland, and, in response, England, were depicted as vampires—to be very convincing.
ReplyDeleteValente shows Stoker throwing away all those, to me, irritating postcolonial binary epistemological structures. He writes that Stoker showed environmentalist leanings similar to Thomas Davis’s which advocated redefining “Irish ethnos on cultural and environmental grounds that would encompass all racial and religious constituencies under a single national banner” (67)—similarly Stoker, in other writings “envisions economic expansion and technological advance working a change in the Irish character that would take his people’ beyond Fenianism and landlordism’” (which seems to have happened!). I like Valente’s belief that Stoker “hibernicized his monster in order to diffuse rather than fix his racial origins” (67). At the same time, what throws a wrench in this attribution of the following idealism to Stoker is the end of this quote: that “the logical implications of this method, moreover, cannot be limited to their intended metrocolonial center of reference, but radiate, like all logical implications, toward the universal, thereby serving to challenge the racial ideology not just of British rule in Ireland, which Stoker openly questioned, but of British imperialism abroad, which Stoker expressley approved ” (67-8). On the other hand, maybe Stoker’s love of Whitman had more to it than their alleged shared trait of homosexuality!
While some of the early parallels Valente draws to establish the Irish Dracula did elicit incredulous “hmphs!” from me, I think that focusing on the more rigid and simplistic points that he makes misses a much richer argument that occurs later in the piece. It was apparent to me that Arata’s argument (which I think, out of the pieces we’ve read, most adroitly performs the contortionist move of being simultaneously comprehensive and flexible) served as the springboard for Valente, and from this germination Valente provides us with some critical insights that extend, enrich and complicate Arata. Once Valente finished telling us that Dracula is Irish, his arguments of what it could mean if Dracula were Irish become both viable and compelling. I thought two of these stronger moments are the different ways we could see Irishness in Dracula’s ability/inability to pass, and his theory of impacted colonialism as differentiated from Arata’s reverse colonialism.
ReplyDeleteI do think Valente leaned a bit too heavily upon Stoker’s biography and Irish heritage but the basis of the observation still stands, especially in making a postcolonial argument about invasion of the colonized. As an outsider, it would seem improbable, nay, impossible for Stoker’s own experiences with these dynamics to not influence his writing and conception of Dracula. What I do find flawed is Valente’s insistence that this necessarily renders an Irish Dracula, rather than arguing on the premise that it is rhetorically reasonable to make such assertion. With that said, I want to return to Valente’s notion of impacted colonialism. (I find it hard to stomach encountering this adjectival use of “impacted” in academic writing—academic writing, that is, not concerning orthodontics.) Dracula’s paleness and ability to “pass,” and his turning British citizens into copies of himself while retaining their “British” features, indicate an anxiety over the possibility of a concerted rise from within—a rise enacted by those from proximate colonies who had immigrated to Britain in large numbers, and swelled the urban slums.
But, more powerful than the anxiety over the large numbers of “barbaric” lifestyles now inhabiting London, is the fear of their integration into the system; an assimilation that could be viewed as both imperially strengthening and nationally weakening. Perhaps Valente’s most perspicacious comment follows this logic: the ability to integrate, for differences between colonizer and colonized to become invisible, possibly (gasp!) non-existent, drives the need to point out, reify, and even invent differences that can be coded, replicated and established as truth, and in the end, serve to expel those from joining the ranks of the “British.” This move to include only to define and ultimately exclude, creates the metrocolonial subject and identity. These ideas I find manifest throughout Dracula and an interesting commentary on the construction of different “ethnic” identities that can be read in Dracula, and therefore presses for a parsing of the multiple meanings stemming both from this multitude, and the ability to perceive all of them.
Lots of thougtful--and diverse--comments so far. To follow-up on the question of Irishness (specific) and postcolonialism (general) in Dracula, I think ideas of substructure and superstructure will add to the discussion tomorrow.
