The Fin De Siècle Monster That Never Dies: Dracula In Neo-Victorian Adaptation
This paper evaluates the adaptations of the novel Dracula in mainstream Anglo-American neo-Victorian film and televisual mediums in the twenty-first century. This paper will take an interdisciplinary and anti-racist approach, considering particularly the depiction of people of colour on screen. I will also be problematizing the definitions of ‘Neo-Victorian’ and reflect upon the nostalgic legacies of conservative and discriminatory practices from the period which seem to be echoed uncritically into our own. I will be applying concepts and values from Critical Race Theory to explore the normative geographies of racialized construction via the story of Dracula. Rather than using the opportunity to subvert the anxieties of the fin-de-siecle period, negotiating a form of post-colonial writing-back, these Victoriana adaptations instead routinely reflect the racialised hierarchies and prejudices of the current time. I suggest that the literary fin de siècle monsters of Bram Stoker’s ur-text have, in the visual mode, conformed to ideologies of racialised discrimination and biased preoccupations. With reference to Baudrillard’s concept of the ‘copy’, this paper seeks to challenge the white hegemonic lack of investigation into the racial tropes presented. In the condemnation of such frameworks, the paper will consider the ramifications of these strategies of racialised monstrosity. While these monsters are made corporeal on screen, this paper considers how the pedagogical response may undermine, reinvent, and reimagine the critical interpretations of the text. In the conclusion of this paper, I will be reflecting upon the difficulties and potential opportunities this radical anti-racist work can offer practice/s within the academy.
Theadora Jean is a PhD researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her current project is a critical-creative thesis on Bram Stoker’s Dracula in relation to the ‘New Woman’ phenomenon of the fin-de-siecle period. She completed a BA in English Literature at the University of Liverpool and an MA in Critical & Creative Writing at the University of Sussex. Outside academia, her short fiction and non-fiction have been published in a range of online literary journals and her chapbook, Tower Block Ghost Story, is out now with Nightjar Press.