ReplyDeleteI do love Juliette’s post—I laughed out aloud when I read it first. I, too, felt Valente’s argument a little awkward when he attributes the text’s Irish Question to Stoker’s conscious strategy. After all, the novel itself seems to be structured by what Valante calls “Freudian dream logic” (64), or a phantasmagoria of displacement/surrogation of SOMETHING whose origin we can’t exactly locate. As we’ve talked in the last class, elusiveness or inconsistency of the text (which in other cases we might even call a slapdash—there is so many details we cannot explain by the inner logic of the text, to which Norton’s notes repeatedly call our attentions) is one of the attractions of the novel. The text seems to evade many of the critical attempts that center upon a certain “origin” of the desire on the part of the author. On the level of character formation, for instance, the characters infinitely mirror each other (Harker- Dracula- Van Helsing – Dracula – Quincey etc.) almost to the extent that we cannot determinate who is the original subject standing before the mirror. In a sense, we may call one of the central tropes of this novel the reproduction without the original. It’s not that all the approach that assumes an imagined authorial-intent is invalid, but Dracula’s inconsistency as a text (which itself emulates the structure of unconscious) seems to elude this type of reading that presumes the author’s conscious design.
ReplyDeleteYet, at the same time, I found Valante’s argument convincing, not because I think “Irishness” is the determinant source of the original desire of the author diffused throughout the text, but rather because Valante treats “Irishness” itself as something very unsettling—what Valante calls “Ireland’s otherness to itself, its own undecidability as a national community” (51). In this sense, I share Stephanie’s uneasiness about Juliette’s provocative term “inherently Irish.” The indices of Irishness Valante lists forms “a pastiche of received perseption of Ireland,” not the Irishness itself—rather, Valante seems to perform the resistance to the conceptualization of what we might call the “inherently Irish.” One of Valante’s points seems to me that not only for English but also for Irish themselves “Irishness” is something constructed through the procedure of othering—it can never be perceived directly, only caught sight of through the gaze of the beholder. I liked his phrase, “Ireland’s racial and national self-alterity” (67), and I think this “self-alterity” is one of the keys to comprehend the Irishness in the text. But…again, Juliette is right, this “self-alterity” is not specific to Ireland, applicable to almost all the national/cultural/racial communities including even England itself.
Like Stephanie and Madoka have pointed out, there does seem to be something troubling about responding to Valente's argument as either a) generalizing too broadly and, thus, not concretely connecting Dracula to Ireland, b) hitting his mark and somehow capturing the essential elements of Irishness, or c) missing a chance to connect Dracula to, say, 'the Orient proper.' Any of those lines of inquiry would drift toward (what I see as) problems with essentializing (maybe what we need is some Spivakian strategic essentializing?). I suppose we might say this is a problem with rhetoric. While Valente does hedge his bets along the way, we might say he relied a bit too heavily on a methodology that is inherently problematic (are we still aloud to say 'inherently'?). However, I think it's interesting to think about why Valente chose to write the piece this way. Ultimately, I'm not sure I have an answer to that question, although I think Madoka and Jordan point to the most convincing moments in the piece for me. The notion of "self-alterity" in Ireland does seem to be on point, especially when one considers the type of ideological makeover Ireland was in neck deep in when Dracula was published. I'm sure we've all read enough Yeats to vaguely understand that his mission—early in his career, at least—was to construct an Irish aesthetic from scratch (I suddenly feel the urge to arise and head over to Innisfree*); that mission seems to be a presentation of Ireland's national ideological anxieties. Valente's discussion of 'impacted colonialism,' which Jordan pointed us to, also seems to be tied to a concrete fear that the English had about the Irish due in large part to the availability of 'passing'; Valente's point should be well taken here, too, considering what we've read so far about frequent English tactics for 'racing' the Irish in the nineteenth century. Still, though, I find myself wondering about Valente's impetus for making this argument exclusively about Anglo-Irish colonial politics.
ReplyDelete*Yeats was obviously extremely "successful" as a purveyor of Irishness, as there's a bar in Tuscaloosa called "Innisfree Irish Pub." Sigh.